Roy (C77),
RonSewell:jammycakes:Especially when you are making extraordinary claims that hundreds of thousands of results taken using dozens of different methods are all consistently out by factors of a million.
PaulGiem:
And dozens of different methods? Really?
From Paul Giem, Scientific Theology , p.116
There are several books on dating methods. Perhaps one of the better ones for an initial survey is *Absolute Dating Methods* by Mebus A. Geyh and Helmut Schleicher.5 This book lists 76 physical and chemical methods used to date the earth, the moon, meteorites, or fragments thereof.Game, set, match.
You failed to read further in Scientific Theology (pp. 136, 137):
So we turn again to Geyh and Schleicher and look at those 75 other methods [besides K/Ar dating]. Some of them, such as 138La/138Ce, 176Lu/176Ha, and 207Pb/206Pb, are used only for Precambrian material, and thus are irrelevant for dating life. They may be valid, or they may be invalid, but it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. Some, such as 3H, 210Pb, and 228Th excess/232Th, are used only for recent (< 3000 year old) samples, and thus again irrelevant for the question at hand. Some are considered highly experimental, such as the 10Be/36Cl method (if evolutionists do not have confidence in a method or its assumptions, it would seem difficult to use it to disprove a creationist time scale). Some are essentially variations on other methods, such as the 39Ar/40Ar method.41 Some are only relative dating methods, such as paleomagnetism and stable oxygen isotopes. Some are used on only meteorites or lunar rocks and are mostly irrelevant for dating life on the earth (all except for the terrestrial ages of meteorites). And some are obsolete, like the chemical lead method. Some, of course, suffer from more than one drawback for our purposes. When all these extraneous methods are removed from consideration, we are left with the following methods: 87Rb/87Sr, 40K/40Ca, 147Sm/143Nd, uranium/thorium/lead and lead/alpha, krypton/krypton, uranium/xenon and xenon/xenon, 14C, 36Cl, 53Mn, 81Kr, 129I, 26Al, 10Be, most of the U and Th disequilibrium series, U/He, Thermoluminscence and relatives, Fission tracks, Pleochroic haloes, terrestrial exposure ages of meteorites, Amino acid racemization, Nitrogen content of bones, and Obsidian hydration. This is still an impressive list, but a far cry from the 76 methods we started with. And this list can be whittled down still further.
Not quite the “dozens and dozens” mentioned earlier (minimum of 48 by my count) Can I have my point back? Or perhaps better, as swamidass said (C78),
Except this isn’t about scoring points. At least it shouldn’t be :frowning:
About that “Gish Gallop” (jammycakes, C68), there is no way I am going to vet all of the 100 reasons (although they are billed as “the 100 most convincing reasons—in no particular order—that the Earth is not less than 10,000 years old.”). But I may reply to a few.
Tree-ring “long counts” from [California](https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/787), [Central Europe](https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/4172), [New Zealand](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.1075/abstract), and [Scandinavia](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00291950802517593#.VCCb7StdVyE) extend up to ~13,000 years. These chronologies are constructed from hundreds of individual trees that overlap, so that even if a tree *did* produce multiple rings during a growth season, the ‘extra years’ would disappear in the correlation process. Even John Woodmorappe [has written](https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/biblical-chronology-and-8000-year-bristlecone-pine-chronology/) that these tree-ring chronologies cannot be explained by multiple rings being produced in a single year or the mismatch of individual tree records.
The matches may not be as secure as assumed (my work on the bones from Nineveh may be relevant here). But even if they are, they only put a putative Flood back past 13,000 years.
There is no radiocarbon in old samples , despite claims to the contrary. Geologically old samples of coal, diamonds, and graphite, for example, yield finite radiocarbon ages that are [consistent with the expected level of contamination](http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/origins/carbon-kb.htm) invariably introduced during sample collection and preparation.
We’ve been discussing that here, and I may discuss that further in the other thread ( Radiocarbon in Coal? )
Coal beds defy rapid deposition , because the high concentration of organic matter begins with the slow accumulation of plant material in oxygen-poor swamps (and *not* by [rapid burial of floating forests](http://www.oldearth.org/floating.htm)). The occasional preservation of leaves and woody material in coal seams would not be possible if all the buried plant material were fresh to begin with (as with rapid burial of existing forests), but requires that organic remains be at varying stages of decomposition.
The writer is apparently not acquainted with the evidence for the allochthonous origin of coal.
Fossilized poop , called coprolite, is found throughout the fossil record alongside the animals that produced them. These paleontological oddities [are indicative of normal ecological conditions](http://thenaturalhistorian.com/2013/08/10/nh-notes-dino-doo-doo-coprolites-and-the-genesis-flood/) and contradict any scenario in which the ‘poopers’ were catastrophically buried.
How do you fossilize poop without burying it rapidly?
Fossilized tracks in eolian (desert dune) deposits , such as the Coconino and Navajo sandstones, are inconsistent with the young-Earth proposition that these sediments accumulated under water. Extremely high sustained flow rates (>2 m/s) of very deep waters (up to 100 m or more) are required to form dunes of comparable size to those in the Coconino and Navajo sandstones. At these flow rates, it would be impossible for any submerged animals (especially small reptiles) even to make contact with the sediment surface, let alone for any prints to be preserved.
The writer is apparently not acquainted with the work of Leonard Brand showing that the tracks were laid down underwater, published in the standard literature.
Accelerated nuclear decay is science fiction. Neither the physics nor the math produces a result in which radiometric dates yield consistently large ages for rocks and minerals in our solar system. One cannot tweak the physical properties of atoms, so as to increase the rate of radioactive decay, without all hell breaking loose—literally. Rates of decay depend on the stability of individual atoms, so if unstable atoms became more unstable, we’d expect stable atoms also to become very unstable, which would be the undoing of the physical universe as we know it. These are not conditions through which an Ark of humans and animals ever could have survived.
That’s a good argument at present against YEC; YLC, not so much.
swamidass,
It would be nice if the comment numbers were posted on the comments themselves. When i searched, comment 49 on the running total was labeled as comment 50 on the search function.