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%.
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.
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.
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."-
“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.”
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.
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.
You need to distinguish between uncertainties in measurements, and uncertainties in extrapolations. The error of a mass spectrometer measurement is not the same thing as the error in attributing an age on the basis of the measurement.
That is correct. The overall uncertainty is based on all known error bars, not just the individual readings. No-one is suggesting otherwise.
Accuracy still ends up round about ±0.1% for modern radiometric methods.
Modern methods have high-precision tools such as atomic clocks, lasers, interferometers, mass spectrometers and various kinds of computer-controlled equipment that were not available in previous eras.
Nuclear decay rates have been tested under laboratory conditions and shown to be highly resistant to factors such as temperature, pressure, chemical reactions, electromagnetic fields, ionisation etc. The few isotopes whose decay rates can change only do so by a small amount and are not used in dating. Additional multiple lines of evidence such as supernova explosions and the Oklo natural nuclear reactor demonstrate that decay rates have remained constant in the past. We can therefore establish firm numerical limits on how accurate our extrapolations will be.
By contrast, metrics such as influx of salt into the oceans are very difficult if not impossible to measure accurately, requiring huge multinational surveys that even then only get a fraction of the necessary data points. And that’s just for current rates. What historical rates could have been is anybody’s guess.