Don't believe in dinosaurs?

[Uncle_bob]

This is a real, serious. topic. I know some people that truely don't believe that dinosaurs ever existed. It's odd. So I'm curious if it's really a common belief.

On a slightly related topic, I had a classmate that though Giraffes were really just robots.

So, what about you? Believe dinosaurs existed?

[Blitzkommando]

Well, seeing that there are people that think New Mexico is part of Mexico and that the US has 53 states (Yeppers. Three states magically appeared!) and others think that we still have 48 (No, not Alaska and Hawaii, but West Virginia and, again, New Mexico) I can believe that there are people that don't. Hell, there is still a group called the Flat Earth Society.

[Sinue_v2]

Didn't Bad Religeon do a song about them?

As for Dinosaurs... of course they existed, though I don't doubt that some people refuse to believe it. They are also the same people that believe that the Earth is no older than 6,000 to 10,000 years old. Though some of the new earth believers also think dinosaurs existed - but were killed in the great flood.

[kurisu1974]

Of course they existed...........look at the bones! http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smile.gif

[Bleemo]

They exist.

We call them birds (http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/avians.html).

[RoninJoku]

Um guys... If dinosaurs exsisted, how come like... They weren't in the holy doctrine of all things that never lies or exaggerates the truth-the holy bible! I mean come on! http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

<Dino-nut for as long as I can remember... And a cold contemplating Darwinist who eats baptised babies.

[Sinue_v2]

They were. Remember? Jesus led the Dinosaurs out of Egypt.

[Bleemo]

On 2006-10-20 06:59, Sinue_v2 wrote:
They were. Remember? Jesus led the Dinosaurs out of Egypt.


Oh SHIT!

[Tystys]

Well, unless those huge fucking monster bones they find are fakes, than yeah, I think there were dinosaurs and soon we'll have a Dino-Crisis scenario on our hands, where someone finds Dino DNA, than clones it, and they run loose killing people....

Or maybe that's a Jurassic Park scenario....hmmm...


Either way, it'd still be awesome.

[Feelmirath]

Pretty hard not to believe in them at this day and age, what with bones being dug up and carbon dating and so on.

[Uncle_bob]

Don't turn this thread into a religious debate, asswipes. http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif

[Otis_Kat]

I believe dinosaurs as you know them didn't exist.




Real dinosaurs had laser jet packs and were always fighting the Transformers.

And we can see who won.

[REJ-]

Um guys... If dinosaurs exsisted, how come like... They weren't in the holy doctrine of all things that never lies or exaggerates the truth-the holy bible! I mean come on!

Wasn't there a reference about levithan in the Bible. I think it was in the book of Job.

[Tallus]

my friend found a tooth in the quarry near my house, so yeah i'm pretty sure they're real. i find trilobites a lot, and they sorta count right?

[ABDUR101]

On 2006-10-20 13:52, REJ- wrote:
Wasn't there a reference about levithan in the Bible. I think it was in the book of Job.


Leviathan could reference any large sea creature, even those found today. I'm pretty sure when sailors way back saw something as large as a blue whale surfacing, and the carcasses of large squid, they were freaked the hell out.

Though I agree, don't turn this into a religious debate. While the topic itself can include the concepts of dinosaurs(or lack thereof) from religious doctrine, we can use what we've uncovered, dug up and found on our own to conclude that, yes, large reptiles(and large-just about everything else) once walked, swam and flew on the earth.

Though certainly everyone is subject to limiting what they wish to beleive as truth as much as they want. So if those bones can't possibly be millions of years old because the world itself was only created 10,000 years ago, by all means, I guess aliens must have just buried them here and then moved on.

There you have it, solid truth, earth is the waste-recepticle of known existance. =]

[DizzyDi]

On 2006-10-20 12:01, Uncle_bob wrote:
Don't turn this thread into a religious debate, asswipes. http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif



Religion would be one of the main things stopping people from not believing in Dinosaurs. Seeing as how in the bible God created Earth, the Heavens, then Man, theres no room for dinosaurs in there.

I believe in 'em though.

[HUnewearl_Meira]

On 2006-10-20 13:52, REJ- wrote:

Um guys... If dinosaurs exsisted, how come like... They weren't in the holy doctrine of all things that never lies or exaggerates the truth-the holy bible! I mean come on!

Wasn't there a reference about levithan in the Bible. I think it was in the book of Job.



And don't forget about Behemoth. He was in the book of Job, too.

There's actually some sparse evidence that dinosaurs have co-existed with humans. I've personally seen pictures of a human footprint (a shoed human, no less) smack in the middle of a dinosaur's footprint. There have also been creatures sighted in South America that match the description of an Apatosaurus on a much smaller scale. What we may very well someday come to realize, is that between things like that, and the old legends of dragon slayers and such, it may very well turn out that dinosaurs and humans co-existed for some time, but dinosaurs were eventually hunted into extinction before we began producing reliable historical records.

Now, concerning the supposed age of the fossils we've been finding... I honestly don't trust radiometric dating methods. They rely on too many fundamental assumptions, such as the ratio of radioactive materials to non-radioactive materials being consistent throughout Earth's history (who knows how many of these ratios have altered over billions of years? I find it hard to grasp that radioactive materials are appearing at the same rate at which they are decaying), and the half-life of a radioactive material being consistent over these periods of time. Even layers of rock don't convince me; there are places on this planet where those layers start out flat, but will make a sharp vertical turn. It's not clear to me that a sheer cliff face will gain matter before it erodes. There's a certain nut and conspiracy theorist extrodinaire by the name of Dr. Kent Hovind (http://www.drdino.com) (his Ph.D. is in Education) that makes a good point concerning the layers of the Grand Canyon:



The line that “it had been carved out by a river” made absolutely no sense to me, but what puzzled me more were the evenly colored stripes of even heights that were uniformly found throughout the entire canyon. Not being a Christian at that time, I was not troubled by the idea of the earth being millions or billions of years old, but I was not able to understand how each of these individual layers, or stripes, got to be of one unified color.

Did they expect us to believe that millions of years of light pink debris were followed by millions of years of gray debris, followed by millions of years of dark pink debris, and so forth? What possible factors could have explained this uniformity of color, not to mention the uniformity of the lines dividing the layers? They are relatively smooth, even lines that stretch for great distances without any signs of erosion between them. It actually looked like the product of different types and weights of silt settling after a flood, although at the time, I erroneously considered the possibility of more than one flood having been involved.

Being an agnostic at the time, I did not look at it as an argument for or against God, it was simply an observation based on common sense. The idea that nearly perfect stripes would have formed through years of decay, being of distinct and differing colors, and without erosion lines, was just plain dumb. If all of the earth looked like the Snake River Canyon their theory might have fooled me, but it does not, so I did see through it. I was puzzled at the time as to why they so many scientists were so gullible, but I just figured that they were morons and left it at that.


Long story short, I don't know how old the world really is (nor do I believe that it's actually important), but nevertheless, I don't think we've actually gotten this thing about rock layers figured out rightly.

[Abaru-FP]

Yes, Dinosaurs existed. It's cute to think that humans are the only child of some super-being though.

Want proof of evolution? Just look at a five year old. The resemblance to a monkey is obvious.
And yes, I hate kids.

[isahn80]

Yeah, there were dinosaurs, and they did co-exist with humans. They even performed essential functions around the household, as the Flintstones have clearly demonstrated.

Seriously, though:



On 2006-10-21 09:20, HUnewearl_Meira wrote:


Now, concerning the supposed age of the fossils we've been finding... I honestly don't trust radiometric dating methods. They rely on too many fundamental assumptions, such as the ratio of radioactive materials to non-radioactive materials being consistent throughout Earth's history (who knows how many of these ratios have altered over billions of years? I find it hard to grasp that radioactive materials are appearing at the same rate at which they are decaying), and the half-life of a radioactive material being consistent over these periods of time.



This is an interesting argument which makes sense. In fact, it motivated me to do a little research of my own into radiometric dating methods. The following is from an article (http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html) written by some guy named Dr. Wiens, who, in addition to having a PhD in physics, is also a Christian.



* There are well over forty different radiometric dating methods, and scores of other methods such as tree rings and ice cores.
* All of the different dating methods agree--they agree a great majority of the time over millions of years of time. Some Christians make it sound like there is a lot of disagreement, but this is not the case. The disagreement in values needed to support the position of young-Earth proponents would require differences in age measured by orders of magnitude (e.g., factors of 10,000, 100,000, a million, or more). The differences actually found in the scientific literature are usually close to the margin of error, usually a few percent, not orders of magnitude!
* Vast amounts of data overwhelmingly favor an old Earth. Several hundred laboratories around the world are active in radiometric dating. Their results consistently agree with an old Earth. Over a thousand papers on radiometric dating were published in scientifically recognized journals in the last year, and hundreds of thousands of dates have been published in the last 50 years. Essentially all of these strongly favor an old Earth.
* Radioactive decay rates have been measured for over sixty years now for many of the decay clocks without any observed changes. And it has been close to a hundred years since the uranium-238 decay rate was first determined.
* Both long-range and short-range dating methods have been successfully verified by dating lavas of historically known ages over a range of several thousand years.
* The mathematics for determining the ages from the observations is relatively simple.



As for half-lives being consistant over billions of years, apparently radiometric decay can be observed in the radioactive-powered light waves from supernova blasts, and they match those from today.

Although I found plenty of other scientific writings that agree with this, I found his the most compelling.

As for the Grand Canyon, the truth is nobody knows how it was formed. Now, there's this thoery that a few periods of geologic "uplift" (basically, mountains rising out of the ground) actually created the canyon, and the Colorado River came much later. Of course, this has many holes in it as well.

So I guess we can accurately tell how old fossils and ancient rock layers are, but there's still a lot about how exactly they got there we don't know.




<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: isahn80 on 2006-10-21 12:53 ]</font>

[DikkyRay]

On 2006-10-20 06:48, RoninJoku wrote:
Um guys... If dinosaurs exsisted, how come like... They weren't in the holy doctrine of all things that never lies or exaggerates the truth-the holy bible! I mean come on! http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

<Dino-nut for as long as I can remember... And a cold contemplating Darwinist who eats baptised babies.


THe bible doesn't say anything about AIDS does it? That exists.
i was raised on the belief of dinosuars. They were always interesting. So im 100% with the belief that dinosuars existed

[T0m]

The thing is, it's not possible to proof that a theory is absolute truth. When someone sets out to proof a theory, that someone will look for evidence supporting the theory, and also see if can be disproven. Then, when enough evidence has been found, and no disproof, the theory will be generally accepted as being true.
Scientists are aware, that any theory will only be true, as long as the there's disproof (or, when there's proof that the contrary is true.)
One of the best known examples, is probably the theory that the Earth is a flat disc. Once, this was a truth accepted by everyone. After evidence was found (and some people were killed along the way..) that this couldn't be true, the theory was rejected and replaced by another one.
Another example is that before WWII, the prevailing theories said the soundbarrier couldn't be breached by airplanes.

Why did I bring up all this boring stuff?
If we take alook at the age of the Earth, we can see that there's a lot of evidence pointing to it being around 4.5 billion years old. (As with practically anything, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) has an interesting article about The Age of the Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth).)
As is usual with things like this, all this evidence doesn't proof that this is absolutely-without-small-print true. But it does mean that the theory of Earth being that age, has a lot going for it.
And the theory of Dinosaurs being real once, is much the same.

Do I believe both these theories are true? Yes, I have an unfaltering trust in science, and as such, I'll believe any accepted theory is true, up until when it's proven wrong. (Yes, then I'll have faith in the new theory; I don't have any emotional attachment to theories).

Two finishing notes.
Despite all the evidence, and despite my personal belief, until someone uses a timemachine (of which the current, prevailing theory is that it's not possible to make one usable on people, but this has been changed a few times) to take a look, it will remain a theory, and not become fact.
Despite theories not being fact, this doesn't mean that there won't be people that have an unshakable belief in a theory. Just take a look at history's religious wars, where people firmly believed that their theory was Truth, worth killing those upholding another theory.

[Luis]

When you doubt about it, just turn your car on!!! =P

[Zelutos]

I don't understand how they wouldn't exist...after all, there are bones to prove that they did...

[Xaos127]

But there's a book saying they don't exist..and books provide lots of information, and knowledge is power, yo.

But I still don't see how you could deny they existed, i've seen Walking with the Dinosaurs - they scary.

BUT! I still voted they don't exist because I always root for the underdog, and I think we can take this poll.

[NickKicken]

On 2006-10-20 06:48, RoninJoku wrote:
Um guys... If dinosaurs exsisted, how come like... They weren't in the holy doctrine of all things that never lies or exaggerates the truth-the holy bible! I mean come on! http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

<Dino-nut for as long as I can remember... And a cold contemplating Darwinist who eats baptised babies.



Science keeps trying to disprove my religion...The only way I can explain it now is to say that in the 10 days (right? getten numbers confused lol)that Earth was being...made...billions of years actually went by, Because whos to say what god's view of a day IS.

[MaximusLight]

On 2006-10-22 21:50, NickKicken wrote:


On 2006-10-20 06:48, RoninJoku wrote:
Um guys... If dinosaurs exsisted, how come like... They weren't in the holy doctrine of all things that never lies or exaggerates the truth-the holy bible! I mean come on! http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

<Dino-nut for as long as I can remember... And a cold contemplating Darwinist who eats baptised babies.



Science keeps trying to disprove my religion...The only way I can explain it now is to say that in the 10 days (right? getten numbers confused lol)that Earth was being...made...billions of years actually went by, Because whos to say what god's view of a day IS.



Ummmm... accually it's seven.... but hey the stories purpose isn't for historical fact it is for spiritual purposes, so yeah there is a good chance it pretty inaccuarate and that dinosaurs existed.

Yeah T-rex!

[Kers]

^ so, Nick, do you believe in dinosaurs?!

[HUnewearl_Meira]

On 2006-10-21 12:36, isahn80 wrote:


* There are well over forty different radiometric dating methods, and scores of other methods such as tree rings and ice cores.
* All of the different dating methods agree--they agree a great majority of the time over millions of years of time. Some Christians make it sound like there is a lot of disagreement, but this is not the case. The disagreement in values needed to support the position of young-Earth proponents would require differences in age measured by orders of magnitude (e.g., factors of 10,000, 100,000, a million, or more). The differences actually found in the scientific literature are usually close to the margin of error, usually a few percent, not orders of magnitude!
* Vast amounts of data overwhelmingly favor an old Earth. Several hundred laboratories around the world are active in radiometric dating. Their results consistently agree with an old Earth. Over a thousand papers on radiometric dating were published in scientifically recognized journals in the last year, and hundreds of thousands of dates have been published in the last 50 years. Essentially all of these strongly favor an old Earth.
* Radioactive decay rates have been measured for over sixty years now for many of the decay clocks without any observed changes. And it has been close to a hundred years since the uranium-238 decay rate was first determined.
* Both long-range and short-range dating methods have been successfully verified by dating lavas of historically known ages over a range of several thousand years.
* The mathematics for determining the ages from the observations is relatively simple.



As for half-lives being consistant over billions of years, apparently radiometric decay can be observed in the radioactive-powered light waves from supernova blasts, and they match those from today.

Although I found plenty of other scientific writings that agree with this, I found his the most compelling.

As for the Grand Canyon, the truth is nobody knows how it was formed. Now, there's this thoery that a few periods of geologic "uplift" (basically, mountains rising out of the ground) actually created the canyon, and the Colorado River came much later. Of course, this has many holes in it as well.

So I guess we can accurately tell how old fossils and ancient rock layers are, but there's still a lot about how exactly they got there we don't know.


Your counterpoint is quite good. I'm impressed. While I will comment that I have no specific belief about the age of the Earth (the exact manner in which God is responsible for Earth's creation is not something I view as being important to my faith), I have to say that I'm not quite convinced of the accuracy of radiometric dating.

I recalled an example that I heard of once, where live penguins were radiometrically dated using the Carbon-14 method, resulting in the penguins' ages being thousands of years. I decided to do a little bit of research into that, and discovered that just about all the references to the subject I could find were in the form of forum debates, and generally posted by your stereotypical conspiracy-theorist Christian. The only reference that really caught my attention also commented that different parts of a mammoth had been dated using Carbon-14, resulting in several thousands of years discrepancy. The poster cited these claims as coming from a Biology text book. Still not entirely convincing, but it turned out that this was not the hinge-point of his argument. What he pointed out, was something that I, myself, have read about fairly recently: before radiometric dating can be done accurately, the radioactive element intended to be used must first have archieved equilibrium between its rate of decay and its rate of generation on Earth. In the case of Carbon-14 (I haven't been able to find a reliable source to confirm this, so bear with me), it supposedly should take 30,000 years, but yet, measurements taken from the atmosphere only indicate that we've accumulated up to about 10,000 years' worth. The aforementioned poster brought to attention that this accounts for the discrepancies encountered when using Carbon-14 dating. That is, however, specific to Carbon-14.

Further research has also brought to my attention that many have pointed out that it's something worth considering, that we've only accumulated 10,000 years' worth of Carbon-14, and have therefore failed to reach equilibrium. It suggests that Carbon-14 has only been developing in our atmosphere for about 10,000 years or so, which could mean one of several things:


The Earth is only around 10,000 years old.
The decay rate of Carbon-14 is not a constant.
Carbon-14's accepted half-life of 5,715 years has been measured incorrectly.
Something drastic occured that wildly altered the levels of Carbon-14 on Earth.
We don't actually know as much as we believe we do.


On most subjects I tend to go with the fourth option, there, personally. There will perpetually be more that we fail to understand, than that which we succeed in learning.

On a tangent, I'll comment that the Biblical method that Christians have used in the past to date the world is inherently flawed; it is based on geneologies listed in the Bible, and the ages at which individuals died, but fails to take into account that it can be demonstrated from different listings of the same geneology, that the geneologies are abridged (it's also worth noting, that apparently in ancient Hebrew cultures, the person viewed as the "father" was simply the oldest man in the family; if great-grandpa is still alive, then he's dad). It's from this flawed math that an age of 6,000 some-odd years is obtained. T0m's Wikipedia link offers this interesting bit of information:



In a book published in 1654, not long before his death, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, Ireland, calculated from the Bible (augmented by some astronomy and numerology) that creation began on October 23, 4004 BC.


This would, of course, mean that Earth supposedly turned exactly 6,000 on October 23, 1996. http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

The Bible says that Earth was created in 6 days. Things to remember about this:


The length of a "day" as we define it wouldn't have been established until several "days" into the Creation.
The Hebrew word used in the original text more specifically refers to "the length of time it takes to accomplish a task".
The first chapters of Genesis are written in a Hebrew poetic form, so much of it is likely to be quite figurative.


Some also speculate, based on Cain's account, that there were other humans on Earth besides Adam & Eve and their immediate offspring (albeit, it's stated that Cain, Able and Seth were not the only offspring that Adam & Eve had). My boss in particular has chosen interest in the theory that the Biblical "Adam" was, in fact, the father of agriculture; the first man who figured out how he could stay in one place and have all the food he needs, therefore, making civilization possible for mankind.

We learn interesting things, don't we?

[NickKicken]

Hell yeah I believe in dinosaurs! How else would they have filmed Jurrasic Park? Seriously, gosh....

[Kers]

Mmm brain for the food in this thread.

[MaximusLight]

HUnewearl_Meira, you bring a smile to me and my brain, however...

The half life of carbon-14 is the time it takes for it to decay into lighter elements, and therefore carbon-14 is reduced over time, so using it's half life (half-life of 5,715 years) to say that it has accumalated over the past 10000 years is wrong.

Now saying that the currecent level of carbon-14 shows that the earth is younger is correct, is you wanted to look at the accuamulation of carbon-14 you have to look at the radioactive isomer that producess it (some heaver element with a diferent half-life)

This said in order for Carbon-14 to in in equilibrium any elements that can decay into carbon-14 also must be in equilibrium, on that note the number of radioactive elements on the earth has greatly shifted since nuclear testing so to date something on the surface of the earth with prolonged exposure to the atmosphere will result in massive error. However, for something buried in the earth that is not contaminated to do a carbon-14 test should be accuarate.

To sum up:
- Carbon-14 decays at a half-life of 5,715 years, and therefore does not build up at this rate (it decreases not increases)
- Heavier elements decay into Carbon-14, these elements have a diffirent half-life, but they are responsible for the accumulation of Carbon-14 (not 5,715 years again)
-Heavier radioactive elements play a roll in the equilibrium of Carbon-14 and must be taken into account.
-The number of radioactive elements has shifted in the last 50 to 75 or so because of nuclear testing, therefor things on the surface will not be accuarate, however, things undergroud (without exposure to the atmosphere) should be accuarate useless there is a special curcumstance (Ex. a radioactive deposite near the fossil)

I totally agree with your points on biblical data, very good in deed.

-keep in mind that the acient hebrews also didn't know about fossils like we do today and therefore have no way of placing them in the biblical acount other than to say that lizards came before humans

[Kevino]

On 2006-10-20 06:48, RoninJoku wrote:
Um guys... If dinosaurs exsisted, how come like... They weren't in the holy doctrine of all things that never lies or exaggerates the truth-the holy bible! I mean come on!



dont mean to ... offend anyone but there is no strong foundation on religion. I'm allegedly a lutheran but i have a hard time believeing in religion and such. so we cant say it never exaggerates and always tells the truth. I mean even if you didnt mean it we cant use this for any basis of conversation. its like building a house on watter. It COULD stay there but we cant be certain unless we alter the house. what i'm saying is can we drop the religious background stuff?

[Kevino]

On 2006-10-22 21:19, Xaos127 wrote:
But there's a book saying they don't exist..and books provide lots of information, and knowledge is power, yo.


another problem i have (dont take this personally Xaos). We cant base any thing solely on books because well... if they dont give you things to base this off of and they you dont check that kind of thing out well you be skrewed. and if you base off of false information you thusly just made false statement. We have solid proof that they exsisted some figmented idea from some random source cant all of a sudden bemake this proof void.

[Red_Dragon_Jr]

This is true....i even got a Velicoraptor tooth at home behind glass.

[Kevino]

thank you

[Red_Dragon_Jr]

On 2006-10-23 06:55, Kevino wrote:
thank you


You're welcome and hey, if dinosaurs didn't exist, where the heck would we get our gasoline at?

[Kevino]

and what the hell would all of the bones be from?

[Kevino]

un less all of them have been fabricated by scientists as some joke.

[Red_Dragon_Jr]

On 2006-10-23 07:13, Kevino wrote:
un less all of them have been fabricated by scientists as some joke.


Maybe, like that one Episode of The Simpsons with the skeleton of an angel. But, the dino-bones have....well stuff in them.

[washuguy]

Do you belive in magic?

[Kevino]

oh oh its magic. You know. never believe it's not so! damn scientists. they fabricated them in their labs and then they used magic to ... put stuff in the bones and age them years in minutes