Regarding your examples, the Berkeley statement was poorly written, but true in that carbon containing material like charcoal within young sedimentary rocks can be dated with carbon dating, though practically, few sedimentary rocks examined are younger than 50K years so it is of limited practical use. In addition, at the limits of the range of measurement, it has large error bars and just about anything over 50K years will date as that as “noise” from contamination and organic bio films make looking further back in time futile.
As for 100 year old rocks dated with long half life isotopes, that too is a fool’s errand as on the other end of measurement, it is like weighing a feather on a truck scale. The lowest weight it measures may be 20 lbs, so the feather will weigh 20 lbs no matter what. Or if you measure the length of your driveway with your car odometer, it will measure 0 or 0.1 miles when the actual length is 30 feet. The only real question is whether the professional people putting this argument forward are ignorant of the constraints of measurement, or if they are intentionally intending to deceive. Another variation of false readings is collecting volcanic rocks that were from older rocks brought to the surface by the lava flow but not completely reset by being molten. Again, a known problem avoided by good researchers, and being well understood. Again, the question remains, intention deception or ignorance and incompetent collection, whether by geologist or dentist. That is harsh, but is there any other reasonable answer? How then should the truth claims about Christ be heard by those who see those practices? Perhaps I have not addressed the same examples you recall, as without specific references, it is difficult to say, so if you have specifics, please share. However, this is what similar claims have proven to be.when examined.
The “reasons” as you put it are the basic rules and principles of how measurement works. They also tend to be stated, explained and tested, and not just hand-waved away by someone who doesn’t have a clue what they are talking about putting the word “reasons” in scare quotes.
YECs blow these errors in conventional dating methods completely out of proportion. 100,000 years may sound like a lot, but it is tiny compared to the 1.28 billion year half life of potassium-40.
What you are doing here is like measuring out your ingredients for a birthday cake by putting them on the back of a lorry and weighing the lorry, and then, when the results come out all mushy and inedible, claiming that it means all the top chefs in 5 star restaurants must be so bad at cooking that they could be serving up rat poison for all we know. It’s total nonsense.
Well if he isn’t thoroughly familiar with the laboratory and field techniques used by paleontology or geology, of course his findings would be suspect. It’s the same in any field of science: you need to understand the standards and best practices involved otherwise you will end up making mistakes.
Take computer programming, for example. As an MD, he might be able to hack together a WordPress theme for his local florist in his spare time, but I doubt if he would even know where to start if he had to secure it against hackers or make it scale up to handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Similarly, he might be able to go and collect some fossils, but without the necessary training and expertise, he simply isn’t qualified to tell the difference between good laboratory technique and bad.
As a further note on the dating,
Here is an example where things are pretty clearly in order:
Recent: Argopecten irradians
Waccamaw: Argopecten vicenarius, Carolinapecten eboreus
Zone 2 Yorktown: Carolinapecten eboreus, Chesapecten madisonius, Ecphora quadricostata
Zone 1 Yorktown: Carolinapecten eboreus, Chesapecten madisonius, Chesapecten jeffersonius, Ecphora quadricostata
Pungo River: Chesapecten coccymelus, Ecphora tricarinata, Ecphora aurora
Not according to Todd Wood, the curator of YEC site CreationWiki:
Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.
I say these things not because I’m crazy or because I’ve “converted” to evolution. I say these things because they are true. I’m motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. [[Emphases in original]]
Wood remains a YEC advocate because of his hermeneutical approach to Genesis 1 - 3. He hopes that through a disciplined research program, a viable scientific YEC set of hypotheses might emerge in the future.
Best,
Chris Falter
The first birds had evolved before the dinosaurs died out. Dogs evolved from wolves, and wolves are still with us.
You don’t have any examples? Animals today resemble animals that lived long ago because of evolutionary relationships. Look at the genus Equus or the genus Homo. What kind of “research” did this Werner guy do? Did he actually work on dig sites? Did he get access to non-public areas of museums? Or was he pretty much a tourist? Did he publish his research in peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals? Or did he merely put out trade books and slick videos (for sale, of course)?
So let’s say there is a systematic error built into that radiometric method for dating rocks that throws dates off by 100,000 years. This would mean a date of 100 million years would be off by 0.1%. How is that a problem?
Domestic dogs supposedly evolved from wolves, and yet domestic dogs and wolves exist side by side. How can that be?
Why is this a problem?
supposedly?
Uh we have new solid evidence on that question.
Darwin was wrong about dogs. He thought their remarkable diversity must reflect interbreeding with several types of wild dogs. But the DNA findings say differently. All modern dogs are descendants of wolves, though this domestication may have happened twice, producing groups of dogs descended from two unique common ancestors.
How and when this domestication happened has been a matter of speculation. It was thought until very recently that dogs were wild until about 12,000 years ago. But DNA analysis published in 1997 suggests a date of about 130,000 years ago for the transformation of wolves to dogs. This means that wolves began to adapt to human society long before humans settled down and began practicing agriculture.
(from pbs)
This is also evidence of how a relationship over time can have quite an effect on the evolutionary process. It doesn’t take necromancy with golems of dust and bone to make something different. A shepherd can do this without any intelligent design whatsoever. 
(P.S. the alterations of domestic sheep don’t go back nearly as far as dogs. Only about 12,000 years for them)
Maybe God dropped chihuahuas into the fossil record?
Some creationists claim that animals that could run for higher ground appear in the top layers of the fossil record. But that doesn’t explain the relative late appearance of flowering plants, that are not so good at running for high ground.
Yes, that is the stock response. Of all the misrepresentations that come out of YEC, I consider this to be one of the most self deluded. Who has never seen the results of even modest floods? They leave a jumbled, chaotic mess.
There are some elements of flood geology that, even with no science background at all, just a shred of common sense, should be obvious. That giant sloths would not outrun velociraptors should be apparent to the village idiot. Elephants and triceratops are roughly the same size and would float the same, bloat the same, and sink the same. And as you mention, there are the plants. In fact, the whole ecosystem is neatly segregated in the fossil record. The only possible explanation is separation in time. Hundreds of thousands of fossils, and not one Precambrian rabbit.
Dr. Carl Werner, on creation.com (we call that a clue), complained that the mammals found alongside dinosaurs are not displayed. As if that’s a strike against evolution. Sorry peanut, but it was scientists who discovered and discussed the tiny mammals that lived at the same time as dinosaurs. And most visitors wouldn’t choose to crowd around a glass case peering at a mouse-sized mammal when they’re in a magnificent hall with dinosaurs. These little fossils are in museums and available for study, just not in public areas. Oops I didn’t think of that.
Worse still are oysters, chamids, coral, physids, and other relatively immobile animals way above dinosaurs.
That might be connected to the “Creation Moments” claim that “until recently, evolutionists believed that mammals did not live alongside dinosaurs.” Like a depressingly high proportion of creation science claims, this is mere slander. Mesozoic mammals were discovered in the early 1800’s, before people had realized that dinosaurs were a distinct group, and were well-publicized. It is true that there are relatively few eye-catching specimens, so Mesozoic mammals don’t show up in public museum displays too often. Likewise, all the worn-down specimens that show a long history of erosion before final burial aren’t often displayed or featured in books, which allows myths about fossil preservation usually requiring rapid burial.
Actually, most of the redating of these particular layers was based on microfossils, which are more global in distribution than the previously-studied macrofossils. (In turn, that means that the microfossils are also likely to occur in other parts of the world where volcanoes conveniently supplied radiometrically datable ash layers). The earlier dating was based on the percent of living species in the fossil mollusks. An added complication comes from adjustments due to a more precise drawing of the official line between age units (and occasional decisions to draw the line between age units a little higher or lower, at a point considered to be more distinctive).
Microfossils are a good example of something incompatible with young-earth and global flood claims, largely neglected by young-earth advocates because the public is ignorant about them. They do not have significant differences in escape ability or hydrodynamic properties. Various types of microfossils do reflect different habitats, but such occur at various levels through the geologic column - there is no pattern of lower elevation to higher elevation habitats. But the types of microfossils change over time, with hundreds of totally different sets of microfossils being found in different layers.
The putting in order of the geologic column was likewise essentially established before any significant acceptance of evolution, and most of the scientists who established the sequence rejected the then-current evolutionary ideas. For example, Michael Tuomey, in his 1848 geological survey of South Carolina, has a section on how the geologic evidence supports the Bible. He briefly dismisses the old-fashioned idea that an old earth is any problem, focusing instead on the fact that geology points towards a beginning, with simpler organisms prevailing as you get older, then eventually rock with no trace of fossils, and thus hinting back towards an ultimate beginning, versus eternalism. The first major publication of William Smith’s work (begun in the late 1700’s) on the sequence of layers and fossils was in a book published by a clergyman friend of Smith’s: “The Character of Moses as an Historian, Recording Events from the Creation to the Deluge” (1813).
The evolutionary ideas of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s were generally perceived as advocating a continuous steady progression towards more advanced forms. As the fossil record did not show such a pattern, these ideas were generally unpopular among paleontologists. Ironically, many current young-earth arguments continue to assume this sort of pattern for evolution and completely fail to address a more C. Darwinian version of evolution.
My research showed many scientific approaches and technologies used to prove evolution, all of which are leaps of faith, full of holes, inaccurate, leaving me with one choice - God’s Word, 6 days(24 hours) of creation. What a surprise, the inerrant Word of God is true!!!
You couldn’t give some specifics could you? What leaps of faith, holes and inaccuracies do you think that you see in the evidence for evolution or geological time?