quote:
What's the stock evo answer to this? anyone know? And any creationists or IDers have an opinion on this?
My take on it is that the Radio carbon dating method is the most unreliable dating method of all the radiometric testing. A brief history: Carbon dating was a theoretcially brilliant tool invented by Willard Libby who earned a Nobel for his efforts. The intended purpose for Carbon dating was to date artifacts of antiquity and not to date fossilized bone. In other words, it was desinged for archeologists not paleontologists.
The methodology behind the theory is that the common carbon-12 (C-12) in the atmosphere can synthesize into very unstable carbon-14 (c-14), which is what they are actualy looking for. The specimen must be organic and must be in a relatively good condition in order to establish a date. There are a few problems associated with it. First, Libby himself stated that ascertaining an age estimate could be decieving because the earth's atmosphere had not yet reached equilibrium, not to mention how atomic testing in the mid 20th century could have potentialy compromised the integrity of any given specimen. As well, the most condemning is the calibration method, which uses unempirical testing to ascertain an age estimate. The problem with this is that its a clear cut case of garbage-in, garbage-out, because its readings are completely effected by the preconcieved notions of the experimentor who might already assume an age estimate in his/her mind, thus, showing a case of bias towards a certain epoch. Finally, even when all of this is not an issue, living penguins and snails have been tested into thousands of years. That's obviously not the case because they are living and currently have mass quantities of carbon inside them. As well, its been noted that parts of one sample will be sent to one laboratory to have been aged at, say, 17,000 years, while part of the other specimen would be dated at 31,000 years at a different laboratory. A discrpency as small as 2.0% equates to a huge discrepency in time, equalling thousands of years of difference. Aside from which, it is impossible to date anything past 50,000 years, yet, many evolutionists have tried to employ the C-14 method on saurian fossils, allegedly dating into millions of years. That's impossible. No carbon could exist in an organism past a few thousand years, and even that which does remain still has all the other problems I listed associated with it.
Final analysis: Its unreliable unless properly calibrated and only if dates well-preserved carbonaceous material under a few thousand years, i.e. well-preserved papyrus.
Edited by nemesis_juggernaut, : edit to add
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