Questions Creationists Never Answer

Your understanding of radioactive decay seems to be a bit off. There is no material that is "lost" by radioactive decay. The material is changed from a parent isotope to a daughter isotope and the date is determined by the ratio between the two.If more parent material is added the sample will look younger. The parent material is lost the sample will look older.If daughter material is added the sample looks older. If daughter material is lost the sample looks younger.It is my understanding that the most common form of contamination is the loss of daughter product. Real geologists please correct me if I am wrong. Therefore the trend would actually be error on the side of younger.Then of course if loss of material of any significant amount were very common at all then we would not have any correlations.{ABE}See also this discussion of the correlation of ages in the Hawaiian islands.This message has been edited by Jazzns, 11-08-2005 03:17 PM

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No smoking signs by gas stations. No religion in the public square. The government should keep us from being engulfed in flames on earth, and that is pretty much it. -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

A more non-combative way of expressing what crash is saying is this.Where in the model of the flood does it describe the mechanism that kept grass, grass pollen, flowering plants, and flowering plant pollen, which is ubiquitous in higher layers of the column, from existing in the lower layers of the column?If flood geology cannot describe the facts of the column then it is a hypothesis in crisis.To deny the geologic column is to deny fact; an even worse proposition.

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No smoking signs by gas stations. No religion in the public square. The government should keep us from being engulfed in flames on earth, and that is pretty much it. -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Daughter material is potentially added during initial formation. I am unaware of any particular mechanisms to add parent material.Loss of daughter material is much more common. The nature of the crystalization of the rock rejects the daughter isotope. Therefore the daughter product "wants" to get out and thus the error if any is more often than not toward the younger rather than older as per your assertion. False. Parent material is part of the crystal matrix AFAIK which is why it exists as part of the rock to begin with. The daughter product is activly rejected which is why for these systems we can assume the initial state. Loss of material is not linear with time. You must soley be thinking of carbon dating. Please realize that carbon dating is vastly inferior to the forms of dating used for igneous and metamorphic rocks. It is a whole different animal. Yes it seems you are limiting your discussion to carbon dating. Certainly carbon dating has its issues which are discussed in many threads here. But that does not invalidate what I said about the numerous other radioactive dating techniques for dating crystaline rock. These are the important ones that give us the age of the earth. Carbon dating is limited to organics and can only give us ages in the tens of thousands of years.

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No smoking signs by gas stations. No religion in the public square. The government should keep us from being engulfed in flames on earth, and that is pretty much it. -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

All dating techniques use a ratio of parent to daughter. Even carbon dating. The only caveat with carbon dating is that the initial concentration of parent isotope is dependent on the environment which is why you get margins of error based on the CO2 in the atmosphere and marine vs non-marine organics. I have read nearly every scrap of material produced by the RATE project. I don't swallow any claims. I am a student of geology. Also, what is an evolutionary geologist? Evolution is the study of changes in a population of living organisms. Geology is the study of the non-living earth and the things its made of. Do you know anyone who has a degree in evolutionary geology? Solutions of differential equations which I am capable of examining and solving myself with my concentration in mathematics.Initial conditions which can be demonstrated with basic chemistry.Constant decay rates which are established via direct observation and verified via subsequent observations from astronomy.A hard math problem and a few facts hardly make something an assertion. Assertions are things that are unfounded. Perhaps you can show us how the solution to a differential equation is an assertion.

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No smoking signs by gas stations. No religion in the public square. The government should keep us from being engulfed in flames on earth, and that is pretty much it. -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show