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To: Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
We can date lava that's been out of the smokehole for 200 years (per historical records) and see radiometric dating methods give us ages for it of tens of millions of years.

If by "we" you mean young earth creationists, you're right. However, scientists don't make the same mistakes.

In the case I'm familiar with, a creationist

1. Applied the wrong kind of dating to the wrong kind of rock (you can't apply K-Ar dating to rocks with little-to-no Potassium).

2. Failed to remove xenoliths from the rock being examined (causing contamination of the sample)

The validity of every radiometric dating technique has been repeatedly confirmed by other dating schemes.

Concerning the age of the earth, how so?

Are you kidding me? Tree rings go back farther than 10,000 years. Varves go back 13,000 years. Ice cores go back 800,000 years. All go back more than 6000 years, invalidating creationism.

But don't stop there. Plate tectonics and palaeomagnetism can be used to derive rough ages of the earth (even if not as accurate as radiometric dating). Helioseismic dating accurately confirms the date of the sun (which, according to a Creationist interpretation of the Bible happened on the same day as the creation of the earth). Mitochondrial mutation rates date life back hundreds of millions of years, not a direct date for the earth but certainly an indirect one. This is just stuff I'm pulling off the top of my head -- I'm sure if I actually thought longer about this I could come up with many more evidences for an old earth.

59 posted on 08/06/2007 7:49:50 AM PDT by Alter Kaker (Gravitation is a theory, not a fact. It should be approached with an open mind...)
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To: Alter Kaker
In the case I'm familiar with, a creationist

1. Applied the wrong kind of dating to the wrong kind of rock (you can't apply K-Ar dating to rocks with little-to-no Potassium).

2. Failed to remove xenoliths from the rock being examined (causing contamination of the sample)

Link please?

The validity of every radiometric dating technique has been repeatedly confirmed by other dating schemes.

Nonsense. If this were so, then Faure wouldn't point out the obvious error (in this case in Rb-Sr dating) made when it is assumed that a lava flow is uniformly and homogenous mixed isotopically, the assumption of which can produce what he called "fictitious isochrons" (G. Faure, Principles of Isotope Geology, 2nd Ed., pp. 145-147). Brooks, James, and Hart likewise point out 22 instances of what they consider to be false Rb-Sr isochron dates (compared with other dating methods), obtained by incorrect assumptions about the magmas' isotopic characteristics (C. Brooks, D.E. James, and S.R. Hart, "Ancient Lithosphere: Its Role in Young Continental Volcanism," Science, Vol. 193 (17 Sep. 1976), pp. 1086-1094.).

Another example: The Cardenas Lavas in the GC are dated by K-Ar methodology to between 760-850 Ma, whereas Rb-Sr dating gives dates to around 1.5 Ga. Even if we wish to operate under purely evolutionary assumptions, maybe evolutionists need to consider cleaning up their science first, before throwing dates at us?

Are you kidding me? Tree rings go back farther than 10,000 years. Varves go back 13,000 years. Ice cores go back 800,000 years. All go back more than 6000 years, invalidating creationism.

Again, these are all dated using assumptions which have not necessarily held up to experimentation. We know that tree rings don't follow the nice, cut-and-dried assumption of 1 ring=1 year. Indeed, you can have multiple rings per year, depending upon the climate in which the tree was growing. Varves can also be deposited at a rate greater than one a year. As for ice core, these rely, again, upon unfounded assumptions as to the uniformity of ice deposition, and would normally be considered useless if they were being used for anything other than establishing great dates for ice formations.

But don't stop there. Plate tectonics and palaeomagnetism can be used to derive rough ages of the earth (even if not as accurate as radiometric dating). Helioseismic dating accurately confirms the date of the sun (which, according to a Creationist interpretation of the Bible happened on the same day as the creation of the earth). Mitochondrial mutation rates date life back hundreds of millions of years, not a direct date for the earth but certainly an indirect one. This is just stuff I'm pulling off the top of my head -- I'm sure if I actually thought longer about this I could come up with many more evidences for an old earth.

Again, all things which rely upon uniformitarian assumptions which do not necessarily hold - they require interpretation through a philosophical lens before they become apparent that they are "proof" for an old earth.

190 posted on 08/06/2007 11:53:56 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (Fred Dalton Thompson for President)
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