Radiocarbon dating is based on assumptions, such as the starting levels. It also assumes a uniformitarian history, and discounts catastrophic events. Lot's of controversy surrounding radiocarbon dating...wide ranges of conflicting dates, for instance. C14 dating - max: 10's of thousands of years...not millions.
Egyptology: all ancient dates were based on the writings of one priest - Manetho. Immanuel Velikovsky has demonstrated that his methodology was extremely flawed, and that current thinking is being revised. Donovan A. Courville places the age of the Egyptian dynasties somewhere around 2100 to 2300 BC, and no older.
Genetics: not dependent upon common ancestry. Genetics is used for improving breeding stock, for instance; and for developing heartier strains of crops. It is not dependent on millions of years.
And the beat goes on.
Few remains prior to 2500 BC? I have obtained over 50 dates older than that myself! My colleagues around the world have thousands of cultures or communities dating older than that!
Radiocarbon dating is based on assumptions, such as the starting levels.
Starting levels are checked and accounted for via tree rings. And no, these trees do not grow all sorts of rings in one year. They use the standing dead bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of southern California. And those tree rings are cross-checked against volcanic events of known ages--and you know what? They agree.
It also assumes a uniformitarian history, and discounts catastrophic events.
False. It assumes anything as catastrophic as a global flood would leave some trace behind.
Lot's of controversy surrounding radiocarbon dating...wide ranges of conflicting dates, for instance. C14 dating - max: 10's of thousands of years...not millions.
The controversy is all from creationists who abhor any method that produces old dates--not for scientific reasons, but for religious reasons. The "controversy" is ginned up out of whole cloth to protect religious belief.
And the "wide range of conflicting dates?" I have examined a lot of these examples on creationist websites and find them to be the result of sloppy research, or outright fabrications. Here is an example:
Creationist claim: Natural gas from Alabama and Mississippi (Cretaceous and Eocene, respectively) — should have been 50 to 135 million years old. C14 gave dates of 30,000 and 34,000, respectively.
When you go back to the original article in Radiocarbon where these dates appeared, you find that they are cited as >30,000 and >34,000! Note the little “>” symbols in front of the dates? These mean “greater than” and indicates that the measured ages reflect the limits of the instrumentation rather than an actual age. In other words, the creationists either goofed and missed the “>” symbols, or lied and hoped that nobody would check up on their research. Busted!
And the fact that the radiocarbon method only goes back some 50,000 years? Everyone who uses that method knows that. It only comes as a surprise to those who have not studied science. Like several posters on this very site (not you) who have complained about using radiocarbon dating to date fossils. They expose their ignorance of the method rather than a flaw in the method.
So overall, archaeology and radiocarbon dating do not support a young earth, and there have been no flaws in the method pointed out by creationist which have withstood scientific scrutiny.
If you are any other readers here are interested, here are some good links for radiocarbon and radiometric dating:
ReligiousTolerance.org Carbon-14 Dating (C-14): Beliefs of New-Earth CreationistsRadiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective by Dr. Roger C. Wiens.
This site, BiblicalChronologist.org has a series of good articles on radiocarbon dating.
Are tree-ring chronologies reliable? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)
Tree Ring and C14 DatingHow does the radiocarbon dating method work? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)
How precise is radiocarbon dating?
Is radiocarbon dating based on assumptions?
Has radiocarbon dating been invalidated by unreasonable results?
Radiocarbon WEB-info Radiocarbon Laboratory, University of Waikato, New Zealand.