Hi Greg,
It’s good that you’re discussing actual evidence now. It’s good to focus on the Bible and theological issues, but you do still need to account for the evidence, even if simply by saying that there must be other factors at work that we know nothing about. What troubles me is seeing it dismissed out of hand as “presupposition” or “religion” without any attempt whatsoever being made to justify claims that it is based on presupposition and not evidence. It sounds ad-hominem at best and borderline dishonest at worst.
Just a couple of remarks on your comments here.
I know that Tas Walker of creation.com has responded to Wiens’s article. Personally I didn’t find Walker’s response at all satisfactory. I wrote some thoughts of my own about his response in another thread on this forum back in February. To summarise: it adopts an unnecessary inflammatory and confrontational tone that is unhelpful and distracting, and many of the claims he makes on a technical level are simply not true.
As others have pointed out, the state of the soft tissue was not consistent with an age of less than six thousand years. It has not yet yielded any sequenceable DNA for starters — in a young earth, we should have sequenced the entire T-rex genome by now.
In actual fact, nobody knows how long soft tissue remnants can survive before becoming completely mineralised. It depends largely on the conditions of fossilisation, and there are a lot of unknown unknowns. In any case, the ages of the fossils were very, very well established and very, very tightly constrained by radiometric dating and other high precision methods.
You’ll need to provide a source for this as it is a new one to me.
I’ve read both the RATE report on helium diffusion in zircons and the various responses to it (Gary Loechelt, Kevin Henke and Randy Isaac).
Unfortunately the various reviews have noted numerous serious purely technical flaws in the RATE team’s work that totally undermine the credibility of their research. For example, they adjusted some twenty-year-old data by a factor of ten to account for “typographical errors.” You simply do not do this. It is not good science to use data whose integrity is in question; it should be discarded, and the original experiment re-done, especially if the original lab notes are no longer available.
They also hand-waved several uncertainties as only affecting the result “by a factor of two or so” or “by an order of magnitude or so” but it only takes half a dozen errors of “an order of magnitude or so” to get you from thousands to billions. The effects of both pressure and anisotropy were ignored, even though other research shows that both of these would be significant.
The RATE team have dismissed the critiques of their work as “petty and nitpicking.” However, to the best of my knowledge, they have not provided any calculations to demonstrate that the critiques really are as petty and nitpicking as they claim that they are. In any case, if you’ve worked with science or technology for any length of time, one thing that you learn fairly early on is that you have to be petty and nitpicking, because seemingly small and inconsequential errors have a nasty habit of not being as small and inconsequential as they first appear. Just read about the butterfly effect if you don’t believe me.