Creationist Arguments with Dating Methods.

This spins off from discussions in "Is the Fossil Record Indicative of Evolution?"Sonic disagrees with dating and posted this site:
Page not found – Evolution-FactsI will bring over the arguments presented there one at a time so we may discuss them but by way of introduction:1) Sonic do you actually think we haven't heard all those before? They have already been torn to pieces on web sites and here. I suggest you do some reading.2) The real big question for those who wrote your site and, now, for you is:
If these different methods have various ways in which they can be wrong, how is it that there is so much agreement between methods? How is it that they date know historical dates accutately? How is it that the independently determined order of the geological strata agree with the order determined when they are dated?You may start on that will I post the first of the arguments from your site. Thanks.

The first part of the site suggests that there are 7 assumptions that must be true for it to work.1) Each system has to be a closed system; that is, nothing can contaminate any of the parents or the daughter products while they are going through their decay processor the dating will be thrown off. Ideally, in order to do this, each specimen tested needs to have been sealed in a jar with thick lead walls for all its previous existence, supposedly millions of years!But in actual field conditions, there is no such thing as a closed system. One piece of rock cannot for millions of years be sealed off from other rocks, as well as from water, chemicals, and changing radiations from outer space.To start with not all dating methods require that things be sealed away. refer to this article: Isochron DatingSecondly, some dating is done on things which are "sealed". That is, crystals. I'm not away of an explanation for how these can leak. If they do how can they leak in a way that produces a large number of consistant results?Astonishingly, the two pages on dating of your site neglects to mention isochron dating. I suggest that it is dishonest to do that.

Sonic, of course they date multiple times! They like to use different methods for a check too. The more the better.And some results are anomolous. But they are not a large fraction of them and they are mostly explainable.If you wanted to check what time is was and it was important to get it right you might check your wristwatch, computer clock, the oven clock and 3 wall clocks. ( you really want to get this right Let's say the answers were: 5:23, 5:20, 5:32, 8:23, 6:01 and 5:21.You have a look at the 8:23 clock, it is stopped, you discard that altogether. The others are all running. You probably figure is is just before 5:30 with a high degree of confidence. You just take the 6:01 time as wrong. Is there anything unreasonable about that?The dates, by the way, come out in agreement with each other a lot. So what we learn from that is the assumptions are, as you say, not always wrong. In fact, it is clear from the results that they are usually (but not always) right!You say: assumptions are not always wrongExactly! Precisely Sonic, all they have to do is be right a few times and the young earth idea is blown out of the water. And that is what we have.If you think they pick the dates to "fit the theory" you are accusing them of lying! Is that it? Is that all you and your creation scientists have left?If so, then it is easily resolved. All the creation scientists have to do is to do a few 10's of really, really careful, really really, good datings and they will have overturned modern geology! Wow! Cool eh?Funny thing, the only datings I'm aware of by creation scientists is using a method that is explicity not for young ages (under 100,000's of years) to date brand new lava. In other words deliberate dishonesty. Where are the carefully published results of reproducible young dates?

This is the second of the "assumptions" that the site mentions. I'm off to bed and will leave it for someone else so they can have fun.What I can tell you Sonic, is that these people must be deliberately doing this. The information they need to get this right is readily avialable. This is dishonest! Even if the topics are complex physics ( which a lot of it is not) they have a duty to talk to the experts to check before the put this material on the web. They don't do this because they are not interested in educating anyone. They are deliberately attempting to confuse and mislead.2) Each system must initially have contained none of its daughter products. A piece of uranium 238 must originally have had no lead or other daughter products in it. If it did, this would give a false date reading.But this assumption can in no way be confirmed. It is impossible to know what was initially in a given piece of radioactive mineral. Was it all of this particular radioactive substance or were some other indeterminate or final daughter products mixed in? We do not know; we cannot know. Men can guess; they can apply their assumptions, come up with some dates, announce the consistent ones, and hide the rest, which is exactly what evolutionary scientists do!

The same methods are used to date intermediate dates between now and the formation of the earth."...the condition is different" is an unsupported assertion and means absolutely nothing. Until you describe how it is different and how that affects dating and in what why that isn't handled by those doing the dating you haven't supplied anything useful to the debate.Sonic, are you getting an idea of how hard this is? You have taken on centuries of careful research. You thought you had the backing of creation "scientists" but they aren't there to actually take on the real research. They are only there to fool those who don't know too much and don't want to think about it. You're on your own without those guys to help.

Sonic, you do not get away with making up "factoids". You actually have to know what you are talking about. Why did you think that your statement above is correct? If you just guessed you should learn not to do that.

But a non-biased source (or even an honest biased one) will describe the problems. In fact, you don't really understand the methods unless you understand the potential problems with them. You certainly can't use them, or decided if they have been used well unless you know the potential problems.Here is the talkorigins site that talks about dating. Note that it introduces the possible problems and also discusses creationist critisms (this is not something you will find often (or ever) on creationist sites).
Isochron Dating