blitz77 writes:
Now take carbon dating. Did you know that C14 is currently being created 25% faster than it is destroyed?
John replies:
Actually, it is being released rapidly via the burning of fossil fuels.
Because the original organic material of fossil fuels is much more than 50,000 years old, the effect from fossil fuels runs in the opposite direction. The carbon it contributes is effectively of infinite age.
According to
Corrections to radiocarbon dates., the use of fossil fuels has reduced the proportion of C-14 content by about 2%, while atomic bomb testing increased it by around 100% at its peak before atmospheric testing was banned.
This means that C-14 dating of organic material from after 1955 has to take into account a rapidly changing and variable carbon isotope profile. Dating of material since the Industrial Revolution but before 1955 requires much smaller compensations for fossil fuels, and unless great accuracy is desired the effect can even be ignored.
C-14 levels varied somewhat even before the Industrial Revolution, but we have very tight compensation factors derived from correlations from tree ring data going back about 11,000 years. Before that the accuracy again begins to suffer but isn't thought to be more than a few percent.
blitz77 writes:
the moon should be in dozens of feet of dust. And so should the earth. That is what NASA feared when they landed probes on the moon, that they would be swmaped with dust.
You're a bit behind the times. Even Creationists no longer accept this argument. Here's an excerpt from a paper by creationists Snelling and Rush of the Institute for Creation Research . It appeared in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal in 1993, and encouraged other creationists to cease using the moon dust argument for the time being:
"It thus appears that the amount of meteoritic dust and meteorite debris in the lunar regolith and surface dust layer, even taking into account the postulated early intense bombardment, does not contradict the evolutionists' multi-billion year timescale (while not proving it). Unfortunately, attempted counter-responses by creationists have so far failed because of spurious arguments or faulty calculations. Thus, until new evidence is forthcoming, creationists should not continue to use the dust on the moon as evidence against an old age for the moon and the solar system."
blitz77 writes:
Take salt in the oceans. If the earth really is as old as the billions of years, the oceans should be a helluva lot saltier than they are.
And all the water should have ended up in the oceans long ago, and there should no longer be any water on land. Except that there are various processes that return the water to the land, and in the same way there are a number of processes that draw salt from the ocean, just not as obvious as those for water. They include the tectonic processes John mentions, but also include the drying up of former ocean or sea basins (the salt flats in Nevada are an example) and wind-born salt blown from the sea.
Then take magnetic reversals. Evolutionists always thought they took millions of years to occur.
The earth's magnetic field reverses every 200,000 years on average. We know this average periodicity because the geologic layers have been radiometrically dated.
In April 1989, a paper appeared in Earth and Planetary Science Letters by Robert S. Coe and Michel Prevot found a thin lava layer which had 90 degrees of reversal recorded continuously in it and they calculated that the layer had to cool down within a matter of 15 days or less.
Coe and Prevot didn't measure an actual field reversal, just an astonishingly rapid change in the angle of the dipole. This anomalous result isn't consistent with current understanding of the internal physics of the earth. Whether or not the Coe/Prevot finding stands the test of time, at best from a Creationist standpoint it indicates that the change from one direction to its opposite can be incredibly rapid, perhaps just a few weeks. But independent of the rapidity of the change, the radiometric data indicate the time between dipole reversals averages 200,000 years.
--Percy
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