{The following message is originally by Coyote, located at message 145 of the "Biological classification vs 'Kind'" topic. It is pretty off-topic there, thus this new topic. - Adminnemooseus}
Your post is nothing but PRATTS (points refuted a thousand times).
I'll take on one (don't want to spoil the fun for others):
3. You are correct that over the past century science has observed a fairly steady rate of radio-isotope decay. However, assuming that same constant rate of decay for 4+ billion years is a bad assumption. As it turns out radio-isotope half-lives can vary substantially based upon a host of factors.
The RATE Group attempted to document the variability of the decay constant, spending over a million dollars of creationists' money. They failed.
Here is a good review of their project:
Assessing the RATE Project: Essay Review by Randy Isaac.
A couple of paragraphs from the conclusion:
The conclusions of the RATE project are being billed as groundbreaking results. This is a fairly accurate description since a group of creation scientists acknowledge that hundreds of millions of years worth of radioactivity have occurred. They attempt to explain how this massive radioactivity could have occurred in a few thousand years but admit that consistent solutions have not yet been found. The vast majority of the book is devoted to providing technical details that the authors believe prove that the earth is young and that radioisotope decay has not always been constant. All of these areas of investigation have been addressed elsewhere by the scientific community and have been shown to be without merit. The only new data provided in this book are in the category of additional details and there are no significantly new claims.
In this book, the authors admit that a young-earth position cannot be reconciled with the scientific data without assuming that exotic solutions will be discovered in the future. No known thermodynamic process could account for the required rate of heat removal nor is there any known way to protect organisms from radiation damage. The young-earth advocate is therefore left with two positions. Either God created the earth with the appearance of age (thought by many to be inconsistent with the character of God) or else there are radical scientific laws yet to be discovered that would revolutionize science in the future. The authors acknowledge that no current scientific understanding is consistent with a young earth. Yet they are so confident that these problems will be resolved that they encourage a message that the reliability of the Bible has been confirmed.
Another review:
Do the RATE Findings Negate Mainstream Science? by Greg Moore
One of the concluding paragraphs:
Young-earth creationists have long claimed there is no evidence for an old Earth. The fact that billions of years of nuclear decay have occurred in Earth history has been denied by most young-earth creationists. Now, the RATE team has admitted that, taken at face value, radiometric dating data is most easily and directly explained by the Earth being billions of years old. This is a remarkable development because no longer can young-earth creationists claim it is merely the naturalistic worldview that makes scientists believe rocks and minerals are millions or billions of years old.
Summary: there is no good evidence for significant changes in the decay constant, and creationists who spent a lot of time and money researching the issue had to admit that.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Red text at top.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Added the "Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth" part to the topic title.
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