Discovery of world’s newest oldest tree means it’s time to revise the Bible.
In 1964, when a living bristlecone pine tree in California was determined to be almost 5,000 years old, it gave Bible literalists a big scare. After all, literalists (young earthers) believe that the earth is only about 6,000 years old. Was that bristlecone pine tree around for the “big flood?” Not quite: young earth adherents argue that that 5,000 year old tree must have been planted right after the waters receded. Maybe Noah himself came to California to plant it.
But now there’s a newly discovered tree that is even older than the bristlecone pine:
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Scientists have found a cluster of spruces in the mountains in western Sweden which, at an age of 8,000 years, may be the world’s oldest living trees.
The hardy Norway spruces were found perched high on a mountain side where they have remained safe from recent dangers such as logging, but exposed to the harsh weather conditions of the mountain range that separates Norway and Sweden.
Carbon dating of the trees carried out at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, showed the oldest of them first set root about 8,000 years ago, making it the world’s oldest known living tree, Umea University Professor Leif Kullman said.
I’m trying to phrase this carefully, now:
This newly discovered living tree must have been planted prior to the creation of the universe!
I don’t quite know how this tree could have been floating around in space prior to the creation of the universe, because there wasn’t even any empty space “back then.” I wonder if it was ever watered prior to the creation of the universe . . . If that ancient tree that was the only thing in the universe fell over, would anyone hear it fall? Did God have a treehouse in that tree? If the tree was the only thing in the universe, how would it know which way to grow up? So many questions.
This unfortunate discovery of a very very old tree now forces our hands: It’s time to revise the Bible to indicate that the universe is more than 8,000 years old. That will fix things as long as we don’t discover any 9,000 year old trees and as long as we ignore all of the scientifically established methods for showing that the earth is actually billions of years old.
[Here is an explanation of why the young earth folks are absolutely wrong when they attack the validity of Carbon-14 dating and here's an extensive list of reputable articles on radiometric dating]
Karl: They core a living tree to count its rings, not cut it down. Much like the way they have drilled hundreds of thousands of holes across the landscape to know where what layers are how far down. Can you say, “Exploratory Drilling” or “United States Geological Survey”?
No tree can have 8000 rings in one trunk.
The climatologists have pieced together a patchy record of what they believe the tree did during the time they propose it to have been alive, based upon the carbon dating of dead trunk and root materials.
It has undoubtedly survived ravage after ravage of cold weather and glaciers that removed it trunks, but there is no complete record of some continuous 8000 rings that can be put together without some driving carbon 14 evidence to fuel the stretch. There are likely many gaps in the growth because of the times when this tree was actually frozen and unable to do anything but wait for the ice to melt.
I believe the entire northern reaches of the globe were under ice just several days after the start of the flood, so the trees may very well from before the flood, that doesn’t mean it is the 8000 years it is claimed to be.
Notice, how the wording “may be the oldest” is used but the cut and dry age of 8,000 years for the carbon dating is very certain and a reliable extrapolation in the dating methodology.
The tree is definitely old and may date from the earliest dawn of anything that was alive on the planet. My question is why aren’t there more trees like this one around if the processes that have changed our planet have been uniformitarian and slow gradual processes.
If this trees has survived across the flood devastation, it must be an ample clue to that region of the world condition during the flood - frozen waters - not warm tropical flood waters.
Karl: Why don’t you put the same amount of skepticism toward A) scientific claims and B) the “Good Book”? It might be refreshing for you. It might be fun for you to look at evidence without pre-conceived notions.
Truly, every discussion at this site is a severely handicapped race for you, with religious claims being given a huge head start over the careful work of scientists
Karl wrote: “No tree can have 8000 rings in one trunk.”
That’s probably true, Karl, but it isn’t how the process works. Dendochronologists reach back in time by coring a wide variety of trees, including many old, dead trees and timbers used in old buildings. Then they compare the growth rings on the various trees to see if the ring patterns match, indicating that the life spans of the trees overlap. For example, if one tree lived from the year 1000 c.e. to the year 1600 c.e., and another tree lived from the year 1500 c.e. to the year 2000 c.e., then the trees will have a matching ring pattern for the years they shared in common; i.e., 1500 c.e. to 1600 c.e. If the more recent tree was cut in the year 2000 c.e., then the ring record will date back 1000 years even though neither tree is more than 600 years old. The key is to find trees which would have experienced the same climate, because that’s what permits the matching ring patterns from different trees to be positively correlated. This is typically satisfied by using trees from the same geographic location.