Congratulations, Jon. You’ve just quote mined me to my face. And twisted the words “where possible” to mean the exact opposite of what they actually say in the process while missing the point entirely.
The point is that there are situations where assumptions can be eliminated from the equations altogether. That is what isochron dating does for starters. Even when they can’t be eliminated, they can still be taken into account, they can still be quantified, and they can still have limits set on how much they could be off by.
Do I need to remind you that quote mining is lying?
Complete and utter pifflebunk.
The age of the K/Pg boundary has been pinned down to 66,038,000±11,000 years. That is a certainty of just one part in six thousand. If that qualifies as “NOT POSSIBLE to be quantified with any degree of certainty,” then quite frankly I don’t know what doesn’t.
And once again, that is the figure that comes out after your much-hyped “assumptions” have been taken into account.
Jon, if you want to convince me—or anyone else for that matter—that deep geological time is not operational science but religiously held philosophy, you need to do better than just state it and demand that we recognise it. You need to back it up with evidence and sound reasoning.
If you want to claim that there are assumptions involved, you MUST explain how those assumptions could have been violated on a young earth timescale in such a way as to produce the exact evidence that we see in reality, down to the same measurements and cross-checks. It is not sufficient just to cry “assumptions” as if assumptions were some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. They aren’t.
If you want to claim that it is religiously motivated, you need to explain how religious motivations could fit into the equation to skew the conclusions from thousands to millions and billions.
You need to explain how lead could get into zircon crystals in sufficient quantities to damage or destroy their crystal structure in only six thousand years. You need to explain how religious motivations could have caused people to overlook or ignore whatever explanation you are proposing. And you need to make sure that they really are overlooking it or ignoring it, and not accounting for it in ways that you yourself are overlooking.
You need to explain how radiometric measurements could have landed in the Hawaiian islands in a young earth timescale yet in a way that is consistent with 80 million years of continental drift at the same rate as that measured directly by GPS satellites today. You need to explain how religious motivations could have caused people to overlook whatever explanation you are proposing.
It’s not that assumptions don’t exist, Jon. It’s that assumptions have rules.