Has YEC ever attempted to address the consilience of carbon dating?

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From the Answers Research Journal article published at the end of 2016:

Uniformitarian scientists initially estimated around 100,000 varves, but the number that was claimed to have actually been counted was just a little more than 29,000. In reality, it is evident that even that claim is dubious once the reported specific details of their counting methodology are unraveled.

First off, the Lake Suigetsu researchers are not “uniformitarian” scientists. Next, the count they are referring to is from the a single, non-continuous core which was completed in 1993. That core yielded a great deal of information and demonstrated the potential of the site, but it would have been obviously desirable to possess a continuous record and cross correlation. This was addressed in 2006 as per my previous reference. The multiple chronological techniques applied to the Lake Suigetsu SG06 sediment core, central Japan

However, problems with the varve-based calendar age scale of the SG93 record limited the impact of these studies (van der Plicht et al. 2004; Nakagawa et al.2012). A statistical re-analysis of the SG93 data set demonstrated that gaps between successively drilled sections of the SG93 sediment core were the main cause of the errors in this SG93 varve year age scale, with uncertainties in the varve counting representing a minor, secondary cause (Staff et al. 2010)…
As a result of these issues, Lake Suigetsu was re-cored in summer 2006, with the retrieval of overlapping sediment cores from four parallel boreholes enabling complete recovery of the sediment profile for the present ‘Suigetsu Varves 2006’ project (Nakagawa et al. 2012).

From this paper, the countable varves extend to 70 kya. These results, along with a number of other papers examining this coring, were published between 2011 and 2014. All of this was available to Hebert, Snelling, and Clarey for their YEC publication in 2016, but they chose to ignore the more recent study and mislead their readership with the impression that the state of affairs remained where it stood over a decade earlier. It took some digging just to figure where they got their outdated information. This is not uncommon. I still encounter YEC criticisms of carbon dating in circulation based on out of context quotes from papers published back in the '60s.

This is another example of how YEC organizations attempt to distract from or evade the consilience of the data. The 1993 lake core was problematic for the YEC timeline, but that is now buttressed and extended by the expanded dataset. Mainstream science is confirmed by the additional detail, and YEC can only respond by obfuscating the connecting evidence.

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Thanks for the replies Andrew and Ron.
I was curious to see the perspective of the AJR claims from atheists.

If I am not mistaken, neither of you specifically refuted the varves being indistinguishable claim.
Did you mention it in passing and it went over my head? Or is it an irrelevant claim due to being about one of the first cores?

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What do the varves at Mt. St. Helens look like? In Lake Suigetsu you get get alternating layers of clay and diatoms. Is that what is seen in the Mt. St. Helens example?

Also, what do the 14C dates look like at Mt. St. Helens? Do you get less and less 14C in the insect and leaf debris as you move to deeper layers?

It’s not enough to say, “Oh, look! Layers!”. It is the features of the layers that matter.

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You have a tendency to say “atheist” when referring to anyone who isn’t a young-earth creationist. Is this an inadvertent confusion or do you truly divide the world sharply in two?

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As for myself, I am a Christian. I believe that entails investigating nature with integrity, and not bearing false witness in regard to creation.

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Your call.

Of course, researchers had the augmenting advantage of microscopy and instrumentation.

Beyond the limit of countable layers, there is considerable additional material which indeed is not resolvable to annual layers. This extends the core date beyond the limits of countable varves to two hundred thousand years or so. This region of the core also includes volcanic layers which can be distinguished.

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Why just from atheists? Are you not interested in hearing from any of the many, many theists who have no trouble accepting carbon dating?

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Thanks for the replies Andrew and Ron.
I was curious to see the perspective of the AJR claims from atheists.

Actually, I’m a christian. Not that it has much bearing on conversation…

If I am not mistaken, neither of you specifically refuted the varves being indistinguishable claim.

I did mention it briefly. Sedimentary structures are fragile and are expected to become indistinguishable due to a number of reasons.

HOWEVER.

When I said that, I made the mistake of assuming that ARJ was using the source in good faith. Turns out they are just straight up lying in this case.

Here’s the quote they use:

”on average as many as 50% of the varves are indistinguishable…”

Here’s the full sentence from the paper:

”It has been shown that the new, automated varve interpolation method produced reliable results from varve records where on average 50% of varves are indistinguishable.”

Schlolaut et al were testing a computer counting method by removing layers from an hand-counted varve record, then seeing if the computer program could correctly guess how many layers were missing. They found that the program was accurate up to 50%.

Nowhere in the paper do they claim that Lake Suigetsu is 50% indistinguishable, and in fact, this method wasn’t involved with counting Lake Suigetsu at all.

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I know this is par for the course for these organizations, but it still shocks me whenever I see it in action. So brazen.

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This whole ARJ paper is just abysmal, and incorporates many of the disingenuous tactics commonly employed by YEC, and Snelling in particular. Davidson and Wolgemuth argued that while 14C, dendrochronology, and tree rings stand on their own as dating techniques, their agreement is inexplicable if these did not reflect actual age. The ARJ response leads

Davidson and Wolgemuth, however, present a new “spin” on the argument: they claim that the correlation between these “varve” counts and radiocarbon dates (as well as tree-ring counts), proves that the Lake Suigetsu varves are true annual events, thus presenting an unanswerable argument for an old earth.

Of course the long standing consilience of data is affirming evidence for validity of independent techniques. That YEC avoids this evidence and has no coherent reply does not make it some new “spin”.

However, careful examination of the papers they cite shows that this apparent agreement is the result of the typical uniformitarian circular reasoning.

Dino coprolites. The apparent agreement is the result of observational science. What is more observational than visually counting varves? Can I can purchase a uniformitarian circular reasoning microscope from Olympus or Fisher Scientific? Accelerator Mass Spectrometry is observational science, and the ratios of 14C are experimental results. That the 14C outcome correlates with varve count is physical reality and not a result of reasoning circular or otherwise.

But as noted earlier, radiocarbon specialists must deal with a host of complications in order to attempt to obtain a specimen’s true calendar age.

The “true calendar age” is a matter of the precision being sought. For the older varve and tree ring sanples, an age simply calculated from first principles of radioactive decay would yield results which are incompatible with YEC. The calibration curves are regressions from tens of thousands of empirical data points of known age to allow dating of unknown age samples much more precisely. The intcal collaborations are in and of themselves validation of carbon dating. The science involved is reasonably accessible, but may indeed be too complicated for YEC to fathom.

Theoretically, this best-fit curve does not necessarily have to pass through any particular data point.

Oh the horror. All the empirically derived regressions ever in the history of science and engineering result in curves that do not necessarily pass exactly through the data points. All our technology, a useless illusion.

The flagship paper goes on to tackle dendrochronology and even biblical archeology and does not improve. YEC has railed against 14C dating for decades. As a kid, I bought into the arguments I read in Acts and Facts. Now, I look at this work, with the PhD geologist head of AiG research as an author, and am struck. Given all that time to mount a criticism of carbon dating, and this, this is really the best they got?

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“Glock, Studhalter, and Agerter (1960) have also shown that the so-called “false rings” that are so common in dry climate trees like the Bristlecone Pine”

I had an e-mail conversation with a bristlecone researcher a few years back when I first looked at AiG’s claim of false rings in bristlecone pines. He knew of only one example of a false ring in a bristlecone - and that was the result of a tree rooted in a cave with a sporadic water supply. Don Batten was back then pretending that non-annual rings occurring in Scots pines was somehow relevant to bristlecone counts, even though he couldn’t provided a single example of a non-annual ring in a bristlecone. The only thing that’s changed is the subtlety of their phrasing.

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You get used to it. After 30+ years, I pretty much expect it.

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Theoretically, this best-fit curve does not necessarily have to pass through any particular data point.

The paper references the RATE project. What’s hilarious is that the RATE project uses a calibration curve because they have to explain why we have carbon-14 dates in the thousands but also uranium-thorium dates in the billions, if all of these samples came from the same flood. Their solution is a “hand-drawn parabolic curve” that — GET THIS — doesn’t pass directly through any of their data points.

The authors at ARJ understand the error bars and trends and such basics of statistical analysis. They understand that a curve doesn’t have to pass through data points. But their job is not to fairly represent the science, it’s to cast doubt. So they do that wherever they can, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

Can I can purchase a uniformitarian circular reasoning microscope from Olympus or Fisher Scientific?

The accusation of circular reasoning totally misses the point. If you apply conventional assumptions evenly across several sets of data, and they give you conventional answers, then that’s circular. But if all of those independent answers match each other, then it becomes verification. Because if conventional assumptions were wrong, we should get noise back. We should run flat into the null like it’s a brick wall.

The whole point of the paper Answers is replying to was to show that we don’t get noise back, we get correlation. But ARJ treats the curve like it’s one of those facebook memes that gives you your birthday if you do some math to your first name. They don’t actually try to address the validity of the curve, they hint at some sort of fiddling behind the curtain and then call it job done.

I look at this work, with the PhD geologist head of AiG research as an author, and am struck. Given all that time to mount a criticism of carbon dating, and this, this is really the best they got?

The only reason that AiG chose to respond to this was because it was published by BioLogos, which has the threat of being able to reach a broader Christian audience. Search their website or their “journal” for papers on less widespread topics like magnetostratigraphy or ERVs or sea floor tectonics, and watch the tumbleweeds blow. AiG isn’t trying to mount criticisms, it’s a propaganda machine.

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Nor does Setterfield’s C decay curve. Sanford’s genetic entropy curve passes through two data points - Noah and David - but since it was generated to pass through those, they shouldn’t count.

ARJ may have shot themselves in the foot.

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What do you do though with C-14 dating that does not match up? Why is there C-14 in coal seams, diamonds, dinosaur bones, and etc?

This quote always has stuck with me when it comes to things like the fossil record and the geologic time scale;

“Structure, metamorphism, sedimentary reworking and other complications have to be considered. Radiometric dating would not have been feasible if the geologic column had not been erected first. The axiom that no process can measure itself means that there is no absolute time, but this relic of the traditional mechanics persists in the common distinction between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ age.”

D’Rourke, J. E. “Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy” American Journal of Science , Vol 276, Jan. 1976 p. 54

Why aren’t you supposed to carbon date dinosaur bones? Well, because they’re too old. How do you know that? Well, the geological time scale. How do you know those dates are accurate when they were established before any radiometric dating method existed? Well, now we’ve confirmed them. By what? Picking a radiometric method suited to the type of material AND how old the geologic time scale says it is.

In the court of law you could have all sorts of evidence lined up, and through sophism, you can have very convincing arguments made that seem to very clearly show the defendant is guilty, but if someone brings in a tape showing the suspect was 100 miles away at the time of the crime, then they didn’t do it! And thus whatever methodology one used to show that the evidence was so “clearly against them” was ultimately flawed, no matter how consistent and corroborating it all appeared.

Presuppositions matter. Do you think when data related to the recent and distant past is being looked at and trying to to be understood, that worldview beliefs about the past that were taught to the scientist as absolute fact isn’t going to affect them? It affects the type of questions you ask. What you you’re looking for. What not to bother looking for because there is no reason to look for something we “know” isn’t there. Or wouldn’t cause one to overlook consciously or unconsciously things that don’t fit or are a bit odd.

I read some pretty ignorant things from people criticizing the Creation position on here. They present an argument to undermine the YEC view by giving evidence that has its interpretation/conclusion on what it says totally based on the presuppositionial belief of an old earth, mankind being here for hundreds of thousands of years, and etc. I remember reading a mocking argument against the Global Flood based on how the Egyptians and etc survived it, all the while the person is totally ignorant to the fact that presuppositions that deny a young earth, and believe in a different origin of mankind are being used as the lense by which to understand that evidence, like how long Egyptians have been around. Archeological parameters, especially when going back real far in time, are defined by the secular/evolutionary history of mankind.

Both the evolutionist and the creationist have presuppositions that are then used to understand the data. When something is found that doesn’t seem to fit, BOTH SIDES will invoke a rescuing device to protect the worldview that is being held. Good examples of rescuing devices; C-14 is found in those very ancient things because of contamination or such other thing, soft tissue in various creatures that are supposed to be be millions of years old are there because of some unknown mechanism. Of course, if it were not for the preheld belief that the creatures were so old, no mechanism would ever be proposed, you wouldn’t look for one (remember, presuppositions affect the questions you ask or need answering), and based on what we absolutely do know about decay/chemistry, we’d be certain those things were only a few thousand years.

I know my presuppositions, and the biases that are a part of my worldview, but I have come to learn after years of dealing with this stuff, that the opposing side is horrifically blind to theirs. I’ve dealt with so many that are as fanatically zealously convinced as any religious person, and just as self-deluded to the point of absolute certainty that they have no bias, no worldview that skews their understanding of the data. And that the scientists who give them the conclusions from the data are just completely logical robots with unwavering absolute objectivity as their highest end.

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Hello Dan. Welcome to the forum. You have raised a number of ideas which are common among YEC, but I will focus on 14C which is the thread topic.

14C dating does not require any rescuing device, because the data is entirely consistent with other relevant age markers. In regards to 14C contamination, the best place to for you to start would be to have a look at this forum’s discussion here directly concerning this - Radiocarbon in Coal?.

Is it a rescuing device that you cannot weigh a feather on a truck scale? It is not a rescuing device to advise against weighing a truck on a kitchen scale. Every measurement procedure has an applicable domain. The “rescuing device” rhetoric from YEC not only reflects an ignorance of the capabilities of C14 dating, but is ironic considering the fabricated response of creationist organizations in regard to radiometric geochronology. Both contamination and instrument sensitivity are physical realities and these limits must be acknowledged in the pursuit of good science. Radiocarbon measurements of carbon dead samples yield an empirical contradiction of the YEC timeline.

All right, you get Mary Schweitzer’s T-Rex femur with unfettered permission to run any test you please. It’s all yours, and you intend to carbon date these. Walk me through this, a step at a time - sample extraction, preparation, isotope measurement, and experimental control.

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I must congratulate you for spending so many words to tell us that you accept and reject things entirely based on your presuppositions, and as a justification for that you offer nothing but the falsehood that you think “they do it too”.

So this is it then, it’s all just make-believe. Everything is entirely and completely determined by your “worldview” and there is no degree of more or less objectivity or more or less reasonableness in how we go about finding out what is true about the world?

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I think it is fair to say that a generic argument about “presuppositions” is not an answer to the fact, to which people have repeatedly pointed above, that creationist writing is routinely filled with outright dishonesty. Nor, of course, is it otherwise helpful. What you must do is honestly and forthrightly show how the data favor your point of view. But for creationism, that cause was lost long, long ago and all that can now be done is pointless yelping about presuppositions and the horrid blindness and bias of scientists.

If this is to satisfy yourself, so be it. But if it is to convince anyone else, you will need something real.

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So where’s your tape in this metaphor? You’re only citing a quote, no data.

Indeed. Mine is scientific, starting with the data. Yours rejects the scientific method and starts with the desired conclusion.

Very little in science is taught as absolute. All scientific conclusions are provisional.

But the scientific worldview goes further and attempts to answer questions.

There’s no presupposition involved. It’s what the data tell us.

This is objectively false. Creationists ignore the vast majority of the data. Kindly note that you cited zero evidence in a page of text.

I have no such belief. Science is not a religion.

Why don’t you present the data, then? The data, not what anyone says about them. This goes back to the falsehood that both sides are examining the same data.

There’s the problem. You have a false presupposition that there is an “opposing side” that ignores evidence that doesn’t fit for ideological reasons.

There’s another false presupposition–that anyone who disagrees with you cannot be religious.

My scientific worldview is that science is about testing hypotheses to correct for my biases. The data are not just sitting in a pile, waiting to be interpreted.

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You first make sure that you have correctly understood the basic principles of how measurement works.

Contamination is most emphatically NOT a “rescuing device.” It is a legitimate source of error, and one of the most basic, fundamental rules of measurement is that you must fully and correctly account for all possible sources of error before drawing any conclusions from your results. This is simply basic standards of quality control that apply to every scientific study, whether you want to call it “operational science” or “historical science,” and regardless of whether you describe the researchers as “creationists or evolutionists.” “Presuppositions” have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

By dismissing contamination as a “rescuing device,” YECs are insisting that the basic rules and principles of accurate and honest weights and measures do not apply to them. In other words, they’re demanding a free pass to make stuff up and invent their own alternative reality. In any other area of science, if you dismissed contamination as a “rescuing device,” you would kill people. Would you buy medication from a pharmacy that dismissed contamination as a “rescuing device”? I rather think not!

What you are doing here is taking a practice that is standard in every area of measurement and twisting it to make it look like it is circular reasoning when it is not.

Of course you pick a method suited to the approximate ball park range of results you expect! You do that yourself when you measure the size of your living room, for example. By YEC reasoning, the fact that you are using a tape measure, rather than a micrometer, or an electron microscope, or a GPS device, or the James Webb Space Telescope, is circular reasoning.

It’s simply a matter of starting off with a wide range of possibilities for the end result (say, 50-250 million years) and narrowing it down to a much more precise figure of 66.04±0.01 million years. It’s exactly the same as narrowing down the width of your living room from “somewhere between three and five metres” to “3.55 metres exactly.” There’s nothing circular, underhand, or “evolutionist” about that whatsoever.

Well before you start claiming that there is soft tissue in dinosaur bones, you’d better make sure you understand exactly what the “soft tissue” consists of.

Let’s get this straight: contrary to what YECs claim, no-one has ever found dinosaur DNA. Nor have they found actual haemoglobin, actual osteocytes, or actual collagen in its original form. What they found were the breakdown products of DNA, the breakdown products of haemoglobin and heavily cross-linked and stabilised collagen. These were the end results of the decay processes of these things, and they all consist of very stable molecules. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that these could not have survived for tens or hundreds of millions of years.

Not as much as you think – and certainly, “presuppositions” are not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Do you really think that creationists are aware of cognitive biases and presuppositions but professional scientists are not? Of course not! There are a lot of rules and protocols in science to reduce or eliminate the effect of cognitive biases and presuppositions. That’s why double-blind studies are a thing. It’s why some fields of research are now starting to insist on pre-registration of studies. And in some studies, the raw data will have offsets added to it before the analysis is done, and then removed afterwards, in order to prevent the researchers from “fixing” their results to what they want to get.

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A “rescuing device” is a conjecture designed to protect one’s worldview from what appears to be contrary evidence. The conjecture can often be something plausible, and/or involve some data that can then either help confirm (not prove) the conjecture or make the apparent contrary evidence a non-issue.

When I mentioned the problem of finding C-14 in diamonds, dinosaur bones (error on my part, should have said fossils), and coal seams, when no C-14 should be detected, the invoking of contamination to explain why there are any significant amounts of C-14 in those types of things, is a type of rescuing device. The explanation given in the Radiocarbon in Coal? link is still a rescuing device. It’s a reasonable conjecture explanating why there may be some C-14 in coalseams, and thus it can confirm that contamination from bacteria can be occurring, but that doesn’t prove that the actual reason for why C-14 is present in any and all samples taken is because of contamination. An alternative hypothesis/explanation, that is just as valid, regarding the same exact fact/data that C-14 is found in coalseams is that they are not millions of years old.

“Both contamination and instrument sensitivity are physical realities and these limits must be acknowledged in the pursuit of good science.”

If both contamination and instrument sensitivity are actual problems or possible problems, then you have an unreliable methodology of dating. I remember when dates given by radiometric dating and then established for years have been overturned by the finding of fossils that don’t fit the dates. Radiometric dating is some of the most laughable garbage I know of that is used to convince people of the secular timescale. It works when the dates fit, and doesn’t work when the dates it gives are later found to not be able to fit. If you don’t know the age of something, it is almost always assumed to work, and if you know the age of something and the age given is wrong, then it doesn’t work. So it works for sure when you don’t know that it isn’t.

Which reminds me of the ridiculous fact of how most of the time the dates of fossils are established by what layer they are found in, and the layers are often dated by what fossils they find in them, and then those dates are ultimately based upon that “established” geologic column, which was devised by first pressupositionally holding to naturalism and uniformitarianism, and that the earth is old. Yeah, this is where the real objective science is being done

“Radiocarbon measurements of carbaon dead samples yield an empirical contradiction of the YEC timeline.”

Let me ask you, what was the world like when God first made it? Do you know, can you explain the Creation model/the Creation position without misrepresenting it? I have yet to find antagonists to Creation who can. What was the rate of C-14 creation in the atmosphere? How much was already there in what was a totally different world that was made mature (how many tree rings would a fully mature tree that’s only a day old and is 200 feet tall have?), does possibly having a stronger magnetic field affect C-14 production?

So you assume your position is right,and that everything was as you believed it to be in the secular origins model, and then you’re going to superimpose all that on a model/position that had a radically different past, environment and etc, and then make the argument that we can emperically show radiocarbon dates that contradict the YEC time line?

Oh no no no, presuppositions don’t play into our position, we’re just objective pursuers of truth.