Quality of the extrapolation leading to billions of years

[Chris_Falter]

John, you have no idea what I have read. Since you seem to think that I am cynical, I feel I must defend my intellectual integrity, which is quite unfortunate. But since you made it an issue, here is my response:

1. I read “The Genesis Flood” by Henry Morris

2. I read “Scientific Creationism” by Henry Morris

3. I read “Evolution? The Fossils Say No!” by Duane Gish.

4. I cheered racously for Duane Gish when he debated Stephen Jay Gould in 1980 on the Princeton campus.

5. I have read about 25 articles on the AiG website.

6. I have read a dozen or so articles on the creation.com website.

Over to you, John. Now you have the opportunity to tell us how deeply you have researched the works written by mainstream geologists and evolutionary biologists.

EDIT: I also read both RATE reports.

[Lynn_Munter]

@johnZ

This is a good response, @Chris_Falter. But the point is that something that is below the detection limit, would indicate zero, since it could not be detected. When it is detected at low levels, but within the range of error or variance, it should be less than the error limit of the detection method, which is reported at about 200,000 years equivalent, or sometimes at 280,000 years equivalent. If this is all that is detected within this range, then the report should indicate this equals zero. However, the values were well outside this range, up to 3.5my.

@Jonathan_Burke Without having extensively looked into radiometric dating myself, isn’t the problem with this that the margin of error is not actually constant over time, but grows wider as we leave the ideal dating range of the isotope in question? So the ‘error limit,’ I’m sure, would be calibrated to samples within the lab’s stated detection range, that is, >2my, and would naturally be larger once we approached 0.

Just because the lab gave a good faith attempt at dating it, based on the assumption that it was somewhere around the lower limit, doesn’t mean that whipping out the little factiod that the sample was of an age known to give bad results using that dating method should invalidate other, proper uses of the dating method.

[thabo (Mike Carney)]

i am sorry to come late to this reading.
I became convinced of the time scale because of plate tectonics.
i live on the west coast of the united states where earthquakes happen. and in the 1950’s there was some uncertainty as to the source. Some movies show earthquakes as miraculous always, "the 10 commandments with Charelton Heston, and The last Crusade with Indiana Jones. Now plate techtonics appears in grade schools. based on the observation that Africa was once joined to South America. They saw the outline of the coast matched up, then they compared geologic deposits and found them matching. how did that happen? how long did it take? how fast is it going on today? I am skeptical about radiometric readings because i don’t see those little neutrons and alpha particles and beta particles. but from satellite photos you can see stretch marks in the atlantic ocean, matching shorelines. about 400million years ago.you can do the math as distance = rate times time. We all learned that math. then other things fall out. You might notice that the appalacians once connected with the Ozark mountains, but around 400million years ago they cracked. We can see land offsetting in orchards in California. it is not esoteric it is cracks on the ground and mountain ranges. And there is not a point where you could say, aha, here is where creation happened. Count the layers in the grand canyon. they extened further back than 7000 years to Adam, and there is no special layer where you might say, things progressed normally to this layer and everything older is - what? the invention of the devil to confuse us?
and different fossils in these layers of rock point to evolution - it is written in stone, you have only to look. I only mow the grass 3 months of the year, never is grass growth constant.