Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1

Well, if you're going to delve into puns you could describe them as all wet and much in need of hydrotherapy.But more seriously, it is simply amazing the nonsense YECs come up with to try to explain the the age of the earth and the biblical flood in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.I call these "what ifs.""What if" the decay constant varies? There's no evidence that it does, but "what if" it did?The vapor canopy and wildly fluctuating decay constant are classic "what ifs" -- totally unsupported by scientific evidence, but enough to let some YECs delude themselves that science supports their religious beliefs when it really contradicts those beliefs.And there you have some of the differences between creation "science" and real science.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Creationists keep bringing up the phony issue of residual C14 in objects too old to contain C14, and they use this to support their mistaken idea of a young earth. Their "issue" with radiocarbon dating is based on 1) their lack of understanding of the AMS method and the many possible sources of C14 at those incredibly small quantities, and 2) wishful thinking.Here is a long and detailed article on the subject. RATE’s Radiocarbon: Intrinsic or Contamination?A pertinent sample:

Taylor and Southon have also measured unprocessed diamond, finding a similar range of 0.005 to 0.03 pMC without background subtraction. They interpret this result as their instrument background, primarily due to ion source memory. Their ion source current varied, unintentionally, over about a factor of two, perhaps due to crystal face orientation or to conductivity differences between samples. The oldest 14C age equivalents were measured on natural diamonds which exhibited the highest current yields [4]. This important observation provides evidence about the source of the radiocarbon.

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If the radiocarbon were intrinsic to the sample, there would be no change in the radiocarbon ratio with sample current. The 14C, 13C, and 12C would change in unison. However, if the radiocarbon were coming from ion source memory or elsewhere in the accelerator, it should give a count rate independent of ion source current. Normalizing the radiocarbon count rate to the ion source current, which is predominantly 12C, would result in higher radiocarbon content for lower source currents, as observed. This data provides clear evidence that at least a significant fraction of the radiocarbon detected by Taylor and Southon in diamond measurements did not come from the diamonds themselves and thus could not be intrinsic radiocarbon.

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The lower values for unprocessed diamond and the current-dependent behavior find no explanation in Baumgardner’s intrinsic radiocarbon model. But these results fit well with the Taylor and Southon evidence that instrument background (specifically ion source memory) is material-dependent, with diamond exhibiting significantly less ion source memory than graphite. The radiocarbon detected in natural, unprocessed diamond measurements seems to be nothing more than instrument background.

Read the entire article and you will see that this is a phony issue, and shows creationists' misunderstanding of the AMS method rather than evidence of a young earth.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

In the Ark/Flood thread you responded to my post with this: 1) The RATE study, funded and run by creationists, attempted to show that the decay rate varied. It failed, and they had to admit that the rate has been constant for hundreds of millions of years.a, b, d) We are aware of the fluctuation in the atmospheric content of C14. This was first described by de Vries (1958), just a few years after the development of the C14 dating method. To account for this, a calibration curve has been worked out using tree ring dating and several other methods of correlation. The atmospheric variation was found to be less than 10% at the greatest.c) Carbon is absorbed into living organisms from the environment. The C14 in the ocean matches that in the atmosphere fairly closely (see below). Creeks and rivers are different; they can have a lot more old carbon from limestone, and thus are not good dating materials. This means old limestone could alter freshwater shellfish, making them look much older than they are. There is a much smaller effect from "reservoir" carbon in oceans, but that is easily identified and accounted for. A lot of study has been devoted to dating charcoal and marine shells from the exact same proveniences (hearths, for example).2) You (or actually the source you cut-and-pasted from) are thinking of other forms of radiometric dating, not radiocarbon dating.3) We do not assume that. We constantly look for contamination, and eliminate it. We date multiple specimens--my last large archaeological project produced 31 radiocarbon dates.Now, I typed that from my own knowledge, without having to hunt the web. You, apparently, know nothing about the subject and are forced to cut-and-paste material from creationist websites and you have no idea how accurate it is. In this case, it is not very accurate at all.Care to try again?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Are you ducking out on us?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Right.But wait! There's more!We have been told that the flood was a global flood (though a few are now backing off those claims).And biblical scholars have reached a general agreement of about 4,350 years ago for the global flood, with fewer and fewer estimates older than about 5,000 years ago.This means that evidence for the global flood should be... (wait for it)... GLOBAL! And RECENT! It should be in my back yard and your back yard and in creationists' back yards not too far beneath the surface.So here is the challenge for creationists: learn some archaeological techniques (local colleges and universities are the place to start) and get busy digging in your back yards. If there was a global flood you will find the evidence at a relatively shallow depth, one which can be dated by a variety of methods. If, by chance, you live in an asphalt and concrete jungle don't try digging in the nearest park--you'll get more attention than you probably want. But you could volunteer on an archaeological excavation, or take an archaeological field school. You don't have to tell them you are a creationist: just pay attention to the strata and their ages (the archaeologists will help fill you in on the data) and check out those strata closest to 4,350 years ago. If you see evidence of a flood at that time period you've got something!The problem you might run into is that early geologists, creationists set on proving the validity of the flood, gave up on it just about 200 years ago. The evidence wasn't there. When archaeology developed as a profession a bit later in the 19th century no evidence of Noah's flood was found using their different techniques--which dealt with soils rather than geological strata. No evidence of a global flood has been found since, right up to the present day, in either profession.In doing archaeology I've probably tested over 100 sites that cross-cut that time period and I've found no evidence of a flood in the areas in which I've worked. But if I could find and document such an event they'd create a special Nobel Prize just for the occasion! You can bet if there was any real evidence I'd be seeking it out and documenting it to a fine degree, and I'd be more famous than Galileo and all those other old guys. But the evidence is just not there: all of the various sciences that have examined the earth in ways that surely would have found such evidence have instead found that the evidence is conspicuous by its absence. Agreed.And while they're at it, they should explain why there is an absence of evidence for a global flood at the agreed-upon date in their back yards and everywhere else.

There is a lot of good information on this site:http://www.radiocarbon.org/IntCal04.htmThe first link, "IntCal04 calibration curve" leads to a lot of graphs of the calibration curve.The actual datasets are also given in additional links.

All of the credible evidence shows that the earth is old and that there was no global flood during historic times.Those who argue to the contrary are not doing science, but are anti-science--they are promoting religious mythology in the face of massive scientific evidence that contradicts that mythology.The age correlations at the heart of this thread are one of the major stumbling blocks to both young earth and recent global flood, but the TRVE believers are not swayed by any amount of scientific evidence that contradicts their beliefs. In fact, for many of them, nothing will convince them that these two beliefs are wrong. They do not rely on evidence, much less scientific evidence, for their beliefs and so will not change those beliefs for such evidence.These are classic examples of Heinlein's statement that, "Belief gets in the way of learning."

I've been waiting for some breakthroughs in this field. Current AMS dates are $595 at Beta Analytic. If we could get some significant cost drop we could do a lot more samples. Additional accuracy would be a nice side benefit as well.

I am familiar with YEC's and their claims regarding radiocarbon dating. They just make things up based on what they need the answers to be, no matter what the facts really are. That 95% figure is from some study some creationist did back in the 1960s. You know how much you can trust that!So far, I have done 611 radiocarbon dates; that is way more, I suspect, than all of these rabid creationists combined! I have written a monograph on radiocarbon dating and delivered lectures to professional societies. I was even on the advisory board for a university radiocarbon laboratory a couple of decades ago.When creationists want to tell me how things are in radiocarbon dating they better bring some evidence and leave the belief and myths behind.And there are a couple of other folks here who are probably even more experienced, particularly in the nuclear chemistry part of the technique.Creationists should tread with caution in this neck of the woods.

Answering just one of your silly questions: Tree rings provide accurate counts taking us years into the past. They correlate within historic times with volcanic activity. No serious researchers question their accuracy.The calibration curve is made by dating those individual rings! For the recent part of the curve the rings are dated annually, while for the older parts of the curve they are dated in five or ten year increments.What this does is allow a calibration curve to be constructed which corrects for atmospheric variation. As creationists are wont to point out, the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere is not constant due to fluctuations in cosmic rays and changes in the earth's magnetic field, etc. (They only know this because scientists discovered it--creationists are drawn to research about as much as vampires are drawn to garlic.)Once the individual tree rings are dated, the difference between a known date (the tree ring) and a radiocarbon age can be established. Calibrating this radiocarbon age allows accurate dates to be obtained from unknown materials.So, to answer this question:This method tells us what happened in the past and allows us to correct for atmospheric variation. We know what happened in the past because we have the tree rings from the past!The dates obtained from C-14 dating are not consistently off, they are calibrated so that they are correct.----------I'll await your response to this specific question and once we get this one thrashed out we can move on. No Gish gallop!

The RATE team, with over a million dollars of creationist money, set out to prove that decay constants weren't constant.They failed.Read a summary of the results below:Assessing the RATE Project: Essay Review by Randy Isaac:
Assessing the RATE ProjectDo the RATE Findings Negate Mainstream Science?:
http://184.173.80.159/...RATEFindingsNegateMainstreamScience

Nice try, but no cigar. There is no "independent evidence" for a year-long global flood about 4500 years ago. There is no evidence for that at all! On the other hand, there is massive evidence that there was no global flood about 4500 years ago.The 500 million years in the Phanerozoic strata sequence is not negated by reference to a flood that never happened. To attempt to use a mythical event such as this "global flood" to calibrate the Phanerozoic strata sequence is just to make things up so it all comes out the way you want. That's the exact opposite of science.By the way, I have independent evidence from my own archaeological work that there was no global flood about 4500 years ago. A skeleton I dated at 5300 years ago had DNA that matched living individuals in the same area, and that DNA didn't match that of peoples from the Near East. That shows continuity of a human population across the 4500 year line in North America, and that evidence by itself disproves the flood.There is another similar example from other archaeologists working in the western US that shows continuity from 10,300 years to living individuals. This kind of evidence, in fact, is found all over the world.(See signature, below.)

I realize there have been a lot of responses to your posts, but you haven't yet responded to my post, Message 120, which contains evidence that:

1) your contention regarding the Phanerozoic strata sequence of the Grand Canyon-Colorado Plateau region is incorrect, leading to

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2) the contention that you made regarding accelerated nuclear decay is incorrect, and further,

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3) there was, based on archaeological and genetic evidence, no global flood during the past 10,000 years.

I would appreciate a reply if time permits.

RAZD and others have been providing you with correlations among a variety of dating methods, while you have been providing nothing but "what-ifs" in reply. "What-ifs" are imagined reasons why things might not be as scientists have determined, provided with no supporting data.Example: Scientist: The sky is blue. Creationist: But what if it was pink in the past?Here is an article that should take care of a lot of your what-ifs, if you are honest about research: Radiocarbon calibration curve spanning 0 to 50,000 years BP based on paired 230Th/234U/238U and 14C dates on pristine coralsRichard G. Fairbanks, et al.

Abstract: Radiocarbon dating is the most widely used dating technique in the world. Recent advances in Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) and sample preparation techniques have reduced the sample-size requirements by a factor of 1000 and decreased the measurement time from weeks to minutes. Today, it is estimated that more than 90 percent of all measurements made on accelerator mass spectrometers are for radiocarbon age dates. The production of 14C in the atmosphere varies through time due to changes in the Earth's geomagnetic field intensity and in its concentration, which is regulated by the carbon cycle. As a result of these two variables, a radiocarbon age is not equivalent to a calendar age. Four decades of joint research by the dendrochronology and radiocarbon communities have produced a radiocarbon calibration data set of remarkable precision and accuracy extending from the present to approximately 12,000 calendar years before present. This paper presents high precision paired 230Th/234U/238U and 14C age determinations on pristine coral samples that enable us to extend the radiocarbon calibrationcurve from 12,000 to 50,000 years before present. We developed a statistical model to properly estimate sample age conversion from radiocarbon years to calendar years, taking full account of combined errors in input ages and calibration uncertainties. Our radiocarbon calibration program is publicly accessible at: sonny apache server along with full documentation of the samples, data, and our statistical calibration model.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/...rticle/pii/S0277379105001654 Fig. 3. Our coral calibration curve plotted with 1% confidence limits (corresponds to 3σ uncertainties for normal distributions) and coral data plotted with 1σ error bars. Calibration curve is compared to the tree ring chronologies (Reimer et al., 2004; Friedrich et al., 2004).------------------------The above is a calibration curve made from two tree ring chronologies and a coral series.At this point you should be starting to get the idea that there is some real science behind these dating methods, and that the creationists' examples are all based on "what-ifs" with no supporting data--especially when multiple dating methods agree as closely as they do.

This post contains no evidence that tree-ring dating is unreliable.Your first example shows that some bristlecone pines are growing faster now than in the past. For dating purposes, what would matter is whether they are growing more, or fewer, rings. This study notes that some of the trees are growing thicker rings. That is not evidence that tree-ring dating is inaccurate.Your second example discussed trees thought, from visual inspection, to be at least 1,000 years old. Tree-ring dating showed they were younger. That is not evidence that tree-ring dating is inaccurate.You really need to select your examples with some care that they actually support your arguments.