(February 12, 2023 at 7:10 pm)jerrymass Wrote: My friend said his friend James Hincley at his church told him that this method is proved wrong constantly. He said they tried to date the pyramids and were way off. That an independent study was more accurate not using that method. He also said they tried to date how old a shark was and they were wrong as hell. He claims they are disproven all the time a nd that science is making this stuff up. Now I personally believe in scientists but do some of them make mistakes or he just cherry picking?
Speaking as somebody who has actually done radiometric dating, the ages produced are typically both accurate and robust if the techniques are appropriate and applied properly.
Given the complete lack of context it's difficult to say much other than "Don't trust Christian apologists when it comes to science!" When somebody tells me that some Creationist organization has once again tried to get a radiometric age and gotten the wrong one what I here is that an amateur with an obvious bias has misused a tool that they didn't understand and gotten a poor result. A bit like claiming that hammers don't work because they're no good for changing light bulbs.
Take this poor shark for example. Why is some fool trying to date a living organism?!? Of course it's going to throw errors! The radiocarbon clock doesn't start ticking until you die. In a similar attempt, apologists tried to show that geological ages were wrong by dating fresh lava. That proved only that they were using the wrong technique and, amusingly, that the 37,000 year age that they obtained was entirely correct once you accounted for the +/-100,000 year error of the method that was used.
Trying to date a pyramid would be tricky and is way younger than anything that I typically work with but if I were to take a stab at it I'd try and date the grave goods. Dating the rock is pointless. You'd just find out when the rock formed if you managed that much. By contrast, the grave goods would be amenable to radiocarbon, dendrochronology on any wood, fission track dating on pottery or glass, and if you want to get flashy you can try for some of the secular uranium daughter product equilibrium schemes. Given a reasonable number of analyses by several different methods you ought to be able to bracket the date of the funeral to within a couple of decades. This is assuming that the pyramid contained grave goods and hasn't been looted.
