Posted on 06/10/2015 2:56:39 PM PDT by Sopater
When discussions start out with assertions that have an expectation that C14 dating can return valid results from a Cretaceous age sample, I conclude that it’s not worth spending much time.
The internet includes any number of simple explanations of how C14 dating, as well as other techniques, work. Spend a few minutes with one.
“C14 dating could not be performed on material from the Cretaceous period for the same reason that material from the Cretaceous period could not contain in-tact organic material.”
One had nothing to do with the other. C14 dating can only be used in organic material between 1,000 and 50,000 years of age. Why? C14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon with a half life of 5,730 years. A living organism takes in carbon, including C14 only during its lifetime. The proportion of C14 left when the remains of the organism are examined provides an indication of the time elapsed since its death. Half of the C14 is gone after 5,730, half of this remaining C14 decays after another 5,730 years. After 62,000 there isn’t enough left for accurate measurement against the background C14 (C14 that is being continuously created through collisions of neutrons generated by cosmic rays with nitrogen).
That has no relationship to the possible preservation of organic particles preserved in a mineral lattice in a multi million year old fossil. There would naturally be no surviving C14 in such material even if it’s organic.
Come on, the Dino bones were placed in the ground right before the flood.
Science is a method, not a body of knowledge. The difference between beliefs and scientific conclusions is, your beliefs are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. That’s why science is science, and belief is belief.
Well, we’re not talking about any “general sense”, we’re talking about what science actually is.
Then, as I said in an earlier post, you use a dating method utilizing an isotope with a longer half life. You can no longer date the organic material directly but have to date any surrounding igneous rock. Isotopes are set in rock as it is created and degrades as the rock ages. Based on a comparison between the observed abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope and its decay products, using known decay rates you come us with an age (the time since the rock was formed as volcanic ash, flow, etc.) You’ve got a number of methods to choose from - uranium/lead, potassium/argon, uranium/thorium, and so on (look them up). One method will often be used to verify another. That is often a check for possible sampling error. But then, you’ve been told this before and you’re just trolling. Belief vs observed fact.
My definition of science comes from scientists, and from dictionaries.
Yours is cherry picked in order to construct that straw man you’ve been attempting to build, and is shallow and wrong. And I’m not surprised.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/science
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/science
https://explorable.com/definition-of-science
No, about the best they can do is report the soft matter somewhat resembles modern birds like Emus -- yes, that's highly suggestive, but not necessarily conclusive.
But radiometric dating is a much different matter, since it has been performed hundreds or thousands of times on materials from all over the world, consistently supporting the standard scientific time-line model.
But certainly radiometric dating is tricky, easy to get wrong, and necessarily requires check & recheck.
And it appears those checks didn't happen on your alleged carbon-14 dating of supposed dinosaur tissues.
So I suspect somebody with malicious intent had the process performed wrong, producing absurd results.
So whoever did it should be thoroughly examined, held accountable and maybe fired.
Your reports of their carbon-14 results suggest to me they are not good people and should not be trusted with anything important.
Sopater: "Primarily because it is not as "verifiable" as climate change models."
Radiometric dating results are verifiable when repeated using different materials, and when subject to peer reviews.
So the big difference is, as I said, political.
However, in scientific theories relating to evolution, there was and still is no obvious political advantage to one theory or another.
Indeed, from the beginning there have been great disadvantages to teaching evolution, as the 1925 so-called Scopes Monkey Trial illustrated.
So, unlike "global warming", evolution theory goes back to a time when government played no role in such matters, and has been confirmed in many details innumerable times since.
That makes it good solid science, in my book.
Sopater: "That is fine, but I would ask the same of you."
Science is what it is, and you are free to oppose whatever aspects of science you wish, for whatever non-scientific reasons appeal to you.
But you cannot call your non-scientific beliefs "science".
They are not.
Actually, legally, no.
When the US Constitution talks about the word "science", it means what our Founders understood by the term: natural science, meaning natural explanations for natural processes.
That assumption of naturalism is specifically intended to avoid conflict with religions, by focusing science on only the natural realm.
In natural-science, the supernatural or spiritual are excluded a priori -- they are assumed away.
Indeed, it's entirely fair to say that today's science, natural-science, is the result you get when you assume away everything supernatural.
Of course, that's a huge assumption, and in the larger sense, totally invalid.
But science begins by saying: we can't define the supernatural, we can't measure it and can't study it, so we scientists will leave the supernatural realm to those better qualified -- theologians, ministers, saints, etc.
Our scientific attention will focus on anything and everything which can have natural explanations, no matter how far-fetched such explanations may seem from a religious perspective.
Since this debate began here, over 100 years ago, US courts have consistently ruled that the definition of that word "science" is to be held and controlled by scientists themselves, and not by anti-natural science people like our FRiend Sopater.
Science is what scientists say it is, whether you like that or not.
If you oppose science, that's fine, it's your absolute right, but you can't call your opposition "science". It's not.
No, there are dozens of standards -- dozens of different radioactive materials whose different rates of decay can be precisely measured and half-lives calculated.
And those measurements are confirmed as reasonable by a totally different set of astronomical measurements used to calculate the ages of stars, galaxies and the Universe itself.
Now I suppose you might propose that God Himself intended to lead scientists astray, by leaving infinite clues as to the Universe's ancient age, while in fact it's quite a lot younger.
But such a Trickster does not strike me as the God of the Bible -- some other religion perhaps?
So we are left with the irrefutable fact that all the evidence science can confirm supports the ancient timeline & evolution of life.
But if we examine it all carefully, we might also notice any number of congruencies between science and Biblical history, and that may be the best we can expect, or even all that we truly need...
Sopater: "To say that the testing on materials from all over the world supports models that have been constructed from assumptions absent of any verifiable evidence is dishonest."
Sorry, but I have never posted a dishonest word, except where clearly identified as sarcastic humor.
It's your claim that such testing cannot be verified which is dishonest, FRiend.
Sorry, but there is no "faith" in science, none.
Science is not about "faith", it's all about questioning everything.
But questioning has to follow certain rules of evidence & logic, and questioning which produces no viable results is eventually set aside.
In the end, science has standard models (theories) for everything it can study, models which are sometimes overthrown, but never without some extraordinary new understanding of available evidence.
Those scientists who do successfully overthrow past models (Einstein comes to mind) are celebrated for their accomplishments, not condemned as heretics.
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