No. C14 can only be used on organic material less than 50,000 years old. There are other methods used that do no use organic material. That is why fossils are dated using other layers. Usually layers that contain material from a volcanic eruption for example. Wikipedia has a article that describes these other methods.
As do I but there was a reason God created fish and bread at that point in history. He was making a very specific point. There is no point in creating a universe with apparent age other than saving a human interpretation of Genesis.
In other words, when we’re examining the consistency of someone else’s position, we can’t assume for the argument half of our opponent’s position - (“the earth was created 6,000 years ago”)… but then sneak in assumptions from our own position - (“there are some layers that are billions of years old”) that they would clearly not agree with, and then claim that their position is inconsistent on the basis that some of their beliefs are inconsistent with some of my beliefs.
Right, no disagreement there, just that you had said, “when fossils are dated using radiometric dating methods,”, and i understood you to mean that it was the fossils themselves that were being dated.
but for clarity I should understand you to mean “when layers containing fossils are dated using radio metric dating methods…”?
So strictly speaking, again, for clarity, except for C14 dating which only goes to 50,000 years or so, fossils are not able to be radiometrically dated, rather, in is the rock layer(s) they are in (or beside, above, below, or between, etc.) that are radiometrically dated, not the fossils themselves.
So with that clarification, i would have to say that I don’t exactly disagree, but just to be clear, it is the layer that is providing the date, not the fossil, no?
And more to the point I am getting at… if a YEC doubts the method used to date the layer, we could hardly use as “evidence” the date of the fossil, which was itself dated by the date of the layer, no?
My skeptical mind forces me to suggest one correction… Perhaps we might rather say…
“There is no point that I can see in creating a universe with apparent age other than saving a human interpretation of Genesis.”
I for one am very hesitant to determine what God may or may not have wanted to accomplish by his purposes, based on what I would have done… or suggest that because I don’t see why God might have done something, that it necessarily follows that God could have had no reason for such.
But we can certainly use the date of the layer which is much older than anything the YEC allow. Then the only argument is with the dating methods and for that the YEC have no good argument.
I don’t base my belief on what I might have done but on what the Bible tells us about the character of God. I don’t believe God would be deceptive.
I’m asking a genuine novice question, for you or anyone else that has the expertise to answer… and I am not asking this to sneak in some defense of YEC, just genuinely curious, given my ignorance…
So there is a volcanic eruption, and from the radioactive decay in that “newly laid down” material (presumably igneous rock?) we date that layer.
But the magma under the earth’s surface that eventually became that igneous rock was itself undergoing radioactive decay for millions of years as well, no?
In other words, If I were to find, hypothetically, two igneous layers, separated by some sedimentary layers… which were each laid down by separate volcanic events…each of those igneous layers came from essentially the same molten magma under the earth’s surface, which itself was undergoing radioactive decay at a certain and constant rate, no?
What is it, specifically, about the process where the magma/lava hardens into rock that allows us to “reset the stopwatch”, so to speak? does the decay rate of a material change based on whether it is in liquid or solid state? the pressure it is under? the temperature?
True and no significant disagreement in this context. My only point is that the existence of fossils seems, then, entirely extraneous to that question.
Short answer, it is when the minerals in the magma form into crystals as it cools. This actually starts the stopwatch.
I know you don’t have time for “yet another book recommendation” but if you want to see an examination of the geological evidence written by Christian geologists read “The Bible, Rocks and Time”. I found it quite interesting. In the chapters on radiometric dating they do discuss the YEC objections in I think a fair manner.
And what is the question exactly? I seem to have lost the thread of this conversation.
I don’t think that’s what is happening here though. If the earth is created with apparent age, the layers that appear old are, indeed, less old, but if they have scars in areas that are claimed to just “look old” and not actually be old, that’s where the claim that they just “look old” breaks down.
So let’s say you have layers A, B, and C created 6000 years ago to look old. They can look a trillion years old. Doesn’t matter. They are actually 6000 years old and just “look old”. Meanwhile, layers D, E, and F occurred naturally in the last 6000 years. Dating those layers should give us correct dates. We would expect all scars to be in layers D,E, and F. How could there be any fossils in layer A, if it is part of the layers created to “look old”? Doesn’t matter what date you give the layers. If they’re placed there just for looks, they shouldn’t have any fossils.
Now what happens with the YEC is that they attack radiometric dating, saying that the decay rates changed, and that layers A,B, and C containing fossils were actually created during a global flood. So they have abandoned the appearance of age argument all together. Layers A, B, and C are no longer layers that just “look old”. They were not part of the originally created earth. You can’t use the appearance of age argument for layers containing fossils.
And C14 calibration tells me that the earth cannot be just 6000 years old, because it would take miraculous manipulating to make multiple independent dating methods all say the same thing up to about 50,000 years. As Bill mentioned, why would God do that? He had a purpose for creating bread and fish or even for creating earth and Adam as mature, so I don’t have any problem with the possibility of those things prior to seeing evidence against them. I do have a problem with saying God miraculously manipulated all the decay rates, various physical constants (that are part of the fine tuning of the universe that allows life), rates of sediment and ice core layer formation, rates of tree ring formation, and other things just to make the earth look like all its scars are very old? The layers with scars should be measuring their correct age. I have no Biblical reason to believe that God manipulated all those things to make the fossil containing layers look old. I have no scientific reason to believe they are really 6000 years old or less.
And this is why the appearance of age argument isn’t used as much by YEC’s anymore. I mostly hear it from lay people, not “creation scientists” themselves. Layer A can’t be both created to look old and contain fossils formed during a global flood. It’s one or the other (or neither).
Daniel, you know as an engineer that scale is critical to the analysis of any problem. If a nut is too large by 1 micrometer but the tolerance is 1 mm, no problem. If the nut is too large by 1 mm but the tolerance is 1 micrometer, you have a big problem.
So why are you ignoring the scale issue?
Geologists have radiometrically dated formations to over 4 billion with a B years ago.
YECs claim the earth is only about 6000 years ago.
The difference is approximately 6 orders of magnitude, right?
But in the analogy you offer, the difference is only 1 order of magnitude:
Your analogy is off by five orders of magnitude.
Now a 30 year old man has been alive for about a billion seconds. To replicate the scale factor correctly, what you should have asked, Daniel, is this:
I trust you might see how the existence of scars, in and of itself, simply could not help distinguish between a man actually 30 years old, and a man created ex nihilo 30 minutes ago with apparent age at that time ?
And then I would answer: I disagree. The scars would be incontrovertible evidence that the man was not created ex nihilo 30 minutes ago.
EDIT: Based on the assumption that the God who creates ex nihilo would not implant misleading evidence of events that never occurred.
Exactly.
I absolutely have not.
The point of our discussion has been: Is the apparent age argument tenable?
I fully understand that YECs always have the option to argue against the premise of the reliability of radiometric dating, and that they use it. But that was never discussed in this thread, to the best of my recollection. Apparent age vs. not, that’s been the focus.
Why you make wild and unfounded accusations against my writing, Daniel, I do not understand. As for example, when you claimed that fossils could only be dated to a maximum of 50,000 years, and then I pointed out the way paleontologists actually date them. You never acknowledged your error. Instead, you made another error by twisting my argument about fossils and apparent age into a straw man: That I was claiming that fossils per se are an independent argument for age. I never said that or implied that. I had only ever said that they are an argument that to the extent the science is correct, the radiometric age of the rocks should be accepted, rather than regarded as apparent.
I don’t like getting into these kinds of discussions, Daniel, but since you have repeatedly misrepresented my writings and now outrageously and with zero, diddly, nada evidence claim that I am twisting other people’s arguments, you have left me no real choice.
Having stated this, I am ready and eager to resume civil discussion whenever you acknowledge having gone out of bounds. Even as I did at the beginning of this post. Can you follow my example, Daniel?
very interesting thoughts and questions. I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool YEC, of course, so i’m not sure what they would say, though i have read their writings with interest…
i would have to do more study than i have time for, but I would assume that any layers that do contain fossils, they would, by definition, claim to be in your second category, of layers that were “laid down” in the last 6,000 years.
to my knowledge (or maybe i’m guessing here), the reason they claim these layers “appear” to be 6,000 years old is not because they were created that way at creation 6,000 years ago… but because the devastation of the flood laid them down in such volume and manner in a way that they appear 6,000 years old, and any appearance of age beyond those 4,000 or so years is based on false uniformitarian assumptions, false assumptions in radiometrically dating, etc.
but you did pique my curiosity…what they would say in response about layers without fossils… were they created this way with appearance of age… I’m not sure if they would even acknowledge the possibility of such things… or if they’d say there are or were any layers that would have been “laid down” in some form or fashion in those first 6 days. There is the implication of some geological activity in those first six days, (of the waters were gathered in one place that would presume some manner of major movement of earth)… so perhaps they might claim those “earlier” layers were created (or accelerated?) in the first creation week?
for my own part, I am very skeptical of any intentional “appearance of age” that seems to have no purpose except to deceive… e.g., instantaneous creation of sedimentary layers that were never laid down by sediment… though I am simultaneously very open to the concept of incidental appearance of age that is inescapable when something is made instantaneously… e.g., a man made instantly that bears the appearance of being ~15-30 years old.
But there will be things that fall somewhere between those two extremes on the spectrum. I am still entirely undecided on the question someone raised earlier… if God did instantaneously created a tree, would there be rings? (or, the more comical question… did Adam have a belly button??) My instinct is to be very skeptical of such things that seem to be deceptive, but I am also very wary of suggesting that God could not instantaneously create a tree because it would pose such a dd such scientific difficulty…
…So what gives me pause are the other instances when God (or Christ) did something similar with “appearance of age”… I assume that, when Jesus performed that miraculous feeding… the bread he gave them gave every indication of wheat that had grown from seed, ripened, been harvested, milled, baked, and cooled… the fish, presumably, gave every indication that they had been born, grown, fed, died, and (presumably?) had been cooked in some way. If there was in fact a purpose that satisfied God for creating something immediately in this way… then I don’t feel at liberty to rule out that possibility in any other case either, realizing that I have no exhaustive knowledge about why he might have chosen to do such things.
Chris, I appreciate and respect your thoughts in general, but somehow we are not connecting when we communicate. From my perspective, you seem to very quickly jump to unwarranted conclusions and make many unwarranted assumptions, about why i didn’t respond, about what YECs would claim, and now about my knowledge of C14 dating… i was and have been quite aware of the basic methods and principles of radiometric dating, and the basic age ranges of the various methods (K/Argon, U/Pb, etc.) decades ago, and how these and others were used to date corresponding fossils. i recognize you seem to honestly believe you have “schooled” me on these principles recently. I fully understand that you completely and honestly believe that i made an “error” there, and I doubt I could convince you otherwise.
For what it is worth, I was trying only to clarify that the data to date the fossil indeed came from the rock(s) (not directly from the fossil as could be the case in <50,000 year C14 dating), hence the date of the fossil can’t be used to date the rock, or the earth, as that would be circular. I don’t know exactly how you interpreted that to believe i was ignorant of issues surrounding C14 dating or the existence of alternate methods of dating fossils.
For whatever reason it seems impossible for me to be able to communicate such that you understand my points or observations in order to further discuss them… and I’m willing to take full responsibility that I have perhaps not been communicating clearly. But regardless, I fear it would be useless to continue discussion. But appreciate your willingness to have engaged. Thanks for your contributions.
I would agree. This seems to pose problems with explaining away radiometric dating as a byproduct of the initial creation. The lava flows and other igneous rocks that sit above fossils had to put down after the fossils.
Flooding won’t change the ratios of isotopes trapped in the rocks, which is what they use to date the rocks. A lava flow from a few thousand years ago won’t date old because there was a flood. I can’t even imagine what types of mechanisms they could come up with that would make these rocks date old by multiple independent methods.
appreciated, thanks. Also, do you have any insight into my question above, as to why magma/lava from different volcanic events would exhibit different “dates”of radioactive decay, when they came from the “same” lava source, which had itself been experiencing said radioactive decay?
There are quite a few methodologies within radiometric dating so it’s hard to address in general. Some of the isochron methods (perhaps Rb/Sr) can be influenced by the source magma, but other methods aren’t affected in this way. For example, K/Ar and the related Ar/Ar dating methods are based on the observation that argon gas boils out of magma. When the magma solidifies it has very little to no detectable argon, and this has been verified by looking at modern volcanic flows. However, the solidified rocks do have K, and one the isotopes of K is unstable and decays into Ar. Therefore, when we find significant amounts of Ar in a rock from solidified magma we can conclude that it got there from the decay of K. We also have zircons which are crystals that form when magma cools and solidifies. These crystals exclude Pb and include U due to basic laws of chemistry. Certain isotopes of U decay into Pb, so when we measure Pb we are measuring the history of U decay in that zircon.
Daniel, my understanding is that the decay while molten does not matter, as you are looking only at the decay that occurs after the parent isotope is fixed in the crystalline lattice in the cooled lava. Here is a link to a good explanation of how it works: https://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
With thanks to you and to @T_aquaticus, and i will have to continue to study… But i still struggle to simply understand the overall concept… surely, there is some radioactive decay happening within the various isotopes that are happening under the earth’s crust… in theory, at some point (millions or billions of years into the future?)… if lava flows out of the earth, it will be entirely absent of detectable radioactive isotopes, not unlike carbon based organisms some 50,000 years after their death… and unlike C14, if I understand rightly, there would be no radioactive source (such as solar radiation) that would be “producing” more radioactive isotopes of molten K under the earth?
I grasp what @T_aquaticus wrote about the argon boiling out and evaporating, with any subsequent Ar produced by K decay being trapped inside the rock, if I am understanding properly, but i’m still trying to grasp the larger idea… Where does the argon go that is the daughter elements of the molten K isotope? does it just remain “dissolved” within the molten magma? does it rise to the surface of the magma, immediately to boil off when exposed to the earth’s atmosphere? Is any Argon that is produced by radioactive decay remain “dissolved” (if that is even the right word) in the cooling lava, or is the assumption that all argon has evaporated/boiled away?
Also, if the amount of K radioactive isotope has been decaying over the years even under the earth’s surface, then an earlier layer of igneous rock would be expected to have less Ar than a later layer, if i’m understanding properly?
The lava does contain radioactive isotopes when it erupts. The important bit is the element the radioactive isotope eventually decays into. Remember, we are measuring both the parent isotope (the isotope that decays) and the daughter isotope (the isotope it decays into). A newly solidified rock will have 40K in it, but very little to no 40Ar. Over time, that 40K continues to decay and produces 40Ar, and it is the ratio of 40K/40Ar that gives us the amount of time 40K has been decaying in that rock since it solidified and started capturing 40Ar.
It boils out of the magma because it is a gas. You only start to accumulate 40Ar in solid rock.
It is the ratio that is important, not the absolute amount. Even if you start with different amounts of 40K you will still get the same ratio between parent and daughter isotope over time. For example, 100/50 is the same ratio as 10/5.
Also, very much appreciate the link… One observation…
Whenever rock is melted to become magma or lava, the argon tends to escape . Once the molten material hardens, it begins to trap the new argon produced since the hardening took place . In this way the potassium-argon clock is clearly reset when an igneous rock is formed. In its simplest form, the geologist simply needs to measure the relative amounts of potassium-40 and argon-40 to date the rock . The age is given by a relatively simple equation…
So to use the above example, I guess what I’m trying to grasp is this: is the amount of K-40 under the earth continually diminishing, or for some reason remaining constant? My intuition would tell me that it is diminishing, as there would be no new source of energy/neutrons (solar radiation, etc.) that would be producing new K-40 (unless from subterranean decay of other isotopes? but even those would decay eventually?)