Changes in the carbon reservoir are dealt with by calibrating ages against other chronometers (i.e. tree rings, U-Th ages of coral reefs, etc…
You can’t determine the age of the Earth by measuring Earth rocks – they have all been recycled to some extent. The 4.5 billion year age comes from dating meteorites by U/Pb, K/Ar, Rb/Sr, all of which agree with one another quite well. One 40-year old spurious date is hardly evidence that K/Ar doesn’t work.
Dude, can you find NO current articles? It seems you are trying to call into question the usefulness of the computer by disparaging UNIVAC. The C14 dating method was invented in the late 40’s. These are criticisms of measurements made in the early days of beta-counting.
…and I have never seen a grizzly bear, so they must be mythical creatures. Astrophysicists have calculated the temperatures and pressures present in the early moments after the big bang, and the hydrogen:helium ratio we see in the universe matches their predictions exactly. We can calculate the rates of formation of 14C, 10Be, 26Al, 3He, and 129I in Earth’s atmosphere, and measure their abundances.
Ultimately, if I’m not sure that a clock works, and I have several other clocks (other radiometric methods, dendrochronology, thermoluminescence, amino acid decay, etc…), and the “broken” clock follows the other clocks precisely, and they all say noon when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, should I assume that the other clocks are also broken?
I find it interesting that the most of your references are 32 years old or older (“Prehistory and Earth Models” was published in 1966, and “How Old is the Earth” by A. J Monty White was published in 1994).
Melvin A. Cook has a B.A. in in Chemistry and an M.A and PhD in physical chemistry. He has a distinguished scientific career, mostly in explosives and metallurgy. He has espoused some pretty lunatic ideas (e.g. in 1952 he claimed that accretion rather than nuclear fusion was the main source of the Sun’s energy), and he has concluded that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics (I am sufficiently knowledgable in thermodynamics to be qualified to evaluate that particular claim; he’s wrong). He has been associated with several “creationist” initiatives and is a strong beleiver that religion, specifically Mormonism, holds the keys to fundamental understanding of scientific principles. (I offer that last sentence not as an ad hominem attack but rather as relevant facts for you to evaluate as you will). I am not sure of his qualifications to evaluate C14 dating, but there is reason to doubt that he is qualified and there is reason to doubt the validity of his conclusions.
A. J. Monty White is certainly a young-earth creationist. I can’t find any of his work on the Web, but from your quote: “the fact that these radioactive minerals have suffered such a large amount of radiation damage that they frequently show ages that are not concordant.” indicates that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Radioactive elements decay at the same rate no matter how much radiation damage the parent material receives.
Sandage is correct that knowledge of when elements were formed, or at least knowledge of concentrations as a function of time, is necessary. Personal presence at the formation of these elements is not the only method of estimating or measuring these values.
Changes in teh concentration of C14 in the atmosphere would affect the method. THis p-articualr issue has already been discussed adequately in this thread.
A few examples of failures of dating is not enough reason to discard the method in light of the many proven successes. Some comments on your examples:
There is some reason to believe that the Jarmo samples were contaminated or deposited at times when Jarmo was unoccupied. Jarmo.
Your information on Vinca is out of date, and there is some reason to believe that some of the controversy over Vinca’s dating was due to some people’s tendency to disbelieve a relatively advanced culture in that area of the world taht long ago. From The History of Ancient Roumanian Civilization:
"For a long time, since 1908, when the site of Vinca itself, 14 km. east of Belgrade, was first excavated, until the early 70s, this culture had been considered much too advanced and its art treasures too sophisticated to be 7,000 years old. Nonetheless, calibrated radiocarbon dates from different sites and phases of the Vinca-Turdas culture finally demonstrated its accurate chronology.
“Dr. Plaisted (p. 20) cites other examples from the literature of invalid K/Ar dates. From Woodmorappe (1979, p. 122), he quotes Gerling et al. (1968) (Woodmorappe reference #297) who got K/Ar dates of 7 to 15 billion years on some chlorites. In another example from a web site, Dr. Plaisted (p. 20-21) quotes Evernden et al. (1964), which states that some devitrified (altered) glasses of known ages gave results that were too young. Both chlorites and devitrified glasses are alteration products. Therefore, unreasonable K/Ar dates are expected with these materials because the alteration events would have caused the argon to move in or out of the materials. Obviously, geochronologists would avoid these materials if they wanted quantitative dates.”
In general, the estimates of concentrations and histories of radioactive elements are far better than guesses, and are cross-checked against other “clocks” wherever possible. Scientists, too, believe that clocks should be set to the right time and operaate properly; that’s why they have made so many efforts to be sure that radioactive dating methods are useful and valid.
So my references are 30 years old? so what? Unless you adduce something published since the references I gave, I am not prepared to retract my quotes from Science and other sources. (I am a paralegal; in my legal research we are exhorted to ensure that we find the latest law: a decision by the California Supreme Court–or case law from the U. S. Circuit Court having jurisdiction over California, for that matter–even if handed down in, say, 1870–can still be good law in the year 2000, unless the court has since reversed its ruling, or, indeed, unless the U. S. Supreme Court has overruled the lower court, or state or federal statutes have intervened.
(Similarly, unless something you can show me, published since the various quotes I’ve posted, that clearly overrules the points in my quotes, I shall not retract them. I fail to see how the mere passage of time is enough, somehow, to cause any of these statements to become suddenly “untrue.”)
I further notice the attack you have made on Melvin Cook, about whom I have heard nothing outside of the quote from him. I seem to remember a quote from H. Allen Smith in How to Write Without Knowing Nothing, about a hillbilly who rejects a radio-news tornado warning because “It’s just a little ol’ dime-store radio.” Humorous, to be sure, but it still carries a point: The medium is not the message, no matter what McLuhan told us. The statement is not untrue because ‘Melvin A. Cook said it.’ It’s appropriate that you used the term argumentum ad hominem.
I did, however, find, in the Readers’ Guide, two articles on Radiocarbon Dating (that’s the heading the Guide uses):
“Absolute ages aren’t exactly,” R. R. Renne et al., Science, Dec. 4, 1998, pp. 1840-1.
“Fossils challenge age of billion-year-old animals,” R. A. Keer, Science, Oct. 23, 1998, pp. 601-2.
I did provide three germane references published since the quotes you posted.
I’m not asking you to retract your quotes; I am asking you to acknowledge that you have quoted mostly items that are from the first half of the existence of a broad-ranging and very active scientific field.
Of course mere passage of time is not enough to invalidate a scientific finding. But the probability of their still being valid is small, and the probability of them being the most recent information on the subject is zero. If a paralegal tells you that he’s found the most recent case law, and you notice that it concerns slavery and was issued in 1850, do you suspect that it may not be the most recent case law? Do you suspec that it might have been superseded?
Note that I did acknowledge the correctness of part of one of your quotes.
I am offended by your characterization of that paragraph as an “attack”. I investigated his qualifications and found that he has significant scientific qualifications; I acknowledged those. I also found no explicit evidence that he knows what he’s talking about in radiometric dating, and some evidence that he may be biased against or ignorant of the field, and some evidence that he is significantly ignorant in a field (thermodynamics) that is directly relevant to his field of experise. I posted that evidence, explicitly noting that I did not intend a personal attack to forestall the possibility of people misinterpreting me, and provided a link to more information.
Interesting. Do you accept him as an authority with no knowledge of his qualifications?
It’s P.R Renne, but it’s easy enough to find … and for $10, I can see the full article. Gee, this Web stuff is wonderful.
Do you have any reason to believe that article supports your position? Because it doesn’t. He discusses errors in radiometric dating due uncertainties of half-lives, and points out that as radiometric dating methods become more precise as other sources of error are eliminated, the uncertainties in half-lives become more important. He includes a figure that shows that the error in [sup]40[/sup]Ar/[sup]39[/sup]Ar dating can be as high as 1.3% due to uncertainty in the half-life! Horrors! He discusses other systems and mentions factors that may introduce errors as high as 3%! Lordy me, we may be 3% off on the age of the Solar System … throw out radiometric dating!
Abstract: “The time scales of important events and processes in geology and archaeology are ascertained through measurements of radioisotopes. The accuracy of the dating depends critically on how well known the radioactive decay constants are. In their Perspective, Renne, Karner, and Ludwig discuss the role that discrepancies in decay constants play in the accuracy of radioisotope dating. As dating measurements become increasingly precise, geochronologists will have to confront these kinds of systematic errors.”
A few gems from the body of the paper:
“Improved techniques and instruments for measuring isotope ratios have reduced measurement errors to the point that analytical precision is often less than 0.5% of the age (in some cases better than 0.1%), allowing increasingly sensitive resolution of time when the same isotopic system and methodology are used to date different samples … As shown in the figure, the age uncertainty in 40Ar/39Ar ages at 4.6 billion years due to decay constant effects alone is ~34 million years [0.7% - JRF] … The precisely known decay constants for 238U and 235U, as well as the existence of internal reliability criteria in the U-Pb systems (9), offer a “gold standard” for geochronology and cosmochronology …”
“Nothing in Renne et al. (1998a) gives any comfort to creationists. The article is dealing with errors of about 3% and less.”
OK, let’s move on to Kerr:
This one could actually indicate a problem with radiometric dating. Or not.
"Three weeks ago in the pages of Science, paleontologists pushed back the origins of multicellular life by 400 million years to a startling 1.1 billion years ago, based on ancient fossilized tracks found in central India. But a paper published about the same time in the Journal of the Geological Society of India may now yank those dates forward again to a more mundane figure of perhaps 600 million years old. The Indian paper, by paleontologist R. J. Azmi of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehra Dun, presents tiny shelled fossils–unarguably about 540 million years old–from rocks that Azmi claims were laid down shortly after those holding the animal tracks. If so, the spectacularly old tracks would be transformed into simply another example of early animals. … The rocks in question, in the Vindhyan basin of central India, were repeatedly dated in recent decades using radiometric techniques, which rely on the slow decay of radioactive elements such as potassium, uranium, or rubidium. Done properly, this method is considered the gold standard for dating rocks. … But Azmi argues that in this case, the ages estimated from distinctive fossil species known to have lived at certain times in the geologic past are more accurate. In layers of limestone and shale just above the sandstone, Azmi found millimeter-scale “small, shelly fossils,” the remains of unique shelled animals whose appearance marks the explosion of new animal forms in the early Cambrian period 540 million years ago. … As geochronologist Samuel Bowring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology notes, the dates might accurately reflect the age of individual mineral grains, but those grains may have formed long before they eroded from parent rock and washed into the sea to become part of the Vindhyan sedimentary rocks. Indeed, the radiometric dates of grains from the formation containing the Cambrian fossils are also about 1.1 billion years old, suggesting that the dates may not reflect the age of the rock layer itself. … Pflüger speculates that perhaps Azmi’s Cambrian fossils are not close in time to the trace fossils after all. Thick layers of sediment may be laid down in one place but not in another, and rocks can be eroded away before the next layer is laid down, making it look as if little time has passed when in fact hundreds of millions of years have gone by. Pflüger also notes that Azmi’s fossils come from a part of the basin different from the one that contained the tracks, increasing the
chances that fracturing and jumbling of rock layers could confuse interpretations.
And Indian researchers, including paleontologists Anshu Sinha of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany in Lucknow and B. S. Venkatachala of the Wadia Institute, say that they are reluctant to adopt a young age for Vindhyan rocks, given the radiometric dates. They also report signs of pre- Cambrian single-celled algae and other fossils in the rocks. To prove the age of the Vindhyan, geologists may have to find and date rocks such as volcanic ash layers, which offer secure dates because they are deposited as soon as they’re formed. Until then, the age of the first animals remains in question."
Ok, interesting and obviously (even to a casual observer) extremely preliminary. And the Science web site offers a citation look-up! Let’s see what’s happened since then … well, there’s five cites but only one has an abstract:
Ahluwalia, AD;Azmi, RJ;Bhargava, et al. “Vindhyan fossil controversy” J GEOL SOC INDIA 55: (6) 675-680 JUN 2000 abstract:
“In this issue we include a gist of reports by O.N. Bhargava and S.V. Srikantia, the comments of R.J. Azmi on their report and the peer-opinion by Prof. S.B. Bhatia. Several investigators were unable to confirm the presence of SSFs reported from the lower Vindhyan of central India. Kerr (1999, p.412), Brasier (1999, p.723) and Bhatt (1999, p.435) point to the possibility of sample contamination or misinterpretation of data.”
The other cites are:
Vishwakarma, RK “Earliest complex life on earth: New look from fossil discoveries” CURR SCI INDIA 78: (7) 783-785 APR 10 2000
Kathal, PK “Should the life’s clock be backed by 400 million years?” CURR SCI INDIA 76: (6) 725-725 MAR 25 1999
Azmi, RJ “Discovery of Lower Cambrian small shelly fossils and brachiopods from the Lower Vindhyan of Son Valley, Central India - Discussion” J GEOL SOC INDIA 53: (4) 488-500 APR 1999
Azmi, RJ “Discovery of lower Cambrian small shelly fossils and brachiopods from the Lower Vindhyan of Son Valley, Central India by R.J. Azmi, Jour. Geol. Soc. India, v.52, pp.381-389, 1998 - Replies” J GEOL SOC INDIA 53: (1) 125-130 JAN 1999
To summarize, you posted two cites, one strongly supporting the accuracy of radiometric dating to 3% or better, and one concerning a possible inaccuracy in radiometric dating or a possible inaccuracy in fossil age identification or a possible inaccuracy in selecting samples of rock to date or apossible inaccuracy in something else; which is still not settled. It appears that you copied the cites without considering what they contain, or maybe you even believed some source that said those papers supported your position. If the latter is true, that source is untrustworthy.
I hope you appreciate the $10 I spent doing your homework for you. If that’s a sample of your research, I wouldn’t hire you to represent me.
[QUOTE]
**
So my references are 30 years old? so what?
In the scientific world, especially in areas which require measurement of small quantities of something, 30 years means a lot. Our ability to measure very small quantities of a substance has vastly increased over the last 30 years. Therefore the accuracy of those measurments has also increased. And 30 years in the science community can change things radically, witness what happened over plate tectonics in the geology world.
(I am a paralegal; in my legal research we are exhorted to ensure that we find the latest law: a decision by the California Supreme Court–or case law from the U. S. Circuit Court having jurisdiction over California, for that matter–even if handed down in, say, 1870–can still be good law in the year 2000
Trying to draw parallels between the science and legal methodologies is perilous. The underlying logic of the two are very different. Good law can make bad science, witness the legal arguements about DNA in the OJ trial.
Let me put it this way: Granted the references I had quoted were all before 1970. What difference does that make? If you have furnished documentation that was published later than the references I provided, where is it? I believe I have courteously asked you to refer me back to the date of the posting in this thread in which such documentation appears–or at the very least, the page number of this thread on which it appears. Why haven’t you done that?
Somehow, I sense that I am compelled to accept the assertion that C-14 dating is accurate, not on the basis of real evidence (or the scientific method, for that matter), but because someone else said so. And, let’s leave the O.J. Simpson trial out of this: I could fill a whole thread with a debate about that topic!
Science Magazine - Volume 279, Number 5354, Issue of 20 Feb 1998, pp. 1187-1190.
Atmospheric Radiocarbon Calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late Glacial Fluctuations and Cosmogenic Isotope Production
H. Kitagawa, * J. van der Plicht
Quoted here, in part
The calibration of the Carbon 14 Radiochronology method is an ongoing matter of interest to scientists. While creationists dwell on the simple fact that there are errors, and even inconsistencies, scientists examine the errors, and inconsistencies, and produce more accurate tools, and greater understanding. A perilous journey, indeed, to seek greater understanding, because then you have to look hardest at the things you got wrong.
Tris.
Dougie, I think the point is that in a field as active as radiometric dating has been, there must be more recent research into the field than what you were able to unearth. This is not so much a criticism of you as of your search engine and/or your search parameters.
My wife had to look into the C-14 question as a result of discrepant dating for sites in Neolithic Britain while doing her undergraduate thesis in 1996. While I neither have her notes or paper nor the references she found, the basic gist would be this:
Much of the dates for the various stages of Stonehenge and the other Neolithic remains have been substantially revised as a result of erroneous C-14 dating. The causes were several: human error, misinterpretation of the readings, and actual C-14 variance that was unsuspected.
While it is correct that C-14 is a trace isotope of carbon formed from nitrogen by irradiation in the upper atmosphere and decaying into it in a fixed time span, several errors were introduced into early C-14 dating.
First, someone erroneously used a too-precise figure for the breakdown period, and much popular literature and popular science writing picked up that without quoting the margin of error. Nobody has changed C-14 half-life figure, but more precise scaling of it means that the too-precise figure (the center of a margin-of-error number) was off by a few percent. Without giving specific figures erroneously from memory, can you see where 5700 +/- 10% and 6200 +/- 1% could refer to the same actual number?
Second, several sources have led to variances in the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere. Atomic testing is one. Also, the amount of wood and of fossil fuels burned has skewed the curve.
Tree-ring counting, while generally accurate, is not always on target. In much of the U.S., trees over 200 years old will be inaccurate by a year due to the cold weather in 1816, which prevented adequate growth to add a ring. Some longer-lived mollusks also add rings to their shell annually, by the way, another useful check.
Finally, one odd fact can throw C-14 dating off: cold and warm weather affect the relative amounts of C-12/C-13/C-14 and O-16/O-17/O-18 incorporated into wood, shells, etc.
For those wondering about dating living trees by C-14, you need to remember that wood is not “living tissue.” Granted that it is part of a living plant, it is the skeleton of the plant laid down by the cambium layer and not changed afterwards. The exact date of death of an organism (subject to margin of error) can be determined by C-14 simply because it stops building cells using the ambient C-14 for a small fraction of them when it dies. But for a tree, when it has laid down a ring of wood, that ring is no longer manipulated by the tree’s living tissue. Even “skeleton” above is a misnomer, since living human/animal bone changes biologically over time and wood does not, except eventually to decay.
dougie_monty, since you seem to be having difficulty finding the posted references in this one-page thread; here again are the references I posted on 6/28 germane to and postdating the references you posted on the same day:
“Dr. Plaisted (p. 20) cites other examples from the literature of invalid K/Ar dates. From Woodmorappe (1979, p. 122), he quotes Gerling et al. (1968) (Woodmorappe reference #297) who got K/Ar dates of 7 to 15 billion years on some chlorites. In another example from a web site, Dr. Plaisted (p. 20-21) quotes Evernden et al. (1964), which states that some devitrified (altered) glasses of known ages gave results that were too young. Both chlorites and devitrified glasses are alteration products. Therefore, unreasonable K/Ar dates are expected with these materials because the alteration events would have caused the argon to move in or out of the materials. Obviously, geochronologists would avoid these materials if they wanted quantitative dates.”
As further evidence that your original references are probably outdated, in your post of 6/28 you cited seven references, six of which (86%) were published in 1968 or earlier. Radiocarbon Web Info - Bibliography lists 171 references. 25 of these references (15%) were published in 1968 or earlier. There has definitely been significant work performed and information produced since 1968.
On 6/29, you posted (without commment on what you thought they contained) two more references, one of which does not appear to be outdated and one of which may be outdated; on the same date I posted a lengthy analysis of those references showing that the first strongly supports the accuracy of radiometric dating to a very few percent or better, and one discusses a particular incident that does not appear to question the validity of radiometric dating in general. Do you have any claims for what you think is in those papers, or any comments on my analysis?
You quoted Dick Kerr’s Science article on the Vindhyan fossil controversy as lending support to your view that there is a problem with radiometric dating in general. That’s simply not the case - if you read the article, you’d see that the major part of the controversy concerned the identification of certain structures as fossils rather than inorganic features of the rock. The present consensus of the Precambrian geological community is:
that Azmi made a mistake in thinking he had identified small shelly fossils (SSFs), as the structures he looked at were inorganic
that the structures identified by Adolf Seilacher and colleagues are not clearly biogenic in nature, and that judgment needs to be reserved until further finds can be made and appropriately dated
The age of Seilacher’s purported trace fossils is controversial because the sedimentary strata he found them in are NOT currently well dated. The only published radiometric dates on that series of rocks (giving their age as approx. 1.1 billion years) were measured in the late 1960s and early 1970s by methods that are now known to produce results with substantial error bars (e.g., Rb-Sr whole rock). More recent unpublished data suggest a considerably younger age for those rocks (~620 million years), but those ages were also calculated by methods (e.g., K-Ar whole-rock) that are recognized as not being the most precise methods currently available. With methods that are otherwise extremely reliable, such as U-Pb single crystal dating, inheritance of zircons weathered out from older rocks and redeposited in younger strata (as JonF described) is a major problem. Hence the need to try to identify undisturbed volcanic ash deposits that bracket the stratigraphic interval containing the purported trace fossils… a very difficult task. But note that the problem is in finding the right kind of rock to date, not in the dating method itself.
The point of all this is that radiometric dating is not a slam-dunk, open and shut case. It has to be done very carefully, there can be contamination, etc etc.
But that doesn’t help you people who think the earth was created 6000 years ago.
Maybe one strata of rock is 1.2 billion years old instead of 990 million years old, because the wrong callibration was used. We’re still dealing with billions of years.
Even if we throw out radiometric dating, young-earth remains impossible. The great paleontologists of the 1800s didn’t have radiometric dating, and they worked out the entire system of geologic eras and relative dating from other sources. They judged how long it would take to form various strata on physical principles…how fast water moves, crystals form, etc, etc…and they still thought the earth must be millions and millions of years old.
Polycarp, your first sentence seems to rely on faith more than anything anyone earnestly defending the Bible needs to muster.
Another clarification: Someone in this thread apparently said ‘According to the Bible, the earth was created 6000 years ago.’ Make no mistake–Idid not say this and I don’t think the Bible says it either. There could have been X number of years–millions, billions, or whatever–between the time of creation (vs. 1 of Genesis Chapter 1)and the periods (“days,” if you prefer) thereafter involving preparation of the earth for man and various flora and fauna. How big a number “X” was, no one knows. (Why doesn’t the Bible go into detail about this? Why should it? Certainly the Bible is a condensed book, and thankfully so, considering that in English most translations contain about 750,000 words and it takes about a month to read…)
No, it definitely does not rely on faith. Polycarp stated a hypothesis that is almost obviously true prima facie. However, that hypothesis is testable, and therefore does not rely on faith. In fact, I tested that hypothesis and you ignored that test!
“Radiocarbon Web Info - Bibliography lists 171 references. 25 of these references (15%) were published in 1968 or earlier. There has definitely been significant work performed and information produced since 1968.”
The Bible does state that the Universe was created in six days. It also contains information which can be interpreted as saying that the Universe was created approximately 6,000 years ago. There are people who believe the “six days” to be literally true, and there are people who believe that the deduction of a 6,000 year age for the universe is also true. I do not know what your personal beliefs are.
As much as I hate to pick nits Jon, this isn’t exactly true. The Bible does not say anywhere that the process of Creation took “six days.” What is does do is complete the story of each “day” of creation by saying, “…and it was eveneing and it was morning, the X[sup]th[/sup] day.”
While this is (obviously) almost the same thing, it is not. You were much more on track when you said:
**
Much more defendable a statement.
**
There are also (quite a few) people who believe that the six “days” described in Genesis were not each 24 hours long. To quote Dr. Gerald Schroeder, author of Genesis and the Big Bang:
I don’t want to cut and paste the entire article here; it’s a hassle, the post is too long, and it would probably be illegal anyway. I provided the link to it above. Suffice it to say that Schroeder’s point is that what felt like 6 days on Earth was really far longer when viewed from a point outside of the expanding newly-born universe.
So, 6 days = billions of years.
As the expansion of the universe slowed (or, put another way, as the universe grew) these two different relative rates grew closer and closer and we now see “time” from the same point of view that the Creator did, billions of years ago, from His front-row seat at the Big Bang.
Hope I did this justice. If you really want to understand Schroeder’s point (and it wouldn’t be fair to disagree until you try to) head to the article - the link is at the top of my post.
There are people who argue that the Bible {i]does* indeed say that Creation took exactly six 24-hour days, and that is a literal truth. I’m aware that there are many varying interpretations of what the Bible says or means, but I didn’t think it was worth going into since it’s an ancillary point. If you’re going to condense the question to a few words, I think that “The Bible does state that the Universe was created in six days” is a pretty good condensation. Were I to write a treatise on the subject I’d choose different phrasing.
Dr. Schroeder also points out that your statement:
is incorrect:
While we’re picking nits, I submit that “It also contains information which can be interpreted as saying that the Universe was created approximately 6,000 years ago” is not merely a defendable statement; it’s a fact. People have extracted information from the Bible and interpreted that information as indicating Creation around 6,000 years ago.
Schroeder makes an interesting argument, although I’m far from convinced by some of his pilpul. However, there’s some serious problems with it.
He claims that the six “days” of creation started from the point of quark confinement, when the Universe was blue-shifted by a factor of 10[sup]12[/sup] relative to today, and fits that to an exponentially decreasing “day” length in which each of six “days” lasts half the time of the previous one.
Why start from the point of quark confinement? He doesn’t give a reason, yet it’s key to his argument. Why not the point of decoupling of radiation from matter (10[sup]3[/sup] blue shift relative to today), which would give a totally different answer? Why not an earlier point? He says “Nachmanides explains that on Day One, time was created”, but time existed before quark confinement (as far as we can tell).
Why fit to an exponential when we have no reason to believe in exponentially varying redshift since the time of inflation (well before quark confinement), and we do have reason to believe in a power-law variation after inflation? He comes up with some strained correlation between the history of the Earth/Universe and his “days” with that exponential, but the correlation is not very good and is not sufficient justification for the exponential fit.
I’m also bothered by the undiscussed and unjustified jump from counting in exponentially decreasing-length days to measuring days in human terms. Why does the exponential stop at six days and jump discontinuously from 8.76*10[sup]12[/sup] hours per day (0.25 billion years per day) to 24 hours per day?
Well, I know ol’ Bishop Usher did this. In fact, he came to the conclusion that the Creation of the Universe occurred in a particular day in October, 4004 B.C., at 3 pm.
However, a careful scrutiny of Usher’s calculations reveals that there were plenty of unspecified time intervals in the Bible which he “fudged.” As it turns out, Usher was expressly looking for a date of precisely either 4004 B.C. or 3004 B.C., and when he discovered that the data pointed to a creation some time between 3500 B.C. and 5000 B.C., he finegalled the data until it fit 4004 B.C. exactly.
Why 4004 B.C.? Because, at the time Usher did his calculations, 4 B.C. had been agreed upon by Biblical scholars as the year that Jesus was born. And Usher really, really, really liked the idea of Jesus being born an exact multiple of 1000 years after the Creation.
So, basically we have numerous referemces to recent science supporting C14 dating against a few 30 year old references against it (and some recent ones which turn out to * support * it)?
** Ding **
Round One goes to C14!
Actually, I’m very impressed by the amount of research that went into this–saves me a lot of time the next time I have to convince somebody that science works.
On the issue of age of references:
Within just about any field of science, there is continual and rapid change. This is particularly true of new areas. Even basic Physics changes over the course of 30 years, and it’s older than some of the things people carbon-date. One’s basic instinct should be that if it’s 30+years old, keep it around, but don’t trust it. For example, you can find thousands of workable reactions in old issues of * Journal of Organic Chemistry * , most of them are now obsolete–more recent work has refined the technique and resolved problems. So dougie_monty: when you post 30+ year-old references, you’re not making your point very well unless you can show that the issue hasn’t been contended since. If there are in truth no more recent references, then the old ones are valid. This is almost never the case in so recent a field.
I agree that he picked 4004 because it was 4000 years before when he thought Jesus was born.
The story I heard about the exact month, day, hour and minute:
That was the month, day, hour and minute that Oxford began its school year. That overly fussy date was a joke!
Now…why did I assume you thought the world was created 6000 years ago? Well, what other reason would you have to disbelieve C-14 dating? The only people in the world who disbelieve C-14 dating are fundamentalist christians who interpret the Bible literally. If you count up the begats (You know…Methuselah begat Laban when he was 653 years old, then lived till he was 734…Laban begat Jehosephat when he was 752 years old…), especially in the part where Jesus’s geneology is stated, then you get around 6000 years.
I’m sure you could go more, or less. But in any case, we’re talking only a few thousand years. A million years is much too much for your purposes…it implies that the Bible is not literally true.
Now, you may not be a fundamentalist christian. But if you’re not then why can’t you accept the evidence that everyone has been pointing you too? C-14 isn’t perfect. But even without C-14, K-A, and all the other radiometric dating methods, we still end up with an earth that is millions and millions of years old, lots of animals not mentioned in the Bible (btw…it is unscriptural to claim that the dinosaurs died in Noah’s flood. The Bible says that Noah took a pair of every animal on earth on the Ark…not just ones that the israelites knew about).
Even if we disregard the geologic record, we can see that the universe must be billions of years old. Maybe it’s ten billion, maybe 15, maybe 20, but we’re certain it’s billions.
Why does this frighten you? I know you must be emotionally wedded to a young earth, but why?
