Pete From 7 Stars: i would beg to differ rob as to who gets most influence in media and education.thought for the day and songs of praise [is there anything else/] gets ,i suspect,much less time than the evolutionary programming of dawkins,attenborough type programs.the same is true in state schools.RI,assembly ,if at all religious anyway,is countered by the naturalistic viewpoint of so called science

Pete, you're comparing apples with oranges here. The vast majority of Christians and Jews, and a significant number of less fundamentalist Muslims are accepting of science, the scientific method and the strong evidence for evolution. So science-based programmes are NOT in opposition to religious ones. They're just entirely separate. However, the ones discussing religion in UK tend not to include atheism or agnosticism as part of their spectrum of discussion. I find it difficult to understand why a programme such as "Beyond Belief" simply never includes an atheist or agnostic viewpoint. You have an issue examined from a Muslim, Catholic, Anglican, Sikh and Jewish viewpoint but it's never even raised that an atheist may have something valuable to add to the issue under discussion.

And Pete: .as a result they get science wrong,-think junk dna,vestigual organs,the eye wrongly wired etc.all predictions and assertions of evolutionists.

I think you'll find it's creationists who've constantly (and knowingly) mis-represented science on their websites and in their publications. Sometimes they've continued (as in the case of moon dust, leap seconds, "the vertical whale" etc) to use their discredited arguments for years, decades even, after they were proved to be wrong, until the inability to keep those discredited arguments going has forced them to make anodyne comments such as "we don't recommend using that argument any more"....without at any point admitting that they were deliberately continuing to promulgate said arguments for years after they were discredited and *known by creationist leades to have been discredited*. In most spheres of endeavour this is called "deliberately lying" to your followers.

Pete: just to add to my previous post where my mind muddled my message,-and surprisingly no-one pulled me up on it
....diamonds supposedly millions of yrs old registering radio carbon.

The problems seems to be, Pete, that you get all your "knowledge" of science from snippets on creationist websites and show little evidence of having made any *independent* efforts to follow the real evidence, so to someone who's had a more in-depth scientific education, *most* of your posts mentioning science seem quite muddled.

With regard to the diamond point in particular. AiG says:

There are two main applications for radiometric dating. One is for potentially dating fossils (once-living things) using carbon-14 dating, and the other is for dating rocks and the age of the earth using uranium, potassium and other radioactive atoms.

Which is plain wrong. Fossils as such are generally NOT dated using carbon-dating, as fossilised material millions of years old usually no longer contains organic carbon...the carbon having been replaced with inorganic materials over time. Carbon dating *is* used to date once-living things, as long as they've not been subject to permineralisation and as long as they're sufficiently young (ie younger than about 50,000 years) that there is still a reasonably accurately measurable C12/C14 ratio left in the material.

Carbon dating has been subject to cross-checking against dates from dendrochronology, varves, ice cores, coral growth rings etc and in all cases the curves match where they overlap, giving a strong indication that the utility of carbon dating *within its applicable band* is correct. For it to be otherwise physical laws would have had to be different in the past....something which we can rightfully be *very* skeptical of in the light of information gleaned from geology, astrophysics and cosmology (all different subjects to evolution/ biology, but which dovetail nicely where they overlap).

AiG then states: Carbon-14 (14C), also referred to as radiocarbon, is claimed to be a reliable dating method for determining the age of fossils up to 50,000 to 60,000 years. If this claim is true, the biblical account of a young earth (about 6,000 years) is in question, since 14C dates of tens of thousands of years are common....When a scientist's interpretation of data does not match the clear meaning of the text in the Bible, we should never reinterpret the Bible.

So it's *very* important for creationists to cast doubt on carbon dating....if they don't then their whole edifice of literal belief comes tumbling down. AiG's further comments on carbon dating are a farrago of wrong assumptions and conclusions which are well de-bunked on several sites.

The RATE diamond experiments are critiqued here:

RATE Critique

And the publication "Perspectives On Science And Christian Faith, March 2008, pages 35-39, concludes:

The RATE team has honestly acknowledged that even if their technical claims were accurate, there remain unsolved problems that cannot be reconciled with any known scientific process. In his summary at the RATE conference in Denver on Sept. 15, 2007, Don DeYoung noted the need to invoke divine intervention in order to circumvent these problems. However, the oft-stated summary by the RATE team, that their results provide assurance of the biblical interpretation of a young earth, leaves the average listener with the mistaken impression that these problems are nonexistent, trivial, or soon to be resolved. Rather, the RATE team acknowledged overwhelming evidence for hundreds of millions of year's worth of radioactivity12 and admitted that compressing this activity into a few thousand years would generate more than enough heat to vaporize all granitic rock.13 They state that no known thermodynamic process could dissipate such a large amount of heat.14 Their expressed hope in solving heat dissipation by cooling via enhanced cosmological expansion15 has not been realized and is not consistent with our knowledge of the expanding universe.16 Thus, the RATE team has provided solid evidence that, scientifically, the earth cannot be thousands but must be billions of years old.

In fact, carbon dating isn't the main thing that should concern fundamentalist creationists. It's the fact that it complements and agrees with dates from varves, ice-cores, tree-ring dating and coral growth, all combining to form a coherent picture. We have varve records going back unbroken for 40,000 years and ice cores going back 700,000 years.

Pete, if you'd actually learn some real science as opposed to getting snippets from AiG and elsewhere, you'd do yourself a big favour. The evidence for an old earth and an even older universe is both overwhelming and very consistent. There are still unknowns, and a few (a *very* few in the big scheme of things) inconsistencies, but to try and leverage young earth creationist dogma into explanations for such inconsistencies is a disservice to those with truly enquiring minds who are willing to follow the evidence where it actually leads, rather than trying to shoe-horn such inconsistencies into a world-view which refuses to accept evidence when it contradicts its pre-suppositions.