No I wasn’t making that accusation and I did not intend to imply that you were on a par with somebody who denies that one plus one equals two. That completely misses the point that I was making. The point was simply that when you are dealing with facts or calculations, they do NOT depend on your worldview.
Not true. There is a test that can distinguish between isochron lines and mixing lines. Plot a second graph of \frac {^{87}\text{Sr}} {^{86}\text{Sr}} against \frac 1 {^{87}\text{Sr} + ^{86}\text{Sr}}. Mixing will give a straight line; true isochrons will not.
Besides, if mixing really were a legitimate explanation we would see as many samples giving negative isochrons as positive ones. We do not.
You need to realise a few things here:
- There is a difference between “doesn’t always work” and “never works.”
- There is a difference between “doesn’t work when you do it wrong” and “doesn’t work when you do it right.”
- There is a difference between “occasionally out by a few percent” and “consistently out by a factor of a million or more.”
- There is a difference between “doesn’t work at the limits of detection” and “doesn’t work anywhere at all.”
The fact remains that these anomalous results are very much in the minority. And in most cases, they are not as anomalous as YECs make them out to be. 270,000 to 3.5 million years is not a big deal for K-Ar dates when you consider that the half life of 40K is 1.25 billion years – a thousand times as much – and to get that level of sensitivity you need to use a high-end radiometric lab with state-of-the-art equipment that charges a lot more for the more advanced processing that’s needed.
In any case, there is a simple way to determine when isochron dating works and when it doesn’t: use multiple different methods whose assumptions are independent of each other. If radiometric methods really were so unreliable that they couldn’t tell the difference between thousands and billions, the different results would be wildly different. Every. Single. Time. Without. Exception. Yet in the majority of cases, they agree with each other to within a few percent.
So no, I’m sorry, the assumptions are not as unprovable as you think they are. And they are not just “naturalistic assumptions” either. Cross-checks such as these are how measurement works in every area of science. “Naturalism” or “worldviews” have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
But every form of measurement works by calculating things, and every form of measurement makes assumptions that could, at a stretch, be claimed to be unprovable. The distance from London to New York works by calculating things and assuming that the speed of light is the same today as it was yesterday. Police speed cameras work by measuring Doppler shift and assuming that they’ve been calibrated correctly and that the driver of the oncoming car isn’t operating some kind of jammer of other.
I’m sorry, but you can’t just cry “unprovable assumptions” as a magic shibboleth to challenge every kind of measurement that you don’t like. There are some assumptions that it simply isn’t reasonable to challenge.
No I wasn’t implying that all creationists are stupid people who don’t understand science and who don’t get degrees. That is a straw man mischaracterisation of what I said. My comment was referring to the kind of people who you yourself described as “lay creationists” who are “the low hanging fruit.” Besides, I was making the specific point that books and YouTube videos are not a substitute for hands-on experience.
Besides, I’ve also addressed the issue of “many eminent scientists who believe in six-day creation.” As I said, very few of the signatories of the Scientific Dissent from Darwin were YECs.