I could say the same. There are no good evidences for an old earth except for a number of secularist misunderstandings like thinking we can correctly extrapolate the rates of radioisotopes decaying over deep time, thinking that tree rings are clocks, ice cores are clocks, etc. etc.
You could say anything you liked, but that wouldn’t prevent it from being wrong. I see you didn’t answer my question either. Let’s try again:
There are excellent reasons for rejecting all the creationist claims of inconsistent dating methods, at least all the ones I know of. There are no corresponding reasons for rejecting the methods of standard science. We could discuss specifics if you would mention any.
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That is not due to my bias, or cleverness, but to the simple reason that the facts as uncovered by experiment and observation support an ancient earth.
Sure, a typical age given for the age of the earth would be 4.55 billion years, but we could be way off and it is actually 4.4 or 4.7 billion years old. Which do you prefer?
Francis Schaeffer insisted Genesis be in time and space, but he was a bit ambivalent about a young earth, and in any event had little to say about the science of time or space.
Well I do take seriously the ninth commandment, to not bear false witness.
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And literally using techniques (DNA sequence analysis) that you are trying to cram into a category that you are desperately trying to denigrate as “historical” to avoid examining the massive evidence it has produced, we produce evidence that is considered to be far more reliable than eyewitness testimony in criminal and civil (paternity in particular) cases.
Can you point me to a single YEC who argues that DNA evidence cannot be used in a paternity suit because it is historical?
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I don’t feel like getting into a neverending debate about all possible dating methods. All people interested in hearing the young earth scientific approach to these dating methods can look up the articles (and there are many) at creation.com.
I have an upcoming article, coauthored with Dr. Carter, that addresses this kind of statement. I don’t know when it will be published, but it should be in the next month or two at the latest. Keep a lookout if you’d like.
However, GAE could be framed more scientifically as a simple observation of the incompetence of some Biblical (highly selective) literalists in their understanding of population genetics. That framing wouldn’t seem very accommodating, though…
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So you can’t point me to a single YEC with even that most rudimentary quantity of intellectual consistency. Why not just admit it instead of all this handwaving?
I don’t believe your claim that your article will address my question, beginning with your incoherent misrepresentation of my question as a statement. I hypothesize that your article will pretend to do so.
If you were really confident that it did address my question, you would offer a response here and now.
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I’m so confident that it will address your question, that I don’t want to waste my time retyping out the article for you here right now.
The only way for you to test your hypothesis will be to read the article when it’s released at creation.com. The title is, Historical science, chaos theory, and the sliding scale of trust.
Retyping? What? Do you not know how to copy/paste?
Your title is consistent with my hypothesis.
It’s just science. The “operational” tag is nothing more than a YEC attempt to falsely discount real scientific results.
You have just demonstrated that you don’t know how the scientific method works.
Past events leave evidence in the present. We can use the evidence in the present to test our hypotheses of what happened in the past. That’s Science 101.
Your Science 101 flunks. This can help.
From your article:
Hypothesis: The Earth is billions of years old.
Experiment: Measure the ratio of uranium and lead in zircons. If the Earth is billions of years old then we should find ratios of U/Pb consistent with billions of years of U decay. Others can find zircons from the same geologic formations and test the ratios for themselves to see if they are repeatable.
Conclusion: Many zircons have been found with U/Pb ratios consistent with billions of years of radioactive decay. The evidence supports an old Earth.
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Then don’t bring it up. Short answer: most creationist “dating methods” assume a caricature of uniformitarianism. For example, the magnetic field one assumes a constant (exponential) decay rate and ignores the history of complete magnetic reversals; the salt accumulation one ignores the various processes that remove salt; and so on. Others don’t even attempt to measure the age of the earth, but just assume that some other thing must be as old as the earth and then measure that.
A vague handwave at some unspecified articles on a web site isn’t much of an argument.
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6 posts were split to a new topic: Is PS an echo chamber?
You just really can’t stand that I’m not willing to debate this right now? I’ll give you one. Nickel concentrations in the oceans provide a maximum age of 133,000 years based on known rates of flow and accumulation.
You’re assuming uniformitarianism and also assuming there is nothing removing nickel from the oceans. As predicted.
Here’s a paper talking about nickel sinks. First one I found. You mention only one of several nickel sinks, which is a problem for your scenario. Still, at least you did mention one, eventually.
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By your Loony Tunes version of science detectives could never solve crimes and get convictions in court unless there were eyewitnesses. All that trace evidence - DNA, fingerprints, fiber samples, tire marks, ballistics, etc. is just historical science and not reliable at all.
You really don’t think through the ramifications of your silly anti-science hand waves at all, do you?
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No but the deposits that form in annual layers can be counted to date a particular layer in the ice core.
Just like tree rings? Well, tree ring dating doesn’t go back so far. Yet it can be extended using fossil samples that overlap with each other. If correct, it certainly refutes the idea of a global flood in the last 8,000 years or so. There was an interesting exchange elsewhere in the blogosphere between a YEC commenter claiming tree ring dating was pseudoscience and another who claimed that she could re-examine the raw data, produce an algorithm to match overlaps, and come to the same conclusions as the original researchers without knowing the method used originally. This she was able to do. Would there be any mileage in seeing if she’d be interested in summarizing her method and results?
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Mileage with me personally? No, since these kinds of algorithms are only as good as the uniformitarian assumptions being used to program them. I’m sure lots of people would get a kick out of it though.