CoolBeans writes:
Hmmmm.... I would like that more people gave their opinion of this.
Perhaps you could post one of the claims you are interested in discussing?
That web page contains very few definite claims that relate to the accuracy of dating methods.
Instead it is full of innuendo.
e.g.
quote:
How can this be? There are several possibilities as outlined below. They are the following.
- Carbon 14 from the surrounding environment have been introduced into the sample. This could happen from ground water washing in or bacteria invading a sample. A hard non porous carbon material such as diamond, hard coal, or amber would make this unlikely and can be ruled out for those materials.
- The carbon 14 lab has used materials in its processing that contain carbon 14. Perhaps the sample holder had some carbon in it.
- Contamination during sample preparation. This is something all labs are aware of and make great efforts to avoid this problem.
- Error due to the machine performing and measuring results. This is not likely given the extreme care given to these many experiments by numerous people over a span of 50 years.
- Nuclear synthesis of carbon 14 in situ during the experiment. This has been ruled out by experts.
- Nuclear synthesis of carbon 14 in the coal or marble itself while laying in the ground for alleged millions of years. This has been ruled out by experts as well.
- Nuclear synthesis of ordinary carbon to carbon 14 while the material is in situ. In other words could the carbon material while buried, frozen or whatever be lying next to or exposed to a strong radioactive material that bombarded the carbon atoms and turned some of them into carbon 14 from carbon 16.
- There actually is carbon 14 in the sample being tested and the dating scheme that claims the material is 100 million years old is itself badly flawed and needs to be reexamined. The carbon 14 testing method does give a more correct and more reliable age than any other method known.
So...which explanation do they think is correct?
The tone of the article implies no.8 - but they don't explicitly say.
They don't offer any explanation for why the others are wrong either.
I think they are relying on the fact that if you throw enough
shit sophistry around, some of it will stick.
"There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god." J. B. S. Haldane