This post is continuation of our post entitled Dialogue - The Expression of Fundamental Beliefs
I would like to reiterate that the comments found in this series of posts are not meant as a defense of Rabbi Meiselman’s essay. They are directed solely at Rabbi Slifkin’s stated opinions on his blog.
Rabbi Slifkin quotes Rabbi Meiselman as follows:
Rabbi Slifkin then goes on to make the following comment.One of the main points of this article will be that all current tools for measuring the passage of time presume stability in the relationships between natural processes, similar to what we observe today. In fact, our entire outlook on time reflects this presumption... The presumption of stability in the oscillations of the cesium atom underlies all notions of time measurement today, as well as their projection into other epochs.
What about them? It is important to understand that "dinosaurs" does not automatically = billions of years. When dinosaur fossils were first classified by paleontologists in the early 1800’s, they did not assume they were millions of years old. But to the uninitiated layman the very presence of dinosaur fossils bespeaks age. For instance, T-Rex, the worlds greatest land predator in history, is automatically presumed by the average person to have lived an inconceivably long time ago (65 million years). Why? Because that’s what evolutionists have been preaching for over 150 years. By now evolutionary dogma has so firmly established itself in the collective consciousness of Western culture it would take a miracle to dislodge it.This paragraph gives the impression that the scientific assessment of the universe being billions of years old are all based on the oscillations of the cesium atom. And most people are not very familiar with cesium atoms, which we can't even see, so he can get away with saying that cesium atoms used to act differently.
But what about the dinosaurs? And the therapsids? And the woolly mammoths?
Notwithstanding, it goes without saying that Rabbi Slifkin does not appeal to the "uninitiated layman" for support. He makes a well-considered argument from the presence of dinosaur fossils in the geologic record. In the following 2-3 posts we intend on analyzing Rabbi Slifkin’s arguments from Geology to see if they can withstand close scrutiny.
To be continued…
"T-Rex, the worlds greatest land predator in history, is automatically presumed by the average person to have lived an inconceivably long time ago (65 million years). Why? Because that’s what evolutionists have been preaching for over 150 years."
ReplyDeleteRed herring. I'm talking about how T-Rex is presumed to have lived before humans. And therapsids before T-Rexes. I couldn't care less if it was a million years beforehand, a billion years beforehand, or a month beforehand. The only significant point is that it was more than six hours before!
Rabbi Slifkin,
ReplyDeleteRed herring. I'm talking about how T-Rex is presumed to have lived before humans. And therapsids before T-Rexes. I couldn't care less if it was a million years beforehand, a billion years beforehand, or a month beforehand. The only significant point is that it was more than six hours before!
This is what you may have meant but the way you wrote the paragraph is misleading (red herring). You wrote:
This paragraph gives the impression that the scientific assessment of the universe being billions of years old are all based on the oscillations of the cesium atom… But what about the dinosaurs? And the therapsids? And the woolly mammoths?
I was merely pointing out to our readers that dinosaurs have nothing to do with billions of years.
As far as your etzem point (The only significant point is that it was more than six hours before!), it is too important to respond to in the comment section. I will address it in one of the future posts of this series bl’n.