Would ID/Creationists need new, independant dating techniques??

i dont think there are any in the world that can back up their claims whit science. All they do is look for is reasons to say why science is wrong and that makes them right at least in their minds.

The YEC position is best summed up by a poster here, archaeologist, whom I've quoted in my signature. It begins and ends with what the bible says. When that's your position, what's the point of any other techniques or methods? They can only do one of two things, support what you already know to be the truth, in which case what use are they? Or, they can undermine what we already know to be the truth, which will lead people away from Jebus, result in the decline and death of all that is good and right in the world, turn the righteous into sinners and probably cause tooth decay.This, perhaps, is the biggest problem with creationism. It's the end. There's no further search for truth. Curious about how the world works? Read the bible. Want to understand why our chromosomes are so similar to a chimps? Because a god designed it that way. Why are there marsupials in Australia but not in Sweden? That's where a god wanted them.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

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We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

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...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

That's not how a YEC would view things.As near as I can tell, Creation Science is nothing more than rebuttal of any secular science that conflicts with the Bible, and primarily addresses science that conflicts with the creation and flood accounts in Genesis. CS serves no other purpose excluding selling books and lecture appearances. Still, many Creationists believe that the rebuttals are good science.Given their hearts desire, YECs would have literal Biblical creation taught in public school classrooms, and would eliminate the teaching of evolution, chemicals-to-biology abiogenesis, and Big Bang cosmology in science classrooms.But federal courts have said that the YEC curriculum is religion, and cannot be taught as science in public schools. Teaching Creation Science rebuttals, perhaps disguised as intelligent design, along side secular science is a fall back position.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : Make minor corrections

Ok, I'll jump in. Seeing that all the strawmen filled back-patting didn't really make for a worthwhile discussion.The issue of the age of the earth is two-fold for the creationist. First, he needs to adress the lines of evidence that seem to indicate that the earth is very old. Nowadays this includes predominantly the various radiometric dating methods, but also geologic issues such as how long it takes for oil to form, for example. This is what the creationist you encountered was doing.Second, he needs to find his own lines of evidence that seem to indicate that the earth is young. Contrary to the widespread ignorance displayed in this thread, creationist routinely write and discuss such issues.Some will argue that they are wrong from the start, because they initially start with a 6k age for the earth because that is what the Bible implies. Because they get it from a religious book, they are wrong per se. But this is flawed logic, and in fact is routinely called the ''genetic fallacy''. This is because the origin of a statement is not relevant to it's truthfulness. It does not matter if it came from a book, or from a dream, or from my imagination while I was walking down the street; a statement is to be evaluated from it's claims, not where it originated.With all this put into perspective (and I doubt anyone will disagree with what I just said), we can now discuss some positive lines of evidence for a young earth. There are also two different types of these:- One that is consistent with the given age. For example, the accumulation of salt in the ocean gives a maximum age consistent with a young earth. This was in fact my very first thread at EvC, and if you want to discuss it you could dig up my old thread and we could start off from there.- One that points to the given age. For example, the helium diffusion in zircon crystals experiment done by Humphreys and Baumgardner falls into this category.

Neither of those has any value for determining the age of the earth. The age of something in the earth is not the age of the earth. You need to find the age of the oldest thing in the earth. Anything older than the salt or the zircon crystals automatically nullifies them as age indicators.

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

By any naturalistic model of the formation of the earth you choose, you will find that the oceans are pretty much as old as the earth itself. Putting a maximum age on them pretty much puts a maximum age on the earth itself. This is as close as you'll get to the researched proposition of ''Date of ____ roughly equals date of the earth''.The zircon crystals issue is a tad more complicated, but when understood pretty much gives us something ressembling what the OP is asking.

That isn't completely correct. We argue that the ONLY reason they conclude that the earth is young is because they get it from the Bible. When they come across evidence indicating a much older earth the evidence is either ignored or explained away with unevidenced, ad hoc mechanisms (e.g. accelerated nuclear decay). That would only be true if the accumulation is constant. It isn't. Accumulation and dilution vary quite a bit from season to season as water at the poles freezes and thaws. Also, erosion is not constant so the input of salt is not constant either. There are also ways of removing salt from the oceans, such as the great salt deposits that are seen in the geologic record.There is no physical law that requires salt accumulation to be constant unlike the decay of isotopes or the speed of light. Like salt in the oceans, helium freely moves into and out of zircons. This is dependent on temperature and pressure. Also, the variables that they used to calculate the age of the zircons by helium difussion were in error.

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Throughout Humphreys (2005), Dr. Humphreys stresses that his YEC conclusions must be correct because his Figure 2 shows a supposedly strong correlation between his "creation model" and vacuum helium diffusion measurements from Humphreys (2003a, 2004). However, Dr. Humphreys' diagram has little scientific merit. First of all, his helium diffusion experiments were performed under a vacuum rather than at realistic pressures that model the subsurface conditions at Fenton Hill (about 200 to 1,200 bars; Winkler, 1979, p. 5). McDougall and Harrison (1999), Dalrymple and Lanphere (1969) and many other researchers have already shown that the diffusion of noble gases in silicate minerals may decrease by at least 3-6 orders of magnitude at a given temperature if the studies are performed under pressure rather than in a vacuum. Secondly, because substantial extraneous helium currently exists in the subsurface of the Valles Caldera, which is only a few kilometers away from the Fenton Hill site, Dr. Humphreys needs to analyze his zircons for 3He, and quartz and other low-uranium minerals in the Fenton Hill cores for extraneous 4He. Thirdly, chemical data in Gentry et al. (1982b) and Zartman (1979) indicate that Humphreys et al. and Gentry et al. (1982a) may have significantly underestimated the amount of uranium in the Fenton Hill zircons, which could reduce many of their Q/Q0 values by at least an order of magnitude and substantially increase Humphreys et al.'s "creation dates." Dr. Humphreys needs to perform spot analyses for 3He, 4He, lead, and uranium on numerous zircons from all of his and R. Gentry's samples so that realistic Q/Q0 values may be obtained.

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The "dating" equations in Humphreys et al. (2003a) are based on many false assumptions (isotropic diffusion, constant temperatures over time, etc.) and the vast majority of Humphreys et al.'s critical a, b, and Q/Q0 values that are used in these "dating" equations are either missing, poorly defined, improperly measured or inaccurate. Using the best available chemical data on the Fenton Hill zircons from Gentry et al. (1982b) and Zartman (1979), the equations in Humphreys et al. (2003a) provide ridiculous "dates" that range from hundreds to millions of "years" old (average: 60,000 400,000 "years" old [one significant digit and two standard deviations] and not 6,000 2,000 years as claim by Humphreys et al., 2004). Contrary to Humphreys (2005), his mistakes are not petty or peripheral, but completely discredit the reliability of his work.
RATE's Ratty Results: Helium Diffusion Doesn't Support Young-Earth Creationism

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Even if that was true, it isn't the age of the oceans that you're measuring; it's the amount of salt. To equate the amount of salt with age, you have to assume a constant inflow and outflow of salt. That assumption is unsupported.Of course, the other problem you have is that your alternative methods don't give the same age.

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

If you and Taq want to discuss the salt in oceans issue, we'll do it in the appropriate thread. you just have to dig it up, and write over there your concerns. That's because it gives a maximum age. If you can't see the difference there is no bothering in discussing.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

I'll do an overview post on the helium diffusion research, then I'll adress critics. I have read in length Henke's paper about a year ago, and through all the smoke of the mudslinging he does, only a handful of issues are of any importance to the data and it's implications.

All you need to do here is provide a reason why oceanic salt concentrations are a reliable method for dating the age of the oceans. This would need to include the reasons as to why accumulation would be constant over any and all conditions that the Earth has experienced during it's lifetime. Perhaps you mean a minimum age? If we date a rock to 1 million years before present (assuming for the moment that the method is accurate) then the minimum age of the Earth would be 1 million years old since the Earth could have existed prior to the cooling of the rock from molten form.

One of the biggest implications of accelerated decay is the heat produced. You need to deal with that as well. Proposing a model that would melt the Earth should raise some eyebrows.

I'm not discussing specific issues. I'm pointing out that your whole approach is wrong. You can't measure the age of the earth by finding one thing in it that's young. Only the oldest thing in the earth tells us the age of the earth. You can find a thousand things that are less than 4.55 billion years old but none of them refutes the measurement of 4.55 billion years. That's just the point. Your methods don't give "a maximum age". They give two different ages. Who's to say that either of them is the maximum?If you want to show a maximum, you should only be citing the maximum. And you should also point out that the maximum age by your own alternative methods is well over 6000-10,000 years.

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

Well, you are way behind the curve. Henke's posting has been updated (and I still don't like it much; I agree that it's over the top). Dr. Loechelt and others have posted severl items criticizing Humphreys: see Helium Diffusion in Zircons. The latest is a letter from Dr. Loechelt published in Journal of Creation, and a response by Humphreys in which he finally admits that he read the temperature graphs in his references backwards. He's incredibly incompetent It's too bad the JoC isn't availabgle online; it's very amusing to see how much space they gave Humphreys after forcing Dr. Loechelt to shorten his letter so. (The JoC article is available to members in the dropbox on TalkRational.org.)

.You have an input, output and the total amount of something. This is the basic requirement for any dating method whatsoever. This alone shows that the accumulation of salt in the ocean can be usedBut more importantly, you have to show that today's condition of the earth is appreciably different then at any other moment in the past. For all we know, there is nothing unusual about the current conditions that would suggest this is not representative of how it has generally always been. Fallacious argument by analogy, because we are dating the rock, but we are finding a maximum age for the ocean. As I have said, the only reason this can be transposed to the earth is because of the relationship ''the age of the ocean is roughly equal to the age of the earth'', this relationship coming from the naturalistic models of the formation of the earth.The same relationship cannot be said of a rock. Because of this, you are correct to say that dating a rock gives a minimal age for the earth. But it's really irrelevant because the two aren't affected by the same relation.The salt in oceans is a maximum, because of the assumption that you start with an ocean with zero sodium in it. You can see this by realizing that by changing assuming there was an initial quantity, the age you get becomes lower.