What's the creationists thought on this?

I like C14 too! I like the fact that with advanced mass spectrometry we have detected C14 in 300 million year old Pennsylvanian coal. Of course, with the half life of C14, that would make the coal no older than 10s of thousands years old. Yeah, radioactive dating, responsible for the 300 million year date is obviously accurate, NOT!

I tried to measure the width of a hair with a tape measure, it measured about 1/16th of an inch. That's off by serveral orders of magnitude! You can't use a tape measure to find the length of anything. Those carpenters are so stupid!

As usual this is a creationist error that gets passed along from one creationist to another without anyone bothering to check the facts. The full details are here:

A Look at Creation Science Part IV The summary:

What we have here is no more than shorthand or sloppy translation from the Russian! The coal is nothing more than charcoal from an archaeological deposit. This sample is even included in the section of the report dealing with archaeological samples, and the paragraph discusses archaeological data.

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The odd use of terms is shown clearly in another radiocarbon date, Mo-353, reported on page 315 of the same article. It reads Charcoal from cultural deposits of a fisher site. The coal was coll. from subturfic humified loam

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But the term coal in place of charcoal was enough to fool Ken Ham, as well as dozens of subsequent creationists who apparently were salivating to find 300 million year old coal radiocarbon dated to recent times, and who repeated Ham’s false claim without bothering to check its accuracy.

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The interesting question is where Ken Ham managed to find Pennsylvanian in that short paragraph, and where he dug up the date of 300 million years.

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This is still another case where a creationist claim about science falls apart when examined more closely.

If you have any specific questions let me know. I do a lot of C14 dating.Minor addition: The article reporting these dates was 1966. AMS dating didn't come into common use until the 1990s.Edited by Coyote, : Addition

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

First, it's not "advanced mass spectrometry," it's "ACCELERATOR mass spectrometry."Second, if you are referring to the RATE project, look again at the actual table of measurements that RATE published (Table 2, p. 605 of the RATE report). Notice that the radiocarbon concentrations in coal vary greatly between samples, ranging from 0.1 to 0.46 pMC, nearly a factor of 5. Even among samples of the same geologic period (Pennsylvanian) there is a spread of 0.13 to 0.46, nearly a factor of 4.If all coal were really the same age, shouldn't it all have the same concentration of radiocarbon? Even if it underwent a hypothetical "accelerated decay" shouldn't it all have the same concentration? Of course it should. Why the variation by a factor of 4 or 5?This sort of large variation is quite consistent with sample contamination, but is inconsistent with the RATE claim that the radiocarbon is intrinsic to the samples.For more information, please see my detailed critique, "RATE's Radiocarbon: Intrinsic or Contamination?", available at a number of sites:
RATE's Radiocarbon - Intrinsic or Contamination?
RATE’s Radiocarbon: Intrinsic or Contamination?
Page not found - Reasons to Believe(And before you believe the erroneous claim that AIG has "effectively rebutted" my critique, notice the dates on my critique and their so-called rebuttal. What they responded to was an earlier, less complete version of my critique. Also look at my footnotes, and notice that I referenced and responded to AIG's so-called rebuttal in my critique.)Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

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"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert EinsteinI am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger

Could you perhaps say more explicitly what it is you're trying to be wrong about. Creationists have made lots of mistakes about radiocarbon dating, and it is hard to tell from your vague ramblings which particular blunder you're trying to refer to.

I believe it is the blunder I referred to above in Message 33.Check out the post and link and see if you agree.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I don't think so, because of his mention of "advanced mass spectrometry" [sic], by which he probably means "accelerator mass spectrometry" (AMS). The measurement that you referred to was from the 1960's, which is pre-AMS. It would have been a decay-counting measurement. I suspect he means the RATE study which I referred to in Message 34. Or maybe he is conflating the two?

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"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert EinsteinI am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger

The typical creationist claim is:

Coal from Russia from the Pennsylvanian, supposedly 300 million years old, was dated at 1,680 years. (Radiocarbon, vol. 8, 1966)

This false claim can be found all over the web.The blog I cited in my post notes that, "The original source for the false information seems to be Ken Ham, Andrew Snelling, and Carl Weiland’s The Answers Book, published by Master Books, El Cajon, CA, in 1992 (page 73)."I believe this is what our creationist, who seems to have disappeared, was referring to. It's a typical creation "science" type of mistake, repeated endlessly on the web.Add: I doubt whether our creationist knows the difference between AMS and older counting methods. I think that was just thrown in for effect.Edited by Coyote, : Addition

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

You can't use Carbon dating to date in the thousands. Creationists claim the age of the Dino's due to the Genesis account of Creation. If you follow the geneologies and the literal six day creation it says Dino's are only 6000 years old. The word dino is "new" and wasn't used in Bible days. The beasts of the field were the dinos. And the average size of Dino's is about that of a sheep which isnt all that crazy to think man lived at the same time as them.

quote:

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You can't use Carbon dating to date in the thousands. Creationists claim the age of the Dino's due to the Genesis account of Creation. If you follow the geneologies and the literal six day creation it says Dino's are only 6000 years old. The word dino is "new" and wasn't used in Bible days. The beasts of the field were the dinos. And the average size of Dino's is about that of a sheep which isnt all that crazy to think man lived at the same time as them.

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Welcome to EvC.I don't hang out on the science side and haven't really gotten into carbon dating, etc. Could you (and only you) explain the carbon dating process and why it can't be used to date something that could be over a thousand years old?I agree that the Genesis 1 account of creation referred to six 24-hour days, but I have a problem with the size of the dinos. I assume you mean dinosaurs. I agree the word dinosaur didn't come about until the 1800's.Given the size of dinosaur bones found, what makes you say the average size is about that of a sheep? That's still a rather large lizard.So if we didn't have the Genesis 1 account how would one figure out how old the dinosaur bones were?

Sorry, that is not correct. The normal range of Carbon-14 dating is back to about 50,000 years, although some labs are experimenting with techniques to reach back perhaps 80,000 years.Carbon-14 is present in only small quantities in the atmosphere and living organisms, and in organisms that have died half of that amount decays every 5,730 years. After several half-lives the beta decay becomes indistinguishable from the background noise, and that forms the upper limit of the method. Research is being done to reduce background noise and that is where any extensions of the usable range are coming from.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

If dinosaurs are really only a few thousands of years old, well within the range of carbon-dating, then we should be able to carbon-date them just as we are able to carbon-date other things that are a few thousands of years old.Yet we cannot. Which would mean that they are too old to be carbon-dated.

Not that you'll ever come back to check the board, since you're just a fly by night Creationist more interested in posting garbage and running away than actually engaging in a REAL discussion about REAL science.Care to point out WHO found C14 in the Penn Coal? Which lab did the study? What contaminants were controlled for? Where the coal was obtained from? How it was transported? How often this occurs? How it cross checks against different samples from the same or nearby sites?Let me guess, a Bible Thumper took the "sample" that they got themselves and paid a specific lab using crappy equipment and not doing the proper controls.Seen this before.If C-14 is inaccurate, then how can we cross reference it with known dates of things? Carbon dating of Egyptian Mummies gives the same dates that we get from decoding the heiroglyphs

And carbon dating of interior parts of the Siloam Tunnel gives a date consistent with the reign of Hezekiah, for those who think that mummies are a bit dodgy.

The "Pennsylvanian coal" PRATT is completely refuted in post #33, above.Add: Message 33Edited by Coyote, : No reason given.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.