this is a good source to look up some info real fast.

I like the idea of tree rings as it is pretty easy to understand even if you don't have a soild back ground in science. I mean you have to explain a few things, but you don't have to explain much else but how tree rings work.

Not for the Earth, but as far as the universe is concerned, what about the fact we can see stars that are millions or billions of light years away?

Well done, narco. Don't neglect to keep pestering him to answer your points.

Carbon dating is good to about 50k years. Older artifacts use other isotopes. Uranium-Lead dating is accurate from 1 million years to over 4 billion.

What did thse creationists give them and what did they claim it was? (Please cite a peer-reviewed source for this event.)

Remember, Garbage In, Garbage Out. 

-Triften 

Hmmm, I'm not seeing any links regarding creationism... are they right on that first page?

-Triften 

1 word, diamonds!  Geologists estimate that the earth is 4.65 billion years old.  The youngest diamonds on the market today are just under 1 billion years old.  The pressure and intense heat required for diamonds to crystallize is far beyond 6000 years.

Another arguement on this same point is the fact that science can not reproduce diamonds in a lab.  We can put a man on the moon, we can put an RC car on Mars, but we can not recreate the conditions that produce diamonds.  Only geology and time can do that.

BB

As someone else stated earlier, radiocarbon dating is utilized for a specific timeframe due to the decay properties. Radiocarbon dating is widely used for items which are quite less than millions of years old. Carbon-14 has a half life of about 5,730 years and dating can be done on objects which contain carbon such as wood for up to around 40-50,000 years old, although better techniques have allowed for dating of items up to around 75,000 years old. (Ebbing,1996; Jurmain, Nelson, Kilgore and Trevathan, 2000; Plummer, McGeary, and Carlson, 2003).

There are other techniques used to date items of much older ages. Plummer et al. (2003) provides the following table to give you a general idea:

Also, isotopic dating is not the only technique available to scientists to use. There's also techniques like ESR, stratigraphy, flourine analysis, faunal correlation, Thermo-luminescence, fission track et cetera. Any combination might be used to cross-check dates received with a particular method to arrive at the most accurate date.

References cited:

Ebbing, D. (1996). General Chemistry (5th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Jurmain, R., Nelson, H., Kilgore, L. and Trevathan, W. (2000). Introduction to Physical Anthropology. (8th ed.). Stamford: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Plummer, C., McGeary, D. and Carlson, D. (2003). Physical Geology. (9th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Fallacy #17 (Attacking young Earth Creationism now) Radiometric dating and the anti-uniformitarianism fallacy

Large atoms with concentrated, crowded nuclei are highly unstable. To correct the instability, they will either

a) Release a highly ionizing but low energy particle consisting of a helium nucleus with two protons and neutrons. This is called alpha radiation.

b) If the nucleon number is isotopically unstable, the atom will change a proton into a neutron or vice versa allowing an electron to be released or a positron depending on beta minus versus positive.

Another thing they can do is released an ultra-high energy wave called gamma which is irrelevant to my question below.

For instance, a carbon-14 isotope. 99.999% of all carbon is stable carbon-12. but carbon-14 isotopes are not stable and make up 1ppt (part per trillion) of all carbon. They release beta radiation to correct the nucleon instability by firing off an electron. This causes it to decay into Nitrogen-14. The great thing about radioactive decay is that it is a random process that obeys probability laws. The other good thing about it is that you can dip a radioactive material in molten lead, in acid, shoot it, burn it, fire particles at it, try to irradiate it again, pass a current through it...and none of these things will change the isotope clocks. They are fixed.

Now let me explain how we use this to measure the age of the Earth and organic material. Radioactive half-life is the amount of time it takes for the Geiger counter count rate (CPS) to fall by half. Radioactivity is a Zeno's paradox, because it falls to 1/2 then 1/4 then 1/8, but never to 0. It takes the same amount of time to fall from full to half as from half to quarter because the probability remains the same, because radioactive decay is an elemental nuclear cycle.

Depending on their isotopic properties, different isotopes and elements decay at different rates. Uranium 238 has a half life of 4500 million years...almost exactly the age of the Earth. Certain Thorium isotopes, and Polonium 221 for example, half in hours to seconds.

All life is made out of carbon, and all life is made out of roughly the same percentage of carbon-14, which is 1ppt (part per trillion). When something is alive, the amount of carbon-14 it has remains at a constant 1ppt, but once it decays, biological processes stop so the carbon influx/outflux stops too, and the C-14 starts to decay into N-14 and is not replaced. So if we examine a dead plant by giving it a radiocarbon test, and we find the amount of carbon 14 (can be calculated using the mass of total carbon) and the amount of C-14 has reduced to 1/8, it means that the plant is 18,000 years old roughly, because C-14 has a half life of 6000 years (actually about 5300 years). The N-14 that C-14 decays into is simply released into the atmosphere.

If you don’t like Carbon 14 dating, there are over 20 types of radioisotope dating, including Pb-Ur, Ar-Ar, K-Ar etc. Some of which can date back millions and billions of years because the isotope is more stable.

To prove that the dinosaur bones are 6000 years old, you would need to find some rocks in ancient geological striation, among the dinosaurs, and test them using multiple isotope tests, which should give you a dating of between 3000 and 10,000 years if you are right.

Radiometric dating is not exact science. However, dinosaur bone dating never drops below 65 million years. They cannot provide exact answers for ancient (millions to billions of years) dating, but using a range establishes consensus. If the Earth was only 6,000 years old, the radioactivity emitted by unstable materials would be huge. We would immediately notice it because almost none would have decayed...in fact, we would not be here because life could not survive in that environment.

Creationists typically answer this with two fallacious arguments:

1. Radiometric dating is erratic, different techniques give you totally different numbers. It cannot be trusted
2. Scientists assume uniformitarianism, while radiometric dating might have been greatly speeded up in the past.

Both of these are ridiculous. The error in the spectrum of radiometric dating is normal experimental error. Radioactivity, after all, is a completely random process. However, the use of multiple isotope tests is not designed to establish a precise age. It is meant to establish the magnitude. If you have three tests, one which says 50 million years, another says 70 million and another says 92 million, then that is your age range. Radiometric errata does not help creationists, because it is used only to establish the magnitude of age. Even with such error, we would notice if the Earth was 6000 years old because the spectrum would bluntly stop between 2000 years and 12000 years. Radiometric errata is not an argument for creationism. The magnitude of age always comes up on the order of millions and billions.

Uniformitarianism. Firstly, this argument is self-defeating. To assume anti-uniformitarianism (a legitimate scientific debate) one must assume the Earth is millions or billions of years old. We can measure the conditions of the last 10 000 years so accurately now that we can be certain that the cataclysm of the conditions necessary to increase radioactivity that much could only have existed long before advanced life, as such bombardment would have inevitably shut down any evolutionary projects. Anti-uniformitarianism only calls into question the accuracy of ultra-slow isotopes like U238, which halves in over 4.5 billion. years. It does not affect fast isotopes like C-14, which we can measure only to the past 60,000 years. Going back this recently, radioactivity could not have increased at all in such a short time span unless our Neanderthal ancestors were performing atomic blast tests.

Obviously, insisting the universe is 6,000 years old is completely ridiculous. As is the idea that the world was created in six days. I could present literally thousands of arguments from every scientific field in existence. Gaseous shifts, atmospheric depletion, spectroscopy, radioactive decay…all impossible if the universe is so young. At 6,000 years of age the universe was barely a tiny baby, and stellar evolution had not yet taken place with the result that matter was simple quark soup and dark energy. On the other hand, when the Earth was 6,000 years old, the Universe was fully mature. Hydrogenous ionization that had taken place during what cosmologists and astrophysicists call the “dark ages” had formed every element imaginable, and had created the fusion process necessary for the creation of stellar bodies and galactic clusters. The sun was still a little sun, because it was created roughly the same time as Earth was pulled together by it’s gravity. When Earth hit it’s 6,000^th birthday, it was a lifeless boiling radioactive rock and an immature, barely existent atmospheric layer of carbon dioxide.