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Specifically, he's heard of tests being done on living things and the results (obviously) are way "out of wack" and to him that's enough to negate the entire method altogether.
I have heard of old C14 dates associated with the shells of certain living molluscs. Molluscs make their shells out of calciums carbonate, and an important source of carbon for these species of mollusc is limestone, which is very "old carbon" and so depleted of C14. It is not surprising that the C14 dates in this case would be very old.
Should any further PRATTs come up,
TalkOrigins has a nice master list of the most common ones.
I think that your basic argument is a good one. Radiometric dating is very expensive, and of course geologists, like other scientists, are interested in getting solid, verifiable results. The idea that geologists would waste so much time and effort on a method that is inherently unreliable is laughable to anyone who has any experience in the sciences. Rather than try to prop up an unreliable method, the method would never have been adopted to begin with.
The American Scientific Affiliation (which, incidently, is an evangelical Christian group) has a good web page explaining the issues of radiometric dating. They explain how it is possible to tell in advance that a sample is not suitable for dating, how many radiometric tests have diagnostic procedures associated with them to tell whether the dates are trustworthy, and how radiometric dating has given extremely reliable and consistent dates.
Unfortunately, I suspect that there will be a counter argument that geologists are biased, and purposely skew their results, that a geolgist's career depends on her following the party line. Again, this is laughable to anyone who knows how science works. Science is done at thousands of universities and research intitutions around the world, each one having its own independent hiring procedures. Research is published in hundreds of journals around the world, each one with its own independent board of editors and peer review procedures. Funding is provided by hundreds of governmental and non-governmental foundations, each one with it own selection criteria. How it could be possible to so thoroughly exclude ideas and research that goes against some "party line" in such an anarchic enterprise as science is beyond me. But it is difficult to change the mind set of those who buy into conspiracy theories.
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