Is there evidence that dating methods MUST be invalid?

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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.

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No expert myself, but... I suspect you're getting on pretty shakey ground here. Care to elaborate on the above quoted some more?Mooseps: It also seems that you still haven't found that "shift" key, except for an occasional entire word .

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.

The quote from the post you refer to is "CO2 from coal fires also is absorbed by lime and cement...".The relevant point is not "fire" but "coal" - since coal is very old carbon, soot particles from coal fires will affect the apparent date.

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.

YEC views place the age of the Earth at a maximum of 10,000 years.Even an 11,000 year range (Carbon dating supported by dendrochronology) is a serious problem.When you add in the fact that there are things that carbon dating shows to be considerably older - and that this age can be corroborated by other data (e.g. the study at Lake Suigetsu, where suitable material buried in the lake was dated by carbon-dating and by counting varves - annual layers) then YEC is in deep, deep trouble without considering any of the other radiometric dating methods.

Yes, and they essentially always do. E.g. see http://www.gate.net/~rwms/AgeEarth.html and One of the main objections to radiometric dating (the latter is currently not available). Unsupported assertion. Where's your data? Exactly how often are inconsistent dates obtained? So Snelling claims. But the samples are not available for others to view, the details have not been published in a form that others can evaluate. As of now is just another unsubstatiated claim.Almeyda, you are missing the entire point of this thread. Even if Snelling's results are correct, it's one anomolous date per tens of thousands of consistent dates. Even if Snelling is corect, it's not evidence that dating methods must be wrong; at best it's evidence that dating methods are occasionally wrong.In the very first post I wrote "... a few erroneous results ... are not such evidence." Yet you insist on posting unsupported quote-mines and a very few supposed erroneous results. Face it ... you have no eviden that radioisotope dating methods must be wrong, the best you have some evidence that they occasionally are wrong. BZZZT! Wrong. Thank you for playing. A specimen older than 50,000 years should have very little C-14 left over from when the specimen formed, but there are other possible sources of tiny amounts of C-14; the amount of C-14 present in a specimen older than 50,000 years depends on the history of that specimen. Other possible sources of C-14 are unimportant in younger specimens, because the C-14 left over from formation swamps any other possible sources, but in older specimens it's the other way around.

Glad that you brought this silly example up because it is very important to understanding dating.First, if they had gotten a date older than radiocarbon date any older than they did, it would have been thrown out as being unreliable anyway. Each of the 40 or so different radiometric methods have cover different ranges and with different accuracies. So if you tried to date a really old piece of wood, say a piece that is 200,000 years old, using radiocarbon dating, guess what, you'd get an age of about 40-50,000 years. Sorry, that is the limit of the method. It does not mean the wood is not 200,000 years old, only that the tester used the wrong tests.Garbage in---Garbage out.This particular test is also a good example because no details are ever given. It is repeated on all the Creationists sites, but on none of them do they give any of the necessary information. If such a thing ever happened, and there is no evidence that it did, it would be classified as a hoax at best, outright fraud being far more likely.Fraud is a strong word and I want you to understand fully why it was the word chosen.Since the {edited to fix spelling (delete an extraneous y)} specifics are never given, we can only assume what happened. Most likely, a sample was given to a lab with no information about its origin and the lab was told to perform radiocarbon testing. The results showed that it was at the limits for testing by that method so it is at least 45,000 years old.That is all that is shown.Sorry, your example shows nothing beyond an poorly attempted fruad.Try again.This message has been edited by jar, 06-14-2004 09:00 PM

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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.

Carbon dating is not THAT error prone - this is shown by the use of other dating methods to provide corroboration.And I know very well that carbon dating is not used on material that is not expected to contain atmospheric C14. But that doesn't change the fact that the carbon dating studies we already have are enough to reject YEC.

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.

Arriving at 'dates' depends upon assumptions, This may be why i believe they are 'invalid' or 'unreliable' because if it could be proven then assumptions would not be needed only facts speaking for themselves. The validity of the calculated date can be no stronger than the weakest assumption used in the calculation. What are some of the assumptions made by most Evolutionists in using these systems?- Evolutionists generally assume the material being measured had no original 'daughter' elements in it, or they assume the amount can be accurately estimated. For example, they may assume that all of the lead in a rock was produced by the decay of its uranium.--- However One can almost never know with absolute certainty how much radioactive or daughter substance was present at the start.- Evolutionists have also assumed that the material being measured has been in a closed system. It has often been wrongly assumed that no outside factors altered the normal ratios in the material, adding or subtracting any of the elements involved.--- The age estimate can be thrown off considerably, if the radioactive element or the daughter element is leached in or leached out of the sample. There are evidences that this could be a significant problem. Simple things such as groundwater movement can carry radioactive material or the daughter element into or out of rock. Rocks must be carefully tested to determine what outside factors might have changed their content.- They assume that the rate of decomposition has always remained constant - absolutely constant.--- How can one be certain that decay rates have been constant over billions of years? Scientific measurements of decay rates have only been conducted since the time of the Curies in the early 1900s. Yet Evolutionists are boldly making huge extrapolations back over 4.5 billion years and more. There is some evidence that the rate of radioactive decay can change. If the decay rates have ever been higher in the past, then relatively young rocks would wrongly 'date' as being old rocks.

I've raised this point a couple of times in the past, but they don't seem to want to hear of it. I did get them to agree that the sun had to show at least 30 million years of age appearance if it was created suddenly a few thousand years ago though, as it would have to at least be beyond it's protostar stage to function as a sun. Granted, that's a lot less than the 4.5 billion years they think it is, but it does establish that a lot of other stuff, if created, might show appearance of age, including the planet, the moon, rocks, gems and other stuff that God would've included in his creation.

There are methods which do not assume this. Since they agree with other methods that do this is NOT a valid argument. Same as above and you have yet to supply a method for there to be highly selective "leakage" into something like a zircon crystal Then please supply this evidence. Note that the evidence has to allow for a rate of decomposition on the order of a MILLION times faster than measured. Also note that the scientific literature discussing changes in decay rates has been presented by some creationist sites in a way that is dishonest.In addition explain where the heat produced at a MILLION times faster went without melting the globe. Show your calculations.In addition explain away the quantum mechanics that suggest that the rates should be constant.And, finally, explain that we have measured rates much, much further back. We can see the result of the decay rates back at least 160,000 years in supernova 1987A.Then, after that, explain the agreement between all the methods when they overlap. Then explain the agreement with historic dates when they are available (eg. Vesuvius' eruption).When you have explained those things you might have the barest beginning of an arguement. Right now you have zip but wishful thinking. Go back to your sources that are supposed to be "scientists". See if you can get the details from them instead of deliberately misleading nonsense.(added by edit)Then when you have done all that, get back to the real topic. Not a bunch of might be, coulda stuff. Go back to why they MUST be invalid not why they MIGHT be if your wishes were granted.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 06-16-2004 01:52 AM

As I am sure Buzsaw knows there are good reasons to think that the relative radioactive decay rates have not changed.1) None of them can be changed by any conditions that would have applied in the relevant timeframe. Since radiometric dating starts with the solidification of the rock obviously any conditions that would melt the rock again would "reset" the clock. The conditions discussed by AiG that would change a FEW decay rates require going way beyond melting the rock - they would reduce it to plasma.
In fact heating episodes are one of the known problems with radiometric dating methods - they can give dates that are too LOW.2) There is no plausible method that would change all the relevant decay modes proportionately. Since the many different radioactive decays used in dating methods give consistent dates the only way accelerated decay rates could explain the actual data is if every single one changed proportionately. That simply isn't a viable possibility.3) Other dating methods agree that YEC is wrong. Even in the 18th century it was obvious that there had been too much erosion and that the Earth was far older than YEC allowed. As I have mentioned in a post just a little way up this topic dendrochronology corroborates Carbon dating back 11,000 years and other studies have provided corroborating data for carbon dating back to 40,000 years ago. There is no sign of any acceleration in the C14 decay rate there either.So, even without going into problems like the heat generated, the evidence is very much against the idea that accelerated radioactive decay could change dates enough to save YEC.