Dating methods aren’t extrapolation when we can literally see into the past. With the arrival of modern astronomy, we can literally look backwards in time, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, and billions of years. That’s not extrapolation, that’s what we’re actually seeing.
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Here’s a reference form the talk.origins archive. These ‘disputes’ have recurred so often that a series of FAQs were made to avoid rehashing frequently repeated points. JohnZ can take his disputes to the various authors of those FAQs.
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But how do we know they work? The argument is almost always that they correlate to other methods. Right? If they did not correlate, then we would assume that they do not work. Thus the circularity. It is said that they correlate to each other, that they are consistent with each other, and therefore they must work. Since they correlate, they must be accurate, since those which do not correlate are not accepted as workable. So, those methods which do not correlate, are not accepted… but of course, the determination of which methods reign supreme and over-rule other methods must be made, and has been made.
We would expect certain types of rocks to give the same radio-decay ratios, even without understanding or postulating the reasons for it. So it is not surprising to see similar ratios for similar types of rocks.
What is surprising is the complete disregard for other methods of “age dating”. The fact that dna is found in stuff supposedly 65 my old, when even completely frozen it would not survive beyond 6my, should raise alarm bells about the radio dating system. Does it? It should.
Wrong. They are verifiable independent of other methods of dating.
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What you don’t seem to understand, is what I actually said. A method cannot verify itself. In the real world, a method must be corroborated by actual measured data outside of itself. This is true for modelling processes, as well as any type of interpretation from data.
In soil science, this means that when we say a soil is deficient in potassium, it is not because it does not have enough potassium in the soil to meet the requirements of plants for growth, but because only a certain amount of potassium is available for plant growth, because the rest (which is lots) is tied up in the soil, and thus in an unavailable pool. If the model is too simple, and assumes x potassium in the soil is much more than the y potassium required by plants, and therefore enought K is in the soil, then without verification (by adding various amounts of inorganic fertilizer potassium), the simple model might be assumed to be right, while it is in fact wrong. The point is that the model, the algorithm, the equations, need to be verified by evidence outside of itself, which in this case means adding fertilizer in plots on various soil types, and then measuring the results.
So in this case of radioactive dating, the evidence appears to be that various methods corroborate each other. However, these methods are all dependant on the same principles, and they do not always corroborate each other (partly because they supposedly do not cover the same range of ages), and sometimes the lack of corroboration is large, especially since the substrate materials apparently can be selected to suit the purpose. The question is never whether the equipment is measuring accurately. I assume the GC does its job. I also assume that by now the techniques for purification and avoiding contamination are reasonably good. But the question is about what minerals are selected for measurement, which rocks are eligible or representative, and what are the starting assumptions.
And thus when a C14 measurement is vastly different than a K-Ar measurement in terms of the interpolated age of the material, we know there is a lack of verification when it really counts.
Hi JohnZ. Please see the FAQs starting from the link I provided. Read the papers and references cited. There is a scientific body of work out there one can follow if so inclined.
I’m not going to repeat information for cases that have been previously brought up so many times that FAQs have been generated.
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I have been on the talk origins site before, and have no confidence in it whatsoever. It is incredibly biased, and often derogatory and simplistic. It is not a good site for true information evaluation.
You imply that you can see obvious problems that many scientists working in the fields for decades either missed and don’t recognize or have sleazily swept under the rug.
Read the articles they cited. Write to a researcher in one of the papers. Educate yourself and read the primary literature if necessary.
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Of course. Such as accurate predictions. You don’t even need another method to measure it.
No it is not just that. It is way beyond that. Do you know what the universe would look like if radio-metric dates are out by millions of years, and the universe is actually only a few thousand years old? Do you know what the universe woudl look like if the speed of light was about the same as the speed of sound? Do you know what stars would look like if they weren’t actually light years away?
On the contrary, many controls are used specifically to calibrate the equipment and detect error. And even then, measurements are accompanied by error margins.
No. This isn’t about starting assumptions or selecting minerals for measurement.
No. We know a C14 measurement is always going to be vastly different to a K-Ar measurement, because they are measuring two completely different things, and they have different time limits. C14 dating is used to date the carbon remaining in organic material, and has a reliable upper limit of between 40,000 and 60,000 years. But K-AR dating is used to date the argon remaining in inorganic material, and has a reliable upper limit of well over 100,000 years.
I don’t imply that the problems are obvious; obviously they are not obvious. But that doesn’t mean the problems are not there.
I don’t appreciate having judgemental judgements made about supposed judgements that I may or may not make about other scientists, and thus do not appreciate the words “sleazily swept” as I find it an emotive phrase used to emotionalize the issue in an adhominem fashion, without actually addressing any points I’ve made.
What are the problems? How is it that the scientists with whom you disagree, are able to make accurate predictions about the universe and the way it works, if they are wrong and you are right?
johnZ,
With all due respect,
- With your background knowledge of the experimental methods, if you believe you have identified critical problems with the methods or the results – and –
- You are citing cases which have been presented at various creationist websites and journals for many years…
Then they would have to be:
- Obvious problems, because many other creationists have noted and published about them – and –
- Swept under the rug by the scientists involved because it is, for all practical purposes, inconceivable that they never noticed or recognized their impacts.
But in fact, contamination, chemical migration, experimental & selection error, decay rates, noise, and many other potential error sources you described have actually been considered in the development of these various methods. There is a large body of scientific work that describes the conditions under which samples are best selected, handled, prepared and evaluated for each of the various radiometric dating techniques. There are publications that describe methods used to validate results and potential sources of errors and how to control for outliers.
previously…
Many of these cases and presentations of radiometric dating science are cited in the URL* I provided earlier and one can do a rather simple search to delve deeper or broader into the literature. Even if for whatever reason you don’t believe the FAQs, you can easily investigate their references.
*These sorts of ‘contradictory’ examples have appeared so often that the folks behind talk.origins organized an extensive collection of common creationist claims here.
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Partly true, but… If you were weighing 50,000 lbs and were out by 100 pounds, which would be demonstrated by driving the truck on and off the scale, re-zeroing, and reweighing, yes the -+ 0.2% would apply. But if you were weighing nothing at all, and a leaf changed the weight by 100 lbs, that would be considerably different. It simply should not register.
Of course, contamination must be ruled out, but contamination is always assumed if dates don’t match expectations. The problem with this is how do we determine that if when dates do match expectations, that it is not simply due to contamination, and that if there was no contamination, that dates would not match expectations.
Of course. I agree. But yet, contamination is almost always cited when measurements do not meet expectations, as in reply to jammycakes mention of contamination needing to be ruled out.
As far as tlak origins is concerned, I am not suggesting that you not use it as a source for your information or rebuttals, just that you not refer me to it. If they have references or sources which are relevant and trustworthy to you, feel free to use them to make your point. But the site is biased, not balanced, nor fair, and too often inaccurate, and I choose not to use it.
If you do not know how this is determined, then the links Argon has already given you will help.
Of course it is cited as a POSSIBLE reason for measurements being inaccurate, because decades of experience has shown scientists that certain kinds of accuracy are typically the result of contamination. That’s why C14 dating always commences with a calibration test, and measures taken to reduce contamination.
But how often do these anomalies actually occur, and how large are the anomalies How often, for example, do measurements of the speed of light “not meet expectations”? How often do K-Ar dates give results of less than six thousand years?
Hi John, hope you and yours are continuing to abide in God’s grace.
You have a profound misunderstanding of the difference between physical scales and radiometric dating. Unlike a scale, the apparatus for radiometric dating does not have a “reading” when nothing is being evaluated. The equipment has to process a sample in order to provide a reading.
In order to “zero” the radiometric dating apparatus, then, geologists process a known very young sample. If the rock is from a 20 year old lava flow, but the apparatus says it is 400,000 years old, then the zero dating result is roughly 400kya. A lab that has “zeroed” their equipment this way might urge customers not to bring any samples suspected of being younger than, say, 2my old, because the error bar will be too wide to get trustworthy results (at least 20%). Because of the inherent variance in readings, you couldn’t even say that a reading of 800kya means the sample is 400ky old. It could be the result of a 400kya swing in readings. With a 100mya rock, a swing of 400kya is insignificant. With a 20 year old rock, though, such a variance would obviously give bad results.
All this to say: when a radiometric dating lab says that you should not bring them a known young sample, you should believe them. And if you disregard their warnings and give them a young sample anyway, then you are incautious, or naive, or deceitful.
Cheers,
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I would concur that the tone of some of the articles on Talk Origins is overly aggressive, and it does sometimes cross the line between explaining science/clearing up misconceptions, and trying to debunk Christianity as a whole. This is counterproductive as it just gets people’s backs up, polarises the debate, and no doubt even contributes towards pushing some “undecided” Christians towards young-earth creationism. However, not all the articles on the site are like that. Different articles have different authors, some of whom are evangelical Christians, so be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
As for your claims that it is often inaccurate, can you cite some specific examples please?
I’ll just set aside my concerns about the fact that they sent samples known to be young to a laboratory that explicitly said it can’t date samples known to be young and assume for the time being that the results were genuinely anomalous. However, this merely proves that we have encountered a corner case. You still have to prove that these corner cases are representative of the whole.
The fact remains that if radiometric dating really were so unreliable that it couldn’t tell the difference between a few thousand years and millions or billions of years, these corner cases would be the rule, not the exception. In particular, agreement between different dating methods would be very, very rare, disagreements spanning multiple orders of magnitude would be the norm, and there would be no upper limit to the ages given by the different dating methods. You certainly wouldn’t see agreement to within a fraction of one percent, 95% of the time.
You’ve claimed that dating methods are only in agreement because they make the same assumptions. However, this simply isn’t true. Both radiometric and non-radiometric methods are used. One particularly striking example is the agreement between radiometric dating and direct GPS measurements of continental drift. Even among radiometric methods, the preconditions are completely different.
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Hi Chris,
Just one general point that needs to be made concerning many methods used to obtain information, be it radiometric methods or analytical methods - all of these need to be calibrated, both for zero readings, and also to establish a linear or non-linear relationship between the two axis (sample, item, and amount). It is for this reason that standards have been set up, and in my field, we take standards and instrumental responses in analytical chemistry very seriously.
I have not performed measurements related to age of samples, but I have performed isotopic distributions, and even in identification and characterisation studies, reviewers have taken a very harsh approach to conclusions based on such.
I think it is worth noting these matters - having said that, I think arguments that seek to claim the earth is 6,000 years old are simply wrong. By the same token, some papers that claim millions of years as established data have left me feeling extremely skeptical - they need to accept the uncertainty inherent is such studies. not by inter-laboratory studies, but by verification of standards that are beyond dispute (if such can be obtained).
And radiometric dating aside, the simple fact is that astronomy alone lets us literally look into the deep past. Astronomy allows us to actually look back in time hundreds of thousands or millions of years. It’s immediately game over for any suggestion that the universe or the earth is only thousands of years old.
That’s before we even get into the ethical question of why God would deliberately deceive us by creating a universe with a false impression of a lengthy past.
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Thanks, George! I always appreciate the insight and additional detail that a working scientist can add to the observations of a non-scientist like myself.