The dating game

I have a firm believe in the Bible, as for the dating methods, if I seem to make myself look like an expert in that field, I have misled you. I am not an expert in that field, and will not be for a long time, if ever.

Then you should have not stated that Ar-Ar has the same problem. At the least you should have said something like: "Doesn't this have the same problem?"

But in fact you were given the Dating from a Christian perspective reference. Which isn't all that much reading and covers it pretty well. That would have told you that Ar-Ar does not have the same problem. You shouldn't have had to ask.

To simplify things a bit what you should understand is that the creationist sites and "experts" have had plenty of time to learn about this. What you need to understand is that they are deliberately misleading you. I think the technical term for it is "lying".

They deliberately leave out important information about the dating techniques.

The take-away from this is don't trust what you are being told by these guys.

Isn`t a dating game something young man and women do in a single`s bar?
(Sorry about that but I couldn`t help it...)

But it has been done?

Yes, I think it has been accurately done for at least thirty years.

And what kind of agreement with measurements do you get?

As perfect as possible. It is not within our technological abilities to detect the difference between the predicted value and the observed value. If there is a difference it would be a while before we have the technology to detect it.

What are the inputs? E.g., speed of light, h bar etc.

h bar and the speed of light aren't inputs, only conversion factors. The true, non-chosen, inputs would be the fine structure constant, the weak and strong coupling constants and a few particle masses.

The true, non-chosen, inputs would be the fine structure constant, the weak and strong coupling constants and a few particle masses

All directly measureable values.

Thanks for the input.

Wow. That was fast. I got my free PDF copy of Evernden et al. by email this morning. I think I'm gonna like interlibrary loan!

Creation moonbat website claimed: On pages 171-174 they discuss why all but one potassium/argon date for the Rusinga Island bioites was discarded. Yet they use biotite in an uncritical manor in other areas where the dates they obtained matched their expectations.

I will be quoting directly form Evernden et al.; I am assuming that the amount quoted will lie within fair use standards.

Evernden et al., p. 172: The potassium-argon results obtained on biotite samplescollected from the tuffaceous sediments of Rusinga Island are highly variable.

In other words, rather than hiding a problem, they are admitting it to the world that obtaining reliable dates is difficult.

Evernden et al., p. 172: These detrital sediments lie upon a Precambrian surface and may be expected to contain significant fractions of Precambrian biotite. [Bolding added.]

On other words, the problem is contamination with far older material. If YEC were true, the Precambrian material would not be very old, and so the contamination would not have led to older dates. It is because the Precambrian material is so old that this problem is occurring.

Evernden et al., p. 172: If such occurs, widely variable K-A dates may result with the minimum age yielding the best estimate of the age of the deposits. If the sample yielding the the minimum age has characteristics that reduce the possiblilty of contamination, we can accept the figure obtained from it as a close estimate of the true age of the deposit. [Bolding is added.]

In other words, it's not a question of choosing the one date that "matches expectations". The best date will be the youngest, and there is no guarantee that this one is going to match "expectations".

Evernden et al., p. 172, 174: The sample used for KA 336 was composed of large (1/2" diameter) euhedral biotite books collected from tuffaceous sediments at the site R 107 in the Kiahera Series. This site is stratigraphically below most fossil-vertebrate localities on Rusinga Island. All other determinations were made on fine-grained biotite concentrated from tuffaceous sediments, all of which might have appreciable contaminating components. The obtained argon-potassium "ages" indicate high contamination: KA 656 -- 22.2 million years, KA 800 -- 42.0 million years, KA 801 -- 167 million years, KA 802 -- 107 million years. Thus our best estimate for the age of the deposits on Rusinga Island is that of KA 336, that is, 15.3 ± 1.5 × 106 years, an age equivalent to the Barstovian of North America. The fossil evidence from these deposits does not appear to contradict this age. [Bolding is added.]

In other words, we actually see a large spread of ages. The "best" age was not chosen, rather, it was determined that the "best" age would be the youngest, and it still might have been older that the fossil evidence would have indicated.

The youngest sample was examined, it was determined that contamination from the un-YEC ancient Precambrian was less likely, and, indeed, the it was close to the age suggested by the fossil evidence, ages that were determined elsewhere by more reliable means.

So, everything seems on the up and up. I certainly see no signs that problems are being hidden or brushed under the rug. Their procedure is explained, the data is given, and anyone anywhere can look at this paper and make up their own minds as to the reasoning of the authors.

Edited by Chiroptera, : added subtitle

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Well done! If I may underscore, the discordant ages were both published and discussed in detail. I supose one might disagree with the reasons for discarding the older ages (I can't see how, but maybe someone could) … but there's no question there's no suppression of discordant ages and no conspiracy to do so.

This one might be worth writing up for the Index of Creationist Claims.

I just brought up these "conflicts" with radioactive dating to see what evolutionists have to say specifically about such claims.

And what you find out, is that

• physicist and geologists (not "evolutionists"^(a)) know more about these "problems" that you were told about by the websites that said they were "conflicts"
• that far from being "conflicts" that they are well known and that there are reasonable explanations for the discrepancies
• that it is the physicist and geologists that originally note the possible sources of errors in different types of dating methods, and that
• then the "creatortionistas" (those posters of your source sites) go and do exactly what the scientists say will produce errors (thus confirming the science),
• that these "creatortionistas" are misrepresenting the truth on these sites, and
• that for every instance of some supposed "conflict" in dating there are thousands of valid dates that demonstrate the earth is substantially older than any YEC concept can explain.

In like mind I presented to you a link to a thread that has, not just a couple of instances of possible "conflicts", but several actual lines of evidence that directly contradicts and invalidates the concept for a young earth: evidence compiled, documented, referenced and correlated into a cohesive whole.

I put together this thread to see what creationists have to say specifically about such evidence. The silence is deafening.

I could set aside days worth of time and look at papers, different sources, books and learn that way. But I find this forum an easier tool to get a faster response to certain questions.

So if you are really interested in learning (rather than an empty repeating of words from someone else), then I expect you to read, question and comment on Age Correlations and an Old Earth: Version 1 No 3 (formerly Part III). Call it expecting as much from yourself as you expect from others.

All in all, I have not lost confidence in my belief, but I do see how creationists are at their infant stages when it comes to knowledge about dating.

Belief has nothing to do with the age of the earth. The age of the earth is a fact. What that age is can be determined from the evidence within certain parameters, and those parameters point to it being between 4.5 billion and 4.6 billion years old.

I agree that many people that call themselves creationists have a very rudimentary - infantile - knowledge of dating methods and the science that is involved and the evidence that validates the science. This leaves them innocent and gullible when it comes to information such as you have come across -- especially when they don't make any effort to find out the validity of those claims.

I also agree that "creatortionistas" are infantile in their intentional misuse of science to prove what science already knows ... that (a) there are some problems with any dating method and (b) "creatortionistas" are not doing valid science.

The life of christ does not depend on the age of the earth to be valid eh? It also does not depend on misrepresenting the truth.

Enjoy.

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^(a) - There is really no purpose for the use of the term "evolutionist" here other than to demonstrate an ignorance of the various sciences that ARE involved. Evolution has nothing to do with the various sciences involved in dating methods, it is not a "belief" system, and it is not any kind of umbrella term. Strictly speaking and "evolutionist" would be a biologist specializing in evolution or a person arguing for evolutionary biology. Dating is not biology.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

Stegve Carlip is pretty guru-ish. From The Constancy of Constants, Part 2:

This could make a pretty good topic all on it's own: The Stability of Constants.

As I said on another post, it is not just the lack of evidence for changes in constants in the past that makes it illogical to consider in science, but the lack of a mechanism that could cause such a change that makes it unscientific to even consider.

You need a mechanism, then predictions of the effect of that on the constants and how that could be tested, then you need to test the hypothesis ...

Thanks.

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Join the effort to unravel AIDS/HIV, unfold Proteomes, fight Cancer,
compare Fiocruz Genome and fight Muscular Dystrophy with Team EvC! (click)

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

As I said on another post, it is not just the lack of evidence for changes in constants in the past that makes it illogical to consider in science, but the lack of a mechanism that could cause such a change that makes it unscientific to even consider.

According Sheldrake Dirac suggested change of G 1*10-13 per year.

I don't see reason why constants couldn't change. Is it something like platonic ideas that existed before Big-bang? There was once no time, no space and yet value of constants had been fixed already and there was no change of G from the beginning? "On the beginning there was fixed Gravity constant".

Materialists should consider constants and physical laws as something secondary what is function of matter and caused by matter. Not sometning platonic a-priori without beginning and end what rules the world and what the blind matter follows.

Just questions.
Enjoy.

quote:

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I don't see reason why constants couldn't change.

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There isn't any reason. It's that the best data available indicates that they have been constant.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Materialists should consider constants and physical laws as something secondary what is function of matter and caused by matter.

Next, you can teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

Next, you can teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

You are a hard-core darwinist who don't know where Central Asia is as far as I remember.

It's that the best data available indicates that they have been constant.

And yet theories that constants could change seems no to be dead. According Wikipedia on Fine-structure constant:

quote:

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More recently, technology improvements have made it possible to probe the value of at much larger distances and to much greater accuracy. In 1999, a team lead by John K. Webb of the University of New South Wales claimed the first detection of a variation in .[9][10][11][12] Using the Keck telescopes and a data set of 128 quasars at redshifts 0.5

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And this is article from 2006:

quote:

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Our model with an inverse Dirac gravitation explains the observation of Anderson et al [2] from the motion of space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 at distances of 10 to 15 AU from the sun, that during 8 years an additional acceleration towards the sun of aP =
(8±3)×10-8 cm/s2 as measured in addition to the standard acceleration.
.
.
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All these speculations may have to be modified in the case that the elementary constants h, c and e are not constant from a possible change of the fine structure constant [8] or even of c [9].

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_structure_constant

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/VISITING_FELLOWS&PROFESSORS/pdf/DiracGravitationB.pdf

Yup. There's a possibility that the fine structuere constant changed by a percent or two billions of years before the Earth formed. Changes of the order required by creationists and changes in the last few billion years have been ruled out.

I don't see a reason why darwinists stick on unchanged values of constants. Change of constants as well as change of physical laws should be something real as change of animals. And yet darwinists - probably much more than physicists - are vey afraid of changes of constants. They are as rigid as fundamentalist. I see no reason - exept reevaluation of radioactive dating of course.