Biological Information and Intelligent Design: New functions are everywhere

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@grog

All that I know is that we based the age of the earth on dating an asteroid that came to earth. I have read also from well meaning scientists that the number of assumptions that go into dating this asteroid is astoundingly great. Secular science pays this no mind because downstream for the sin nature is to circumvent anything Bible or anything God which naturalistic evolution does a great job at which requires long ages.

I don’t know which “well meaning scientists” you’re referring to here, but they aren’t telling the truth. I’ve seen many, many YEC claims about the assumptions involved in radiometric dating that are simply not true. For starters:

1. Radiometric dating does not make assumptions about the initial amount of parent and daughter isotope in the rocks. There is a technique called isochron dating that side-steps this assumption completely.

2. Similarly, isochron dating does not make assumptions about contamination or leakage either. These would readily be apparent because the points on the graph would not lie on a straight line.

3. Samples are routinely dated using multiple methods, both radiometric and non-radiometric, and close agreement to within a fraction of one percent is the norm in more than 90% of cases. Claims that these methods only give the same results because they are calibrated against each other, or because they make the “same assumptions of uniformitarianism,” are untrue.

4. Anomalous results account for less than 10%, and possibly as few as 5%, of cases. In most cases, they were not actual radiometric results at all, but were merely attempts to determine whether or not specific methods could be applied to novel situations. There’s a vast difference between showing that one particular method does not work on metamorphic rocks, and showing that no methods work on anything.

5. Cherry-picking of the data can not account for this high degree of concordance, because (a) there are hundreds of thousands of results recorded in the scientific literature, and (b) radiometric dating is too expensive (thousands of dollars per sample) to allow for this kind of chicanery to remain covered up for very long.

6. The suggestion that nuclear decay rates could have varied significantly in the past is complete science fiction. Even the young-earth creationist RATE team admitted that accelerated nuclear decay sufficient to squeeze the observed radiometric results into 6,000 years would have released enough heat to vaporise the earth.

7. There is no evidence of primordial radiocarbon in ancient coals and diamonds. The RATE team did not follow the correct procedures for taking contamination into account.

8. Allegations of circular reasoning — such as the claim that “fossils are used to date rocks and rocks are used to date fossils” — are untrue.

9. Vast swathes of the evidence for an ancient earth comes from oil exploration. Petroleum geologists have to produce results that are correct, not results that are ideologically convenient. There is no room whatsoever in oil exploration for “secular science” fudging the figures to produce artificially inflated or otherwise fictitious ages. If they tried any such thing, oil companies would waste a fortune drilling in the wrong places only to find that they couldn’t get the oil out of the ground.

Greg, I suggest you read the article Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective by Roger C Wiens. He explains these things in fairly comprehensive detail. Make sure that you read it carefully and that you properly understand the maths and reasoning behind it.