How do you know God isn't dead?

[Statler Waldorf]

Yep, it's hard to kill a fictional character.

It’s also hard to kill one that cannot die.

Again you fail to comprehend selective neutrality. For something to be selectively neutral - any conception of a "trial" loses all meaning. A selectively neutral mutation is happenstance Stat, nothing more and nothing less. Nothing acts upon it because there is no way for any action to be directed at it or at it's behest. It's not an issue of possibility, no ones arguing that selectively neutral mutations are possible - I'm simply explaining to you - very blunty, that they exist. If this were the only concept which you failed to comprehend - it would be difficult to see how you could understand evolutionary theory at all - this single omission colors every response in your posts. You need to get that handled man.

And I am bluntly telling you that you do not understand your own theory. According to the theory neutral mutations become fixed in a population through the process known as genetic drift. In genetic drift each subsequent organism is viewed as a trial. It works perfectly in simplistic models, but at the genetic level there are too many variables and too much information and not enough trials to fix these neutral mutations through genetic drift (even if we grant you 10^46 organisms throughout Earth’s history). This is why Evolutionists like Dawkins emphasize fixation through natural selection over the neutral theory.

Clearly not, because you're running an AIG playbook here and it's fucking insulting.

The insurance company?

I'm not defending anything. I just asked you a question. You anticipating my stance toward anything outside the subject matter of my question is an assumption, and my opinion of it hasn't been stated. I asked YOU if assumptions are all that should be verifiable, and if so, I asked YOU, how an assumption could be confirmed. You did not answer either of these questions. Is there a reason why?
[/quote]

Either you reject radiometric dating, which means you probably wouldn’t be asking me such a question, or you accept it and also accept the unverifiable assumptions it’s founded upon and therefore refute your verificationism; I figure it’s the latter.
I did answer your question, it depends on what sort of assumption we are talking about.

TLDR version:

Hello Pocaracas,
In the interest of trimming this down a bit I’ll respond to your abridged version and if there is anything in particular you want me to address in the longer version please let me know and I’ll address it. Sound fair enough?

The creationist is at it again. Science presents several independent methods for dating a rock. Where the methods' domains overlap, they have quite good agreement, thus increasing our confidence on each of the methods.

I am sure you are aware that all rocks that do not agree with the dates they are looking for are tossed out. If all of your methods are based off of the same assumptions, and those assumptions are wrong then you are going to get consistent but wrong dates. I want rocks of empirically verifiable age accurately dated by the method, unfortunately that’s never been done before.

However, the creationist dismisses them due to some assumption that has to be made in all of them, and in all of them the assumption has to be wrong, because it contradicts the creationist's book.

If you’re making assumptions that would be wrong if the Creation model were true and then using those assumptions to argue against the Creation model then that’s begging the question.

Independent erroneous assumptions about completely different physical principles, yielding the same results, is the same as saying that the laws of physics must have been different in the past.

Natural laws are descriptive, not normative, so they could very well have been different in the past. However, the decay rate of a nuclear isotope itself is not a law of physics it’s merely an observable rate; we know rates vary.

So I hear the creationist saying that the Universe has been changing its laws in such a way that science cannot grasp... in such a way as to make science consistently arrive at the wrong results... all this, because a specific people a few thousands of years ago MUST, obviously, have gotten word from the creator itself, and wrote a book where they detailed the whole account.

Again, Creationists believe in the uniformity of natural law, but that is not the same thing as the assumption of uniformitarianism, which they reject. You actually reject this assumption as well when it serves your model, for example you believe the observed lunar recession rate due to tidal friction was far slower in the past because of supposed global ice ages even though according to the laws of physics it should have been faster in the past. Creationists believe nuclear decay rates were different in the past due to a global flood. Why are you allowed to violate the assumption but they are not?

Thus the creationist dismisses consistent independently corroborated assumptions, while retaining the fully unsupported assumption that those people wrote reality.
Talk about intellectual dishonesty!

Yes, there’s some intellectual dishonesty at play here, but it’s not on the part of the Creationists. You know good and well that radiometric dating does not always yield consistent results, you also know that it does not accurately date rocks of known age, you also know now that there are dating methods that contradict its results (i.e. lunar recession, soft tissue in pre-historic fossils, and the faint young sun paradox). Let’s not overplay your hand my friend.

You see physics works when it deals with computers, the internet, satellite communication, sending a man to the moon, saving your ass with an MRI, but dating rocks??? Are you kiddin me?

Why are you confusing historical sciences with empirical sciences? For a mistake that’s far too great, even for you. It is kind of funny that you brought up sending a man to the moon (which was spearheaded by a young Earth creationist) and the MRI (which was invented by a young Earth creationist), you cannot make this stuff up; life is fantastically ironic.