Normal

So what's the Hebrew word for singularity? In what terms could Moses possibly describe the beginning of the world so that people that long ago could understand? Did you want him to talk about sub atomic particles and red shifting?

GunnerJ

First off, you miss the point. You criticized Tap Dancing because you claimed he ahd no "proof" that the currently accepted model of cosmology is accurate. But if you have already presumed that the ancient mythology of a nation of bronze-age goatherds is the absolute objective truth, than it's simply disingenuous to ask for "proof," you've made up your mind, and whether or not "proof" exists, you won't recognize it.

Second, I'm not sure what the "bounds of science" are, but if this "evidence" you claim to have is, in fact, evidence for your beliefs, you should be able to show how it demonstrates those beliefs to be correct. Don't cop out with this "bounds of science" crapola.

MrDarwin

Did anybody else see a wee bit of a contradiction between these posts?

And they wonder why we find them so unconvincing.

WinAce

Engaging in a bit of Omphalos hypothesizing, are we? Have you ever heard of the criterion of parsimony? If you walk into a room and see a dead guy with a knife stuck in his back, are you going to assume the obvious, or that ghosts sucked all his blood out and framed his poker buddy?

That's what testing is for. So far, you've only described the initial stage of hypothesizing the answer to an observation. In science, your hypothesis should allow you to infer predictions that will hold true if you're right.

So, for example, if you predict there are fingerprints of the suspect on the murder weapon or blood and grass stains on the boulder and you find them, your confidence in your hypothesis goes up. If it passes numerous tests from all manner of data, your confidence goes up by orders of magnitude. Eventually, you end up as confident that you're correct as you're confident that the earth is round.

The supernatural is totally irrelevant to the purely empirical question of whether the earch was once uniformly covered by water that laid down the entire geologic record. We know the geologic consequences of floods. The record not only doesn't match this hypothesis' predictions (uniformly depositing a layer of silt and sediment everywhere, arranging fossils by hydrodynamic properties) but actually contains observations that can't exist if there was a flood - delicately arranged dinosaur nests complete with eggs, fossilized dry mud cracks, fossils arranged by evolutionary lineage...

Which predicts that radiometric dating should be wildly discordant not only from method to method, but from geographic region to region as well. But what's that? The methods are instead eerily consistent with each other AND observed rates of seafloor spreading, plate tectonic movements measured by satellite and other means of dating the earth?

Darn, so much for that hypothesis.

If the fact that radiometric dating is ocassionally off (due to incompetent measurements or such) discredits it, then the thousands of uses of antibiotics that don't stop infections means medicine is a materialistic lie propagated by atheists. See my parody Antibiotic Effectiveness: a Critical Review by the Institute for Demonology Research.

It won't work much past 50,000 years, just as a scale meant for measuring jewelry will give anomalous readings if you try to weigh a child on it. There are other methods good for billions of years, in fact, more than those we can use in the short-term. Furthermore, tree rings and ice cores are but a few of the methods that work for mere thousands of years in the past.

Uh-huh. Would that include cave paintings from 50,000 years ago, by any chance?

Do you mind if we ask for a reference to verify you're not talking out of your rear end?

Go back and familiaze yourself with the meanings of Hebrew terms in Genesis 1 alongside their Babylonian contemporary writings. Then come back and claim, with a straight face, that the Hebrews didn't accept a flat earth. Raqiya, anyone?

ps418

Gosh. Really?

No shit. That's why when you collect minerals to date, you make every effort to collect unweathered minerals. For instance, you want some unweathered zircons or quartz to date that granite? Well, take your rock hammer and get to the unweathered material beneath the surface. Then examine the minerals carefully under magnification for signs of weathering such as micropitting. Duh!

Yes, scientifically determined dates are constantly getting more precise and more constrained. As opposed to creationist dating, which picks a date that is completely wrong in the first place, and sticks to it no matter what contrary evidence emerges.

Off by millions is not necesarily much, considering the range of possible dates for most dating systems. In fact, something very interesting becomes apparent when you plot a large sample of "bad dates" against their expected dates. The graph does this for a sample of "bad dates" collected by John Woodmorappe.


Young-earth arguments: a second look

Notice that, 1) even in this sample of Woodmorappe's 'bad' dates, hand picked to illustrate the unreliability of radiometric dating, the agreement of expected date and actual date is still extremely good, and 2) far more of the dates are too young than are too old.

Thanks for the update on the state of the art 14C dating. . . in the 1950's.

A typical, steaming pile of YEC BS. Please, could you provide the ref were Libby eschews million year dates? Obviously, Libby knew that million year old dates could not be determined using his method, but that was simply because of the short half-life of 14C and the extremely small amounts of nuclides measured. Libby did not reject the use of other dating methods for longer time scale, so you've got your facts seriously botched.

Another very basic point you seem not to understand is that advancements in 14C dating did not cease with Libby 50 years ago. The method has steadily improved since that time due to improvements in analytical technology, such as accelerator mass spectrometry, and calibration techniques. However, you should not accept the validity of the method simply for these reasons. You should accept the validity of the method because tests of 14C against independent chronometers based on entirely different principles, such as tree rings, lake varves, and historical records, indicate that it works quite well. The graph below, also from Morton's article (data from Turekian, 1971), shows the correlation between varve count age and 14C age. Note again the extremely good agreement.



Young-earth arguments: a second look

A similar comparison was published a few years ago (Kitagawa and van der Plicht, 1998), showing the correlation of 14C ages to varve count ages all the way back to 40k years, which is the limit of the useful range for 14C dating. And again, the agreement of expected age with 14C age is quite good (though not perfect due to secular variation in 14C production rates):



If Libby were alive today, he'd be amazed at how well his methods works. And at the stupidity and dishonesty of YECs.


Becker, B., 1993. A 11,000-year German Oak and Pine dendrochronology for radiocarbon calibration: Radiocarbon 35:201-213.

Kitagawa, H., and van der Plicht, J., 1998. Atmospheric Radiocarbon Calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late Glacial Fluctuations and Cosmogenic Isotope Production, Science 279 (5354): 1187- 1190.

Turekian, Karl K., editor, 1971. The Late Cenozoic Glacial Ages, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).

Patrick

Radcliffe Emerson

Oh, I thought this meant the New York Mets.

Genesis doesn't correctly peg anything, except stupidity.

BrotherMan

Not to derail this tangent back to the original post or anything, but no one mentioned the obvious retort.

This only begs the question: Which Genesis account? Chapter 1 or Chapter 2?

Kevbo

Thank you very much for the visuals, Patrick! I've never seen such a good graphical representation of dating methods anywhere else.:notworthy