Radiocarbon doesn’t date things millions of year old. The practical limit is 50K years.
Radiocarbon dating is calibrated by at least a dozen independent yearly dating proxies - tree rings, lake varves, ice cores, ocean sediment cores, speleothems, etc. Yet every time we post the IntCal13 data you always find something else to do.
So is any inference from data in historical sciences. The distinction you imagine doesn’t exist. Several scientists in different disciplines, notably chemistry (@Jordan) and evolutionary biology (me) have told you that and shown you examples.
Here’s another. I work with DNA sequences (in a lab!), and I use them to reconstruct the evolutionary history of life. When I form a phylogenetic hypothesis based on DNA sequences, I can repeat those observations by re-sequencing the same gene or, more importantly and a better test, a different gene. If multiple genes agree, the initial hypothesis has been tested. If enough agree, it’s been tested enough that we can consider it fact. Your distinction, again, is illusory.
From my surveying, YEC allows that C-14 and other dating methods are good for relative sequencing but not absolute dating. To my knowledge, YEC has never published any C-14 calibration curve.
The measured decay rates allow only one interpretation of a given sample dating. YEC does not interpret that evidence differently - YEC dismisses that evidence. A huge difference. A conjecture about speeded up decay in not an interpretation.
Assigning a date to an artifact from radiometric dating may be “historical” science, if you please, but it is at least based results from real, solid, repeatable, experimental, empirical, OBSERVATIONAL science in that decay rates have indeed been measured time and again. The YEC speeded up decay conjectures enjoy absolutely zero observational support. It is ironic there is this YEC emphasis on observational science when to much of their literature is based on “how do you know it wasn’t different back then” dismissals of observational science.
If you are going to put out some superficial comment there that there is actual, laboratory evidence for accelerated decay rates [under any conceivable terrestial condition], please do some very deep digging first and have your data and math in order. Be assured, there isn’t.
The forensic scientist IS doing historical science, but it is also the case that the further back we go, the less certainty we can have, because the more room for unknowns creeps in.
I guess I see some value in distinguishing between historical and non-historical (not sure whether that’s observational, experimental, or what in your view) science from a philosophical perspective. But I think it’s not nearly that clear cut in practice.
Say we find a body, and unfortunately it looks like the person overdosed on a drug. A relevant forensic question would be if person actually took enough drugs to overdose. If not, perhaps we might suspect foul play and go look for other causes of death. Now, in order to determine if the person overdosed we can’t just determine the level of the drug in the body at this minute and make a judgment as to a probable overdose because metabolism still occurs, etc. We would want to figure out what the peak concentration was. We can get an idea of that by looking at the kinetics (rates of reactions) of the drug in people now and back-tracking.
We use data now to look back at what happened in the past. We use data now to look into the future (prediction). We rarely ever collect data to be used only right now. I think that makes the chronological split problematic from a practical perspective.
I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone to say that the deeper in time we look the more uncertainty their might be, but that does’t mean we can ignore or cast general doubt on multiple lines of evidence that seem to be pointing in the same direction.
I don’t see a problem with YECs wanting scientists to be clear about assumptions going into things like radiometric dating. It is assumed that measured decay rates haven’t changed (significantly) over the life of the Earth. But they also shouldn’t misrepresent the strength of those assumptions either. We don’t see decay rates changing under massively different physical conditions (temperature, pressure, etc.) which would be relevant to the task at hand. They also shouldn’t dismiss when radiometric dating from terrestrial and extraterrestrial sources agree, when multiple isotopes agree, when other ways of determining the age of the Earth/universe also agree.
In my mind, if YEC scientist and thinkers have an alternative model that fits the data equally well, then it’s worth looking at. Instead, it seems to me most of the energy is spent telling scientists (many of whom are Christians) that what they see is not real and that it’s all due to a lack of commitment to a particular theological interpretation or philosophical presuppositions, none of which have much of anything to do with the actual science.
And if decay rates were radically different a few thousand years ago, enough to make the YEC timeline work, the earth would have been sterilized, probably vaporized, and all sorts of other physical “constants” would have to be radically altered, with bizarre effects, perhaps explosion of all stars if fusion is likewise speeded up.
This whole YEC whining jag about “historical science and observational science” is just an offshoot of Ken Ham’s infamous science denying excuse: “Were you there??? Did you see it???”
It really is amazing the many and varied excuses YECs come up with for ignoring scientifically verified reality. It’s a graduate level course in self-deception.
I think that’s sound, but at the same time it is still only probabilistic. The certainty is relatively high because there aren’t very many unknowns and we have a lot of relevant data to draw on.
Imagine this same situation but you’re trying to do forensics on a case that occurred 1000 years ago. How much certainty could you have? Now imagine you’re talking about something that allegedly happened 65 million years ago!
I don’t see a problem with YECs wanting scientists to be clear about assumptions going into things like radiometric dating. It is assumed that measured decay rates haven’t changed (significantly) over the life of the Earth.
Great! That’s not the only assumption involved, though. You also are assuming a closed system; and yes, I know isochron methods claim to overcome the need for such an assumption, but there are problems there as well and it’s a highly technical debate over that issue that I can’t get into at the moment.
But they also shouldn’t misrepresent the strength of those assumptions either. We don’t see decay rates changing under massively different physical conditions (temperature, pressure, etc.) which would be relevant to the task at hand.
No, not at the present time we don’t. But to assume that means they never changed is, again, an assumption, and if we live in a world with a catastrophic (and at least at times, supernaturally-influenced) past, that assumption may not be valid.
n my mind, if YEC scientist and thinkers have an alternative model that fits the data equally well, then it’s worth looking at. Instead, it seems to me most of the energy is spent telling scientists (many of whom are Christians) that what they see is not real and that it’s all due to a lack of commitment to a particular theological interpretation or philosophical presuppositions, none of which have much of anything to do with the actual science.
The ‘actual science’ is the measurements themselves. The interpretation is a claim about history. YEC’s do not say “what you see is not real”. We say "you cannot make assumptions like that, especially when we have other powerful lines of evidence including foremost Scripture itself that contradict that conclusion).
If the event 66 MYA was the impact of a 10km wide asteroid which left a huge crater and an immense amount of physical evidence we can be 100% certain.
There’s a new thread here just for presenting this non-Scriptual positive evidence for your YEC claims. When do you think you can present some of your claimed “powerful lines of evidence”?
OK, so this is what I find interesting about genetics. If it was just a matter of fossils, or geology, I think I find your argument more persuasive. But what @John_Harshman, @Mercer, @swamidass and others have shown me is that it’s different if what happened in the past keeps getting carried, at least to some extent, forward in time. My genome doesn’t just reflect my genome at this second, it also reflects my mother and father’s genome, and my grandparent’s genome, etc. Your position that the further back we go the less certainty we have makes sense, but sometimes the past is brought to us in the right now.
So aren’t you making a historical argument, that the rates were different in the past? Why should we have any certainty in that? Even if there was a catastrophic past, we weren’t there to measure how it effected decay rates, right?
That’s really to simplistic I think. Science is not measurement.
The measurement is repeatable, observational science. The age assignment is a mathematical outcome of the measurement. YEC does not offer another interpretation, it dismisses the evidence. There are no observational measurements of radioactive decay which support a terrestrial age of six thousand years. Radiometric assigned dates are based on observational science, the YEC alternative is not equivalent because it is not based on any observational measurements, but on complete conjecture.
@PDPrice, by the way, thanks for pointing out Dr Carol Cleland. I looked her bio up at UC Boulder, seems really interesting. @swamidass, she would make an excellent Office Hours.
It’s hard to see how someone could sincerely claim that it is merely a difference in interpretation.
@PDPrice, how about the two experimental studies I offered as examples above? Are you going to ignore them and demonstrate that you don’t believe that YECs are interpreting the same evidence?
How do you rationalize dismissing the evidence, as a Christian and a human being?
Whether the hypothesis being tested concerns something happening in the past or present is not the point. The strength of the conclusions comes from the strength of the predictions and the measurements, not the amount of time that has passed.
Genetics is a very interesting area in and of itself. It is probably the strongest argument of all against Neo-Darwinian evolution. Dr John Sanford has contributed hugely in this area, along with Dr. Robert Carter.