14C and U/Th radiodating exist, and can date samples in that range. They consistently find samples older than 6,000 years old.
You need to evidence this accusation. You need to show that it is both ad hoc and a response to creationists.
U/Th dating of speleothems:
It isn’t a problem for older rocks because the excess argon present at the formation of the rock is insignificant compared to the amount of argon produced by the decay or 40K over millions of years.
I’ve been sitting out from active discussion, but Talk.Origins seems to have covered much of this already.
So true! That whole project has always amazed me. Rarely does that sort of group have such generous funding. (And that came after many years of complaining, “If only Young Earth Creationists had the kind of large research grants that evolutionists routinely get!”) As I see it, they basically ignored their own compilations of published data and rationalized the evidence to confirm what they originally were so determined to “prove.” I’m kind of amazed that the R.A.T.E. project is still cited by anybody because it strikes me as an embarrassment to their position. How can it not be considered anything but a massive failure in need of a supernatural rescuing device to salvage their initial hypothesis?
@David_MacMillan, is my opinion of R.A.T.E. accurate? I’m not trying to start a new thread—but this one seems kind of “done” because the key evidence is already on the table, and perhaps I see some parallels between the R.A.T.E. approach and presuppositions when compared to how @r_speir is ignoring the data and basic physics.
True. Of course the accelerated decay ploy doesn’t work either (quite apart from the physical issues) because it requires super-finetuned accelerations, so that elements with vastly different decay rates (as in, orders of magnitude different) were accelerated just so that they ended up indicating similar ages in rocks where the different methods can be used side by side.
Well the difference is that the guys in RATE actually knew something about radiometric decay equations, which doesn’t appear to be the case for @r_speir.
RATE rehashed the old helium diffusion and radiohalo PRATTs and then reviewed in detail the extremely good evidence for an ancient earth. At the end of it they basically concluded “well the evidence is obvious that the Earth is very ancient…so we’re going to propose miraculous accelerated decay.” So it was successful in that it demonstrated the very thing YECs are always so skeptical about.
I have read your comments. I guess I can take heart in the fact that some of you are starting to get the picture I am proposing. RATE does not enter into the discussion. I am aware of the RATE literature. I am proposing something entirely based on initial radioactive conditions 4500 years ago and how those conditions might have “overshot” an accurate radio dating of a young planet, in such a way as to make it undetectable via the long half-lives being used to try and take a measure of it. Radiometric dating is touted as a good and pure science and I know that is not the case by any stretch. I will continue my investigation. If the planet is truly young, it may have entirely escape detection with the current tools we have.
*Initial conditions would be the idea that the closure of the radioactive properties at cooling would have been extremely close to the conditions under which we found it 4500 years later.
So long for now.