• Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
    55·
    2 months ago

    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?

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        4·
        2 months ago

        Can blame it on the devil, or can say it’s just a test by God. Anything from old rocks to fossils to light from distance stars created enroute. Using science to debate someone who doesn’t understand science or thinks it’s all a trick isn’t going to work.

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • HowManyNimons@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        Being born from mother tigers is the only way that terrestrial tigers can be created. Except on Creation Day, according to Creationists. It’s not much of a stretch to say that’s where the Earth’s original stock of lead came from too.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      I find it funny that AtheistMemes comments on this gif are primarily on the science, and ScienceMemes where this was cross posted is filled with Christian apologetics.

  • ivanafterall ☑️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    261·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
      13·
      2 months ago

      In what backwoods podunk shithole did you have a creationist “professor?” What were they even ostensibly teaching?

      • m_f@midwest.socialOPEnglish
        13·
        2 months ago

        I had a “Creationism vs evolution” class because I did one semester at a religious college before realizing I wasn’t religious. It was about what’d you’d expect, and no, the credit didn’t transfer to a real college

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        3·
        2 months ago

        I’ve seen anecdotal stories of geologists who claimed they were creationists. The brain is an amazing thing.

          • Rhaedas@fedia.io
            1·
            2 months ago

            I suppose, but the point is they do a job that requires them be knowledgeable of the science, and yet can compartmentalize things to do that but also have beliefs that run very much against what they observe in reality. Hell, geology was a science born from creationists trying to find evidence of the Flood, who then chose to go the path that the data took them, not the Bible.

      • Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        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.

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
    22·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • Goun@lemmy.ml
    14·
    2 months ago

    That’s crazy, is this the only source of lead? Like, can’t lead come from somewhere else?

    • domdanial@reddthat.comEnglish
      25·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • EmoPolarbear@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Wrufieotnak@feddit.org
        5·
        2 months ago

        It’s a different isotope, so different number of neutrons. If the proton number would be different, it would be another element altogether, since the proton number defines what element it is.

  • switchboard_pete@fedia.io
    14·
    2 months ago
    • Decay of radon-222 isn’t the only way lead can be created, just a way
    • The U238 that started the chain could pre-date the earth
    • Half life is only when half of the sample has decayed, but less than half could have decayed into lead
  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    121·
    2 months ago

    I think this is bad science. Its important to call out bad science to prove that good science exists.

    I don’t think all lead is the result of radioactive decay.

    • m_f@midwest.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Do you have some more reading about this? The wikipedia article doesn’t really touch on it.

      • Windex007@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 months ago

        The assumption is that the only way lead can exist is via a series of radioactive decay. It is a way. It is generally created in stars by a much more direct process, not through radioactive decay.

        • abbadon420@lemm.ee
          2·
          2 months ago

          Is there an emperic difference (like the isotope number or whatever) between lead created through radioactive decay and lead created directly in a star?

        • m_f@midwest.socialOPEnglish
          21·
          2 months ago

          So the meme is incomplete, but the general point still stands from what I can tell, right? Stars take orders of magnitude longer than 4k years to create lead as well, and there is no way of lead being created that could happen in 4k years, unless you start getting into “God made the universe look old” territory?

          • Windex007@lemmy.world
            4·
            2 months ago

            I mean, it’s created at a cosmic rate in the right sized star.

            You’d need to back up and start talking about the big bang and star formation, and at that point lead isn’t really part of the argument. Most elements exist as a result of stars smashing atoms as per my understanding.

            • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 months ago

              Most elements exist as a result of stars smashing atoms as per my understanding.

              In a single star the heaviest element you can make is Iron.

              To get anything heavier than Iron, which Lead is, you need your first start to blow up making iron, and the stuff left behind to eventually form a bigger star, then that star needs to blow up (where you’ll get some gold, lead and a few other slightly heavier elements. Then the remaining parts of the star need to form a neutron star. You then need that neutron star to find and eventually crash into another neutron star, and thats where you get the really heavy elements like uranium.

              • Windex007@lemmy.world
                1·
                2 months ago

                So does that imply that Lead has existed in the universe strictly longer than Uranium? Is the meme entirely backwards?

                • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  I think it could, yes. Not much (more comes out in the neutron star on neutron star action), but yes some from single large start explosions.

          • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 months ago

            Stars take orders of magnitude longer than 4k years to create lead as well, and there is no way of lead being created that could happen in 4k years, unless you start getting into “God made the universe look old” territory?

            Thats correct, but the meme is written as a scientific explanation and its is wrong/incomplete. To correct it, go with what you said, not with what the meme says.

          • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.ukEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Not really, the original point was to prove the earth isn’t 4000 years old. Even if this were the only way lead could be created I’m assuming some portion of the decay could take place in space and then be part of the earth’s formation.

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 months ago

        Stellar element synthesis is where most elements, iron and below, form. Hydrogen, the most common element, fuses to Helium, Lithium. There are more cycles to stars burning elements, Carbon-Nitrogren-Oxygen Cycle, and a bunch of other stuff, all the way up to Iron. After Iron, nuclear fusion can no longer sustain the star, and it collapses into a neutron star (or any other intermediary ranging from hypothetical quark stars to black holes).

        On collapse, you get a supernova. Supernova and other high energy events (called Gamma Ray Bursts, usually attributed to Supernova anyway) explode in a shower of neutrinos and gamma rays. These neutrinos rarely interact with matter since they have no charge, but they still contain a lot of energy, traveling near the speed of light. Gamma rays are the highest energy photons. Anything either particle interacts with will change it.

        The collision of the gamma rays burst and nuetrinos with interstellar matter creates the remainder of the elements, much in a similar way we do on earth to create the synthetic elements (like plutonium).

        Any isotope can be created this way. Isotopes that are unstable then decay until they become something stable - Uranium -> Lead.

        The universe is so old that enough of these elements were able to gather by gravity, forming the relatively tiny deposits we can find on our planet.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 months ago

        If you want a layman approach then this Youtube video about where gold comes from is pretty good. You can skip most of the first half about the culture of gold. The second half of the video is the creation part.

        If you want a technical approach then you want to talk about Rapid Neutron Capture and GRB. You’ll find that kind of talk here. Warning: When you start digging deep into scientific explanations you discover that there’s more we don’t know. As the article ends with the idea that our current working theory of r-process doesn’t happen often enough to explain how much gold we have so there’s likely at least one other way gold is created in the universe. Welcome to cutting edge science!

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
        31·
        2 months ago

        I am not claiming to be a professional particle physicist, and I don’t have my high school chemistry textbooks memorized so I can’t quote the exact page where Rapid Neutron Capture creates heavier elements that doesn’t go immediately to radioactive elements first.

        • n3m37h@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          2 months ago

          Still does not disprove the above decay chain. So religion is still BULLSHIT.

          Just because for and Toyota are different companies doesn’t mean they don’t both make cars, can make the same thing multiple ways

          You can be right too, I surely don’t know. But when saying things as fact, the way you think something happens means jack shit

          • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
            21·
            2 months ago

            Still does not disprove the above decay chain.

            I never said the decay chain was wrong, I said it wasn’t the ONLY way lead came into existence.

              • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
                21·
                2 months ago

                I call it bad science because the meme is suggesting that that is the ONLY way lead exists, therefore the universe is X years old. Its not the only way lead exists, there is a much shorter way. (still way more than 4000 years old)

            • n3m37h@sh.itjust.works
              11·
              2 months ago

              You are the one stating that. Not the meme. They literally stated just the decay chain time line.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
    134·
    2 months ago

    This is an inherently unwinnable trap. Creationists will ultimately always play the undisprovable “God made it that way” card. Blind faith is a mental illness that’s endemic to humanity and is probably going to get us all killed.

    • CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org
      71·
      2 months ago

      Omfg, my dude. I get your point, everybody does, i mean, look at the sub name… But calling people mentally sick just because they can’t resist our inner cope machanism, aka magical thinking, which was developed and stayed there since before the civilisation, is like calling people with allergies “subhuman”, or people who can’t resist the urge to sleep at night *weak".

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
      52·
      2 months ago

      Calling it mental illness isn’t just a stretch it’s just fuckin wrong my dude. I get what you’re saying but bro, that’s just how humans work.

      For the vast majority of people, belief in science isn’t fundamentally different than belief in religion. Very few people actually know. The rest of us are taking it on faith that the scientific method is working. Even when it isn’t (that’s a fascinating story, btw, a lot of scientists confirmed findings before it was ultimately debunked.)

      Taking things on faith is part of why we work as a species, knowing a thing to be true without ever seeing it is critical to a functioning culture.

      The fact that that well has been poisoned with bullshit is a natural consequence.

    • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Yeah they will say DOG made all that lead when It created the universe four thousand years ago. No amount of evidence can convince someone who doesn’t understand what evidence is.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 months ago

      God made it that way.

      Well god must have made you with brain damage.

      I don’t have brain damage!

      Don’t deny the miracle of life God gave you, he gave you brain damage for a reason! Just because you don’t know his plan doesn’t mean your brain damage doesn’t exist… Have faith.

      🙏

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    5·
    2 months ago

    The futility of using scientific factoids to argue with an account named “Christians Against Science”.

  • candle_lighter@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I was in a Discord call and we were talking about theology and one guy used this argument against creationism. The Christian girl in the call said if Adam spawned in as a fully grown adult then God can create pre-aged uranium too.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
    4·
    2 months ago

    The only thing that you can use to convince someone who is dead set the Bible is the only truth is…the Bible. And even then they’ll use gymnastics, but at least they can’t just discard the source of evidence like they will anything else. If they bend over backwards to keep the Bible valid, then you know you’ll waste time trying to debate them.