Science Frontiers

[artsylady]

"The accuracy of the test is +/- 1 million years. "

I know, so this method would be completely useless if everything actually WAS actually less than a million years old...

Correct?

[artsylady]

Regarding the magnetic field.

Please read with objectivity if you can.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v20/i2/magnetic.asp

[artsylady]

"Unfortunately, you're right. There are far too many crackpot sites out there trying to confirm the YEC view of life despite thousands upon thousands of evidences that they're very very wrong. Such is human fallibility, and human gullibility"

There aren't thousands and thousands of evidences. Let's take the so-called transitionals. We know that there are very very few, compared to the number of fully formed fossils, which number in the millions. But even Colin Paterson, curator of the British Museum, admitted he knows of no true transitionals. I can provide you with the quotes that evolutionists don't want you to know about.

Evolution is a philosophy - nothing more.

[artsylady]

"C14 dating is always fraught with difficulties. However, just because it sometimes throws up wrong dates does not invalidate it as a dating method, just one that has to be done carefully. It is natural to get the occasional error in tens of thousands of successful datings. "

We already know that KAR will date everything young at a very old rate, right? So if the earth is young, it's completely useless, right?

Geochron labs used to have a disclaimer on the front page of their website which did have a disclaimer about the requirement to TELL THEM where you found the item and how old you beleive it to be, based on where it was found.

They took that disclaimer off shortly after I started debating on a board much like this about 10 years ago.

So, besides K-AR and carbon dating, are there any other methods?

c-14 can also be very unreliable and can also date very young things at very old ages. I showed you an article that appeared in a scientific magazine from Science frontiers about this.

Did you know that seashells in particular are very often dated very incorrectly by C14? Why seashells?

"The "carbon problem" seems to hit the scientific creationists the hardest, but it also has interesting implications for today's earth. Consider first where the carbon in the earth's crust resides:

Petroleum 201 x 1018 grams Coal 15 Limestone 64200 Biosphere 0.3

In this article, these figures are made more understandable by physical descriptions of some of the truly colossal deposits of oil, coal, and limestone. For example, in the Canadian Rockies, the Livingstone limestone was deposited 2000 feet deep on the margin of the Cordilleran geosyncline but thins eastward to about 1000 feet in the Front ranges.

"...it may be calculated to represent at least 10,000 cubic miles of broken crinoid plates."

Two implications are:

Even if the earth's biosphere were completely converted into oil, coal, and limestone each year, the earth would have to be far older than the 6000 years desired by the creationists, unless most of the carbon deposits had non-biological origins, which seems unlikely.

The immense inventory of carbon tied up in biologically produced deposits was originally abiogenic. Where did it come from?

Abiogenic methane and carbon dioxide released from the crust seem the most likely sources. This means that the crust must have once had, and may still have, prodigious supplies of methane. T. Gold and S. Soter have long argued that the earth's crust still retains and sometimes releases methane."

Here's another one.

"Pursuant to the possible effect of the earth's recent envelopment by a molecular cloud on the accuracy of carbon dating (SF#98), we now look at the potential distortion caused by the ingestion of primordial carbon (carbon-13) by plants and animals. Primordial carbon may come from limestone or natural gas welling up from the earth's interior. Modern life forms that metabolize primordial rather than atmospheric carbon dioxide, with its cosmic-ray produced carbon-14, will appear extremely old when carbon-dated.

For example, M. Grachev et al carbon-dated flatworms and a sponge collected from a bacterial mat near a thermal vent 420-meters deep in Lake Baikal. The apparent ages of these living organisms ranged from 6860 to 10,200 years.

(Grachev, M., et al; "Extant Fauna of Ancient Carbon," Nature, 374:123, 1995)

Even animals eating these apparently ancient life forms may take up their carbon-13 and, in effect, be drained of carbon-14. They would appear to age rapidly. Such false aging has actually been induced in the laboratory with mice fed on brewer's yeast grown in natural gas. These mice, living in cages at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, were carbon-dated as being 13,000 years old, and were expected to attain a ripe old age of 35,000 in a few months. (All this was part of a cancer-research project.)

Of course, most carbon-dating in archeology is not endangered by the primordial-carbon problem. But, as K. Turteltaub, "father" of the Lazarus mice, commented:

"We've joked about sprinkling them [the mice] around archeological sites just to confuse everyone."

(Weisman, Jonathan; "Of Lazarus Mice and Carbon-14," Tri-Valley Herald, July 12, 1993. Cr. R. Berg)

"They can never state why it is that all the dating methods known agree with one another. If the dating methods are wrong, how is it that they all agree with one another, even when they use wildly different techniques?"

I'm sure there's an answer to that too, other than the fact that the dating labs pretty much have to be told how old the items are before they'll date them. I'll try to look at this more later when I have more time.