Evolution vs Creationism Debate
- Thread starter Volsung
- Start date
W'rkncacnter
Mister Freeze
As I stated above, and one should be able to deduce, you are still basing the date off of a series of assumptions (i.e. unknowns). When you do that you are not dealing with empirical science anymore.
You didn't address the errors. Like dating recent lava flows to potentially several million years old and finding C14 in fossils supposedly hundreds of thousands to millions of years old. In addition C14 levels have not been constant throughout history and a global flood would affect that even more.
W'rkncacnter
Mister Freeze
As I have continually pointed out, I don't claim the evidence is not there. I just think it points to something other than evolution.
No. I deny what the evidence points to. To deny that it exists would be absurd.
I'm going to take that to mean you couldn't find where I did it either.
No, you show me evidence then give your interpretation of the evidence as "fact" and assume I must agree.
I read/watched many of them. I've browsed talkorigins.org. I've debated this many times over with other people.
You are welcome to bow out of the discussion, and I don't harbor any ill-feelings toward you. Nor do I think less of you. I apologize for frustrating you as that was not my intention. I wish you well in your journeys across Skyrim.
DrunkenMage
Intoxicated Arch-Mage
The date is rounded off to what is close, with an error margin of say 20 Million years out of billions.
Dating recent lava flows? I assume you refer to the thing an Creationist mentioned about recent lava being taken and suddenly being labeled as several million years old? No. That is actually completely nonsense.
The idea that a “chunk” was broken from a lava and dated to be millions of years came straight from an actual scientific research, in which a chunk was broken from fresh lava, and was dated to be 22 million years old. However, the scientists who were involved in the research were not trying to date lava; they were instead dating olivine inclusions within the lava.
Olivine has high melting points therefore are not molten by the lava, hence the term “olivine inclusions” within the lava. This is the “chunk” which was taken from the Hualalai volcano to the lab. Potassium/ argon dating revealed that these chunks were indeed 22 million years old, which comes as no surprise, because these olivine inclusions are old.
To quote an earlier post of yours.
Isochron methods do not assume that the initial parent or daughter concentrations are known. In basic radiometric dating, a parent isotope (call it P) decays to a daughter isotope (D) at a predictable rate. The age can be calculated from the ratio daughter isotope to parent isotope in a sample. However, this assumes that we know how much of the daughter isotope was in the sample initially. (It also assumes that neither isotope entered or left the sample.)
With isochron dating, we also measure a different isotope of the same element as the daughter (call it D2), and we take measurements of several different minerals that formed at the same time from the same pool of materials. Instead of assuming a known amount of daughter isotope, we only assume that D/D2 is initially the same in all of the samples. Plotting P/D2 on the x axis and D/D2 on the y axis for several different samples gives a line that is initially horizontal. Over time, as P decays to D, the line remains straight, but its slope increases. The age of the sample can be calculated from the slope, and the initial concentration of the daughter element D is given by where the line meets the y axis. If D/D2 is not initially the same in all samples, the data points tend to scatter on the isochron diagram, rather than falling on a straight line.
DrunkenMage
Intoxicated Arch-Mage
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
God commands not to lie, so the Bible must be 100% true. Yet we have those twisting the words of the bible and it's allowed?
It is rather hypocritical for those religious to twist their religion's rules to help their case against science and evolution.
"Uses the bible as why something is true."
"Says the bible doesn't exactly mean this..."
DrunkenMage
Intoxicated Arch-Mage
You look for any small doubts, or anytime an logical assumption is made. Using assumptions don't destroy evolution or dating, but the assumptions are based on something extremely logical. Dating doesn't just use C14, but they cross reference with many dating methods to find the results.
Science never uses one thing, to prove something. It's tested, different, and when several methods point to the one conclusion. It then becomes Scientific fact.
Just because you look for any gap, doesn't mean Divine Creation. But you're just turning God Creator of the Universe, and Everything. Into, God of Gaps.
W'rkncacnter
Mister Freeze
A swimming race illustrates the simple principles involved in measuring time. This swimmer is competing in a 1,500 metre race and we have an accurate, calibrated wristwatch. We note that at the instant the swimmer touches the edge of the pool our wristwatch reads 7:41 and 53 seconds. How long has the competitor taken to swim the 1,500 metre race?
When I have asked an audience this question they have looked at me incredulously and said, “Starting time?” You cannot know how long the swimmer took unless you knew the time on the wristwatch when the race started. Without the starting time it is impossible to establish the time for the race. Note: Impossible.
Actually, knowing the starting time is still not enough. During the race you have to watch the swimmer and count how many laps he has swum so you know that he has done 1,500 metres. And you have to check to make sure he touches the edge at the end of each lap. Without these observations you cannot be sure that the time is valid. That is why you need at least two, sometimes three judges to measure the time of the race to the standard needed to enter the record books.
It would make no difference how accurate or high-tech the wristwatch was. You could talk about the tiny quartz crystal and the piezoelectric effect used to provide a stable time base for the electronic movement. You could describe the atomic workings of the quartz oscillator and how it resonates at a specific and highly stable frequency, and how this is used to accurately pace a timekeeping mechanism.
But without reliable witnesses the accuracy of the watch makes no difference. You can only establish the time for the race if it was timed by two or more qualified eyewitnesses who observed the start, the progress and the finish.
This illustrates the whole problem with the radioactive dating of geological events. Those who promote the reliability of the method spend a lot of time impressing you with the details of radioactive decay, half-lives, mass-spectroscopes, etc. But they omit discussion of the basic flaw in the method: you cannot measure the age of a rock using radioactive dating because you were not present to measure the radioactive elements when the rock formed and you did not monitor the way those elements changed over its entire geological history.
If you check this educational page by the US Geological Society you will see that they spend all their time talking about the technicalities of radioactive decay. But they do not even mention the basic problem that you cannot know the radioactive concentrations that existed in the rock in the past.
In other words, the fatal problem with all radioactive dates is that they are all based on assumptions about the past. You can get any date you like depending on the assumptions you make. And that is what geologist do, they make up an assumed geological history for rock depending on the numbers that come from the geochronology lab.
Source
When I have asked an audience this question they have looked at me incredulously and said, “Starting time?” You cannot know how long the swimmer took unless you knew the time on the wristwatch when the race started. Without the starting time it is impossible to establish the time for the race. Note: Impossible.
Actually, knowing the starting time is still not enough. During the race you have to watch the swimmer and count how many laps he has swum so you know that he has done 1,500 metres. And you have to check to make sure he touches the edge at the end of each lap. Without these observations you cannot be sure that the time is valid. That is why you need at least two, sometimes three judges to measure the time of the race to the standard needed to enter the record books.
It would make no difference how accurate or high-tech the wristwatch was. You could talk about the tiny quartz crystal and the piezoelectric effect used to provide a stable time base for the electronic movement. You could describe the atomic workings of the quartz oscillator and how it resonates at a specific and highly stable frequency, and how this is used to accurately pace a timekeeping mechanism.
But without reliable witnesses the accuracy of the watch makes no difference. You can only establish the time for the race if it was timed by two or more qualified eyewitnesses who observed the start, the progress and the finish.
This illustrates the whole problem with the radioactive dating of geological events. Those who promote the reliability of the method spend a lot of time impressing you with the details of radioactive decay, half-lives, mass-spectroscopes, etc. But they omit discussion of the basic flaw in the method: you cannot measure the age of a rock using radioactive dating because you were not present to measure the radioactive elements when the rock formed and you did not monitor the way those elements changed over its entire geological history.
If you check this educational page by the US Geological Society you will see that they spend all their time talking about the technicalities of radioactive decay. But they do not even mention the basic problem that you cannot know the radioactive concentrations that existed in the rock in the past.
In other words, the fatal problem with all radioactive dates is that they are all based on assumptions about the past. You can get any date you like depending on the assumptions you make. And that is what geologist do, they make up an assumed geological history for rock depending on the numbers that come from the geochronology lab.
Source
W'rkncacnter
Mister Freeze
As stated: dating the age of rocks/fossils is not empirical science. The scientific method requires observation and repeatable experiments. We don't have the time to wait a couple billion years (or even million years) to test. If it is not empirical science it cannot be proven and cannot become fact. What you have is their "best guess".
DrunkenMage
Intoxicated Arch-Mage
Dating in geology may be relative or absolute. Relative dating is done by observing fossils, as described above, and recording which fossil is younger, which is older. The discovery of means for absolute dating in the early 1900s was a huge advance. The methods are all based on radioactive decay:
Every few years, new geologic time scales are published, providing the latest dates for major time lines. Older dates may change by a few million years up and down, but younger dates are stable. For example, it has been known since the 1960s that the famous Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the line marking the end of the dinosaurs, was 65 million years old. Repeated recalibrations and retests, using ever more sophisticated techniques and equipment, cannot shift that date. It is accurate to within a few thousand years. With modern, extremely precise, methods, error bars are often only 1% or so.
Radiocarbon dating can easily establish that humans have been on the earth for over twenty thousand years, at least twice as long as creationists are willing to allow. Therefore it should come as no surprise that creationists at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) have been trying desperately to discredit this method for years. They have their work cut out for them, however, because radiocarbon (C-14) dating is one of the most reliable of all the radiometric dating methods.
This article will answer several of the most common creationist attacks on carbon-14 dating, using the question-answer format that has proved so useful to lecturers and debaters.
Question: How does carbon-14 dating work?
Answer: Cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere are constantly converting the isotope nitrogen-14 (N-14) into carbon-14 (C-14 or radiocarbon). Living organisms are constantly incorporating this C-14 into their bodies along with other carbon isotopes. When the organisms die, they stop incorporating new C-14, and the old C-14 starts to decay back into N-14 by emitting beta particles. The older an organism's remains are, the less beta radiation it emits because its C-14 is steadily dwindling at a predictable rate. So, if we measure the rate of beta decay in an organic sample, we can calculate how old the sample is. C-14 decays with a half-life of 5,730 years.
Question: Kieth and Anderson radiocarbon-dated the shell of a living freshwater mussel and obtained an age of over two thousand years. ICR creationists claim that this discredits C-14 dating. How do you reply?
Answer: It does discredit the C-14 dating of freshwater mussels, but that's about all. Kieth and Anderson show considerable evidence that the mussels acquired much of their carbon from the limestone of the waters they lived in and from some very old humus as well. Carbon from these sources is very low in C-14 because these sources are so old and have not been mixed with fresh carbon from
the air. Thus, a freshly killed mussel has far less C-14 than a freshly killed something else, which is why the C-14 dating method makes freshwater mussels seem older than they really are. When dating wood there is no such problem because wood gets its carbon straight from the air, complete with a full dose of C-14. The creationists who quote Kieth and Anderson never tell you this, however.
Question: A sample that is more than fifty thousand years old shouldn't have any measurable C-14. Coal, oil, and natural gas are supposed to be millions of years old; yet creationists say that some of them contain measurable amounts of C-14, enough to give them C-14 ages in the tens of thousands of years. How do you explain this?
Answer: Very simply. Radiocarbon dating doesn't work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C-14 left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium-40 (K-40) decay. Younger objects can easily be dated, because they still emit plenty of beta radiation, enough to be measured after the background radiation has been subtracted out of the total beta radiation. However, in either case, the background beta radiation has to be compensated for, and, in the older objects, the amount of C-14 they have left is less than the margin of error in measuring background radiation. As Hurley points out:
Question: Creationists such as Cook (1966) claim that cosmic radiation is now forming C-14 in the atmosphere about one and one-third times faster than it is decaying. If we extrapolate backwards in time with the proper equations, we find that the earlier the historical period, the less C-14 the atmosphere had. If we extrapolate as far back as ten thousand years ago, we find the atmosphere would not have had any C-14 in it at all. If they are right, this means all C-14 ages greater than two or three thousand years need to be lowered drastically and that the earth can be no older than ten thousand years. How do you reply?
Answer: Yes, Cook is right that C-14 is forming today faster than it's decaying. However, the amount of C-14 has not been rising steadily as Cook maintains; instead, it has fluctuated up and down over the past ten thousand years. How do we know this? From radiocarbon dates taken from bristlecone pines.
There are two ways of dating wood from bristlecone pines: one can count rings or one can radiocarbon-date the wood. Since the tree ring counts have reliably dated some specimens of wood all the way back to 6200 BC, one can check out the C-14 dates against the tree-ring-count dates. Admittedly, this old wood comes from trees that have been dead for hundreds of years, but you don't have to have an 8,200-year-old bristlecone pine tree alive today to validly determine that sort of date. It is easy to correlate the inner rings of a younger living tree with the outer rings of an older dead tree. The correlation is possible because, in the Southwest region of the United States, the widths of tree rings vary from year to year with the rainfall, and trees all over the Southwest have the same pattern of variations.
When experts compare the tree-ring dates with the C-14 dates, they find that radiocarbon ages before 1000 BC are really too young—not too old as Cook maintains. For example, pieces of wood that date at about 6200 BC by tree-ring counts date at only 5400 BC by regular C-14 dating and 3900 BC by Cook's creationist revision of C-14 dating. So, despite creationist claims, C-14 before three thousand years ago was decaying faster than it was being formed and C-14 dating errs on the side of making objects from before 1000 BC look too young, not too old.
Question: But don't trees sometimes produce more than one growth ring per year? Wouldn't that spoil the tree-ring count?
Answer: If anything, the tree-ring sequence suffers far more from missing rings than from double rings. This means that the tree-ring dates would be slightly too young, not too old.
Of course, some species of tree tend to produce two or more growth rings per year. But other species produce scarcely any extra rings. Most of the tree-ring sequence is based on the bristlecone pine. This tree rarely produces even a trace of an extra ring; on the contrary, a typical bristlecone pine has up to 5 percent of its rings missing. Concerning the sequence of rings derived from the bristlecone pine, Ferguson says:
Other species of trees corroborate the work that Ferguson did with bristlecone pines. Before his work, the tree-ring sequence of the sequoias had been worked out back to 1250 BC. The archaeological ring sequence had been worked out back to 59 BC. The limber pine sequence had been worked out back to 25 BC. The radiocarbon dates and tree-ring dates of these other trees agree with those Ferguson got from the bristlecone pine. But even if he had had no other trees with which to work except the bristlecone pines, that evidence alone would have allowed him to determine the tree-ring chronology back to 6200 BC.
So, creationists who complain about double rings in their attempts to disprove C-14 dating are actually grasping at straws. If the Flood of Noah occurred around 3000 BC, as some creationists claim, then all the bristlecone pines would have to be less than five thousand years old. This would mean that eighty-two hundred years worth of tree rings had to form in five thousand years, which would mean that one-third of all the bristlecone pine rings would have to be extra rings. Creationists are forced into accepting such outlandish conclusions as these in order to jam the facts of nature into the time frame upon which their "scientific" creation model is based.
Question: Creationist Thomas G. Barnes has claimed that the earth's magnetic field is decaying exponentially with a half-life of fourteen hundred years. Not only does he consider this proof that the earth can be no older than ten thousand years but he also points out that a greater magnetic strength in the past would reduce C-14 dates. Now if the magnetic field several thousand years ago was indeed many times stronger than it is today, there would have been less cosmic radiation entering the atmosphere back then and less C-14 would have been produced. Therefore, any C-14 dates taken from objects of that time period would be too high. How do you answer him?
Answer: Like Cook, Barnes looks at only part of the evidence. What he ignores is the great body of archaeological and geological data showing that the strength of the magnetic field has been fluctuating up and down for thousands of years and that it has reversed polarity many times in the geological past. So, when Barnes extrapolates ten thousand years into the past, he concludes that the magnetic field was nineteen times stronger in 4000 BC than it is today, when, actually, it was only half as intense then as now. This means that radiocarbon ages of objects from that time period will be too young, just as we saw from the bristlecone pine evidence.
Question: But how does one know that the magnetic field has fluctuated and reversed polarity? Aren't these just excuses scientists give in order to neutralize Barnes's claims?
Answer: The evidence for fluctuations and reversals of the magnetic field is quite solid. V. Bucha, a Czech geophysicist, has used archaeological artifacts made of baked clay to determine the strength of the earth's magnetic field when they were manufactured.
He found that the earth's magnetic field was 1.5 times as strong as today around 1 AD, 1.6 times as strong around 400 BC, 0.8 times as strong around 2000 BC, and only 0.5 times as strong around 4000 BC. In other words, it rose in intensity from 0.5 times its present value in 4000 BC to a peak of 1.6 times its present value in 400 BC, and it has been slowly declining since then. Even before the bristlecone pine calibration of C-14 dating was worked out by Ferguson, Bucha predicted that this change in the magnetic field would make radiocarbon dates too young.
As for the question of polarity reversals, plate tectonics can teach us much. It is a fact that new oceanic crust continually forms at the mid-oceanic ridges and spreads away from those ridges in opposite directions. When lava at the ridges hardens, it keeps a trace of the magnetism of the earth's magnetic field. Therefore, every time the magnetic field reverses itself, bands of paleomagnetism of reversed polarity show up on the ocean floor alternated with bands of normal polarity. These bands are thousands of kilometers long, they vary in width, they lie parallel, and the bands on either side of any given ridge form mirror images of each other. Thus it can be demonstrated that the magnetic field of the earth has reversed itself dozens of times throughout earth history.
Barnes, writing in 1973, ought to have known better than to quote the gropings and guesses of authors of the early sixties in an effort to debunk magnetic reversals. Before plate tectonics and continental drift became established in the mid-sixties, the known evidence for magnetic reversals was rather scanty, and geophysicists often tried to invent ingenious mechanisms with which to account for this evidence rather than believe in magnetic reversals.
However, by 1973, sea floor spreading and magnetic reversals had been documented to the satisfaction of almost the entire scientific community. Yet, instead of seriously attempting to rebut them with up-to-date evidence, Barnes merely quoted the old guesses of authors who wrote before the facts were known. But, in spite of Barnes, paleomagnetism on the sea floor conclusively proves that the magnetic field of the earth oscillates in waves and even reverses itself on occasion. It has not been decaying exponentially as Barnes maintains.
Question: Does outside archaeological evidence confirm the C-14 dating method?
Answer: Yes. When we know the age of a sample through archaeology or historical sources, the C-14 method (as corrected by bristlecone pines) agrees with the age within the known margin of error. For instance, Egyptian artifacts can be dated both historically and by radiocarbon, and the results agree. At first, archaeologists used to complain that the C-14 method must be wrong, because it conflicted with well-established archaeological dates; but, as Renfrew has detailed, the archaeological dates were often based on false assumptions. One such assumption was that the megalith builders of western Europe learned the idea of megaliths from the Near-Eastern civilizations.
As a result, archaeologists believed that the Western megalith-building cultures had to be younger than the Near Eastern civilizations. Many archaeologists were skeptical when Ferguson's calibration with bristlecone pines was first published, because, according to his method, radiocarbon dates of the Western megaliths showed them to be much older than their Near-Eastern counterparts. However, as Renfrew demonstrated, the similarities between these Eastern and Western cultures are so superficial that the megalith builders of western Europe invented the idea of megaliths independently of the Near East. So, in the end, external evidence reconciles with and often confirms even controversial C-14 dates.
One of the most striking examples of different dating methods confirming each other is Stonehenge. C-14 dates show that Stonehenge was gradually built over the period from 1900 BC to 1500 BC, long before the Druids, who claimed Stonehenge as their creation, came to England. Astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins calculated with a computer what the heavens were like back in the second millennium BC, accounting for the precession of the equinoxes, and found that Stonehenge had many significant alignments with various extreme positions of the sun and moon (for example, the hellstone marked the point where the sun rose on the first day of summer). Stonehenge fits the heavens as they were almost four thousand years ago, not as they are today, thereby cross-verifying the C-14 dates.
Question: What specifically does C-14 dating show that creates problems for the creation model?
Answer: C-14 dates show that the last glaciation started to subside around twenty thousand years ago. But the young-earth creationists at ICR and elsewhere insist that, if an ice age occurred, it must have come and gone far less than ten thousand years ago, sometime after Noah's flood. Therefore, the only way creationists can hang on to their chronology is to poke all the holes they can into radiocarbon dating. However, as we have seen, it has survived their most ardent attacks.
- Certain naturally occurring elements are radioactive, and they decay, or break down, at predictable rates.
- Chemists measure the half-life of such elements, i.e., the time it takes for half of the radioactive parent element to break down to the stable daughter element. Sometimes, one isotope, or naturally occurring form, of an element decays into another, more stable form of the same element.
- By comparing the proportions of parent to daughter element in a rock sample, and knowing the half-life, the age can be calculated.
- The best-known absolute dating technique is carbon-14 dating, which archaeologists prefer to use. However, the half-life of carbon-14 is only 5730 years, so the method cannot be used for materials older than about 70,000 years.
- Radiometric dating involves the use of isotope series, such as rubidium/strontium, thorium/lead, potassium/argon, argon/argon, or uranium/lead, all of which have very long half-lives, ranging from 0.7 to 48.6 billion years. Subtle differences in the relative proportions of the two isotopes can give good dates for rocks of any age.
Every few years, new geologic time scales are published, providing the latest dates for major time lines. Older dates may change by a few million years up and down, but younger dates are stable. For example, it has been known since the 1960s that the famous Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the line marking the end of the dinosaurs, was 65 million years old. Repeated recalibrations and retests, using ever more sophisticated techniques and equipment, cannot shift that date. It is accurate to within a few thousand years. With modern, extremely precise, methods, error bars are often only 1% or so.
Radiocarbon dating can easily establish that humans have been on the earth for over twenty thousand years, at least twice as long as creationists are willing to allow. Therefore it should come as no surprise that creationists at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) have been trying desperately to discredit this method for years. They have their work cut out for them, however, because radiocarbon (C-14) dating is one of the most reliable of all the radiometric dating methods.
This article will answer several of the most common creationist attacks on carbon-14 dating, using the question-answer format that has proved so useful to lecturers and debaters.
Question: How does carbon-14 dating work?
Answer: Cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere are constantly converting the isotope nitrogen-14 (N-14) into carbon-14 (C-14 or radiocarbon). Living organisms are constantly incorporating this C-14 into their bodies along with other carbon isotopes. When the organisms die, they stop incorporating new C-14, and the old C-14 starts to decay back into N-14 by emitting beta particles. The older an organism's remains are, the less beta radiation it emits because its C-14 is steadily dwindling at a predictable rate. So, if we measure the rate of beta decay in an organic sample, we can calculate how old the sample is. C-14 decays with a half-life of 5,730 years.
Question: Kieth and Anderson radiocarbon-dated the shell of a living freshwater mussel and obtained an age of over two thousand years. ICR creationists claim that this discredits C-14 dating. How do you reply?
Answer: It does discredit the C-14 dating of freshwater mussels, but that's about all. Kieth and Anderson show considerable evidence that the mussels acquired much of their carbon from the limestone of the waters they lived in and from some very old humus as well. Carbon from these sources is very low in C-14 because these sources are so old and have not been mixed with fresh carbon from
the air. Thus, a freshly killed mussel has far less C-14 than a freshly killed something else, which is why the C-14 dating method makes freshwater mussels seem older than they really are. When dating wood there is no such problem because wood gets its carbon straight from the air, complete with a full dose of C-14. The creationists who quote Kieth and Anderson never tell you this, however.
Question: A sample that is more than fifty thousand years old shouldn't have any measurable C-14. Coal, oil, and natural gas are supposed to be millions of years old; yet creationists say that some of them contain measurable amounts of C-14, enough to give them C-14 ages in the tens of thousands of years. How do you explain this?
Answer: Very simply. Radiocarbon dating doesn't work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C-14 left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium-40 (K-40) decay. Younger objects can easily be dated, because they still emit plenty of beta radiation, enough to be measured after the background radiation has been subtracted out of the total beta radiation. However, in either case, the background beta radiation has to be compensated for, and, in the older objects, the amount of C-14 they have left is less than the margin of error in measuring background radiation. As Hurley points out:
Without rather special developmental work, it is not generally practicable to measure ages in excess of about twenty thousand years, because the radioactivity of the carbon becomes so slight that it is difficult to get an accurate measurement above background radiation.
Cosmic rays form beta radiation all the time; this is the radiation that turns N-14 to C-14 in the first place. K-40 decay also forms plenty of beta radiation. Stearns, Carroll, and Clark point out that ". . . this isotope [K-40] accounts for a large part of the normal background radiation that can be detected on the earth's surface". This radiation cannot be totally eliminated from the laboratory, so one could probably get a "radiocarbon" date of fifty thousand years from a pure carbon-free piece of tin. However, you now know why this fact doesn't at all invalidate radiocarbon dates of objects younger than twenty thousand years and is certainly no evidence for the notion that coals and oils might be no older than fifty thousand years.Question: Creationists such as Cook (1966) claim that cosmic radiation is now forming C-14 in the atmosphere about one and one-third times faster than it is decaying. If we extrapolate backwards in time with the proper equations, we find that the earlier the historical period, the less C-14 the atmosphere had. If we extrapolate as far back as ten thousand years ago, we find the atmosphere would not have had any C-14 in it at all. If they are right, this means all C-14 ages greater than two or three thousand years need to be lowered drastically and that the earth can be no older than ten thousand years. How do you reply?
Answer: Yes, Cook is right that C-14 is forming today faster than it's decaying. However, the amount of C-14 has not been rising steadily as Cook maintains; instead, it has fluctuated up and down over the past ten thousand years. How do we know this? From radiocarbon dates taken from bristlecone pines.
There are two ways of dating wood from bristlecone pines: one can count rings or one can radiocarbon-date the wood. Since the tree ring counts have reliably dated some specimens of wood all the way back to 6200 BC, one can check out the C-14 dates against the tree-ring-count dates. Admittedly, this old wood comes from trees that have been dead for hundreds of years, but you don't have to have an 8,200-year-old bristlecone pine tree alive today to validly determine that sort of date. It is easy to correlate the inner rings of a younger living tree with the outer rings of an older dead tree. The correlation is possible because, in the Southwest region of the United States, the widths of tree rings vary from year to year with the rainfall, and trees all over the Southwest have the same pattern of variations.
When experts compare the tree-ring dates with the C-14 dates, they find that radiocarbon ages before 1000 BC are really too young—not too old as Cook maintains. For example, pieces of wood that date at about 6200 BC by tree-ring counts date at only 5400 BC by regular C-14 dating and 3900 BC by Cook's creationist revision of C-14 dating. So, despite creationist claims, C-14 before three thousand years ago was decaying faster than it was being formed and C-14 dating errs on the side of making objects from before 1000 BC look too young, not too old.
Question: But don't trees sometimes produce more than one growth ring per year? Wouldn't that spoil the tree-ring count?
Answer: If anything, the tree-ring sequence suffers far more from missing rings than from double rings. This means that the tree-ring dates would be slightly too young, not too old.
Of course, some species of tree tend to produce two or more growth rings per year. But other species produce scarcely any extra rings. Most of the tree-ring sequence is based on the bristlecone pine. This tree rarely produces even a trace of an extra ring; on the contrary, a typical bristlecone pine has up to 5 percent of its rings missing. Concerning the sequence of rings derived from the bristlecone pine, Ferguson says:
In certain species of conifers, especially those at lower elevations or in southern latitudes, one season's growth increment may be composed of two or more flushes of growth, each of which may strongly resemble an annual ring. Such multiple growth rings are extremely rare in bristlecone pines, however, and they are especially infrequent at the elevation and latitude of the sites being studied. In the growth-ring analyses of approximately one thousand trees in the White Mountains, we have, in fact, found no more than three or four occurrences of even incipient multiple growth layers.
In years of severe drought, a bristlecone pine may fail to grow a complete ring all the way around its perimeter; we may find the ring if we bore into the tree from one angle, but not from another. Hence at least some of the missing rings can be found. Even so, the missing rings are a far more serious problem than any double rings.Other species of trees corroborate the work that Ferguson did with bristlecone pines. Before his work, the tree-ring sequence of the sequoias had been worked out back to 1250 BC. The archaeological ring sequence had been worked out back to 59 BC. The limber pine sequence had been worked out back to 25 BC. The radiocarbon dates and tree-ring dates of these other trees agree with those Ferguson got from the bristlecone pine. But even if he had had no other trees with which to work except the bristlecone pines, that evidence alone would have allowed him to determine the tree-ring chronology back to 6200 BC.
So, creationists who complain about double rings in their attempts to disprove C-14 dating are actually grasping at straws. If the Flood of Noah occurred around 3000 BC, as some creationists claim, then all the bristlecone pines would have to be less than five thousand years old. This would mean that eighty-two hundred years worth of tree rings had to form in five thousand years, which would mean that one-third of all the bristlecone pine rings would have to be extra rings. Creationists are forced into accepting such outlandish conclusions as these in order to jam the facts of nature into the time frame upon which their "scientific" creation model is based.
Question: Creationist Thomas G. Barnes has claimed that the earth's magnetic field is decaying exponentially with a half-life of fourteen hundred years. Not only does he consider this proof that the earth can be no older than ten thousand years but he also points out that a greater magnetic strength in the past would reduce C-14 dates. Now if the magnetic field several thousand years ago was indeed many times stronger than it is today, there would have been less cosmic radiation entering the atmosphere back then and less C-14 would have been produced. Therefore, any C-14 dates taken from objects of that time period would be too high. How do you answer him?
Answer: Like Cook, Barnes looks at only part of the evidence. What he ignores is the great body of archaeological and geological data showing that the strength of the magnetic field has been fluctuating up and down for thousands of years and that it has reversed polarity many times in the geological past. So, when Barnes extrapolates ten thousand years into the past, he concludes that the magnetic field was nineteen times stronger in 4000 BC than it is today, when, actually, it was only half as intense then as now. This means that radiocarbon ages of objects from that time period will be too young, just as we saw from the bristlecone pine evidence.
Question: But how does one know that the magnetic field has fluctuated and reversed polarity? Aren't these just excuses scientists give in order to neutralize Barnes's claims?
Answer: The evidence for fluctuations and reversals of the magnetic field is quite solid. V. Bucha, a Czech geophysicist, has used archaeological artifacts made of baked clay to determine the strength of the earth's magnetic field when they were manufactured.
He found that the earth's magnetic field was 1.5 times as strong as today around 1 AD, 1.6 times as strong around 400 BC, 0.8 times as strong around 2000 BC, and only 0.5 times as strong around 4000 BC. In other words, it rose in intensity from 0.5 times its present value in 4000 BC to a peak of 1.6 times its present value in 400 BC, and it has been slowly declining since then. Even before the bristlecone pine calibration of C-14 dating was worked out by Ferguson, Bucha predicted that this change in the magnetic field would make radiocarbon dates too young.
This idea [that the fluctuating magnetic field affects influx of cosmic rays, which in turn affects C-14 formation rates] has been taken up by the Czech geophysicist, V. Bucha, who has been able to determine, using samples of baked clay from archeological sites, what the intensity of the earth's magnetic field was at the time in question. Even before the tree-ring calibration data were available to them, he and the archeologist, Evzen Neustupny, were able to suggest how much this would affect the radiocarbon dates.
Not only that, but his predictions were confirmed in detail: There is a good correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field (as determined by Bucha) and the deviation of the atmospheric radiocarbon concentration from its normal value (as indicated by the tree-ring radiocarbon work).
So, once we know all the magnetic data, we see that it really supports the tree-ring calibration of C-14 dating, rather than the conclusions of Cook and Barnes.As for the question of polarity reversals, plate tectonics can teach us much. It is a fact that new oceanic crust continually forms at the mid-oceanic ridges and spreads away from those ridges in opposite directions. When lava at the ridges hardens, it keeps a trace of the magnetism of the earth's magnetic field. Therefore, every time the magnetic field reverses itself, bands of paleomagnetism of reversed polarity show up on the ocean floor alternated with bands of normal polarity. These bands are thousands of kilometers long, they vary in width, they lie parallel, and the bands on either side of any given ridge form mirror images of each other. Thus it can be demonstrated that the magnetic field of the earth has reversed itself dozens of times throughout earth history.
Barnes, writing in 1973, ought to have known better than to quote the gropings and guesses of authors of the early sixties in an effort to debunk magnetic reversals. Before plate tectonics and continental drift became established in the mid-sixties, the known evidence for magnetic reversals was rather scanty, and geophysicists often tried to invent ingenious mechanisms with which to account for this evidence rather than believe in magnetic reversals.
However, by 1973, sea floor spreading and magnetic reversals had been documented to the satisfaction of almost the entire scientific community. Yet, instead of seriously attempting to rebut them with up-to-date evidence, Barnes merely quoted the old guesses of authors who wrote before the facts were known. But, in spite of Barnes, paleomagnetism on the sea floor conclusively proves that the magnetic field of the earth oscillates in waves and even reverses itself on occasion. It has not been decaying exponentially as Barnes maintains.
Question: Does outside archaeological evidence confirm the C-14 dating method?
Answer: Yes. When we know the age of a sample through archaeology or historical sources, the C-14 method (as corrected by bristlecone pines) agrees with the age within the known margin of error. For instance, Egyptian artifacts can be dated both historically and by radiocarbon, and the results agree. At first, archaeologists used to complain that the C-14 method must be wrong, because it conflicted with well-established archaeological dates; but, as Renfrew has detailed, the archaeological dates were often based on false assumptions. One such assumption was that the megalith builders of western Europe learned the idea of megaliths from the Near-Eastern civilizations.
As a result, archaeologists believed that the Western megalith-building cultures had to be younger than the Near Eastern civilizations. Many archaeologists were skeptical when Ferguson's calibration with bristlecone pines was first published, because, according to his method, radiocarbon dates of the Western megaliths showed them to be much older than their Near-Eastern counterparts. However, as Renfrew demonstrated, the similarities between these Eastern and Western cultures are so superficial that the megalith builders of western Europe invented the idea of megaliths independently of the Near East. So, in the end, external evidence reconciles with and often confirms even controversial C-14 dates.
One of the most striking examples of different dating methods confirming each other is Stonehenge. C-14 dates show that Stonehenge was gradually built over the period from 1900 BC to 1500 BC, long before the Druids, who claimed Stonehenge as their creation, came to England. Astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins calculated with a computer what the heavens were like back in the second millennium BC, accounting for the precession of the equinoxes, and found that Stonehenge had many significant alignments with various extreme positions of the sun and moon (for example, the hellstone marked the point where the sun rose on the first day of summer). Stonehenge fits the heavens as they were almost four thousand years ago, not as they are today, thereby cross-verifying the C-14 dates.
Question: What specifically does C-14 dating show that creates problems for the creation model?
Answer: C-14 dates show that the last glaciation started to subside around twenty thousand years ago. But the young-earth creationists at ICR and elsewhere insist that, if an ice age occurred, it must have come and gone far less than ten thousand years ago, sometime after Noah's flood. Therefore, the only way creationists can hang on to their chronology is to poke all the holes they can into radiocarbon dating. However, as we have seen, it has survived their most ardent attacks.
DrunkenMage
Intoxicated Arch-Mage
Absolute certainty is not required. Assumptions are made based upon observations. The reliability of the assumptions is ultimately tested by crosschecking to independent dating methods. Radiometric dating is known to be accurate not because it is assumed to accurate, but rather by cross-checking and proving it is accurate.
This could be applied to you, in a debate between Creationism and Scientific Radiometric Dating.
Has only provided evidence that argon dating has some undefined error in some cases, and that a few cases of carbon dating are in error. He offers some unrefereed papers by avowed creation scientists that there are broader problems, but even in those claims, there is nothing that questions the overall statistical accuracy. The arguments are akin to claiming that a wristwatch cannot be used to measure time, because sometimes the battery fails or the display is misread. Errors do happen, but they are well within the claimed error bounds and they are limited by cross-checking. With a wristwatch you check with a different clock, with radiometric dating the checks are with different dating methods and different isotope pairs.
Points out the problem with carbon dating of coal and diamonds. The problem is well known. Coal contains radioactive thorium, and the thorium creates C14 in situ. As a known limitation, it is not particularly troublesome. It is comparable to knowing that a wristwatch won't work properly in high magnetic fields; once one is aware of that, it is readily avoided.
DrunkenMage
Intoxicated Arch-Mage
The flaw in your stance, is you're attacking one part of radiometric dating. When one dating method is never used, but always cross-referenced with other methods, other labs, and different isotopes.
C14 isn't often used past 70,000 years. Many other isotopes which have an older half-life are often used.
The only flaw, is when challenged is you target the fact "Well you can't see it with your eyes, you can't wait around for millions/billions of years." Which is often used by creationists.
But that is, as explained above. A very thin argument, like saying your watch can't be used to correctly determine time. Science cross checks their findings, much as you would check another clock to set your watch. Creationist straw grasping, is quite common. Especially surrounding radiometric dating.
I can't observe God, nor have I ever observed God creating the Universe. Therefor by that same logic, God cannot be.
C14 isn't often used past 70,000 years. Many other isotopes which have an older half-life are often used.
The only flaw, is when challenged is you target the fact "Well you can't see it with your eyes, you can't wait around for millions/billions of years." Which is often used by creationists.
But that is, as explained above. A very thin argument, like saying your watch can't be used to correctly determine time. Science cross checks their findings, much as you would check another clock to set your watch. Creationist straw grasping, is quite common. Especially surrounding radiometric dating.
I can't observe God, nor have I ever observed God creating the Universe. Therefor by that same logic, God cannot be.
Seanu Reaves
The Shogun of Gaming
Oh
Mirroring it "Why would God prevent it?" i am on my phone so that is why i dont clean this up as much.
Conversely I dont care for anyone who relies solely on religious faith. I see Faith healing as a scam at worst and skilled placebo at best.
Like Neil Degrass Tyson said " this universe wasn't made for us."
Yet here we are by all logic we should have not been able to evolve to this point anyway to have this discussion in the first place. Yet... here we are living breathing building and killing. Hahaha
I have to ask, what do these counter? We(everything living) are still the most complex machines ever made. One thing I will never get is people asking " Why would God let this happen."
Mirroring it "Why would God prevent it?" i am on my phone so that is why i dont clean this up as much.
Conversely I dont care for anyone who relies solely on religious faith. I see Faith healing as a scam at worst and skilled placebo at best.
Like Neil Degrass Tyson said " this universe wasn't made for us."
Yet here we are by all logic we should have not been able to evolve to this point anyway to have this discussion in the first place. Yet... here we are living breathing building and killing. Hahaha
W'rkncacnter
Mister Freeze
Uggg, wall-o-text. . .
I'll admit I only read part of it before going cross-eyed. It would be best to break it into smaller chunks as I have neither the time nor the patience to read through a bunch of copy/pasted text.
All of the methods rely on assumptions. They have to. That they give similar results merely attests to the general accuracy of the calculations, not the accuracy of the assumptions.
I'll admit I only read part of it before going cross-eyed. It would be best to break it into smaller chunks as I have neither the time nor the patience to read through a bunch of copy/pasted text.
You can't "prove" one potentially faulty method using another potentially faulty method. . .
All of the methods rely on assumptions. They have to. That they give similar results merely attests to the general accuracy of the calculations, not the accuracy of the assumptions.
But this isn't a matter of timing an event with a wristwatch. It's like finding a stopwatch on the ground, assuming the stopwatch originally started at 0 was never stopped and restarted and tracks time accurately.
W'rkncacnter
Mister Freeze
You misrepresent my argument. I am not saying that because it hasn't been observed it is not true. I'm saying that it can't be "proven" true as you keep claiming. I'm saying there is reason to remain skeptical rather than accepting it on blind faith.
For the record, I don't accept Christianity on blind faith.
Anouck
Queen of Procrastination
You ask for evidence. Someone shows you evidence, and then this:
That's why it is pointless, my friend.
That's why it is pointless, my friend.
Anouck
Queen of Procrastination
Mage and I believe in evolution because of evidence. You just say 'you are having blind faith' - while no one here is having blind faith. We are skeptical. It is exactly being skeptical that led me to the conclusion that modern day scientists just might know that bit more about the world than people 2000 years ago who lived in a time when intelligent women were considered witches and red haired people servants of the devil.
It can be proven true. If the simple arguments you come up with right now would break the case of evolution, then it would not be an accepted theory.
Once again: the evolution theory was an extremely unpopular idea in the 20th century. You did not want to be associated with that as a scientist, because people would hate you for it. There was no advantage whatsoever in being in favor of evolution, other than that it is true.
You are going to repeat it can't be proven anyway. There wouldn't be a single piece of evidence that would change your mind. You even said in the beginning of the debate that 'you were not going to be convinced anyway'. That was one of the first things you said. That, to me, indicates that you did not enter this debate with an open mind.
You ask people to be skeptics. Of course, they should be. But there is a difference between being critical and just not believing anything at all - regardless of how much evidence there is in favor of it.
Provide me, please, with one piece of evidence in favor of creationism. And I know that Jesus existed, there is evidence for that. But I am talking about evidence that is going to show me how God created the world in 6 days. I asked you before, and you said: 'well, that is a miraculous event'. You can keep drawing that card. And that's fine, but then you're the last person to start about skepticism and evidence, buddy.
W'rkncacnter
Mister Freeze
Not with modern science. It can be supported with evidence but it cannot be proven. Scientific proof requires observation and repetition.
You've said this before and it simply is not true. There has been wide-spread support for evolution almost from the beginning.
Source
The level of support for evolution in different communities has varied with time. Darwin's theory had convinced almost every naturalist within 20 years of its publication in 1858, and was making serious inroads with the public and the more liberal clergy. It had reached such extremes, that by 1880, one American religious weekly publication estimated that "perhaps a quarter, perhaps a half of the educated ministers in our leading Evangelical denominations" felt "that the story of the creation and fall of man, told in Genesis, is no more the record of actual occurrences than is the parable of the Prodigal Son."
By the late 19th century, many of the most conservative Christians accepted an ancient earth, and life on earth before Eden. Victorian Era Creationists were more akin to people who subscribe to theistic evolution today. Even fervent anti-evolutionist Scopes Trial prosecutor William Jennings Bryan interpreted the "days" of Genesis as ages of the earth, and acknowledged that biochemical evolution took place, drawing the line only at the story of Adam and Eve's creation. Prominent pre-World War II creationist Harry Rimmer allowed an Old Earth by slipping millions of years into putative gaps in the Genesis account, and claimed that the Noachian Flood was only a local phenomenon.
In the decades of the 20th century, George McCready Price and a tiny group of Seventh-day Adventist followers were the among the very few believers in a Young Earth and a worldwide flood, which Price championed in his "new catastrophism" theories. It was not until the publication of John C. Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry M. Morris’s book Genesis Flood in 1961 that Price's idea was revived. In the last few decades, many creationists have adopted Price's beliefs, becoming progressively more strict biblical literalists.
I never claimed to have an open mind. I have not misrepresented myself.
Yet when I brought up things such as Irreducible Complexity you didn't even bother to refute it. I understand that the evidence could conceivably point to evolution, but there are issues which don't make sense that need to be addressed.
Provide me, please, with one piece of evidence in favor of creationism. And I know that Jesus existed, there is evidence for that. But I am talking about evidence that is going to show me how God created the world in 6 days. I asked you before, and you said: 'well, that is a miraculous event'. You can keep drawing that card. And that's fine, but then you're the last person to start about skepticism and evidence, buddy.
I could give evidence, but as I stated - it's the same evidence used to support evolution just a different interpretation. So you'll immediately claim it's not evidence of Creation. Instead I brought up the issue of Irreducible Complexity as an indicator of an intelligent designer as well as an unexplained issue with evolution. You still haven't addressed it.
NENALATA
Last King of the Ayleids - RETIRED
Yeah... what W'rkncacnter said.
Cause that's why lmao
I'd love to contribute more to this however all I do anymore is work. No one cares what I think, even if I had time to.
Cause that's why lmao
I'd love to contribute more to this however all I do anymore is work. No one cares what I think, even if I had time to.
DrunkenMage
Intoxicated Arch-Mage
Our place in the universe, is tiny. So tiny that our galaxy would be smaller than a pinhead. Our solar system, is much smaller than a pinhead in our galaxy. Our planet, is insignificant on the scale.
We already have evidence that our type of planet, ocean, landmass. Isn't at all special, besides having us on it. There are reports of many like it. So if it can be 100% proven, even just once... How would religion accept that? Another Earth? Two? Three? Hundreds? Thousands?
What happens if we discover life on another planet? Even something as small as a microbe? How would religion take that?
The good thing about Science, they can admit when wrong. They can take mistakes, learn from it. Religion is doctrine, that if proven false, it falls. Religion can't admit fault, and is afraid to admit error. Because if they're wrong, even just once. They lose their grip of power, their very foundations.
Yet the evidence from radiometric dating, actually keeps in line with evolutionary facts. So if this is a faulty method, the results would be inconsistant, they'd be completely random. Not constantly agreeing. Just because one wristwatch fails, doesn't mean they all do.
Actually you're not arguing the results from when radiometric dating, agrees with events within Bible. Say the date of a sword, the date of human remains from that time period. You're arguing results when it starts to go "Hang on, the Earth is older than 6,000 years"
You mentioned recent lava flows, as evidence it's flawed. When Scientists weren't even dating the lava itself. You've mentioned floods... But sorry to say.
It is impossible for a flood to produce varve sediments with layers having pollen grains sorted by season in the layers. Sediments in floods may appear in layers, but the layers depend upon materials settling out of the water at different rates. Mixing a solution and having it settle in repeating patterns of spring-summer-fall-winter pollen, each in discrete layers, is an impossibility. No physical mechanism for that has been suggested and none demonstrated.
Pollen types and fish scale types in varve columns are used to study past climates. The species of plant or fish present indicates the climate at the time the sediment was deposited. Periods of climate warming and cooling are thus tracked. A great flood would produce a sample of only one climate condition, when the flood occurred.
It's like finding 100 stopwatches, each looked at. One disagrees, ninety nine point to the same time. You focus on the one that disagrees, and therefor say it proves the method is flawed, and unreliable.
Except ignoring the countless examples, of them all agreeing or when they're all coinciding with evolutionary claims. The amount of evidence is staggering. Yet you're focusing on the 1% error.
The 'evidence' you're using as to why radiometric dating fails went from sources, to now "Well it's just an assumption" which is the last straw grasp. Losing any credible source that can actually disprove radiometric dating, besides great claims of Creationists who actually can't even provide the truth of events as to what was going on when 'lava' was being dated, or go on about how floods suddenly change everything.
Seanu Reaves
The Shogun of Gaming
And? We still stand unique in being able to think as we do. To reason as we do. Findingmultiple earth like planets proves many things and does open worlds (tee hee) of thinking. But until we find other "sentient" life there is nothing for religion to reject. You can be in up points in how some extreme people may react ( and I do believe that is what you expect from me, but it still holds little bearing on religious teaching at all. Religion is quite possibly one side of the coin that demonstrates our strange reasoning. The other side being science. The irony is the coin is intolerance.
Now I say that with utter bias and accept that as part of my nature.
I also want to point out size means little. A black hole is but literally a point of extreme gravity. A single point in your grand galaxy, yet that point is what is holding the galaxy together. Something to think about "bigger doesnt mean better, and size is not a prize."
Now I say that with utter bias and accept that as part of my nature.
I also want to point out size means little. A black hole is but literally a point of extreme gravity. A single point in your grand galaxy, yet that point is what is holding the galaxy together. Something to think about "bigger doesnt mean better, and size is not a prize."
