Why not here (re: Joe's geomagnetism web page)

What on earth do you mean that accelerated decay issn't ad hoc ? The only possible reason for believing it is an assumption that the Earth is young in the first place.What is more you need a very specific miracle that speeds all the relevant decay rates by the same amount, somehow keeps the spreadign rates close to proportional on top of explaining how carbon dating goes back beyond your Flood and has been calibrated and tested against independant measures such as dendrochronology and the varves of Lake Suigetsu to dates that go past the usual YEC creation, let alone the Flood.And then you have to reconstruct geology so that massive catastrophes somehow produce the same results that mainstream geology predicts for far greater timescales - instead of looking like massive catastrophes.There is no cause for optimism there. A more realistic view would be that your opinion is so close to the "appearance of age" argument that it suffers from the same theological problems in addition to the reliance on ad hoc miracles and a huge dose wishful thinking.

So what you are saying is that accelerated decay is an ad hoc attempt to explain away the evidence against a young Earth, therefore it isn't ad hoc.With regard to Yellowstone, why should the radiometric dates reflect the *lower* limit ? And with the evidence of in place trees, surely such a dating would be evidence AGAINST accelerated decay since a single catastrophe is not a viable explanation.And sadly it seems that you can't see is that what you call "complexity" is the number of coincidences you need to invoke to explain why so much data supports an old Earth.Either you have your "it's a catastrophe so of course it will look like the result of a long slow process" excuse or you have "well God just happened to do everything in way which created a false appearance of age". Which as I say is theologically much the same as the more common "appearance of age" argument which attributes false age to the creation rather than, as you have it, the Flood.Even if you assume a Flood and assume that God used CPT to do it, it doesn't follow that God would initiate it by manipulating decay rates - the heat is what is needed and a miracle could do that. The difference is that manipulating decay rates creates a false appearance of age.Even if you assume that God would manipulate decay rates it doesn't follow that all the decay rates used for dating rocks would change proportionally - the mechanisms of decay vary enough that changes in physical constants, say, would not produce that result. Indeed there seems to be no reason to do such a thing, except to create a false appearance of age.And other processes - whether by coincidence or by design also have to speed up by the right rates to produce the false appearance of age.So we have three alternatives:
1) God is out to deceive us
2) God just happened to create huge amounts of deceptive evidence for no reason any of us can think of
3) The Earth really is old.Got any reason why 2 should be treated as a credible answer ?[This message has been edited by PaulK, 10-31-2003][This message has been edited by PaulK, 10-31-2003]