Is there evidence that dating methods MUST be invalid?

so which one are you debating? uraniam 238's half life of 4.5 billion years? or 235 at 704 million? or how about thorium 232 which is 14 billion? rubidium 87 at 48.8 billion years? samarium 147 at 106 billion? or potassium 40 at only 1.25?the fact that all these line up to give the dates of the oldest rocks at 4.3 billion years is kind of suspicious against your point. are you arguing that, you know, the laws of basic algebra don't work?

nit picking aside (i guess you learn something every day) i will go into it. apparently people don't understand statictical aberations. graph one thing against another of any function, and in the real world all of the results will be scattered a little. the degree of the scattering of the plots tells you how strongly associated one thing is with another. there are bound to be statistical aberations, points way off the line. but how many, and how far determines the accuracy of any scientific test.the fact is that there ARE a few tests that are way off the mark. but since they comprise a very small percentage of tests, and most results are pretty close, the testing can be said to be accurate.in the real world, there are problems. tests go wrong, contamination or tampering happens, and sometimes people just make errors. this is accounting for those aberations -- they do not rule out the testing method. this seems to be a favourite argument anyways.

we're not here to hate. we're here to debate. nothing is meant as a flame towards you, at least speaking for myself. i happen to be a christian. like any theory, there's room for dispute. but disputes on technicalities and details do not invalidate the general truth of the matter. no one in any scientific field relating in the slightest to the field is in debate as to the veracity of it, unless they hold prior religious convictions -- creationists.however, there is no such thing as an evolutionist. this is a word made up by creationists to make it seem like people who study and understand evolutionary theory are espousing some kind of doctrine of anti-christianity. this is just not so. there is no religious doctrine to it at all.the people who deal with it are SCIENTISTS: evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, geologists, etc.some of them are even christians. yes, but we don't chuck the entire theory just because there's a few areas that need working on, an instead impose a black-box explanation -- "god did it" -- and investigate no further. this stops all human understanding. instead, we work on the areas that need work. and believe me, there aren't many. but what most creationists don't understand, especially when it comes to dating, is statistical aberation.presuming we date a rock 100 times, using a half dozen different isotopes. 95 tests come back as ~2 billion years old. 3 tests come back as ~1.95 billion years old, and 2 come back as 200 million years old.what happened? is the testing method invalid? no, it yeilds reasonably accurate and consistent results 98% of the time. what's more likely is human error, but even ruling that out, sometimes in the real world, tests just don't work right. that's why science retests and allows for dispute. this is just wrong. i've seen more advances in evolutionary theory in the last 5 years than ever before. mostly in the field of paleontology, becuase i was always a dinosaur nut as a kid, and i pay a little more attention there. he's no longer at that university, apparently.but his statement is clearly wrong. he's a biologist, not a physicist. ask any physicist if decay rates flucate. ever. because they don't.as or a long term radiological clock: No webpage found at provided URL: http://time.govstatistical aberations. not every result needs to be explained. sometimes someone just messed up. results that out of order in every test may need to be, but not ones where 98% are all in predictable ranges. i'm not sure what he means by that. how old is lava? brand new. should we expect anything else? well, sort of. it kind of exist before that, didn't it?radiological dates of rocks are the dates since major molecular restructuring. i'm not sure offhad if dating a sedimentary rock will show the results of the sediments that make the rock, or the rock itself, or the average of all the components. i'll look that up, because that might be causing the confusion. it's fallible, but it gives instant insight into which layer you're digging in. nothing else. no conclusive dates are ever given by index fossils alone. by no means! a small set of counter examples, especially statistical aberations in scientific testings disprove nothing. suppose we stopped using insulin because it didn't work on 30 people? or deciding that aids is no longer an epidemic because there's a family in england that's immune to it? you can't base results on the bits that are out of the ordinary. well, it's also good to know WHICH isotope to use. they all have ranges in which they are most accurate, since they all have different half-lives and our tools are only so accurate. plus, if they date something as way different from what it's expected to be, they can check for things like contamination. i haven't seen anyone demonstrate a better understanding of it than physicists. certainly not creationists who argue that the laws of physics are different now than the used to be a few thousand years ago.[editted to add:]also, the point was to show that techniques MUST be invalid, not that they occasionally CAN be.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 06-11-2004 02:24 AM

duh.the number one things that throws of carbon dating? FIRE. do you know why? fire burns things. charring is carbon. which really throws off the carbon to nitrogen ration, making it look it hasn't decayed at all.also, carbon dating is innefective after about 40,000 years anyways, because the amount of carbon 14 is usually so negligable.in other words, it's inaccurate for two obvious reasons. other isotopes and their half lives:Uranium-238, Lead-206: 4.5 billion years
Uranium-235, Lead-207: 704 million years
Thorium-232, Lead-208: 14.0 billion years
Rubidium-87, Strontium-87: 48.8 billion years
Potassium-40, Argon-40: 1.25 billion years
Samarium-147, Neodymium-143: 106 billion yearsno one dates fossils or rocks with carbon-14 since it can't be done. no one uses it for things out of the span of human history. carbon 14 doesn't embarass anyone. except people who believe in the shroud of turin.

i remember seeing a show on the shroud of turin sometime back, a reputable one i mean. there were talking about how they had to date the shroud by the plant life (fungus, burrs, seeds, etc) found on it instead of the actual fabric, because it had been involved in a fire.the show may have of course been wrong. i'll look it up, i suppose.(and i don't like the shift key)

still looking into this. this post seems to indicate that fire does indeed throw off c14 dating: Carbon-14 dating (Steven B. Harris) i have no idea how legit that is, of course. mostly when i google for c14 stuff, all i find is creationist bs, "evolutionist" refutations, and stuff about the shroud of turin that i don't really care about.

ok. that makes sense.but anyways, the point is still irrellevant, because it's an improper usage of c14 dating, out of its accuracy range anyways.

paulk: what i mean is that there a ton of other dating methods that are less prone to error (not saying there's a huge error margin in carbon) that show the earth to be ALOT older than 10k years.rocks and the geologic record aren't dated with carbon, either.

semantics, really. and i know carbon dating is not that error prone.i'm just saying that it's a favourite among creationists for some reason, when most of the old-earth evidence is really derived from other sources and methods.

because god is evil, vengeful, deceptive, traitorous, and maniacal, of course.what else does fundamentalism say about their god who lies?

now THIS is a weird place to get a nigerian scam spam. ...why reply to my message about dating?