Dating Methodology and its Associated Assumptions

Again, I'm no "respected evo," but I'll contradict it. The Cretaceous ended about 64,500,000 years ago, as attested by maybe a couple of hundred dates using five or more separate, independent radioisotope methods on rocks from all around the globe. If you want a pile of links, Mark24 posted them here a few months ago. I'll find the thread, if you'd like.Where did Lyell claim 80 million? Just give me the volume and chapter from that online edition, if you don't remember the page.Or withdraw your claim that he said so.

I should of said my source supports the claim and not Cory's link. The above quotes are from: "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" by atheist Richard Milton, (pages 22,23,50) [1997]Now the attacks on the messenger will commense which is a compliment to the evidence. Milton is an atheist with no creationist ax to grind which makes his expertise objective and pristine. I expect these exact points to be completely evaded.Other than this issue I completely disagree with the content of your Admin post.This means I believe you are essentially, silently saying that unless I agree with my opponents I will be punished.To forestall this inevitable action I hereby concede all outstanding points to all my opponents and will no longer post in this topic.

Bullshit, as you've been shown repeatedly.If you would quit making stuff up, WT, I might believe a little of what you write. I went to the library a few minutes ago, and found that Lyell did, in fact, offer what he himself called an estimate that the Cretaceous ended about 80 million years ago. He made this estimate in the 1860's, though, not in "Principles." And though Milton may claim to be an "atheist," he damn sure can't claim to be a scholar. He's a crank who knows how to sell books to gullible people.

Since it appears your statement about Lyell has been demonstrated to be half right (just off by a third of a century as to when he said it) you don't have to do the work. I'm not nearly as impressed with how accurate Lyell was because it is so much later but still pretty impressed.Since you won't be posting here anymore I guess we can leave it to someone else who might like to discuss it.Maybe someone will try to support your false accusation of fraud by the entire scientific community. You sure won't be able to and know it which is why you are bowing out again. The fraud accusation is what someone makes when they are totally at a loss to explain why, most of a century later, new technologies come up with independent dates that are much closer to the geological estimates that to the 6,000 years. Is a cry of "fraud" all you have? Is that the totality of your argument?Why don't you go back to something simpler. Reading a map perhaps? LOL You ran from that one too didn't you?This message has been edited by NosyNed, 10-06-2004 09:48 PM

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In fact, it is not at all astonishing when you know that today's accepted date has been derived not from an absolute, independant source but from conjectures including Lyell's.

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Unmitigated nonsense. Are you saying that if two age estimates are close, that they both must be wrong and there is some kind of conspiracy to make them similar? That is poisoning the well, WT. In other words, mainstream geochronology can NEVER be correct. Pretty strong statements coming from one who has no background whatever in the field!By the way, do I have to exlain to you that 65 my is 15 MILLION years less than 80 my. Is that now a trivial difference to YECs?

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Ever since Lyell estimated that the end of the Cretaceous was 80 million years ago, the accepted value has been in this ballpark. Any dating scientist who suggested looking outside the ballpark, at 20 million years or 10 or 5 would be looked on as a crackpot by his colleagues. More significantly, perhaps, he would not be able to get any funding for his research."

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Lots of geologists look outside the 80 my 'ballpark'. They just don't find the Cretaceous. Another silly argument. Where do you get your material?

My source said what you disagree with. Atheist Richard Milton.http://www.alternativescience.com/

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My source said what you disagree with.

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So, do you often quote works that you disagree with?

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Atheist Richard Milton.

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That's an authority? I suppose that if you disagreed with Milton that it would be his opinion. Well, I suppose it can still be funny. Even from an atheist.

Cory :How did Lyell get so close ?The only b.s. is your angry response which evades the point.Dating Methodology and its Associated AssumptionsMy presence in this topic has been to level the indictment (brought to my attention by persons like Jonathan Wells and Richard Milton), that evolutionary dating methodologies have the appearance of objective scientific determinations, but in reality are a "database of self-fulfilling predictions" which contain not a single starting and external benchmark date. Once again, I point out that in any dating attempt (like KBS Tuff) the discard dates are the real thriller of interest. Accept dates are ALWAYS accepted on the basis of what is already known, and what is already "known" was accepted from knowledge that was already "known" etc.etc. Round and round goes the circle = a "database of self-fulfilling predictions".The rock painting incident are unplanned snapshots that provide an irrefutable basis to confidently falsify the reliability of dating methods and their associated assumptions.This message has been edited by WILLOWTREE, 10-22-2004 03:29 PM

and lets just ignore all those nasty correlations on age dating methods that just keep reinforcing the evidence for an old earth.and an older universe.yep. nonsense quotient in full operation?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Blind luck, mostly, and a decent appreciation of how slowly shellfish and the like evolve. Where did Milton get this figure, do you think? The thickness of the Cretaceous here beneath my desk is zero meters. An average worldwide thickness is hardly indicative of rate of deposition in any one spot: Holocene deposits are building up quite a bit faster 100 miles south of New Orleans than they are in Lubbock, Texas.If dating is so terribly inaccurate, WT, why to the 14C dates in Lake Suigetsu increase monotonically with depth in the core from there? How are all 250 of them "wrong?" Why are there 50 dates from 100,000 varves down or so that ALL show "too old to date" by carbon-14?Document some of this fraud that goes on "all the time," WT, or shut up about it, already.

Two responses in a row you have opted to get nasty and post insults.Anger and insults do not refute anything but indicate the validity of the argument and your inability to answer.

It's not fraud if you know about the rejected dates.And that's rather the fatal flaw in your argument - even when the dating goes ary, scientists still report their results, as well as their reasons for their rejection.So we know how often the dating works, and we know how often we're rejecting dates that don't fit. If the number of dates that we rejected outnumbered the ones we didn't, we'd know that your criticism was spot-on - we were cherry-picking data to match assumptions.But that's not what happens. The dating results are almost always on target; very rarely, and in specific instances, do we get results that we have to reject. This indicates to any thinking person that the dating is completely valid.I mean, pretend that you wiegh yourself with ten differen methods. 9 of them give you results clustered around 175 lbs; the tenth returns a weight of 2 ounces. What does a reasonable person conclude? That they probably weigh 175 lbs or so, and that the tenth result was the result of a measuring error; or, akin to what you would have us believe, the entire endeavor of measuring weight is flawed because there's no such thing as gravity?Don't be an idiot, WT. Dating is accepted because the vast majority of results return values consistent with our models. If we're supposed to believe that, in fact, scientists cherry-pick results, then where are all the rejected results? If you're right, almost every time we have something dated, we should wind up rejecting the results. So where are all these rejected results?

Someone else already noted this, but geological periods have no single thickness in the geological column. Rates of deposition vary widely all around the globe, and they can be positive (actual deposition) or negative (erosion). Milton is wrong to say this.He's also wrong to say the Cretaceous lasted 65 million years. It ended about 65 million years ago. It lasted roughly 80 million years.There may be places on earth where Cretaceous layers are 15,000 meters thick, I don't really know, but there are certainly many places where no Cretaceous layers exist anymore. Once again, rates of deposition vary widely all across the globe. Calculating an average deposition rate for a geologial period has no meaning. Milton doesn't have a finding. As already stated, it isn't possible to calculate average deposition rates for geological eras. You can only calculate average deposition rates for specific examples of geological layers. For example, if there is a region where the Cretaceous layers are 15,000 meters thick, then we can divide 15,000 by 80 million (not 65 million as Milton erroneously did) to get about .2 mm/year. (Hmmm. Milton got the same answer using the wrong figures. He must have been provided the numbers by someone else, then garbled them in the paragraph you quoted.) Milton is claiming that geologists believe that the rate of sedimentation has remained constant throughout geological time, but geologists definitely do not believe this. As has been said several times now, deposition rates vary widely around the globe. And they of course vary over time, also. Calculating an average deposition rate for a geological era doesn't have any meaning, and probably isn't possible to determine anyway since it frequently isn't possible to measure how much was eroded, since in most circumstances there's nothing left to measure. The thickness of human hair averages around .05 mm, not .2 mm.Fossilization generally requires quick burial. This doesn't happen that often, which is why fossils are relatively rare compared to the number of creatures that have ever existed. This story seems just transparently silly. Joan Ahrens painted on rocks in art class? She took the rocks and put them in her garden? The rocks were stolen and carted all the way out to the South African bush? Archaeologists discovered them and couldn't tell the rocks were anomalous to the area, couldn't tell they had only relatively recently been placed there, couldn't tell the art was not aboriginal in origin, and couldn't tell the paint was modern? And then at least two labs carbon dated the art to 1200 years? Is there anything you won't believe?The story about Joan Ahrens appears at two websites. This one is from AskMoses.com - Torah, Judaism and Jewish Info - Ask the Rabbi: Hmmm. In one story she's an art student, in the other an art teacher. In one story she produced the art in art classes, in the other her students produced the art, in her garden I guess.The real problem is that your annecdotal stories do not represent legitimate rebuttal to scientifically developed dating methods. If dating methods were truly unreliable or invalid then it would be easy to demonstrate this scientifically.--Percy

They are not being ignored.They are being challenged.Indictment: Age Dating methods and correletions = database of self-fulfilling predictions.Strength of Indictment: Total lack of any external benchmark dating determination.Evidence of Indictment:In addition to the unplanned snapshot of the South African rock painting dating incident (Message 68) which exposed the dating method to be completely unreliable - Milton concludes:

how does not even addressing the issue of correlations challenge anything?try reading Dr. Roger C. Wiens at
Radiometric Datingfor a christian perspective.enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}