As I have been busy preparing for my first ever trip to the USA (insert excitement emoticon) I haven't been able to attend to this debate as much as I would have liked. However some recent comments could not go unanswered.
In
message 43 Minnemooseus and Buzsaw continue to discuss Buz's analogy of dating his stone wall to the radiometric dating of rocks and fossils. Buz makes the extraordinary statement:
Buzsaw writes:
How so is it a terrible analogy? Because it debunks modern dating methodology? Methinks so.
As one of the more coherent creationists on this site I am surprised that Buzsaw thinks that an analogy can be used to debunk scientific methodology. He really should be aware that an analogy is simply an educational device often used to help a layperson understand a problem (which might be outside of his or her experience) in a simplistic manner. If that analogy fails to adequately describe that particular scenario, then that does not ‘debunk’ the scenario.
In my original post on this thread I said that radiometric dating would be like dating when the mortar sets in his analogical wall. This is because in the real world we often date the crystallisation time (ie ‘setting’) of the igneous rocks sandwiching the sediments. In
message 61 Buz states that his wall is mortarless. Thus the analogy is moving further away from the real world (where we do have the igneous ‘mortar’ to date) and I believe this is why Minnemooseus thinks his analogy is a poor one. I have to agree.
Having said all that, there is a technique I have used (third-hand) called thermoluminescence dating (wiki :
Thermoluminescence dating - Wikipedia)
Thermoluminescence (TL) dating is the determination, by means of measuring the accumulated radiation dose, of the time elapsed since material containing crystalline minerals was either heated (lava, ceramics) or exposed to sunlight (sediments).
In Buz’s drystone wall analogy we would pull out two or three of his bricks and measure how long since the walls had been exposed to sunlight, thus giving us an approximate date for construction — and a date a long way removed from the actual age of the component rocks.
Thus Buz still has not found a way to explain why or how, in nature, the sediments and the fossils within them cannot be dated by measuring he 'setting time' of the igneous rocks sandwiching them. Consequently the 'old earth' ages of the fossils stand.