Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

Blessings.  INI posted this in another site where I was discussing the length of the creative days.  The I thought some here may be interested so here is:

Genesis 1:1-5, Day One
Highlights: light created, division of darkness and light, morning and first day, earth formed & "watery deep"
Conclusions possible: Stars created, earth formed
Solar system creation 7-8 byo; Universe estimated 15 byo
Therefore, the length of day one can be roughly 7-8 billion years, by far the longest days.

Genesis 1:6-8, Day Two
Highlights: waters and firmament separated
Conclusion possible: formation of Earth's atmosphere and accumulation of O2 & O3 (g)
Atmosphere formation known to be tied in with earliest events of Earth, but the planet here is still under formation, thus dating the end of the second day at earth's full formation and the beginning of day two at the end of the solar system formation (the "light created"). 7-8 byo through 4.5 byo to 3.5 byo

Genesis 1:9-13, Day Three
Highlights: Earth and sea formation, vegetation sprouts, grass also, trees
Conclusion: This covers the appearance of photosynthetic algae all the way through the first sporophytes & saphrophytes. Plant morphology has changed little to none since these first plants, interestingly enough.
3.5 byo - 1.5byo

Genesis 1:14-19, Day four
Highlights: Atmosphere clears and stars appear in night sky (v14), moon & sun...
Conclusion: Because these were likely PRODUCED on day one (see: light being made), we can conclude this is when the atmosphere cleared. I think this is probably one of the most interesting revelations of Genesis. Some people find it redundant to say that the luminaries appeared on day four when the light was created on day one, but this is missing the point of the events that occur here...
AND: it places day four at about 1.5 byo thru 750 myo

moving along...
Genesis 1:20-23, day five
Highlights: Finally fauna! Seacreatures, "sea monsters" ///
Conclusions: Interesting thing I read in HG Wells Outline of History: some of the first sea animals included giant water scorpions and the precursors of jellyfish...so these multicellular seacreatures were indeed "Sea monsters" AND still primitive. We also see "winged creatures." I like to point out here that these, at first, are NOT birds. Remember the pterodactyl? Thus, when I see pictoral accounts of the creation, I find it ironic that these beasts of the sky (up to fourty foot wing spans) are usually no where to be found, but we see little hummingbirds fluttering by hibiscus flowers! Interesting, no?
So at this point we have sea creatures and the first creatures of the sky, but no perminently land dwelling fauna. Evolutionists even agree with this, that land life emerged from the sea. Whlie I don't completely agree with this, it's obvious that sea life was a predecessor of land life.
750 myo - 250 myo

Genesis 1:24-31, Six...
The last CREATIVE day. Domestic animals appear "according to their kinds," as is so often pointed out. Man made "in our image." People take this too literally. Since we know God is a Spirit (Jn 4:24) we're obviously not saying he made us with 2 legs, 2 arms, and a head and the whole 9 because that is how he looks. Nor is it comparing us to the Savior who is to come later. Gorillas are scarely different topically, in terms of anatomy. We know this refers to our spirit, our free will, and our large cephalic zone...perhaps to our detriment there - I criticized Xtians often for overly glorifying man because of this one bite in the Bible, but it is significant to us as Christians. We are held to a higher standard than the animal world. I'm digressing. Lineage dates mankind at 6500-7000 yo. Carbon dating says more along the lines of 50,000...homo erectus 6.2 MYO...So the dates get muddled. Let's trust JAH?  ;)
250 myo - 6,000 - present day.

We're said to be currently in the seventh day.

"But he answered them, "My Father has kept working until now, and I keep working." -Jn 5:17

I am making an effort to find information concerning the effectiveness and accuracy of these dating methods you mentioned above. I don't have the link right now, but I have read that carbon dating is HIGHLY inaccurate. However, I just cannot wrap my head around the idea that the earth is only 6000 years old; a theory that Christianity unrelentingly pushed forward. :-\ I'm a bit lost haha.

https://ncse.com/cej/3/2/answers-to-creationist-attacks-carbon-14-dating

Above is a link to some findings obtained by a number of researchers concerning the accuracy of the C-14 dating method. They also share some perspectives of the Creationist where necessary. It would seem that from the article; the C-14 dating method, despite being challenged by creationist in certain aspects, can be quite reliable. I found the "tree ring" method of dating to be very interesting.

I did some more research and I came across fossil records and some other convincing info. So I'm good now.

Below is an article from reddit written by 'verylittle' explaining the limits of C-14 dating and other methods and some of the instruments used in dating.
"Only by liars, or by people who have been lied too.


So a bit of background for anyone who isn't familiar with the what radiocarbon dating is or how it works. High energy cosmic rays are constantly bombarding the earth from space which convert a little bit of the Nitrogen-14 in the atmosphere into Carbon-14. Of course, the carbon-14 is radioactive and decays away slowly. What this means is that there is an approximately constant fraction of the carbon in the world which is this radioactive carbon. It gets taken from the air and used in photosynthesis by plants, and so all living things should have this same fraction of 14C in them as long as they are alive and actively exchanging matter with the environment. When something dies its 14C begins to decay away and by measuring how much 14C is left in some dead thing (either by counting the decay rate with a Geiger counter or running it through a mass-spectrometer) we can measure how long ago it died.
Okay, we're all up to speed.
Basically, 14C has a half-life of about 5,730 years. After about 50,000 years there isn't really enough 14C left to get a good measurement. If you spend a really really long time over it with your Geiger counter you might be able to date it out to about 75,000 years.
As for the statistical uncertainty: it depends on your precise method, how you prepared your sample, how long you checked it with your Geiger counter/how many measurements you made, and how good your calibration is. Generally, the literature presents a range of dates. For example, "The Shroud of Turn is carbon dated to AD1260–1390." So that's about 5% uncertainty, but still pretty good.
So basically, it's given as a range or (mean age) +/- (standard deviation). Unfortunately I cannot access the journals as I'm not on the university network, but a few numbers off the top of my head: For something from the past millennia, like human remains, it is possible to get measurements with 5% uncertainty. The older the remains/artifact, the bigger the uncertainty. At the extreme limit of dating, going back about 5000 years, you get uncertainties spanning a few hundred years, but this is still often able to get it in the 5% regime.
Again, a lot of this depends on the sample and the method for measuring it.
I would like to add one key point: how do we know that the rate of carbon-14 production in the atmosphere has been constant? Even if we understand the radioactive decay processes well enough now (which I assure you, we do), there is still no way to know that the amount of C14 produces in the atmosphere hasn't been fluctuating due to solar weather or just probabilistic fluctuations, right? Actually, there's a very good way to check this- tree rings. Tree rings offer thousands of years of data, neatly organized, which can be averaged over many trees, to obtain a very good calibration of the amount of C14 in the atmopshere.
Let me just say, the people who claim that radioisotope dating is inaccurate have no idea what they are talking about. Yes, there are limitations, but anyone who says "carbon dating is just flat out wrong and bad and stupid" is wrong. For one thing, carbon dating doesn't work on things that don't have atmospheric carbon in it, so rocks, or things older than 50k years shouldn't be dated by carbon, but by different isotopes.
For example, how do we date the world to being 4.6 billion years old? We use uranium-lead dating. As uranium decays it goes through a two separate series of different radioactive isotopes which in turn decay, and eventually hit lead. By measuring the relative abundances of a bunch of these, you can date the rock. So well so, that you can measure 4 billion year old rock to within +/- 1 million years. That's like a +/- 1% or less. That's actually better than carbon dating on a longer time scale, because Uranium has a much much longer halflife than carbon 14. But obviously, U-Pb dating doesn't work on organic materials or things that are relatively recent, or on things that lack uranium!"


Interestingly enough the creationist perspectives I've come across mention nothing about Uranium-Lead(U-Pb) dating. They don't go into much detail about the technicalities of how dating takes place either.