Re: The savage athiest evil of uranium

bimms@xxxxxxxx wrote:

Sure. Try this site:http://archaeology.about.com/od/dating/Dating_Archaeological_Sites_an...


I will check that out.


Someone else has already done so. I would also like to take this
opportunity to point out that the error in C14 dating that has to be
corrected by tree rings is only a few percent, certainly not enough to
make any difference to you.


Actually, since Carbon dating has a sinusoidal distribution, there are
multiple answers to any given reading. It is NOT just a simple
exponential decline at all, and thus you cannot get just a single
answer.

You are very confused about this. You confuse the decay curve for C14 in
dead organisms with the abundance curve of C14 in the atmosphere. That
curve is not sinusoidal, but irregular. But that doesn't mean you can
get different dates for the same amount of C14 in a sample. It just
means that you can't compute the date if you know the C14 abundance in
the atmosphere. But nobody does that. And the necessary corrections are
small, insufficient to make C14 dating useless even if you ignore them.

You have been given such a link. If dendrochronology goes back 8000
years, then some trees lived through 6000 BP.

That's a big if. You have to realize that a lot of assumptions are
going on, and you are talking about thousands of tree rings. For it to
overlap, you have to some how be sure that a particular tree ring
width corrleates with another trees rings, and you have to pick this
out carefully out of THOUSANDS of tree rings. (And thats only if you
are lucky enough to find trees that are thousands of years old).

All of which can be done.

And if you cant use trees that go back thousands of years, you have
even more overlapping problems, trying to decide between different
trees with hundreds of tree rings, which requires more overlapping by
a factor of ten, which is even more prone to possible false
correlation errors. (You might correlate the wrong rings with each
other).

You might. But the greater the overlap, the less likely that is. This is
not a serious critique of dendrochronology.

In other words, the whole thing has way too much guesswork and
assumptions. Its just the nature of the thing, can't be avoided. But
there is certainly room for reasonable doubt. I'm not saying I
automatically discount the whole thing. It is just a little on the
iffy side of things.

In your opinion as an expert?

Not as more than a smudge. A star in that position would have been
nicer, until telescopes. And by the way, the idea that the Andromeda
galaxy was created just to give us an attractive smudge in the sky is
the most ridiculous hubris imaginable.

Hubris? What about the hubris of trying to overthrow the fundamental
bedrock of our Western Civ? (The Bible and Christianity)?

You make the absurd assumption that biblical literalism is synonymous
with Christianity, when it has never been so, at least as far back as
Augustine.

That seems a
heck of a lot more hubristic to me. What, all previous generations of
westerners based their entire society upon a gigantic lie? But
nevertheless were somehow able to become world dominant nevertheless?
I'm sorry, that is a much more hubristic position to take.

No, that's called a strawman position, since nobody holds it.

We know that God exists due to biochemical complexity among other
things. That means he would assist the true religion to prosper. Which
means Christianity is "likely" to be true. Note I did not say
ABSOLUTELY PROVEN to be true. Just "likely" to be true.

And everything you say above is nonsense. We don't know that God exists.
And who says Christianity prospers more than other religions? Islam and
Hinduism seem to be doing pretty well. Are they the true religion too?

And what is more to the point, virtually all of our western
institutions have Christian ideas at their core, even if the explicit
Christianity is submerged in "secular" language dressing. From "human
rights" to "freedom" to "equality" to "love thy neighbor" we all are
like fish, swimming in the water of implicit Christianity. And some of
us are doing our best to poison the very water we swim in, by
attacking the faith that we live, move, and have our being in.

Again, nonsense. The idea of freedom goes back at least to the ancient
Greeks. "Love thy neighbor" is a tenet of almost all religions, and is
hardly unique to Christianity. Certainly Christianity had a big
influence on western institutions. But so did Roman law, Greek
philosophy, Indian mathematics, etc. And none of these concepts have
anything to do with biblical literalism.

Yes, you're right. Sorry. It's a bristlecone pine, and it's 4767 years
old. You need overlap with dead trees to go back 6000 years, or 8000.

Okay, good. And don't you think it takes quite a bit of guesswork to
correlate tree ring width from a tree that has thousands of tree
rings? And the problem of possible false correlations gets even worse
if you have to work with shorter-living trees?

No. If you think this is a problem, present some evidence.

Are the assumptions wrong? If not, why bring it up? If so, critique them.

I AM critiquing them.

No. You're claiming they're wrong. Critiquing requires the presentation
of some evidence or argument.

I think there is too much guesswork going on,
and furthermore the carbon distribution is sinusoidal, which means
there are multiple answers to any given reading, rather than a single
answer you would get from a true exponential decline curve.

Once more, you confuse the C14 atmospheric abundance curve, which is
irregular but not monotonic, with the C14 decay curve, which is
exponential. The two have nothing to do with each other.

You were listening about as well as you have been here in TO, which is
to say you were clutching at anything that might vaguely support your
preconceived notions, and ignoring the rest.

Not a fair characterization at all.

I will agree that you don't think it is.

A mud flow is just a wet ash flow. Close enough.

Simply not true. Much more than ash was being sloughed off the
mountain. In fact, most of the ash was airborne, and the mud flows
were massive straight down the mountain, overturning trees like
matchsticks and so forth.

What do you think the mud was? What other than ash was there to make the
mud flows?

No. The water didn't cause stratification. It just dug gullies (canyons,
if you like) in unconsolidated, layered tuff.

Which WAS stratified. Why do you keep denying the obvious here?

I don't. You are just confusing the digging of a hole with the
deposition of the sediment that the hole is dug in. The strata were
layered because they consist of multiple ash flows.

Only if you throw out all of geology.

Not ALL of geology. Only the bit of dogma that says stratification can
only happen over millions of years. You see, in science, if empirical
data contradicts your theory, you adjust your theory. But you knew
that.

In science, if you see a green frog, you don't assume based on that
observation that crows are green too.

The more I think about it, the more self-contradictory your position
becomes. If you think the Grand Canyon sediments were laid down in a
worldwide flood, you have to reject all geological dating, because the
sediments are well correlated to vary from Precambrian (counting the
metamorphosed layers at the bottom) through Permian. And if you do that,
you lose all the benefits of old-earth creationism.

The key fact is that stratification can be caused rapidly. The non-
stratified sections of the Earth will still be valid places to apply
geological dating. It is only in well-defined strata that we could
allow the possibility that they were flood caused, and thus not very
amenable to normal dating correlations.

Why would floods make normal dating correlations invalid? You aren't
making sense here. Many deposits can be directly dated radiometrically
(based on igneous rocks that underly, overly, or intrude them). And
these can be correlated to other rocks by many methods. None of these
methods have anything to do with assumptions about how long it takes to
deposit multiple strata.

It's impossible to accept the geological time scale and still accept a
worldwide flood, much less several of them, unless you propose one that
left no trace. No flood can leave sediments that vary in age by millions
of years.

Actually, one flood could simply deposit strata on top of another
strata that was already there. And the other strata could have been
deposited by another flood, or perhaps not. Just because SOME strata
is caused by rapid flooding, does not mean it ALL is.

So far, you haven't shown any evidence that any strata were deposited by
a worldwide flood.

The only thing that has been disproven is that ALL STRATA are
automatically the result of millions of years. All the rest of geology
is pretty much intact.

It's not even clear what you mean by that. We have known for a long time
that a single layer can be the product of rapid deposition. Turbidity
flows can take minutes to deposit several meters of sediment. That
doesn't affect the known ages of the geologic column.

What, you can just wave your magic carbon-wand and discount all dates?
If I have a device that measures lengths only to the nearest 10%, and I
claim that a tree is 40 feet high, are you going to tell me that the
tree may be only 3 feet high, because my measurement is inaccurate?
That's not thinking, it's taking any excuse possible not to think.

Again, you are ignoring that the distribution of carbon is sinusoidal.
Your ten percent figure is simply not true. A periodic sine wave leads
to multiple solutions that vary from one end of time to the other. I
still remember my high school pre-calculus! Hope you have not
forgotten yours.

What you need to remember, or perhaps learn for the first time, is how
radiometric dating works in the first place, and the difference between
the C14 atmospheric abundance curve and a C14 decay curve. They are
unrelated.

It's so hard to figure out in advance what parts of science you accept
and reject. You appear to be an old-earth creationist who rejects all
knowledge of how old particular rocks or fossils are. What's the point
in being an OEC if you do that?

I don't reject "all knowledge" of the age of rocks. For example, I
accept the reverse magnetic polarity of rocks in the spreading ocean
floor zones. This seems quite conclusive evidence that the world is
very old, since the earth's magnetic polarity switches every few
million years. (I'm sorry, I don't remember the exact amount of time
it takes to switch).

It takes a few thousand years to switch, and the periods between
reversals are irregular. By the way, you can date many terrestrial rocks
by remanent magnetism, based on the patterns of magnetic reversals
recovered from them.

The only thing I reject is that all strata are automatically caused by
millions of years. Some strata can be formed in a matter of hours. Mt.
St. Helens proved that.

In fact it didn't, but it's true that some individual layers can be
formed quickly. Multiple layers takes longer, but not necessarily
millions of years. This is all irrelevant to the actual ages of rocks in
the geological column, since they were not determined by assuming that
it takes millions of years for layers to form.

just previous creation, that puts the new creation at the K/T boundary,
65 million years ago.

I did not say the dinosaurs were from the "just previous creation."
All I said was they lived "before" 6000 years. "Before" leaves a lot
of possibilities open.

I'm confused by your unwillingness to commit. Do you disagree with the
claim that we know the age of the K/T boundary?

but nearly 65 million years later. Nor were there any modern species at
that time. And you just got finished claiming that the Grand Canyon
sediments were all laid down in a single flood, perhaps the flood of
Noah. That's incompatible with any sort of time line.

I may have implied that, but I did not explicity say it. Maybe the
Grand Canyon was laid down by several different floods, not just one.
It could have been laid down by each successive biosphere destruction,
when God decided to destroy one biosphere and replace it with another.
My main point was, that stratification can be the result of rapid
processes, as Mt. St. Helens showed.

So basically, you're unwilling to come out and say anything about the
ages of any rocks. You're hiding behind ambiguity. Again, what's the
point in an OEC who denies the efficacy of modern dating and correlation
methods? If you don't deny them, then you must agree that the Grand
Canyon strata span over a billion years of time. Further, none of them
have the characteristics expected of flood deposits. There are no
worldwide floods in the geological record.

Can you make any sense out of your view of geology? How many creations
were there? What was created each time? How does each correspond to
standard geological periods? Which was the most recent creation, and
what does that correspond to? And what does the flood of Noah correspond to?

I am going to have to do a heck of a lot more research before I can
answer those questions. My main point was simply that stratification
is not automatically the result of millions of years. I base this off
an actual empirical observation. I start with empirical observations,
and then build the theory off of them. I don't have a fully fleshed
out theory at this point, as you can probably tell. But that is no
reason to automatically reject it. Scientists should not automatically
reject theories.

Scientists should, however, reject theories that are easily falsified by
the evidence, as is everything you have said so far. Humans are much
older than 6000 years. There is no evidence of any worldwide flood, much
less many of them. There is no evidence of total extinction and
recreation of life at any time in the past. There is overwhelming
evidence of common descent in the history of life.

You have come up with a theory that the moon is made of some sort of
dairy product. The fact that you won't commit to that product being
cheddar, yogurt, or whipped cream doesn't prevent it from being
falsified easily.

.

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