Replies

“Your rebuttal shouldn’t be “nuh uh”. It should be a simple description of the process.”

That’s funny, because a poster in a prior thread complained by saying I was being “long-winded” for reply point by point, and now here you are in effect complaining that I’m too short-winded. It seems like no kind of response is ever going to be acceptable to the folks arguing creationism.

For what it is worth, there is no “simple description of the process”, because there are many processes involved in the assortment of dating methods, and many of those processes can be quite complex in their relationships to the other processes.

Take for example just the topic of stratigraphic columns so often criticized by creationists. One of the common creationist myths is the claim that older fossils must always be discovered lower in the stratigraphic column than newer fossils. While that is generally true when you can reasonably assume the stratigraphic columns have not been disturbed in a manner that alters the chronological succession, it is not true where erosion, faulting, folding, and other geological events have redistributed the fossils within the stratigraphic column. Recourse to principles and methods in geology, geomorphology, biostratigraphy, nuclear chemistry, and more may then needed to observe and correctly determine the natural alterations that were made in the stratigraphic column. In other words, the stratigraphic column is itself sometimes a difficult to master subject in ambiguous circumstances, and there are enough other geological, biological, chemical, physics, astronomical, and other disciplines that can be brought into play to assemble the pieces of the puzzle together.

“Otherwise, the argument as I have seen it online is a circular one.”

You haven’t even begun to touch upon the subject much less seen enough to make a reasoned judgment on such matters. It’s kinda like the paleface Easterner out in the vast landscapes of the American West saying he can’t see anything important, but the American Indian looks at the tracks and trail signs and proceeds to describe the animal or the man who made the tracks and trail signs right down to size, weight, being righthanded or lefthanded, age, habits, and what he is thinking next. Keen expertise in making observations and knowing how to understand their meanings can be a very powerful set of tools.