We all know Answers in Genesis does its darndest to be the most professional (or, failing that, the least dishonest) Creationist organization out there. For one, there's the whole "Arguments we think Creationists should NOT use" page trying to separate "bad" Creation science from "good" Creation science. Failing that, AiG resorts to the postmodernist "Well you have your opinions and presuppositions on how science works, we have ours" equivalency argument that sounds good on the surface.
Recently a Creationist acquaintance of mine sent me
this link from AiG regarding the amount of C14 in diamonds.
The central claim that AiG makes is that a peer-reviewed, non-Creationism-affiliated pair of researchers performed a carbon dating experiment on diamonds from the paleozoic era, and these things should be so old that there shouldn't be ANY detectable amount of C14 remaining. When the results came in... voila! The amount of C14 within the diamond registers a date of about 49,000 years! These aren't old diamonds at all, and is merely more evidence for a Young Earth!
So I dug a little deeper, first by downloading and reading the
actual paper and emailing the researchers.
The thing is, even just reading the title gives you a hint that this paper wasn't anything along the lines of what AiG claims.
In an AMS experiment an ion beam converts the carbon-containing sample into a charged particle beam, which is then used to measure the amount of C12 versus C14. The problem is that it's only 5-20% efficient at conversion, and the remaining 80-95% is vaporized and a small bit of this clings to the inside of the machine as a layer of "black crud." Over time this builds up and contaminates future samples.
The original researchers, Southon and Taylor, used paleozoic diamonds as "blanks" to measure the amount of contamination within the machine. Since the samples were millions of years old, they shouldn't contain any detectable C14 and what should register should be only the gunk within. This was a method Southon and Taylor used to calibrate AMS machines... it wasn't intended to actually date diamonds.
If AiG actually read this article they should've known clearly that the experiment didn't demonstrate any levels of C14 in diamonds. The amount of intellectual dishonesty in this degree of distortion and misquoting is absolutely grotesque.
Edited by BeagleBob, : Missed an "e" in "degree."
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