Does the "clear meaning" of the scriptures trump science?

[faded_Glory]

You completey missed the point, but never mind.

[Mark10.45 (Mark McGowan)]

You deceive yourself when you think that you know WHY God does something. You are not capable of understanding God. Nor am I. Nor is anyone. To claim that you are capable of understanding WHY God does something is representing yourself as an authority over God. Which you are not. If you claim that your are, you are deceiving yourself. I am not talking about science. I am talking about the error of claiming that God does this or that for this or that reason…you will never know why, you might know how, but not why.

Isaiah 29:16 - Surely you have things turned around! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay; For shall the thing made say of him who made it, “He did not make me”? Or shall the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”?

[r_speir]

@Mark10.45

You deceive yourself when you think that you know WHY God does something.

I am not presuming to know the “why” of God’s plan but somehow you have convinced yourself that I am, which is the only error going on here. Therefore, your entire disparagement of my position is unwarranted, irrelevant, and pointless.

[thoughtful (Valerie (non-scientist))]

@swamidass

This is precisely what we mean by “making God deceitful.” I’m certain that this isn’t merely a problem of wording…

I was gently giving @r_speir the opportunity to see that he carelessly took God’s name in vain. @r_speir can you see that? If not, you may have your own idols to root out.

@r_speir

Is deception the right conclusion? Or rather should we be prudent and more carefully consider what God’s creation processes might have involved?

I agree with you that we should be prudent. However, we should consider sins of omission before accusing others of what you actually really did seem to say.

@Mark10.45

To claim that you are capable of understanding WHY God does something is representing yourself as an authority over God.

We can only know why as far as God tells us. Beyond that I agree with you.

[r_speir]

@faded_Glory

You completey missed the point, but never mind.

I know your point, but what none of us here know is what the real experts know who date rock samples. The unfortunate truth is that even if contamination is eliminated in the testing equipment, the Mt St Helens/Austin dating taught us all that contamination is likely never fully eliminated in any sample we ever test. My simple point is that if the interior of the planet contains very old nuclides - which apparently it does - we will never be able to reliably date anything on the surface using magma eruptions or intrusions.

[T_aquaticus]

@r_speir

I am thinking that radioactive nuclides were tools of the Creation God used for aging purposes.

Increasing decay rates to fit into a young Earth would cook all life. That’s not going to work, unless you invent yet another miracle where God just makes all the heat disappear. All you are doing is inventing endless miracles for the sole purpose of making the Earth look older than it is. All of these observations are already explained by the constants and laws of physics we see right now . . . you know, those empirical observations you are so big on.

@r_speir

God would employ radioactivity as a sliding clock-aging mechanism to inject great age, and all that accompanies that process, into the system.

Why? For what purpose?

[T_aquaticus]

@r_speir

The unfortunate truth is that even if contamination is eliminated in the testing equipment, the Mt St Helens/Austin dating taught us all that contamination is likely never fully eliminated in any sample we ever test.

What those dacites told us is that YEC’s will purposefully choose improper samples with obvious signs of contamination. The contaminating material could be seen under magnification.

All scientific measurements have some error and some noise. What you are looking for is the signal that exists above the noise. When the noise and error is 0.1% of the signal, then you have a good measurement in most scenarios.

[T_aquaticus]

@r_speir

"#2. Because all but one of the dates in the above table are below the 2 million year lower dating limit established by Geochron Laboratories, the dates may be nothing more than contamination artifacts from the mass spectrometer at Geochron Laboratories. The 2.8 million year old date also may have largely or entirely resulted from contamination.

Your bathrooms scales can’t measure the weight of a feather, but those same scales can still measure the weight of an adult human. All measurement tools in science have a range where they are accurate. That’s how science works.

If there is a 2 million year noise floor on the instrument (and it’s probably much less than that) then a 200 million year old rock will be off by 1%. Do you really think that delegitimizes the method?

[John_Harshman]

@r_speir

My simple point is that if the interior of the planet contains very old nuclides - which apparently it does - we will never be able to reliably date anything on the surface using magma eruptions or intrusions.

That once again reveals a basic misconception of how radiometric dating works. The age of the nuclide isn’t relevant (and presumably most of them pre-date the formation of the earth). What’s measured is the age of incorporation into rocks during crystallization. That’s why metamorphism or melting resets the clock.

[T_aquaticus]

@r_speir

Maybe science should look beyond the apparent rather than settling for the first data set. In reality, there is an entirely different set of data available.

So says the person who continually demands empirical evidence. Now we see that you will reject empirical evidence in favor of evidence that doesn’t exist.

[RonSewell (RonS)]

@thoughtful

But it’s not like it’s a completely foolproof concept.

I do not wish to go down the radiometric dating rabbit hole, which is off topic to the OP, but here are a couple of papers which are specific responses to your referenced article.

Old textbook knowledge reconfirmed: Decay rates of radioactive substances are...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969804317303822

[r_speir]

@John_Harshman

That’s why metamorphism or melting resets the clock.

That is precisely what no-one has ever been able to prove. If you were correct - and this will answer all the rebuttals posted - the science of radioactive dating would be able to arrive at a fast and legitimate age every single time. The reality is, there is just too much contamination to ever reliably arrive at an authentic date. That fact alone disqualifies the whole scientific endeavor.

[T_aquaticus]

@r_speir

The reality is, there is just too much contamination to ever reliably arrive at an authentic date.

That’s not a reality. That is something you invented.

Brent Dalrymple is one of the top experts on radiometric dating. This is what he had to say:

In the early afternoon of August 24, 79 CE, Mt Vesuvius erupted violently, sending hot ash flows speeding down its flanks. These flows buried and destroyed Pompeii and other nearby Roman cities. We know the exact day of this eruption because Pliny the Younger carefully recorded the event. In 1997 a team of scientists from the Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of Naples decided to see if the 40Ar/39Ar method of radiometric dating could accurately measure the age of this very young (by geological standards) volcanic material. They separated sanidine crystals from a sample of one of the ash flows. Incremental heating experiments on 12 samples of sanidine yielded 46 data points that resulted in an isochron age of 1925 +/- 94 years. The actual age of the flow in 1997 was 1918 years. Is this just a coincidence? No — it is the result of extremely careful analyses using a technique that works.

This is not the only dating study to be done on an historic lava flow. Two extensive studies done more than 25 years ago involved analyzing the isotopic composition of argon in such flows to determine if the source of the argon was atmospheric, as must be assumed in K-Ar dating (Dalrymple 1969, 26 flows; Krummenacher 1970, 19 flows). Both studies detected, in a few of the flows, deviations from atmospheric isotopic composition, most often in the form of excess 40Ar. The majority of flows, however, had no detectable excess 40Ar and thus gave correct ages as expected. Of the handful of flows that did contain excess 40Ar, only a few did so in significant amounts. The 122 BCE flow from Mt Etna, for example, gave an erroneous age of 0.25 +/- 0.08 Ma. Note, however, that even an error of 0.25 Ma would be insignificant in a 20 Ma flow with equivalent potassium content. Austin (1996) has documented excess 40Ar in the 1986 dacite flow from Mount St Helens, but the amounts are insufficient to produce significant errors in all but the youngest rocks.
Radiometric Dating Does Work! | National Center for Science Education

[John_Harshman]

@r_speir

That is precisely what no-one has ever been able to prove.

You are exceedingly confused and confusing. Contamination, such as it is, is a completely different question from your confusion about old nuclides. And ironically you are cherry-picking a few problematic dates from the mass of perfectly good ones.