The virgin birth? I assumed that was a troll on your part because of how obvious the answer is(literal of course).

Sorry, just quoting other people people trying to rationalize fitting all the animals in the measurements given, that's all. Those people consider those numbers to fall under the literal section.

Literal Section:
-Virgin Birth

Figurative:
-Anything involving numbers


..I'm learning here.

The measurements of the Ark are literal. What is wrong with that situation is the assumption that the flood was global.



To say that all things involving numbers are figurative would be incorrect.

Also, some things in The Bible are literal and figurative.

This post was edited by Bad_Ass_MoFo on May 23 2011 01:39pm

I'll give you some insight .

Think of the exactness of how Noah was told to build the Ark with a rigid set of instructions .

Can you think of anything else in the Old Testament that is as exact and rigid as it relates to salvation ?

It's funny how many times you've posted and yet you still haven't given me one environmental factor that will change the half-life of an element or anything that will screw up uranium-lead dating.

Fact) You do not know the starting point of these elements.
Fact) Quantum physics currently state that you cannot measure this on an atom by atom basis, which is why they use groups and the Law of Large Numbers instead. This is another inherent flaw, and should be an obvious suspect in and of itself.
Fact) We have discovered things that effect the half-life of other elements (such as beryllium and rhenium-187). You cannot state empirically that no such conditions exist which could alter the half-life of other elements, nor that they did or did not occur in the past. You can assume and believe these things, but they are not facts.

Does anyone?

Post #8, 14, and 21. Please read those. Thanks

Since there are people posting here who claim to have some background in the field, can someone link me to a research level paper with a decent statistical methodology section? If the actual reported results of these tests are based entirely on CLT normal approximations with nothing else, I'm going to have to rethink my confidence in carbon dating. At the very least, I would hope they do some nonparametric estimation to test the assumptions of the model and some kind of moment test to make sure the CLT approximations are valid.

Paul, I don't think your criticisms of the statistics here are particularly valid assuming everyone is doing their jobs. We've gotten fairly good at identifying flaws in model assumptions by using tools that don't depend on any assumptions (other than that some unknown probability distribution is in the background). If they did their work well, even small sample confidence intervals would be more than accurate enough to rule out any serious problems. There is a bound on the maximum possible error from the CLT approximations that people use to justify sample sizes of 30 or more being fairly good estimates. As to your criticisms about the constancy of parameters, again given the amount of data I assume they have collected, they could use nonparametrics (much stronger than CLT in terms of assumptions, but weaker in the convergence rate) to test whether or not the parameter values might have changed significantly over time. Again, I don't know anything about the empirical methodology, but in terms of the tests we're good at identifying those kinds of problems.

Fair warning, I don't know anything about/couldn't care less about anthropology.