The Creationists' Nightmare

[frankiej]

Wait...wait..wait, are you arguing against science here or for science? You seem to be slipping back and forth as it suits your idiotic beliefs.

Yeah, I wasn't sure whether to post a facepalm picture or not.

[Whateverist]

I agree that scientists for the most part do not have an agenda. They simply look for naturalistic solutions. That's all good until we run into a solution that may not be natural.

I know I'm repeating myself but here goes anyway. There are no non-natural solutions/explanations. There is only the sorting of that which can and cannot be explained. That which you would call a solution which may not be natural would really be an unexplainable mystery. So long as "God did it" remains a black box, nothing has been explained. The minute you start to tell us how God did it you are back on track to explain something because you have again entered the natural world.

[Undeceived]

Your whole argument rests on one big "if", which isn't particularly plausible. You will need more support than christian dogma.

If not absolute dating, by what do you know the earth is old?

As to what you said about K-Ar; The rocks may not have been on the surface for very long, but have been in the earth for as long as the K-Ar dating says they have.

K-Ar dates to when the igneous rock was created, i.e. spit out of a volcano.

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If the dates "correspond uncannily" to your fairy tale then one would be at a loss to explain why they went extinct 65 million years ago.

Why do their fossils still contain carbon then? If you carbon-date, they are ~10,000 years old, before calculating error. Suppose just for a second dinosaurs are a couple thousand years old. Then C-14 was correct, and K-Ar was wrong (as it should be for such small dates). All dating first requires a ball-park guess at the age range.

[The Grand Nudger]

If not absolute dating, by what do you know the earth is old?

Time machines. Whats that? You don't believe me? Well, HG Wells "The Time Machine" states that blah blah blah....

[Taqiyya Mockingbird]

Those gaps could just as easily disabuse us of some particular notion as they could reinforce them, which is why, for example, I asked for a pre-cambrian platypus.

You're asking for a date that doesn't exist. According to creationism, the earth is no more than 6,000 years old. If you carbon-dated the oldest fossils, that's how old they would come out to be (Google carbon-dated dinosaurs. Not only do their fossils contain carbon which should all have decayed long ago, but the dates correspond uncannily to the Christian Bible). All cambrian dates are done with K-Ar or similar methods done on the rocks around the fossil. The methods require an assumption that the earth is old. If the earth is young, K-Ar is not accurate. We see this in the rocks of recent volcanic eruptions. We know the rocks are young, but they date to millions or billions of years (it's all over the place). They are simply too contaminated with the daughter isotope.

Uh, yeah.....<ahrrrm...>

[Cato]

You're asking for a date that doesn't exist. According to creationism, the earth is no more than 6,000 years old. If you carbon-dated the oldest fossils, that's how old they would come out to be (Google carbon-dated dinosaurs. Not only do their fossils contain carbon which should all have decayed long ago, but the dates correspond uncannily to the Christian Bible). All cambrian dates are done with K-Ar or similar methods done on the rocks around the fossil. The methods require an assumption that the earth is old. If the earth is young, K-Ar is not accurate. We see this in the rocks of recent volcanic eruptions. We know the rocks are young, but they date to millions or billions of years (it's all over the place). They are simply too contaminated with the daughter isotope.

You really have no clue what you are saying, do you?

Do the creationsit sites that you get this crap from ever mention what a xenolith is? K/Ar is accurate and not all over the place as you suggest.

Contaminated with the daughter isotope? This statement alone proves your ignorance of radiometric dating. It's the daughter isotopes that scientists are interested in (well, more precisely the ratio of the daughter isotope to the parent isotope). You absurdly talk about 'contamination' with the daughter isotopes when in fact this is exactly what's being counted.

Another indication that you have no clue is again related to your use of the work contamination. You know there is a creationist argument in here somewhere and its related to the daughter isotope, but you are only blathering what you've hear or read and don't understand the science. The daughter isotopes of potassium and argon are gaseous, which means the issue isn't their contamination of the sample (already addressed), but that they can escape the rock when it is subjected to heat cycles. This is why this particular radiometric technique is only used on igneous rocks.

At least try to understand what the AIG or other creationists are saying before rolling into an forum like this with such obviously ignorant assertions.

[Annik]

I've taught my dogs German, English and hand language, I know it's not that your dogs dumb, it must be your lack of ability to teach.

There is so much wrong in this statement.
1. Dogs are associative learners. You could use the words "Booga Booga" for sit and they would sit. They don't understand "Booga Booga", they just recognize the sounds and your tone of voice (the have also evolved to read human facial emotions).

2. It's called sign language. As an ASL signer, this particularly bothers me.

3. There are some dogs that do not respond as well to training. There are also dogs that excel in it. Aussie Shepherds are amazing learners.

[Undeceived]

K/Ar is accurate and not all over the place as you suggest.

http://www.earthage.org/EarthOldorYoung/..._Earth.htm
Scroll down to table one and look at Hualalai or Russian volcano.

Contaminated with the daughter isotope? This statement alone proves your ignorance of radiometric dating. It's the daughter isotopes that scientists are interested in (well, more precisely the ratio of the daughter isotope to the parent isotope). You absurdly talk about 'contamination' with the daughter isotopes when in fact this is exactly what's being counted.

"Contamination" means that there is an excess of the daughter isotope to start, in K-Ar's case, Argon. That makes the rock look older than it is. You might hope the daughter will escape into the atmosphere to balance out, but that's not always the case. If it does not escape during forming, it will not at all. Experiments on recent volcanoes have shown this. Basalt, for example, is no longer used or shouldn't be used because of its excess 40Ar (explanation: http://www.detectingdesign.com/radiometricdating.html ) Some old-earth advocates choose to ignore this, as you can see in the "oldest rocks" discovered in Canada, which are... basalt. ( http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/157...in_canada/ )
If the rocks of recent volcanoes are not good for dating, how can we be sure past ones are?

[Taqiyya Mockingbird]

From your third link:

" A strip of bedrock located in the eastern area of Canada’s Hudson Bay was discovered to have the oldest rocks on Earth, said scientists on Thursday. The rocks were formed about 4.28 billion years ago"


HERP A DERP DERP



PS: Your other two sources are YECCH-derp (read: "whacko") propaganda bullshit sites. Which means they are not sources at all.

[Cato]

[quote='Undeceived' pid='299568' dateline='1339704957']
[quote]http://www.earthage.org/EarthOldorYoung/Radiometric_Dating_and_The_Age_of_the_Earth.htm
Scroll down to table one and look at Hualalai or Russian volcano.


"Contamination" means that there is an excess of the daughter isotope to start, in K-Ar's case, Argon. That makes the rock look older than it is. You might hope the daughter will escape into the atmosphere to balance out, but that's not always the case. If it does not escape during forming, it will not at all. Experiments on recent volcanoes have shown this. Basalt, for example, is no longer used or shouldn't be used because of its excess 40Ar (explanation: http://www.detectingdesign.com/radiometricdating.html ) Some old-earth advocates choose to ignore this, as you can see in the "oldest rocks" discovered in Canada, which are... basalt. ( http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/157...in_canada/ )
If the rocks of recent volcanoes are not good for dating, how can we be sure past ones are? [/quote]


Confirmation bias at its best. You seem to ignore all of the other volcanoes where the K/Ar returned 'zero' year results consistent with expectations. In the case of Hualalai, the dating was specifically conducted on Olivine inclusions purposefully extracted for measurement. The 22 million year result was appropriate since the inclusions were known to be old. The scientists were not measuring the age of the igneous rock from the lava flow. Your claim that this is proof that K/Ar dating is innacurate and as false as it is disingenuous.

K/Ar dating is routinely used on basalts. Scientists understand the model limits and account for them in what is known as 'error' (I am hoping that you understand what error means when describing measurement results). Even if we allow for a very generous amount of pre-decay argon that we can estimate to be equivalent to 500,000 years, what does this really mean when we are measuring the age of rocks in billions of years? Do you realize how insignificant this error is?