How do you know God isn't dead?

[pocaracas]

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?

That'll do fine... If you hadn't done it, I'd start using the TLDR versioin on my next post (or this one!)

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.

Aye, not all rocks agree.... that's because the Earth is far from static and rocks mix and mingle, ending up with young rock contaminating old rocks. If the person taking the sample is not careful with it, contamination becomes easy.

Not all methods are based on the same assumptions. but I guess you know that, but choose to ignore it. more dishonesty...

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.

No,nonononononononoNO.
I'm simply trying to put myself in your shoes... for once (didn't like it, will avoid it at all costs).
You say the assumptions must be wrong because they disagree with your book. Or is that not the reason why you claim the assumptions present in all dating mechanisms must be wrong?

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.

They could have been different, but there's no evidence supporting that view.... And what sort of force(s)/field(s) would make them different, oh great and powerful, all-knowing, creationist?
About the decay rate of nuclear isotopes...Indeed the exponential decay is experimentally derived... and, as such, only based of the limited temporal span of the experiment.... But it fits oh so well to the curve... And nature likes exponentials only too much... and there's no reason to think that the exponential turns into something else as we go back... Why? I told you! Short lived radionuclides follow the exponential to the letter. Long lived ones behave similarly in the lab, for new fresh off a volcano rocks, for Mt Vesuvius rocks, and others.... If they follow the same exponential law regardless of their age, then why would we even dream that they followed a different law in the remote past?

OH yeah.... the laws of physics must have changed in the meantime... -.-'

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?

Global flood causing radioactive decays to change?! What was that flood made of?!
Sorry, but this has got to go in here!



About the moon, the radioisotope dating methods have placed the moon at ~4.5 Billion years old. That matches quite well with the oldest rocks on Earth.
When do rocks begin to age? When they cool off. When they pass from the lava state to a rock state.

So all we know is that the rocks on the moon's surface were lava ~4.5 Billion years ago.
That and the fact that the moon is seen as drifting away has led some people to speculate that the moon and earth are remnants from a collision of other two proto-planets... It's speculation, just as the idea that the moon was drifting in space and was caught by the Earth's gravity.... the speeds were just right to keep it in orbit.... and the two planets were just created at the same time, based on the same original materials... like Mars, and Venus...

Also, you've probably noticed that the moon is pockmarked with crater impacts. Each of those can tug the moon closer or farther from the Earth... Thus rendering any calculations based on the present drifting speed quite inaccurate.

Now do tell me there's a similar process that, in the past, hampered or facilitated radioactive decay... -.-'

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.

really?.... -.-'

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,

Enjoy your reading... do try to follow the references.
http://ncse.com/rncse/20/3/radiometric-dating-does-work

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.

Lunar recession... yeah, there are some problems there so you don't want to keep it as a contradicting example.
Soft tissue... it seems you're still not reading the article. Let me bring it up from memory: they say they've found fossilized soft tissue. Fossilized. As in, turned to rock. All they have are the arrangement of the soft tissue... not the soft tissue itself. Read the damned article if you want more details.
Faint young sun? what is this new thing you bring up? Googling.....
No climate paradox under the faint early Sun... oops, you did it again!


And then you have the independent experiments that confirm radiometric dating.
Here's a nice article on it, I'm linking page 5 because I know you don't like reading these things too much and this is the page where all the intro material finally boils down to a number: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/p...sun_5.html
Oh, yeah... it's from a Nobel laureate. Have fun.