[Calgaryborn]

Originally Posted by photon

Radio carbon dating has been tested and is accurate. It has been calibrated with many different things that we know the age of. Tree ring data for example (which gives a nearly exact calendar for more than 11,000 years back), and historical objects where the age is known like the Dead Sea scrolls, wood from Egyptian tombs, etc. It is also consistent with other forms of dating. C-14 dating has been calibrated to 30,000 years by using uranium-thorium dating of corals, to 45,000 yeas ago by using lead-thorium dates of glacial lake varve sediments, and to 50,000 years ago using ocean cores from the Cariaco Basin which have been calibrated to the annual layers of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Care to explain how all of these unrelated methods can all produce consistent dates independantly?

Wow your giving me a lot to explain! Lets see Radio carbon dating has not been proved accurate. You've been lied to. Scientist routinely take multiply test samples and throw out those that are wild; In other words don't fit in to their time line. As far as these other technique go they are subjective as well. The Greenland ice sheet for instance doesn't have an annual layer of Ice but rather adds layers depending on the temperature fluctuations and moisture throughout the year. This supposed constant is far from constant. Objects found in the ice that we can date have shown this. I'm thinking of a plane in particular that went down in WW2 and was found under the ice. I'll look for the article. The point being that the dating techniques that can be verified have proven unreliable.

You also have to consider the possibility of the earth being created when looking at your data. If the world was created in a short period of time things like trees would have to been created in various stages of maturity. They are Dependant on each other. Other species are also Dependant on these various stages of maturity and on each other. Would a tree created without rings stand up in a wind? I remember hearing about a Japanese experiment to genetically alter a tree to grow square rather than round. The reason being less wood waste when milling boards. This experiment terminated because they discovered that square trees didn't stand up in the wind.( I know off topic but, I found it interesting)

Originally Posted by photon

1. They've known since 1969 that the dating has to be calibrated for the initial condition of the subject. So they calibrate it by determining the C-14/C-12 ratios at various times in the past.

Which they surmise by looking at the layers of ice in Greenland or else ware and count each layer as one year. They have no way of knowing accurately what the C-14/C-12 ratios were 400 hundred years ago let alone 4000 years ago or beyond.

Originally Posted by photon

2. No system is closed (even in a perfect lab condition), so scientists don't just assume the system is closed.

• Many rocks approximate a closed system so closely that various radiometric dating methods produce results to within 1% of each other. Just because some rocks may not be "closed", that doesn't mean none of them are.
• When testing a rock, if they test multiple minerals and they all agree within a few percent, the rock isn't contaminated. It's unlikely that multiple minerals are contaminated in different ways that all happen to come up at the exact same date.
• They go to great lengths to minimize the potential for contamination.
• They can use Isocron methods to find contamination. For example two isotopes of uranium decay into seperate isotopes of lead. In a closed system, plotting the ratio of the two different decay pairs will correlate. If it's contaminated, the plot will be off (since one ratio will differ from the other). http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html

If environmental contamination has occurred it could be a localized event which multiply samples will detect or it could be a regional or even world wide event. These events wouldn't be identified by multiply samples because they would have effected all the samples equally. If one was to look they might find in such an instances large gaps in their time line with no apparent samples.

Originally Posted by photon

3. Are you going to question gravity next? Or maybe the speed of light? Do you have anything to support an outrageous claim like "radioactive decay rate isn't consistent"? It's amazing to what lengths creationists will go to create FUD.

Yup. Light has been recently shown to be slowing down and if I remember right gravity is weakening. Both were thought to be constants at one time. Now if the rate that gravity is weakening was a constant we could tell approximately how long the earth could harbor life. This wouldn't disprove Creation but it might alter the current time line of evolution. But of course we have no way of knowing if it has been consistently weakening. I'm not sure if there are any theories out there that explain why light is slowing down but, I'm sure if there is; they have just as much chance at being right as being wrong.

Regarding my "outrageous claim" I didn't say it wasn't a constant. I said we don't know. You don't know. We have only been observing it for a little over a hundred years. If you read my link(in the last post) it addressed the difficulty in making an assessment with such limited data. Who would have though light was slowing down a few years ago. We are still learning and part of that process is recognizing the fallibility of our own assumptions. Science needs to keep asking questions. The problem with the theory of evolution is that scientists have quit asking the questions and instead are giving the answers. Conclusions are fine but, not when they cease to be open to question the science has crossed the line into religion. Evidence of this can be found all over this board: Theories of creationists are mocked; There scientists are minimized; Motivations are imagined; Any links provided are disregarded because they use the word "creation" or "God".

This general behavior is akin to folks reaction to articles questioning the causes of global warming. The mantra is soon heard: " All the respected scientists agree" or "that scientist is being paid by big business". I was on a Christian message board yesterday in the cults section. Some fellow had started a thread called "the newest religion" . He suggested that environmentalism was the newest popular religion and that it was quickly sweeping the nation (He was from England). I didn't fully agree with him but, I did suggest some current growing religions that use environmentalism as a plank. Kind of like their gospel or purpose.

Evolution Isn't a religion in and of itself but, it is the gospel of the Atheists. Without Evolution Atheism would be much poorer. That is why it is defended so vigorously here and else ware. That is why contempt is found in so many posts. The atheist clings to the theory of evolution like I cling to the finished work of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately that means that many atheists become scientist and seek answers that work within their belief system. Conversely, they don't ask questions that jeopardize their world view and obviously are hostile to those questions them self and those who ask them.

You see Creation scientists as a fringe group of religious zealots that have exchanged their scientific integrity for a faith system. I see them as a group of men and women who have dared to think out of the box. They risk the monetary and public rewards of following the pack in order to ask questions that have been blacklisted by their peers.