I’d like to challenge you to listen to a productive conversation by someone with your beliefs about origins, Todd Wood and someone with beliefs like most of the people on this site, Darrel Falk. @Randy just posted it here: Godly Discourse: The Fool and the Heretic at Calvin College 1/9/20
I found it very encouraging and I’m not even a Christian. If you decide to give it a try I’ll be happy to talk about it with you as a fellow ‘outsider’.
What’s the point of any of that?
You might as well argue that bathroom scales don’t work because they can’t weigh 5 milligrams.
If your ruler is only 12 inches long (C14 is only a good tool for up to a maximum 50 ka as the graph shows), does that mean that a distance of three thousand miles does not exist (deep time)?
Ken Wolgemuth has written for Biologos. I think you may have misunderstood him… You may like to try his articles on age of the earth with @davidson on the link. Thanks.
If you don’t know the age of a sample beforehand, how do you know which radiometric dating method you need to apply? You don’t. You apply you’r best guess and adjust as you go.
You start with potassium-argon dating or uranium-lead dating because it gives you a rudimentary date range and then you adjust from there.
The thing is that radiometric dating has been invented in the 1930s and 40s. We didn’t understand the weak nuclear force involved in the process before. However, the stones were already set to a certain imaginative age which has never been corrected although the age has only been estimated before radiometric dating has been invented. Why didn’t the allegedly precise radiometric dating methods correct the estimated ages afterwards? Do you assume that geologists in the 1700s could estimate age that well? I highly doubt that! So basically, the radiometric dating results are being >selected< to not conflict with the rock ages set in times before radiometric dating. If you don’t see any problems with that, I have to conclude a really pronounced bias on your side!
I suggest you ask Dr Wolgemuth again (good choice by the way) and read his articles. Also, C14 deals with once living things, not plain rock. Thanks
Apologies that this will be a bit of a “hit and run” answer as I am heading off into the Uintas Wilderness for a week of backpacking in an hour.
The quick answer is that geologists did not have any real knowledge of the ages of the rocks they were studying. They were able to use basic logical tools to place the puzzle pieces of earth history together into a meaningful sequence, but without knowing the actual ages of the layers. Those attempting to figure out likely ages knew there were lots of uncertainties in their approaches. Interestingly, in the context of this question (or comment) when radioactivity was discovered and methods developed to date rocks, the oldest rocks turned out to be much, much larger than anyone had previously estimated. So there was no confirmation bias.
As to “how do you know which method to use?” it becomes apparent very quickly if the wrong isotopes were selected, as there will be too little daughter product yet formed (rock younger than initially thought) or too little original isotope left (rock older than initially thought).
And to add on to Gregg’s good reply above …
Even if they did make an initial guess (presumption) up front, there is still the matter of the tight (within error bars), independent consistency of various dating methods (and even internal consistencies of some of these dating methods within themselves!) that would all have to be written off as an impossibly large collection of coincidences if these dating methods were orders of magnitude wrong. And good initial guesses are a real thing since dating samples is not cheap and you don’t want to waste expensive lab time using the wrong dating method. If you’re going to weigh your truck, you drive down to the local seed co-op and park on the scale there - you don’t waste your time trying to use a bathroom scale you already know can’t do it.
Trial and error. If the measurements are outside of the method’s reliable range then you use a different method.
Those were measured ages, not imagined ones. I am sure that many dates have been adjusted as our measurement of radioactive half-lives has improved. In fact, carbon dating has been extensively recalibrated as we learned more about the history of 14C concentrations in the atmosphere:
Can you give us examples?
They did. They still are.
Radiometric dating, or more broadly, geochronology, encompasses a diverse range of approaches which cross-correlate, and is the focus of study for a cohort of scientists. Their work is published in broad journals such as science and nature, and feature heavily in scads of geology journals, but there are also journals specifically dedicated to geochronology which you would give a sense of the challenges and potentials involved with dating.
Radiocarbon is put out by Cambridge and includes some open source content, and all issues published prior to 2012 are free to access.
Geochronology is published by the European Geosciences Union and is open source.
https://www.geochronology.net/
Quaternary Geochronology is concerned with advances in quaternary dating techniques, that being the recent 2.6 million years. It sprinkles in a few open source articles.
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/quaternary-geochronology
Palaeo deals with the record of climate and ecology revealed by geochronology, and fatures the odd open source article.
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/palaeogeography-palaeoclimatology-palaeoecology
So the study of geochronology is hardly some unchallanged and unverified assumption that scientists just glibly take for granted, but rather a dynamic field of science in its own right, undergoing constant refinement and extension of technique. There are scientific journals, associations, and geology division specialized on the discipline, with entire careers dedicated to the task. Their work will not be dismissed by some ad hoc rhetorical hand wave. This is a world away from the church choir.
I don’t know much about these different methods. Are any absolute, or do they all have to be calibrated? If they are all calibrated off the same hypothesis, then garbage in garbage out.
This is a general problem I see with evolutionary theory is the methods all seem to be parameterized, and thus have parameters to tweak to fit whatever theory is required. So, even if we have a buch of independent methods of measuring things, if they all are parameterized, all the parameters can be tweaked by the same assumption to fit whatever assumptions we want. Thus, the ‘conscilience’ of metrics may sound impressive, but they all are tuned to reconcile. I can do the same thing with machine learning, get a bunch of different over parameterized algorithms and models, train them with the same dataset and assumptions, and get a conscilience of super accurate models that completely fail in the real world.
I don’t see a lot of evolutionists trying to falsify the fundamental theory of evolution. Or rather, I do, but such people become pariahs of the establishment and ostracized, which also is another possible cause of confirmation bias.
Evolutionary theorizing just does not seem very scientific in how it is conducted, and I believe at this point I am fairly well versed in the state of the field, at least in regards to the bioinformatics side, which should gives us the most accurate data regarding evolution. Maybe evolutionary theory is doing good science in the details, but not in regard to the theory as a whole. So, on that point I’m in pretty strong agreement with @Henry_Dalcke.
What seems to confuse people is just how consistent everything actually is even with error margins.
We don’t have just one way of dating but several. Independent scientists who never meet at completely different labs in different parts of the world come up with the same conclusions.
Secondly in addition to dating we see geological layers. The strata. When looking at this we always see a specific pattern of this layer always comes before this layer and never after. Or this layer always comes after this layer and never before. Even if there is a layer missing, layer a is always before layer D. When we look as layer A we see specific types of fossils. Some layers never see other types of fossils. Some fossils sometimes move between multiple layers. But we never see fossils from layer A in layer C for many species. Fauna and flora. We also see morphology traits. Such as we never see angiosperms before the Anisian Age (and this is debated on if it’s angiosperm pollen or angiosperm like pollen). We never see woody angiosperms at this point and not for a long time until after that. We find some animal fossils only in the Jurassic , none of them a T. rex either. So we know based off of strata that some animals begin to exist and that some never existed before or after this layer and so on. We can also look at things like continental drift. We can see when things like Pangea existed, and how naturally flora and fauna were on both and how we then see morphological differences as they split apart form plates moving.
We can look at genetics too. We can see the genetics of of certain basal traits within an family showing up verses later derived traits of the different genre and species of that family.
There is a reason why you don’t find rock arrowheads inside a T. rex. There is a reason why you never find homo sapien skeletons along side Ichthyostega or anything humanoid actually.
So the idea that it’s just like 2 forms of dating only weighing in on the entirety of evolution and the age of the world is wrong. It’s completely incorrect.
Then even once you deal with evolution itself the idea that dna was already holding the genes for monarchs to eat on milkweeds back when the only Caddis flies were here in the Triassic well before the Eocene epoch by 170,000,000 years. So it’s not sloppy. The magical idea being presented that dna just keep rearranging everything but already solid for southern magnolias before angiosperms we’re here just simply is not plausible.
Because of you believe the totality of science is wrong about evolution and age of the earth is wrong then by all means the other idea being presented here is not even tissue strong.
The only reason why these other ideas even bubble up is not because of science. It’s because of s single interpretation of scripture out of many on 1-11 chapters of one book wrote 4000 years ago inns completely different language and constructed by people with a fraction of the understanding we have who had a very different worldview.
A secondary point is this.
“Biblical kinds” are used to describe species getting on to the ark. If the earth is 6,000 years old roughly, and a flood covered the whole earth, then do y’all believe a T. rex was on the ark? Maybe just a baby one? Or was it a species that predated a trex thst was really tiny? Or did T. rex already die in a short few hundred years from the time of Adam and Eve until the flood and so Noah just took a lizard or what? How does all of that play out of genesis 1-11 is accurate and literal science and history?
The time from Adam’s birth to Noah’s birth was just over 1,000 years. Was T. rex on the ark? Or did T. rex species die out in that 1,000 years until the ark? Or did T. rex come into existence after the ark?
Not true. The critique of evolution comes from atheist quarters, and from mathematicians (e.g. Wistar) and evolutionary biologists who find the theory lacking. I personally come at this from an information theory and computer algorithm perspective, and see a fair amount to be desired. Look at the panel of ID contributors, and there are number of agnostics and atheists. There are also criticisms from religions that have no problem with extremely old earth, such as Hinduism that believes in timelines that exceed the timelines scientists currently propose.
That’s still not the reason why these other ideas are here. They are inspired by what I said.
You are sure only people who criticize the dating methods employed by evolutionary theory are 6 day Biblical literalist?
I don’t know much about dating, but I criticize the common descent model on mathematical modeling grounds.
What’s another somewhat commonly accepted scientific answer for the age of the earth and how we have species diversity? Anything that at least 20% of scientists believe and not some random 3 guy offshoot?
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