-
Welcome to Baptist Board, a friendly forum to discuss the Baptist Faith in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to all the features that our community has to offer.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon and God Bless!
How old is the earth
- Thread starter 7-Kids
- Start date
mud
I am going to try now and start working my way through your list. I likely will not go in order and I may not even get to everything. But, you deserve a response. To keep things short, I am not going to repost our first go at it, just the subject though I may do some quoting as necessary. I don't pretend that all will be refuted but I think I can give a good answer for most.
1. Spiral galaxies
This is a good example of what I have been pointing to as anomalies to BobRyan. For most of the spiral galaxies we have observed, density waves are a good explanation of their structure. That there a few examples where the data do not fit that model was grabbed by AIG and twisted to make it sound as if their was a general problem with spiral galaxies. Just not the case. It takes more than a few oddball results to overturn a whole science discilpline.
So, on to the answer. As it turns out, they have discovered that there are different kinds of density waves (magnetohydrodynamic density waves to use the full term) in action within spiral galaxies in the 11 years since the article cited by AIG. The article was pointing out that slow MDWs do not explain the structure of M51 and others. But, we now know that fast MDWs do explain the structure seen. So, there is not a problem with the structure of spiral galaxies.
Here are a few references:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1046/j.1365-8711.1999.02882.x/abs/
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/nph-ex_refcode?refcode=1998ApJ...493..102L
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~abstract/abstracts/JD14P.html#abstract14
http://aa.springer.de/papers/9348002/2300405/sc4.htm
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/products/journals/freepdf/mnr1958.pdf
I am going to try now and start working my way through your list. I likely will not go in order and I may not even get to everything. But, you deserve a response. To keep things short, I am not going to repost our first go at it, just the subject though I may do some quoting as necessary. I don't pretend that all will be refuted but I think I can give a good answer for most.
1. Spiral galaxies
This is a good example of what I have been pointing to as anomalies to BobRyan. For most of the spiral galaxies we have observed, density waves are a good explanation of their structure. That there a few examples where the data do not fit that model was grabbed by AIG and twisted to make it sound as if their was a general problem with spiral galaxies. Just not the case. It takes more than a few oddball results to overturn a whole science discilpline.
So, on to the answer. As it turns out, they have discovered that there are different kinds of density waves (magnetohydrodynamic density waves to use the full term) in action within spiral galaxies in the 11 years since the article cited by AIG. The article was pointing out that slow MDWs do not explain the structure of M51 and others. But, we now know that fast MDWs do explain the structure seen. So, there is not a problem with the structure of spiral galaxies.
Here are a few references:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1046/j.1365-8711.1999.02882.x/abs/
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/nph-ex_refcode?refcode=1998ApJ...493..102L
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~abstract/abstracts/JD14P.html#abstract14
http://aa.springer.de/papers/9348002/2300405/sc4.htm
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/products/journals/freepdf/mnr1958.pdf
BobRyan
Well-Known Member
Nope. The problem goes away. If the majority of the "excess" is precipitating out of solution then it is no longer in the water adding to the concentration. The U is in equilibrium and there is not a problem. </font>[/QUOTE]As I said data in support of God's Word is a "problem to be solved" for our atheist evolutionist friends - and also for "Some" Christians.
Your view above is wrong.
If the data showing influx to be 100x outflux and some part is in solution with some part also being a precipitant then it is STILL the total that must be "accounted for" by 4 billion years of time.
See - your issue is "again" in trying to make "Data go away".
The problem "remains".
Of course your "other problem" is that the study you quote claims to be "inconclusive" the results are said to be "Seasonally dependent" and the concentrations "vary" depending on their test cases.
A hopeful "monster" style of "proof" UTEOTW? Are you hoping it "suddenly works out"??
In Christ,
Bob
BobRyan
Well-Known Member
#1. No 100's of 1000's of millions of data proving evilution.
#2. you have gone from "NO DATA" in support of God's Word to now "a handful of data". Which is it UTEOTW?
In fact it is the greatest majority of data that DOES support entropy that DOES support variation WITHin a kind and NOT beyond it that DOES support YEC geochronometers, that DOES support failure for abiogenesis, that DOES support genetic wells of lost data rather than cumulative genetic data leapfrogging.
Only a very FEW of the geochronometers give numbers remotely suggestive of evolution.
Sad (for evolutionists) - but true.
In Christ,
Bob
A_Christian
New Member
I studied the Bible for myself. If I were born in an Islamic country, yes I may have been a Muslim. However, to be a Christian one needs a Savior. There is no Savior in Islam. One only follows the specifications of that religion and women must stay in their place as they belong to men. The Bible works through both men and women and that alone makes it different then other beliefs.Originally posted by Brett:
A_Christian, then how do you know that what you were taught about God and the Bible was not erroneous?
By your logic, the only way to learn about God is to study Him and His Word by yourself. Of course, this is a great way to do it!But it also does not mean that we cannot learn from others, as if they are corrupt and incapable of conveying correct information.
Everyone is indoctrinated. Had you been born in an Islamic country, you would almost certainly be a Muslim. To say that evolutionists are "indoctrinated", while true, is meaningless, because everyone is indoctrinated in some way or another. But evolutionists have a heckuva lot of evidence to back up their "indoctrination".
Evolutionists, have fabricated a false sense of evidence. They leave out what doesn't fit their charts and ignore what they don't have answers for.
No Bob, the basis of the uranium "problem" was that the influx into the ocean waters was much too much. What this paper shows is that most of the U never gets into the ocean water to begin with. There is no influx problem because most of the uranium is being removed through flocculation. precipitation, and / or colloids. The paper is also clear that their results are consistent with other such studies. The material balance is in balance.
I still maintain that there is NO evidence for a young earth. There are things that we may not be able to explain at this time, but we have also shown that we usually do find an explanation in the end. The overwhelming majority of the data points to an old earth. If you think you can overturn all of science by scraping along the edges looking for things that we cannot yet explain, you may be in for a surprise. Take on the bulk of the old evidence instead of assuming that the few things you dig up that are not explained yet somehow equates to a young earth. Especially when most of them have been explained if you look hard enough.
It does not matter what phrase you choose.
You want to overturn the current paradigm. You may call it bad science or whatever. But it is what is currently accepted. Poking around the edges suggesting that everything is wrong because you can find a few things that have not been explained yet is not convincing. Asserting bad interpretation without pointing out exactly where all these people have it wrong AND giving an interpretation that better explains the data is not convincing.
You want to overturn the current paradigm. You may call it bad science or whatever. But it is what is currently accepted. Poking around the edges suggesting that everything is wrong because you can find a few things that have not been explained yet is not convincing. Asserting bad interpretation without pointing out exactly where all these people have it wrong AND giving an interpretation that better explains the data is not convincing.
Paul of Eugene
New Member
How many of the people who are saying one unsolved mystery should convince evolutionists to give up on evolution will give up belief in the Bible based on one unsolved puzzle about Bible interpretation?
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander folks.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander folks.
5. Decaying Magnetic Field of the Earth
"Yes the rocks at mid ocean ridges show field reversals, but the layers aren't marked with dates."
No, not exactly. These rocks have formed as the seafloor spread apart allowing molten rock to flow up and fill in the gaps. So these rocks can be directly dated through radiometric means. We can also measure the rate of the spreading and calculate how long ago a particular area was formed. Amazingly, the two dates give the same ages. Well, maybe that is not so amazing in an old earth scenerio. Point is, do do have dates to show us just how long the seafloor has been spreading.
There are a number of problems with Baumgardner's model. The most glaring seems to be that he requires a thermal diffusivity 10,000 times as high as the actual thermal diffusivity of the earth. Thermal diffusivity is basically how quickly heat can flow through some material. He also has a major heat problem. He requires that the mantle was at higher temperature in order to reduce its resistance to flowing, viscosity, in order for it to well up. Now, where did this heat go afterward? I have not seen an answer to that heat balance problem, though maybe he has one. I don't know. In addition, Baumgardner himself estimates a heat release of 10^28 joules of energy during the process. This would have displaced the oceans alright. It would have boiled them dry.
As far as Coe and Prevot go, you should check out "Core Flow Instabilities and Geomagnetic Storms During Reversals - The Steens Mountain Impulse Field Variations Revisited" by P. Ultreguerard and J. Achache. Earth and Planetary Science Letters v135(1-4): pp91-99 (1995 Oct). It seems that what they found is best explained by magnetic storms during the reversal process. This is also consistent to other cases where the whole reversal process has been recorded in rocks that were cooling much more slowly.
"The sun experiences magnetic field reversals every 11 years--Good Point! In contrast to thousands of years (the accepted time frame for reversals on earth), I'd call that rapid."
Good. You accept that we have evidence that magnetic fields decay and then reverse rather than simply decay. They also seem to happen at intervals. so, why have we not recorded a reversal on the earth during our lifetimes, or at least as long as we have been using magnetic compasses?
"Yes the rocks at mid ocean ridges show field reversals, but the layers aren't marked with dates."
No, not exactly. These rocks have formed as the seafloor spread apart allowing molten rock to flow up and fill in the gaps. So these rocks can be directly dated through radiometric means. We can also measure the rate of the spreading and calculate how long ago a particular area was formed. Amazingly, the two dates give the same ages. Well, maybe that is not so amazing in an old earth scenerio. Point is, do do have dates to show us just how long the seafloor has been spreading.
There are a number of problems with Baumgardner's model. The most glaring seems to be that he requires a thermal diffusivity 10,000 times as high as the actual thermal diffusivity of the earth. Thermal diffusivity is basically how quickly heat can flow through some material. He also has a major heat problem. He requires that the mantle was at higher temperature in order to reduce its resistance to flowing, viscosity, in order for it to well up. Now, where did this heat go afterward? I have not seen an answer to that heat balance problem, though maybe he has one. I don't know. In addition, Baumgardner himself estimates a heat release of 10^28 joules of energy during the process. This would have displaced the oceans alright. It would have boiled them dry.
As far as Coe and Prevot go, you should check out "Core Flow Instabilities and Geomagnetic Storms During Reversals - The Steens Mountain Impulse Field Variations Revisited" by P. Ultreguerard and J. Achache. Earth and Planetary Science Letters v135(1-4): pp91-99 (1995 Oct). It seems that what they found is best explained by magnetic storms during the reversal process. This is also consistent to other cases where the whole reversal process has been recorded in rocks that were cooling much more slowly.
"The sun experiences magnetic field reversals every 11 years--Good Point! In contrast to thousands of years (the accepted time frame for reversals on earth), I'd call that rapid."
Good. You accept that we have evidence that magnetic fields decay and then reverse rather than simply decay. They also seem to happen at intervals. so, why have we not recorded a reversal on the earth during our lifetimes, or at least as long as we have been using magnetic compasses?
12. History too short
If Humphreys is right, then how did the native Amarican populations accomplish all that they did without ever bothing to develope written languages? They built great cities, great monuments and structures. He seems to think that written language is inevitable and in a short time. So what about the Americans?
If Humphreys is right, then how did the native Amarican populations accomplish all that they did without ever bothing to develope written languages? They built great cities, great monuments and structures. He seems to think that written language is inevitable and in a short time. So what about the Americans?
A_Christian
New Member
It doesn't take alot of brains to build sand castles only time and energy. The Maya did have
picture writing.
picture writing.
My wife delivered our second child today, a healthy baby girl.
Mother and baby are doing well.
Praise God!
-------------------------------------------------
Praise to the Lord, Who hath fearfully, wondrously, made thee;
Health hath vouchsafed and, when heedlessly falling, hath stayed thee.
What need or grief ever hath failed of relief?
Wings of His mercy did shade thee.
Praise to the Lord, Who doth prosper thy work and defend thee;
Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
If with His love He befriend thee.
- Joachim Neander
Mother and baby are doing well.
Praise God!
-------------------------------------------------
Praise to the Lord, Who hath fearfully, wondrously, made thee;
Health hath vouchsafed and, when heedlessly falling, hath stayed thee.
What need or grief ever hath failed of relief?
Wings of His mercy did shade thee.
Praise to the Lord, Who doth prosper thy work and defend thee;
Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
If with His love He befriend thee.
- Joachim Neander
Radiometric dating is suspect in that it is based on unsupportable assumptions (I believe this was previously mentioned in this thread). Rocks observed to have been formed decades ago routinely date to vastly greater ages. Why does this fact mean nothing to old earthers? Are we supposed to believe that a rock sample from a mid ocean ridge came back with one and only one date and not a range of dates? I would be surprised if there wasn't a significant amount of "wiggle-room" to correlate the radiometric date with a date derived from current measurements of sea floor spreading using uniformitarian assumptions.
Uniformitarianism is seriously flawed in that it does not give enough weight to catastrophic process and it ignores outright the most significant geological event since the creation of the world -- the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic processes can do in hours what the slow and gradual processes we normally observe would take centuries to accomplish.
Sudden tectonic movements (earthquakes) are one such phenomenon that can accomplish in days what we'd assume required centuries or millennia to perform. Volcanism is another. For example, in the process and aftermath of the Mount St. Helen's eruptions in the '80's a great deal of geological restructuring was accomplished (mind-boggling excavation, massive sedimentation, extensive canyon formation, and the speedy growth of a lava dome some thousands of feet high in a matter of a few years). And St. Helen's was only a moderately severe eruption.
Floods can devastate entire regions overnight, sweeping away entire towns and modifying the landscape to the extent that it is unrecognizable from its former topography. Grant a multitude of processes like these on a large enough scale, and the entire world will perish.
If language means anything, the living word of the Most High God tells us that God sent a flood of waters upon the earth some 4500 years ago. It says that the flood was global in extent even to the point that "the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered" -Genesis 7:19. This flood prevailed upon the earth for the better part of a whole year. This is what a straightforward reading of holy scripture says and we affirm that "The sum of thy word is truth; And every one of thy righteous ordinances endureth for ever" -Ps 119:160.
Is there any physical evidence in the geology and geography of the earth of such an awesome cataclysm. Yes, as Ken Ham says, there are "billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth." Not only so, but there are innumerable geological features that require flowing and/or static water on a scale that puts our grandest modern rivers and inland seas to utter shame.
It wasn't many decades ago (less than 20) that our foremost naturalists saw and acknowledged evidence for the Great Flood. How is it that in our time of high achievement in all areas (save holiness) this abundant observable evidence speaking so clearly of a world awash in water at the command of God has become evidence that God is not necessary to explain life—the world has existed for millions of years and in that amount of time life can arise from non life and it can go on to change and adapt becoming diverse and more complex? I say they willingly forgot that God has intervened in history and prefer to believe that “all things continue as they were.” Their thinking has become futile because their foolish hearts are darkened. Although they claim to be wise, in truth they are fools for they have given up the immortal God for mortal man, and for birds, animals, and reptiles.
By seeing evidence for long ages instead of evidence of a world violently overturned, the absurd notion of biological evolution has been given a veneer of plausibility. The secular have concluded that God really is dead and have chosen to do that which is right in their own eyes. Some of us recognize that evolution is impossible without a plan but are unwilling to believe that the “new experts on biology” are completely wrong. And they can’t believe that the “new experts on geology” are wrong either. So they add God to long ages and evolution and end up believing that the all knowing, all powerful, all holy God used the sloppy and painful processes of struggle and death to produce over millions of years the “higher animals.” Could such a God truly affirm that all was then “very good?” And why upon commission of the first sin would He say that death was sin’s penalty? If death had been occurring for millions of years prior to the first sin, it certainly could not be the result of sin. Effects do not precede causes. And if death is not the penalty for sin, then the stated purpose of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is false and Christianity is bankrupt. Yea, the whole of God’s word becomes illogical and fallacious. Is this not the direct conclusion of a world view based on the gradual development of the physical and biological world over long ages, regardless of whether God was “involved” or not? Since we know (we do know, don’t we?) that God’s word is neither illogical nor fallacious, must we not surmise that long ages and evolution are wrong? Is the modern view of earth history right, or is the inerrant word of the immortal God right?
The data from the physical sciences can and does make sense within a framework built around the idea of a supernaturally created earth which subsequently suffered a global flood and its protracted secondary and tertiary effects. This framework/worldview does not lead to the numerous difficulties with God’s word as described in part above.
Without including in our science special creation and the global flood as described in God’s inerrant word we cannot hope to arrive at right conclusions regarding earth history. And that is exactly what has happened and the trickle-down has affected nearly all areas of belief and learning and the fruit is telling.
Did I somewhere get off on a tangent?.
Uniformitarianism is seriously flawed in that it does not give enough weight to catastrophic process and it ignores outright the most significant geological event since the creation of the world -- the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic processes can do in hours what the slow and gradual processes we normally observe would take centuries to accomplish.
Sudden tectonic movements (earthquakes) are one such phenomenon that can accomplish in days what we'd assume required centuries or millennia to perform. Volcanism is another. For example, in the process and aftermath of the Mount St. Helen's eruptions in the '80's a great deal of geological restructuring was accomplished (mind-boggling excavation, massive sedimentation, extensive canyon formation, and the speedy growth of a lava dome some thousands of feet high in a matter of a few years). And St. Helen's was only a moderately severe eruption.
Floods can devastate entire regions overnight, sweeping away entire towns and modifying the landscape to the extent that it is unrecognizable from its former topography. Grant a multitude of processes like these on a large enough scale, and the entire world will perish.
If language means anything, the living word of the Most High God tells us that God sent a flood of waters upon the earth some 4500 years ago. It says that the flood was global in extent even to the point that "the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered" -Genesis 7:19. This flood prevailed upon the earth for the better part of a whole year. This is what a straightforward reading of holy scripture says and we affirm that "The sum of thy word is truth; And every one of thy righteous ordinances endureth for ever" -Ps 119:160.
Is there any physical evidence in the geology and geography of the earth of such an awesome cataclysm. Yes, as Ken Ham says, there are "billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth." Not only so, but there are innumerable geological features that require flowing and/or static water on a scale that puts our grandest modern rivers and inland seas to utter shame.
It wasn't many decades ago (less than 20) that our foremost naturalists saw and acknowledged evidence for the Great Flood. How is it that in our time of high achievement in all areas (save holiness) this abundant observable evidence speaking so clearly of a world awash in water at the command of God has become evidence that God is not necessary to explain life—the world has existed for millions of years and in that amount of time life can arise from non life and it can go on to change and adapt becoming diverse and more complex? I say they willingly forgot that God has intervened in history and prefer to believe that “all things continue as they were.” Their thinking has become futile because their foolish hearts are darkened. Although they claim to be wise, in truth they are fools for they have given up the immortal God for mortal man, and for birds, animals, and reptiles.
By seeing evidence for long ages instead of evidence of a world violently overturned, the absurd notion of biological evolution has been given a veneer of plausibility. The secular have concluded that God really is dead and have chosen to do that which is right in their own eyes. Some of us recognize that evolution is impossible without a plan but are unwilling to believe that the “new experts on biology” are completely wrong. And they can’t believe that the “new experts on geology” are wrong either. So they add God to long ages and evolution and end up believing that the all knowing, all powerful, all holy God used the sloppy and painful processes of struggle and death to produce over millions of years the “higher animals.” Could such a God truly affirm that all was then “very good?” And why upon commission of the first sin would He say that death was sin’s penalty? If death had been occurring for millions of years prior to the first sin, it certainly could not be the result of sin. Effects do not precede causes. And if death is not the penalty for sin, then the stated purpose of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is false and Christianity is bankrupt. Yea, the whole of God’s word becomes illogical and fallacious. Is this not the direct conclusion of a world view based on the gradual development of the physical and biological world over long ages, regardless of whether God was “involved” or not? Since we know (we do know, don’t we?) that God’s word is neither illogical nor fallacious, must we not surmise that long ages and evolution are wrong? Is the modern view of earth history right, or is the inerrant word of the immortal God right?
The data from the physical sciences can and does make sense within a framework built around the idea of a supernaturally created earth which subsequently suffered a global flood and its protracted secondary and tertiary effects. This framework/worldview does not lead to the numerous difficulties with God’s word as described in part above.
Without including in our science special creation and the global flood as described in God’s inerrant word we cannot hope to arrive at right conclusions regarding earth history. And that is exactly what has happened and the trickle-down has affected nearly all areas of belief and learning and the fruit is telling.
Did I somewhere get off on a tangent?.
Congratulations on your new baby! Glad she is healthy.
Now, you hit upon something with your reference to radiometric dating. "Radiometric dating is suspect in that it is based on unsupportable assumptions (I believe this was previously mentioned in this thread). Rocks observed to have been formed decades ago routinely date to vastly greater ages."
Now this is a long thread and I do not remember everything that went on in it. And I really am not in the mood to go back a reread the whole thing. But I do not believe there has yet been any legitimate problems with radiometric dating raised thus far.
You alluded to rocks being dated to the wrong age. There are only two examples of this I can think of from this thread. And I amy be confusing threads. In one, the RATE group took a volcanic rock that was known to be only a few years old and had it dated. Unfortunately, they asked for it to be dated with a method useful only for rocks a few millions of years old to a few billions of years old. Any age less than a few million years would have placed the level of the daughter isotope below the detection limit and down into the noise. So the age came back, with a range of course, of somewhere around several hundred thousand years old. Now, any scientist in the field would know that an age in this range was just noise and basically implied an age of zero, or at least younger than what the method is capable of determining. But the RATE folks ignored this and promoted it as a failure of radiometric dating because a rock a few years old dated to a few hundred thousand years old. And then, of course, it ends up getting posted on this thread. Now whether this was done with ignorance or malice, I have no way of knowing though I do have my own opinion. These nice people were also kind enough to do the same thing with C14 dating of a diamond. In this case, the age of the diamond dated to an age that indicates that you are only measuring background radiation and therefore you can only say that your date means older than that age but we have no way of knowing how much older. Of course they again present this as a failure when the actual results were exactly what one would have expected. You may see which way I lean on the malice versus ignorance question.
Now the other was Snelling and his young wood in old limestone. Except that all indications, he won't let anyone see the samples, are that he had iron oxide radiocarbon dated as opposed to wood. The lab that did the dating called him up and told him that it was not wood. He said date it anyway. The literature of the field says that iron oxide can get into these types of areas and when dated give a completely meaningless date. He ignored this, too. The areas he found the "wood" are known to have many deposits of such iron oxides, but since he has already ignored this possibility... But he has a nice story to tell.
So far, the anomalous dates I have seen proposed usually either fall into the category a wrong interpretation of the answer, as shown above, and a bad selection of material to date. That is when enough information is known to piece everything back together.
Now, as far as your claim of variability within the data. There will always be variability. But that does not mean there is a problem. I work at a pilot plant doing research. We have a lot of instrumentation measuring the gas composition of our various streams. Sometimes we may have 4 or 5 instruments making the same measurement. If we are only getting a spread of 5 - 10% between the different readings, we are happy. Try it this way. Do you remember doing chemistry labd in school. They would always make you repeat things at least a few times. And while the answers rarely came out to be the same between trials when you got similar answers, it gave you confidence that you were doing the experiment correctly. Same thing here. YOu make your measurements necessary to get a date. You do them a few times, there will be a range of values measured which will correspond to a range of dates. In addition, these guys have been doing this long enough to know what their experiemntal error is. And this is reported right there in the published materials. If they date several times, you will generally see all the results. Even if you get only one result it will not simply say "100 million years." It will say "100 (+/-2) milion years." They give you the uncertainty. Its good science. Do you know think there is some variability in the rate at which the oceans are spreading apart? So any estimate there will also include some experiemental error. But when you look out across a wide swath of the ocean, and you can get an estimate of the age of a given region from two different sources, completely indepenent of one another, and you repeat this for the different areas, and the two methods consistently give ages in the same ranges, you are probably doing something right.
Now, you hit upon something with your reference to radiometric dating. "Radiometric dating is suspect in that it is based on unsupportable assumptions (I believe this was previously mentioned in this thread). Rocks observed to have been formed decades ago routinely date to vastly greater ages."
Now this is a long thread and I do not remember everything that went on in it. And I really am not in the mood to go back a reread the whole thing. But I do not believe there has yet been any legitimate problems with radiometric dating raised thus far.
You alluded to rocks being dated to the wrong age. There are only two examples of this I can think of from this thread. And I amy be confusing threads. In one, the RATE group took a volcanic rock that was known to be only a few years old and had it dated. Unfortunately, they asked for it to be dated with a method useful only for rocks a few millions of years old to a few billions of years old. Any age less than a few million years would have placed the level of the daughter isotope below the detection limit and down into the noise. So the age came back, with a range of course, of somewhere around several hundred thousand years old. Now, any scientist in the field would know that an age in this range was just noise and basically implied an age of zero, or at least younger than what the method is capable of determining. But the RATE folks ignored this and promoted it as a failure of radiometric dating because a rock a few years old dated to a few hundred thousand years old. And then, of course, it ends up getting posted on this thread. Now whether this was done with ignorance or malice, I have no way of knowing though I do have my own opinion. These nice people were also kind enough to do the same thing with C14 dating of a diamond. In this case, the age of the diamond dated to an age that indicates that you are only measuring background radiation and therefore you can only say that your date means older than that age but we have no way of knowing how much older. Of course they again present this as a failure when the actual results were exactly what one would have expected. You may see which way I lean on the malice versus ignorance question.
Now the other was Snelling and his young wood in old limestone. Except that all indications, he won't let anyone see the samples, are that he had iron oxide radiocarbon dated as opposed to wood. The lab that did the dating called him up and told him that it was not wood. He said date it anyway. The literature of the field says that iron oxide can get into these types of areas and when dated give a completely meaningless date. He ignored this, too. The areas he found the "wood" are known to have many deposits of such iron oxides, but since he has already ignored this possibility... But he has a nice story to tell.
So far, the anomalous dates I have seen proposed usually either fall into the category a wrong interpretation of the answer, as shown above, and a bad selection of material to date. That is when enough information is known to piece everything back together.
Now, as far as your claim of variability within the data. There will always be variability. But that does not mean there is a problem. I work at a pilot plant doing research. We have a lot of instrumentation measuring the gas composition of our various streams. Sometimes we may have 4 or 5 instruments making the same measurement. If we are only getting a spread of 5 - 10% between the different readings, we are happy. Try it this way. Do you remember doing chemistry labd in school. They would always make you repeat things at least a few times. And while the answers rarely came out to be the same between trials when you got similar answers, it gave you confidence that you were doing the experiment correctly. Same thing here. YOu make your measurements necessary to get a date. You do them a few times, there will be a range of values measured which will correspond to a range of dates. In addition, these guys have been doing this long enough to know what their experiemntal error is. And this is reported right there in the published materials. If they date several times, you will generally see all the results. Even if you get only one result it will not simply say "100 million years." It will say "100 (+/-2) milion years." They give you the uncertainty. Its good science. Do you know think there is some variability in the rate at which the oceans are spreading apart? So any estimate there will also include some experiemental error. But when you look out across a wide swath of the ocean, and you can get an estimate of the age of a given region from two different sources, completely indepenent of one another, and you repeat this for the different areas, and the two methods consistently give ages in the same ranges, you are probably doing something right.
BobRyan
Well-Known Member
Actually the paper stated specifically that the results were inconclusive, they varied by location and also had possible seasonal dependencies. No wonder this is not accepted as an actual solution for the problem by the scientific community.
But it is very useful for pointing out that fact that for most data problems in evolution today "any old excuse will do".
I find that to be consistent and "instructive".
Furthermore - the influx is seen both in solution and as the precipitant. And it is 100X the outflux. There is no mechanism today known to compensate such that "it is not there" in the oceans. Saying that it is building up in vast quantities in the estuaries is a silly claim that has not been shown at all to be the case.
The study group was searching for a way to get rid of the salt problem and suggesting avenues for further study. They had not solved the problem. (At least not emperically)
In Christ,
Bob