Creationist problems with radiocarbon dating

Hello kbertsche,I obviously erred in what I was looking at. I briefly skimmed your original post link of your critique. To be honest, I didn't even read the AIG article yet either so I'm not sure what it says. I'm going to print both up tonight and probably read them after work tomorrow.Thanks for your response and for the advice you gave on how to go about understanding this issue.

FYI, regarding Morris' uniformitarian estimates for the age of the earth, here's a simple "uniformitarian" estimate for the age of the earth that gets a bit closer to the topic of radiocarbon, though this is uranium rather than carbon. This will just give us an approximation, and is the type of simple "back-of-the-envelope" estimates that we do in physics. Let's start with the assumption that all heavy elements in the solar system came from supernova explosions. Let's further assume that the isotopes 235-U and 238-U were made in equal abundance. Now let's look at the current abundance of each and calculate an age. 235-U has a half-life of 703.8 MY, and accounts for 0.72% of natural uranium. 238-U has a half-life of 4.5 BY and accounts for 99.3% of natural uranium. From these abundances and half-lives, how long ago would they have been at equal abundance? The answer comes out to about 5.9 BY. We would expect the supernovas to be older than the earth, so this is not bad for an overly simplified back-of-the-envelope estimate.

Yeah, and he ran like a rabbit, never to return, from Dr. Bertsche already. RATE and Radiocarbon

I remember reading that debate. If I remember correctly Baumgardner tried to explain lake varves (e.g. Lake Suigetsu) as the result of earthquakes. He never once tried to explain why 14C decreased with depth, or how an earthquake could sort insect and leaf debris by minute changes in 14C.

Science is a very competitive field. You get money for being right, not for toeing the line. If radiocarbon dating didn't work then you can rest assured that someone would have made a scientific career by demonstrating just that.To use an analogy, how can Joe Blow be assured that NASCAR drivers don't vote ahead of time on who will win a race and then fake the entire race? It's possible, isn't it? Of course, it isn't in any driver's best interest to have this type of system, and this is just for 40 or so drivers. Imagine if there were millions of drivers world wide. Do you really think that such a system would work? Do you really think they could keep a 200 year old secret going among millions and millions of scientists?

One word: Wrestling.

And how long did they keep that secret? A couple of years?

Fair enough. It wouldn;t surprise me though if some dumb ass still thinks it's all "real". But I see your point. Keeping secrets on such a large scale is simply impossible.

I'll bet an Abita Amber that this "study" is the one that includes the sodium content of the oceans as indicative of a "young earth." The same data that was mined by Morris (or his source) also contains the aluminum content of the oceans, which "proves" that the oceans are about 110 years old. And think about that a minute: do you know even a single sailor that was around in the days of the Cutty Sark? See! That's evidence that Creation was in about 1890!

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

Not a few years ago. H. Morris died in 2006 after having retired some time before that -- I can't find off-hand what year he retired. The last books he published were in 2002 and 2003.Could you please give us a citation for that "study" so that we could offer a proper response? It certainly sounds to me like that ubiquitous "Uniformitarian Estimates of the Age of the Earth" appendix that seemed to appear in every one of their books from the early 80's on. Instead of a study, that was a list of their stock and standard claims citing their source of each. As I recall, most of them were from an unpublished work by Harold Slusher.Those claims are not part of a recent study. They date back to the 70's and early 80's and earlier. They are all PRATTs ("points refuted a thousand times") which have been examined and refuted a thousand times over. The reason they have been refuted a thousand times is because somebody like you keeps trotting them out as the latest thing.talkorigins.org has a comprehensive list of PRATTs (not their term for it; I've only seen that acronym here) and short explanations. You could start there. Or start a PRATT thread with the best one in your opinion and then line up the rest of your ducks.Edited by dwise1, : "... from the early 80's on."

That was quite a bit more than a few years back. He also did not collect "all the uniformitarian ways to rate the age of the earth", he collected only those ways which disagreed with the ways mainstream science actually uses to measure the age of the Earth (see The Age of the Earth for an overview). Morris's table was demolished by Dalrymple in 1984: see How Old is the Earth: SOME CREATIONIST AGES OF THE EARTH.

Even H. Morris mentioned aluminum's residence time, but just did a kind of "huh, I wonder what that's supposed to mean". Obviously, what it meant was that he had it all wrong. Instead of a constant build-up of the substance, what's happening is that as that substance enters the system, it's also leaving it, such that any given particle of that substance would remain in the system for its residence time.On another forum, a creationist once opened my eyes as to what's really going on with them. He had presented that tired old sodium-residence-time-in-the-oceans claim and I responded both by pointing out that residence time is not what he thinks it is, but also by asking why he would use that claim since sodium's residence time is in the millions of years, which completely contradicts his explicitly-stated claim of the earth being no more than 10,000 years old. His illuminating response was that it didn't matter at all to him whether the earth was 10,000 years old or millions of years old ... just so long as it wasn't 4 billion years old as science says it is.They don't really have any interest in their own claims (as supported by their extreme disinterest to defend or even to discuss any of their claims), but rather they are only interested in attacking science and in proving it wrong. As I understand it, once they are able to prove science to be wrong, they can then be free to pick and choose what parts of science to ignore and what to keep: evolution, no -- flush toilets, yes.Offered as possible insight as to why creationists have problems with radiocarbon dating as well as with the rest of science.

Awaiting your responses.

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

Hey dwise1,I saw the results of the study in a chart form and one brief paragraph published in The New Defender's Study Bible 2006, p. 2076-2079. It's obviously not the full study and that's why I really didn't elaborate on it but just asked kbertsche if he knew of the study and his thoughts on it. I'm fully aware that Dr. Morris is deceased and did most of his work from the 70's-90's.The actual number of studies was 68 (if it matters) and he states the oldest age of the earth that was revealed was 1-500 million years, with 23 methods revealing this date, 23 methods giving a year of 0-10,000 with some scattered in the middle.Someone mentioned one being something about the oceans. Yes, one is salt levels in the ocean, rate of decay of earth's magnetic field, and growth rate of human population. Again, I can't comment on the actual study as what I looked as it a very basic explanation and not a full methodology explanation.

Taq, I'm in no way saying that there is some grand conspiracy to keep a perceived fallacy a secret. Kbertsche isn't implying that I'm saying that either. I'm being honest from a city employee perspective (lol) that I have no clue on what I'm even reading when I read this stuff...it looks like gibberish. In my 3 months of crash course reading creation publications I've not read one author/scientist who says they believe that the scientific community is involved in a "wrestling conspiracy" (good analogy Huntard) to keep this a secret from the layperson.Take care,
Flyer