Bubba

Just a quick question-wouldn't proof that the universe was a good 100,000 years old (not even going to 4.6 Billion) answer a creationist rather well in terms of refuting Hebrew Cosmology and the worldview of the writers of Genesis? I was thinking about Derek and his post about his discussion with his fundy co-worker. Also thinking that the evidence of the last 100,000 years of geological, biological, and human activity has to be pretty damn good. So the questions are...

1. How good is the evidence from a scientific standpoint that things like glaciation (sp?) have happened in the last 100,000 years? This would seem to be overwhelming and irrefutable proof to me against the young earth arguement in and of itself.

2. What do we really know about prehistoric but modern Humans and their activities over the last 100,000 years? I've read a lot of articles about ancient peoples but never really put all of the evidence together or checked its veracity.

3. Has anyone tried this line of reasoning with an open minded creationist???

Coragyps

It's sort of funny, if I understand it right, how the present status of absolute dating stands. 100,000 years is a little bit of a bastard child. Radiocarbon dating is good up to about 50,000 years back, tree rings to maybe 12,000, varves in lakes to maybe 20,000 (?), and layers in the ice of Greenland and Antarctica to 200,000, as I recall, but with somewhat reduced accuracy in the older portion of that record.
Rubidium-strontium, potassium-argon, uranium-lead and the like, on the other hand, are at their best with ages in the millions of years - the half-lives of these are so long that the intrinsic errors of measurement might be +/- 50,000 years, though getting better all the time with new analytical methods. So these are really good at dates like 64.5 +/- 0.1 Ma, but 0.1 +/- .05 Ma doesn't look as impressive.
The absolute dating methods that amateur Coragyps knows of that work best around 100 kA are things like amino acid racemization and quartz luminescence - and these are fairly new methods that are still being calibrated against the "old reliables." And racemization, at least, could potentially be interfered with by various environmental conditions.

Now none of this changes the facts: we have solid, incontrovertible dates of over 3.5 billion years for many, many rocks from spots all around on the earth. And we have many, many equally good dates, in unbroken-by-giant-flood series, for the last several tens of thousands of years. And in the range of 100,000 years that you mention, we have scads of good dates too - it's just that the error bars, as I understand it all, are a little wider in that range.

hezekiah jones

With a WHAT?!?