Being a scientist myself, this argument is not very good. The believer can just say that god created lead as well, and didn’t wait for it to be created by decay. If god can create a universe, why shouldn’t they be able to create some lead?
Exactly! In fact, we know that the universe was created in media res so that light photons allegedly streaming to us from thirteen billion light years away in mid transit with the exact amount of red shift it would have from that object retreating away from us due to cosmic inflation, and was, in fact, created by God 2000 in route in the (great) void of space so that it would smack not just into the dot that is Earth, but some dude’s telescope and spectrum analyzer.
In fact, I wasn’t born fifty seven (and some days) years ago. I was born this last Tuesday when the universe was created with everything in motion.
ETA Apparently in the last decade, Last Tuesdayism (the omphalos hypothesis that the universe was created last Tuesday) turned into Last Thursdayism
Prior to that, Last Thursdayism was a separate sect who suggested the universe was recreated every Thursday the way we reboot our OS every once in a while.
Is this kind of decay the only way that all terrestrial lead was created?
The Earth was created 10 seconds ago and we all have implanted memories, change my mind.
Blasphemer. It’ll be created tomorrow and this is all part of the memory implant.
I had a creationist professor who had a whole bunch of bullshit specifically intended to “debunk” aging using Polonium half-lives, etc…
You’ll never “disprove” it for them, because they don’t want it disproven. They’ll just find the relevant page on Answers in Genesis/Ken Ham’s website written by someone with a Ph.D. from Pensacola Christian College and consider it done. They’re not in it to actually find the truth. It’s not a good-faith discussion/debate.
In what backwoods podunk shithole did you have a creationist “professor?” What were they even ostensibly teaching?
I’ve seen anecdotal stories of geologists who claimed they were creationists. The brain is an amazing thing.
I went to high school in rural Mississippi and had a creationist biology teacher. We quickly touched on what the textbook had to say about evolution, then spent the next week or so watching this video series on various species with symbiotic relationships and how some of them could not have possibly evolved without the other. And it was a public school. Knowing what I know now, I should have told him to stick his illegal proselytizing up his ass and just spent his class period studying in the library.
Fortunately when they go find some page in AiG, you can just go point at the corresponding entry here: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
Been a while since I’ve seen that resource. Old webpages are refreshing sometimes.
You might be interested in the community I cross-posted it to then, if you’re not already in it: !oldweb@lemmy.ml
That’s not the gotcha OOP seems to think it is. If the world was magicked into existence by a supreme being 4000 years ago, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been magicked into existence with heavy elements having decayed by an arbitrary amount or with Pb by itself. 'Tis the problem with invoking appeals to magic. And anyway a quick look on wiki says that primordial Pb was mostly created by neutron capture of lighter elements, not radioactove decay of heavier ones, so the mere existence of Pb proves nothing wrt the timeline of U decay anyway… but at that point if you’re bringing nucleosynthesis into it, you may as well point to anything higher than lithium or even atoms as a concept as “proof” rather than picking anything as exotic as uranium decay.
That’s crazy, is this the only source of lead? Like, can’t lead come from somewhere else?
Yeah, this post is not fully correct. The lead nail in the coffin is not that lead exists, it’s that we find it in certain mineral matrixes that don’t form with lead.
Zircon is the most widely referenced mineral in uranium-lead dating, as the mineral rejects lead during its formation, but will incorporate uranium. So when we find zircon with lead in it, it means that the uranium has decayed and turned into lead while being stuck there, and the percentage of uranium to lead in a sample lets us determine its time of formation.
I’m fairly certain this is leaving out important details. I believe it decays into a unique form of lead with a different number of either protons or neutrons. The actual numbers I could not tell you as I’m remembering this from high school.
