not sure. how we can know what peocesses those atoms get?
Take a look at the article “Radiometric Dating—a Christian Perspective” by Roger C Wiens. The section on rubidium-strontium dating illustrates the isochron method, or three-isotope plot as the article calls it.
The article is an essential read for anyone interested in this aspect of the origins debate. It explains in detail how scientists verify the various assumptions involved in dating, and addresses a lot of common young-earth misconceptions about the subject.
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It depends on what you mean by “old”, but for K-Ar, the error range is about 200,000 yrs, based on the theory and the accuracy of measurement. So if K-Ar dated something at less than 200,000 yrs, it would be similar to dating it as possibly zero years, or 100 years, or 1000 yrs. However, when it dates this rock as 3.5 my, it is well outside the error range. So the question is, how accurate is an error range of 200,000 yrs? And error ranges for other methods are greater. And if they are not greater error ranges, then that really begs the question how another method can date one hundred year old rock as more than 100 million years old or more than 3 billion yrs?
You cannot really date rock with the C14 method, since you need biological material to create the C14/C12 ratio, which is the indicator for age. Volcanic rock (igneous) does not contain this carbon. Sedimentary layers cannot be dated directly with any radiometric method, since the processes necessary for a radiometric timeclock have been disrupted.
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I can’t answer this question. that would be a major time consuming study. But remember that even when there is not discordance, this by itself does not discount the discordances. If numbers were simply random, one would also expect a number of concordant numbers. And the numbers become concordant partly because of the large overlapping error ranges. However, again, under any theory imaginable, one would expect a large number of concordant results from the same method on the same type of rock.
While the half-life is large, this is immaterial to the point made. It is the error range of measurement that is the issue, not the half life. As a parallel example, just because a person’s half life is 50 years, does not mean that he cannot measure the length of a minute of his life reasonably accurately. The half life of K40 cannot be directly measured, but is inferred from the amount of decay occurring in a considerably shorter period of time; that is why the error range is much smaller than the half life.
Actually, it is obvious that he is not arguing this. It is not that the rock is pre-aged. You merely assume it is aged because of your assumptions about beginning stages and conditions. His point is merely that if everything was this hot at the beginning, and it affected beginning conditions, then it will have higher levels even if much younger. This is not the same as saying that it is pre aged.
Your second statement is trying to argue against old dead statements of decades ago, which have been discounted and not used by serious YEC scientists as well as by most non-scientists who are YEC.
Sorry, this is simply not correct. If numbers were simply random, concordances would be rare, while the spread of discordances would be over multiple orders of magnitude, certainly much larger than the 15% cited by the RATE project. That is, assuming we got any dates at all—under those conditions, isochron dating and step-heating techniques in Ar-Ar dating would not yield dates at all. On the contrary, it is discordances that are rare, and they are usually if not always explainable by known edge cases in the techniques used.
Take a read of the article I linked to earlier—the article “Radiometric Dating—a Christan Perspective” by Roger C Wiens. Take the time to read it properly—don’t just skim it. It explains in detail what the commonest edge cases are and what effects they have on the results concerned.
Note also that it is a departure from the scientific method to just dismiss these edge cases as “rescuing devices.” They have to be falsified rigorously and numerically before they can be discounted.
Besides, even the main YEC organisations no longer claim (since RATE) that radiometric dating is an exercise in cherry-picking random numbers. Instead, they’re claiming accelerated nuclear decay.
As others have pointed out, error ranges for modern radiometric dating techniques are of the order 0.1%.
We’re talking about different methods on both the same and different types of rock, as well as concordance with non-radiometric methods e.g. ice cores, lake varves, and the rate of continental drift as measured by GPS satellites.
Again, you need to start quoting some numbers to back up your points. The half-life of K40 has been determined by methods such as this to an accuracy of about 0.2%.
In any case, the point I was making was that the results you cited were right at the limits of the range for which K-Ar dating is suited. The dates cited were obtained on the instruction of Steve Austin et al by Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who clearly stated at the time on their website that they did not have the specialist equipment necessary to perform K-Ar dating on samples less than 2 million years old.
I personally believe that as Christians, whatever we believe about the age of the earth, we need to maintain our position with honesty and integrity, as the Bible has far, far more to say about the need for honesty than about either the age of the earth or evolution. This means, in particular, that any claims that we make that our position is supported by science must meet the standards required by the scientific method, and that any rebuttals we make of scientific methodologies must portray those methodologies accurately, representatively and fairly. It also means that attempts such as this to game the system to prove a point have no place whatsoever in our arguments, and should be vigorously opposed, whether we are young-earth or old.
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K-Ar dating is accurate to less than 1%. So if something is dated at 200,000 years the age of the sample is somewhere between 199,000 and 201,000 years old.
Amen to that.
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15
im not sure its true. see this article for example:
" If molten material passes through solid rock, partially liquefying it, then a mixing of two rock formations occurs. Currently, there is not a definitive way to tell the difference between a mixing line and an isochron line.2 Therefore, one must assume that the isochron line began with a slope of zero much like the earlier methods of assuming initial parent or daughter concentrations."-
so we cant be sure.
The article I linked to previously addresses this issue:
“If a two-component mixture is suspected, a second dating method must be used to confirm or disprove the rubidium-strontium date. The agreement of several dating methods is the best fail-safe way of dating rocks.”
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so we back again to the argument about agreement of several methods. but again- in the past several methods agree with each other. and still they was wrong. so its again just an assumption.
And we’re back again to the point that I made that the methods of the past had far, far greater uncertainties.
It’s not a case of “right” versus “wrong”, it’s a case of “precise” versus “vague finger-in-the-air estimates.”
In any case, concordance isn’t an assumption, it’s a test of assumptions.
Yes, I would withdraw my statement about random numbers and concordances. It is too vague. And I did not even mean to imply that the numbers found were random.
However, the error ranges are in the millions of years for various methods, even though this error range is assumed to be small .5 to 2% - in terms of the attributed age attached to the measurement.
Thus, the ages for the Permian-Triassic boundary are 251.4 ± 0.4 million years ago (206Pb-238U) and 250.0 ± 4.4 million years ago (40Ar/39Ar), clearly not statistically resolvable. Neglecting uncertainty in 40K-40Ar data for the 40Ar/39Ar standard, which compounds decay constant error, only decreases the absolute error to ±3.6 million years.RADIOISOTOPE DATING: Enhanced: Absolute Ages Aren’t Exactly Paul R. Renne, Daniel B. Karner, Kenneth R. Ludwig
Yes, and the measured age of the universe is 13.799 billion years +/- 21 million years. I think this is amazing precision and accuracy given the progress in cosmological measurements in the past 5 years.
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I’m not sure what your point is here.
Incidentally, error ranges are not assumed. They are calculated e.g. by taking the standard deviation of a set of measurements.
Don’t just blindly assume that everything you don’t understand properly is an assumption.
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not realy. because they both use an extrapolation. so its not true.
I’m sorry, but I don’t follow your logic here.
How does using extrapolation mean that older methods don’t have greater uncertainties?
its the same logic. we take a process that we know about is rate and make a conclusion about the past. simple.
That doesn’t answer my question. How does this falsify differences in the size of the uncertainties?
how do you know that the uncertainties size is less in the modern memthods?