mung bean

I am tempted to ask if that item would, perchance, be a penis.
However in the interest of decorum (a subject dear to my heart)
I will refrain from asking.

Cege

There is OT scripture to describe this ice age of several hundred years after the Flood? Do you maintain that the tower of Babel incident in the OT occured during a global ice age?

From an article about the formation of the English Channel:

To the north of the channel basin was a lake which formed in the area now known as the southern North Sea. It was fed by the Rhine and Thames, impounded to the north by glaciers and dammed to the south by the Weald-Artois chalk ridge which spanned the Dover Straits.

It is believed that a rise in the lake level eventually led to a breach in the Weald-Artois ridge, carving a massive valley along the English Channel, which was exposed during a glacial period.

At its peak, it is believed that the megaflood could have lasted several months, discharging an estimated one million cubic metres of water per second. This flow was one of the largest recorded megafloods in history and could have occurred 450,000 to 200,000 years ago.

If the earth is <10,000 years old, how could the formation of the English Channel during a megaflood 450,000 to 200,000 years ago be possible?

Calilasseia

Eric's already asked that.

In fact, variations on the same question have a disturbingly frequent habit of being asked (and again, Eric tends to be particularly vigilant in this respect) because Dave has an equally disturbing tendency to alight upon material such as this, which describes some "catastrophic" event, followed by a ludicrous attempt to use said attempt to 'validate' the global flood. Usually made ludicrous for precisely the same reason - the date assigned to the event in question is hundreds of thousands or even millions of years in the past (someone will probably point you at a Dave attempt to add the Chicxulub meteorite event to the list from 65 million years ago). Dave's catch-all answer for this of course is that the dating techniques used to assign those dates were all wrong (indeed, by definition in DaveWorld™, any dating technique assigning a date earlier than 4004 BC or whatever it was Ussher or some other religious fetishist came up with for the waving of the magic wand) but the problem here is that this is baloney because [1] several of those techniques rely upon precise mathematical laws (N=N₀e^-λt anyone?) [2] others rely upon definable annual events, and [3] once the metrical system for each has been determined as a first approximation, they can all be cross correlated to make sure that they're giving reasonable answers with material of known date before being used to assign dates to materials whose dates are not known in advance. This is the 'consilience' aspect Dave never once addressed in the formal debate - the assorted dating techniques were tested where possible upon material of known age in order to verify their utility value (and likely experimental error bars in order to establish the first-order accuracy, then cross-correlations and assorted other refinements were used to hone that accuracy (oh look, there's those two words again, calbration curves).

Note that this is the part that Dave has failed to register when trying to cast doubt upon the validity of these methods - in accordance with good scientific practice, dating techniques were, when first devised, tested against material of known and independently verifiable age in order to establish whether or not the methods were correct. Having thus established sufficiently good accuracy with a number of known test materials, it was time to use them on unknown materials. If a dating technique in its first approximation tells us, for example, that a small sample of paper is 795 years give or take 3 years either way, and that small sample of paper happens to be taken from the Magna Carta (dated 1215, and thus 792 years old) then we have one result that gives us some confidence in it. If we repeat this testing, and build up, say the following results:

Paper sample 795±3 yr (Treaty of Magna Carta, signed 1215)
Timber sample 477±2 yr (Warship Mary Rose, built 1509)
Paper sample 460±2yr (Vellum document known as the Anthony Roll, 1546)
Leather sample 362±1 yr (Uniform of named participant in English Civil War, 1646)
Leather sample, 1203±3 yr (Belt belonging to inhabitant of Jorvik Viking community in England, 805 AD)
Paper sample, 1206±2 yr (Sample from Book of Kells, dated ca. 800 AD)
Paper sample, 556±1 yr (Sample from Gutenberg Bible edition No. "Hubay 26" from National Library of Scotland, dated 1452)

then we start to have increasing confidence in a dating technique that is producing good matches with objects of known provenance.. That is the point - scientific dating techniques aren't dreamt up overnight and cobbled together slapdash fashion like the content of an AiG webpage, they're subject to analysis, including experimental testing upon materials of known age (where this is possible of course) in order to establish that they're founded upon a reasonable hypothesis. Once you have, say, 30 or 40 results from materials of known age that make sense, you have increasing confidence that the technique is a good one. Furthermore, if that technique involves precise mathematical relationships AND cross-correlates well with one or more other, independent dating techniques, then we have even more confidence in it.

Now, if that dating technique returns sensible values for the ages of objects of known historical provenance, and correlates with other dating techniques that do likewise, then it becomes exceedingly difficult to claim that said dating technique (and, for that matter, the others that correlate with it) are somehow flawed. Which means that if said dating technique is used to date an object of previously unknown historical provenance, and returns that the object is 50,000 years old, then this poses something of a problem for any theory that claims that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. That is why we have confidence in those dating techniques - both multiple independent corroborations AND prior sensible results returned upon materials of known historical provenance. Now, any attempt to cast doubt upon those dating techniques has to explain not only how ALL of them can be wrong, but that ALL of them return the SAME errors, and yet somehow, while returning these errors, manage to do so for objects beyond a certain age whilst returning accurate ages for younger objects such as the ones I listed above. Now, I don't know if those materials listed above have actually been subject to dating techniques, but there will probably be samples of known historical provenance that have been tested, which means that my above point - namely good scientific practice when developing the techniques - makes them all the harder to refute.

Faid

SO!

You finally admit it?



You believe that scientists fudge their data?

It's the Great Atheist Scientist Evilutionist Conspiracy, aint it dave?

That's all you're left with in the end, and you know it.

But it's good that you finally had the guts to reveal to the world your true beliefs. True, it might hurt your image as a "scientific journalist", but it wasn' doing that well anyway.

The truth will set you free, dave.

akki007

Would this work for afdave...

Dave, why don't you have a tree in your own back garden dated? A tree that you know the exact age of. Have somebody date that tree and see if the dating technique gives the correct age.

Dave Hawkins

I didn't accuse them of fabricating. I am simply questioning them. Isn't that what peer review is all about? Why aren't YOU questioning them? If you have done any science reading at all, you should know that scientists routinely reject "anomalous" dating results and explain it as "contamination" or some such thing. We should be asking ourselves "What makes it anomalous?" "Anomalous" implies a preconception of what the date "should" be.

So ... if we really want to be scientific, we should be asking ...

1) Why were only 46 samples plotted initially? Were only 46 dated because of cost as you suggest? Why only 85 out of 250 later?
2) What about this top flocculent layer that's 29cm deep? How does it become "unflocculated" many years from now so as to continue to give us an accurate record of time? It should, right? I mean the assumption is that these varves have been happily forming for the last 50,000+ years.
3) How did these organic samples get preserved when it takes 10 years to get a sediment layer of about a 1/4"? I should think any leaf would be quite decomposed after only a few months, wouldn't you? OK, maybe a few years. But do you see my point?
4) Why did they take cores so close together? Why not spread out as far as possible?
5) What about the uncorrelated segment?

Many questions.

Why aren't YOU asking these? Why isn't someone asking these? Could it be because you LIKE the results and don't want to mess with them because they contradict that bothersome book called the Bible?

deadman_932

You're not a "peer." You're a rather ...well, let's be generous...you're not a scholar, you're not a scientist. You're a tool of creationists.

YOU are not a "we." Secondly, I assume you have statistical evidence for this "routine" behavior on the part of scientists?
No? Thought not.

46 is plenty. 85/250 is more than statistically robust. You should be asking why all of the dates agree. If Suigetsu were formed more recently, you wouldn't have any of the data that is known to exist.

Try learning for yourself, Mr. Creationist Geology. Oh, that's right, you need to be spoon-fed because you're incapable of personal research.

Again, why not research this yourself? I DO see your point, but it's kind of hidden by the sombrero.

How far away were the most distant samples from each other, Dave?

I don't know anyone in radiometric or other dating methods that is in it to "contradict the Bible." Many of them are Christians, in fact.

You just don't like the results and because you are ignorant, as you were of inorganic radiometrics and carbon dating...you raise irrelevant issues as a smokescreen for your lack of relevant data. In short, you are negaging in fallacy and false accusations of fraud. Typical of the dishonest tactics of creationists, which you should avoid.

Occam's Aftershave

The results WERE peer reviewed before being published Dave. Scientists DID ask and ANSWER those questions, to the satisfaction of all the experts concerned. And to verify the answers were correct, they cross verified the results against 11 other independent methods of calibration and the resulting data sets. Lake Suigitsu isn't the only lake where varve counts were done Dave, just like the German Oak forests aren't the only place dendrochronology was ever used. There are hundreds of independent data sets from the methods, and guess what Dave - THEY ALL AGREE TOO.

12 totally independent methods of C14/C12 historic ratio calibration, with hundreds of data sets, and they all agree Dave.

WHY DOES ALL THIS INDEPENDENTLY GATHERED DATA AGREE DATE?

I can only think of two explanations:

1. There was a massive world-wide conspiracy over the last 50 years to deliberately fudge ALL the data in ALL the samples EVER collected everywhere. This evil cabal would have to include not just C14 labs, but all the data end users (archaeologists, historians, etc.) who see first hand the dates agreeing with the other historical records. And through some miracle, all these tens of thousands of co-conspirators managed to keep their work completely secret.

2. The data is correct.

Which one is more likely Dave?

Oh BTW Dave, the current poll results are 61-0 DAVE LOST. Your arguments sure aren't convincing many people, now are they? :grin: :grin: :grin:

deadman_932

Here's an idea, Davey, my boy: You claim to have lots of spare cash. Certainly ICR and AiG do, from fleecing the rubes.

I know there are fundamentalist Japanese citizens.

I can tell you exactly how to get a cheap set of core samples using PVC pipe, weights, ropes, tubing and an 80-dollar vacuum pump.

How's about you go get your own samples from Suigetsu and engage in actual science by replicating the dates? This would be similar to my offer to take you to the Grand Canyon to collect rock core samples, which you also backed off of. It would be similar to Elka's kind offer to take you to see paleosoils yourself and sample them. It would be similar to Humphreys the fraud going out and testing his zircons for He isotopes ( still not done, possibly because he can't tell a metamorphic from igneous rock).

you COULD do any of those things, because hallmarks of science are replicability and claim checking.

But you won't.

Calilasseia

That's rich, given the ever growing list of unanswered questions that have been put to you and which still await answering ... could it be because YOU don't like the results of doing so, and don't want to mess with them because they falsify that tiresome book called the bible?

Now, given that I've expanded that basic question with respect to dating techniques, how about an answer, Dave?

If all of these dating techniques are so much hooey, how is it that:

[1] Despite being centred upon independent phenomena, they all give excellent agreement with each other;

[2] They all give reliable dates for artefacts of known age against which they were tested beforehand?

In order to dismiss them, Dave, you need to demonstrate:

[1] That they are all in error;

[2] The existence of a mechanism that allows them all to be in error by the same amount because of their agreement;

[3] The existence moreover of a mechanism by which they are all in error for objects beyond a certain age, but still reliable for objects of known historical provenance against which they have been tested.

Going to even attempt to answer this Dave? Or are you going to engage in yet more handwaving, evasion and simple blind assertion that they must all be wrong because your 3,000 year old collection of myths says so?

Oh, and when you've done that, there's the "where's the flood deposit" thread I've had waiting for you to visit that's still clutching its bouquet at the altar Miss Haversham style waiting for Davey the groom to show up.

Every time you dodge these questions Dave, you hammer more nails into the coffin that's holding the rotting corpse of the credibility of your belief system.