[Thanks to Alan Fox for asking questions about YEC and Elizabeth Liddle for her generosity in hosting this discussion]
YEC part 1 gave some theological and philosophical context to the case for YEC, and part 2 will hopefully focus solely on empirical and scientific considerations. Part 2 challenges the mainstream view that the fossil record is hundreds of millions of years old.
If empirical considerations alone suggest the fossil record is not more than a several million years old, does it matter on balance that the data don’t exactly arrive at 6,000 years old? I think not. As far as I’m concerned, if the fossil record is not anywhere near as old as the mainstream claims, the creationists will have won the essentials of their case independent of whether the universe and Earth are billions of years old. Creationists can afford to lose the issue of the age of the Earth and universe, but Darwinists cannot survive the fossils record being only a few million years old. But as I demonstrated in YEC part 1, time isn’t the friend of evolution anyway, it is an enemy since nature tends to erode complexity, not construct it.
If the age of a skyscraper built with 1 billion year old rocks does not imply the skyscraper was built 1 billion years ago, the age of the fossil record can be formally separated from the age of the universe and age of the Earth and age of rocks. The time of death of someone can be determined forensically and the process doesn’t rely on the age of the Earth or universe or rocks around deceased to make a reasonable inference. The age fossil record is about establishing the time of death of the fossil not the rocks the fossil is buried in. The age of when a strata was formed is independent of the age of the rocks that form the strata.
When I ask geologists how do permineralized or well-preserved fossils form. As a matter of principle, does the entombment happen quickly or slowly? “Quickly” is the usual reply. Why? Rapid burial with minerals and water are the necessary ingredients to effect preservation. If the creature dies and is left out in the open to scavangers and decay processes, it will not fossilize. So as a matter of principle, such fossil bearing formations didn’t take millions of years to form. Thus one can’t argue the fossil record is old because it took millions of years to bury them! In the case of wooly mammoths with undigested tropical vegetation in their stomachs, they’d have to be instantly buried in snow to effect the necessary freezing to preserve the vegetables in their stomachs — not millions of years. That’s the other thing, why are the mammoths in a tropical environment one moment and then buried in a cataclysmic blizzard the next, and then never unfrozen till discovered in Siberia? Hmm…..
So like a detective, we’ve established certain fossils are buried rapidly, not over millions of years. The question remains when it happened, or maybe when it couldn’t have happened.
The mean sea level of the US is here is around 760 meters. Erosion of a mere 10 microns per year would wipe 760 meters into the sea in 76 million years. A sheet of paper, by the way is 100 microns thick. The slowest mean erosion rate I’ve found in literature is 2.5 microns per year, and even that would wipe out the Phanerozoic in many areas.
I point to this empirical study by Princeton geologists Judson and Ritter: Judson and Ritter
Taking the average height of the United States above sea level as 2300 feet and assuming that the rates of erosion reported here are representative, we find that it would take 11 to 12 million years to move to the oceans a volume equivalent to that of the United States lying above sea level. At this rate there has been enough time since the Cretaceous to destroy such a land mass six times. Accepting this figure creates the problem of maintaining a continental mass above high elevations. A problem beyond the intent of this report
Granted, that may only be a mean value for now, but one can’t fight gravity, sediments will tend to move toward the oceans, erasing the fossil record in the process. Even if Judson and Ritter are off by a factor of 50, that would still wipe out the fossil record all the way to the beginning of the Cambrian.
But even more to the point, we have forensic clocks that may put an upper limit to the time of death of the fossil in question. There is the very embarrassing fact that the supposed carboniferous era of 300 million years ago has ubiquitious traces of C14, and this is acknowledged in peer-reviewed literature. 0.1% present day concentration of C14 will yield a presumed age of 57,000 years. That is 1 part in 1000. We have frequent detections of comparable levels, so much so many won’t even try to date with C14 beyond that presumed age because there seems to be a persistent amount in fossils!
Some claim contamination, but this explanation is not as credible as one might suppose.
First consider in-site contamination. To maintain a background persistent concentration of C14, one needs to keep adding more carbon from atmospheric sources into the fossil to maintain 0.1% concentraion. The problem with this scenario however is that the added C14 will decay away, and one needs to add even more carbon contaminants the next iteration to maintain a background C14 level of 0.1%. One ends up with something analogous to the compounding interest rate problem. Say I added a mere 0.1% contaminant every 50,000 years, over 300,000,000 years, the fossil will either gain 402 times in mass or be diluted from the original material by that factor. Maybe in-site contamination might work as an explanation for isolated cases, but not for repeated discoveries in diverse geographical locations, otherwise one would have to argue nature conspired to fool us by contaminating the entire world recently for no good reason.
Consider contamination during processing of the fossil. 1 part in 1000 might seem like very little, but consider contaminating a hard piece of fossil marble or shell or bone. Just to illustrate, take a 1 gallon (not quite 4 liters) sample of something hard. A little less than a small teaspoon (4 milliliters) of contaminant to 1 gallon would be 1 part in 1000. Do you think you can force that much contaminant into something relatively hard? 🙂 Even 1 teaspoon into 10 gallons wouldn’t exactly be easy (1 part in 10,000). So this is not as credible an explanation as would be supposed either. Are experiments and analysis actually done to determine the source of contamination? No, because the fossils C14 is primarily due to contamination, it is due to the fact the fossils are young. And few are willing to stick there neck out to point out they can’t demonstrate the source of supposed contamination.
Radioactive decay chains have be also ruled out unless of course one assumes 99% Uranium and less than 1% of fossil!
See:
Problems using Coal as a C14 free source
Lowe points out:
Many (super 14) C dating laboratories have established that coal samples exhibit a finite (super 14) C age, apparently caused by contamination of the specimens before any laboratory preparation is undertaken.
He then points out the contamination cannot be due to radioactive decay of other products:
Because coal is formed over geological time scales at depths providing excellent shielding from cosmic rays, its 14C content should be insignificant in comparison to the 14C introduced by even the most careful sample preparation techniques used in 14C dating laboratories. How is it then, that a material, which should show a14C age indistinguishable from that produced by a combination of machine background and contamination during careful sample preparation, routinely produces a finite 14C age?
One suggestion is that radium, which is present in some coals at the sub pm level, as a decay product of the uranium/thorium series, may produce 4C during an extremely rare decay event (Rose & Jones, 1984). Jull,Barker and Donahue (1987) have detected 14C from this process in uranium/ thorium ores. Blendowski, Fliessbach and Walliser (1987) however, have shown that the 14( decay mode of 226Ra is only of the order of 10-11 of the preferred a decay channel to 222Rn. Thus, the amount of 14C produced by such events derived from radium in coal must be considered as insignificant.
and finally capitulation at the ubiquity of the problem
There are many other unpublished accounts by 14C laboratories in which the use of coal as a background test material has been investigated. In many cases, the samples were found to contain 14C, and further studies were discontinued. The AMS and gas counting facilities, DSIR, in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, eg, have observed apparent ages for coal specimens ranging from 25-40 kyr, and the NSF Accelerator Facility at Tucson, Arizona has determined ages of anthracite samples ranging from 30-40 kyr (AJT Jull, pers commun, 1988).
Lowe invokes bacterial contamination, but I pointed out why such in site contamination is contradicted by the “compounding interest” problem, not to mention, bacteria in deep parts of the Earth would be feasting off C14 depleted carbon, not atmospheric carbon!
Next is the fact of biological materials with half-lives that preclude their persistence in fossils. DNA has a half life 521 years give or take, homochiral amino acids have half-lives on the order of hundreds or a few thousand years. The state of these biological materials in fossils is inconsistent with the time of death hundreds of millions of years ago.
Additionally, we have ancient fossil DNA that looks like modern DNA, breaking the biological molecular clock hypothesis. See: Pardox of Ancient Bacterium. But detractors bring up the contamination complaint yet again.
The actual forensic clocks refute old age fossils in the fossils themselves (C14, DNA, homochiral amino acids, inconsistency with biological molecular clock). The well preserved variety of fossils could not have been buried in a process taking millions of years as a matter of principle, and there should be serious doubt the fossil record would still be around after hundred million years, maybe not even 11 million years.
Finally, I keep hearing assertions about all the mounds of data that prove the fossils are old. Actually it’s mounds of publication not mounds of actual facts. The amount of words dumped out does not necessarily make claims any more credible than Kairos Focus being verbose proves Kairos Focus’ FYI/FTR are correct. It’s the physical facts that count. The tons of fossilized material themselves do not indicate an age that is as old as most presume.
This is simply false.
We can hope.
Sal writes:
I don’t see this difference as a struggle for survival. Should evidence accumulate that the Earth is in fact very much younger than it appears, evolutionary theory would be falsified as evolution needs enough time to work. So scientists would be hard put to come up with other hypotheses to explain the “new” facts. Whoever consider themselves “Darwinists” will indeed survive.
But speculation on what might be different if the facts were different is idle. Let’s first see what facts and observations we can agree on and then we can consider whether our explanations need updating or rejecting.
One compelling piece of evidence for the age of the Earth is from radiometric dating. Is there anything grossly wrong in the Wikipedia article or is it a reasonable overview of methodology?
Sal writes:
If you are now conceding that evidence does indeed show the Earth to be around 4.5 billion years old, we can move on to fossil evidence.
Sal writes:
I’m no geologist, but I would have thought erosion rates might vary depending on things like steepness of slopes and the hardness of the material being eroded, and that the erosion rate of a plain might be different from that of a scarp or peak. I might even expect sediment build up to increase heights of flood plains. More a case of levelling than removing material at a constant rate over a whole continent.
Here is the abstract for the paper Sal cites. It appears to be paywalled and dates from 1964. Is there more recent data on erosion rates?
1) There is a volume issue. Some strata are composed almost entirely of organismal hard parts. 10% of the world’s sedimentary rock is limestone. There’s a lot. An awful lot. Put those organisms back into the sea simultaneously. How was such an enormous biomass sustained?
2) There is a flux issue. This limestone is a substantial repository of historic CO2, and of calcium/magnesium. Wind back history, put that CO2 back into the atmosphere and the mineral back into rocks, and try to get it into this biomass in the time available, via known fixation processes.
3) There is an issue of stratigraphy. I know for a fact that I can go to strata of a certain relative age (dated simply by superposition) and I will not find anything other than representatives of a narrow biota, a consistent subset of the entirety of the fossil record. It simply beggars belief that such fine sorting could be achieved by any known process except some kind of evolution and historic succession of deposition. The gradation of certain species is so fine that they can be used to accurately identify a layer just a few centimetres in thickness across the entire globe.
4) There is a hydrostatic issue. A vital part of the mineralisation process is the overburden. How can so many tons of overburden be suspended in the sea at once? How was the water eliminated on deposition (again, a flux issue)?
5) There is an energetic issue. Generation of this volume of sediment, and its uplift into the Rockies etc, cannot be had for free. F=ma. ‘Traditional’ mechanisms apply the force slowly but inexorably, from radioactive decay at the earth’s interior. You need enough energy to melt the globe and everything on it if you want it to happen quickly.
6) There is a localisation issue. Why is the fossil biota so heavily biased in favour of shallow marine creatures, such as one might find at continental margins, precisely where sedimentary runoff accumulates?
7) And so on.
Just damn.
Sal, you are serious competition for the Time Cube.
“So like a detective, we’ve established certain fossils are buried rapidly, not over millions of years.”
Nobody claims it takes millions of years to bury a fossil, or even for the fossil to form (as in inorganic minerals replace the organics of the once living organism).
The fossil may in fact form relatively quickly, get buried in hours(after all, how long does it take a landslide to bury an animal? It’s pretty much instantaneous), form in centuries or millenia(the process of replacing the organics with minerals), but then lay there more or less unaltered for millions of years.
Notice the difference there, there is no requirement that the “fossil took millions of years to form”. It’s the relative position in the geologic column, and the ages we can assign to the strata in which the fossil is embedded(with dating methods like radiometric dating and many others), that make the case for fossil ages and their chronology. Not how long it takes for any particular dead animal to become fully fossilized.
I once constructed a science fiction plot based on measuring the rate of water rise while the tide was coming in, and assuming it would continue at that rate indefinitely.
Sal has presented the plot as fact.
Damn Sal, you’re at Ken Ham levels of ignorance and stupidity here.
1. Sea level has not been constant but has varied as much as 400′ below the current level during ice age times.
2. Mass above sea level in the continents is constantly being replaced by the uplift of plate tectonic movements.
I notice you also completely ignored the evidence for fossils found in every layer of strata since the Cambrian. Ignoring data might work well with your fellow YEC chowderheads but not among professional scientists.
Its amusing that loss of fossil record to erosion is not important when discussing gaps, and failure to lose the entire record is evidence for YEC.
Interesting post.
I’ll say it. Your post comes across as a drowning man clutching at straws. You know all the weakness in the YEC case. You have tried to defend YEC against them, but the defense fails and you know it.
In the meantime, what about the Australian Aborigines, the koalas, the platypus, the kangaroo?
I have moved to the fossil evidence. The clocks inside the dead fossils themselves indicate youth, I listed at least 3 clocks with half lives.
1. C14 half
2. DNA half life
3. homochiral amino acid half life in proteins
The substantial trace presence of C14, DNA, and homochiral amino acids indicates relatively recent time of death of the fossils. Recent as in not more than a few million years ago, maybe less, certainly not 300 million years ago for the Carboniferous era, and if we actually look at Cambrian shells we may likely find the same indicators of youth.
As far as the radiometric dates of rocks the fossils are buried in, as I pointed out, the age of a rock a dead thing is buried in doesn’t imply the dead thing died when the rock was formed. A living dog today can be killed by burying it in 65 million year old rocks. If we find this buried dog 10 years from now, we shouldn’t conclude the buried dog is 65 million-year-old fossil because it is buried in 65 million year old rock.
The age of rocks a fossil is buried in should take priority of the actual age of the fossil itself. I provided nice forensic methods for placing an upper limit on the age of these fossil. The anomalies I mentioned are known, they just don’t make the headlines, but they should. Few seem willing to stick their necks out and raise the proper amount of skepticism about a widely accepted belief. I’m raising that skepticism here in the skeptical zone.
A proper refutation of what I laid out would be:
1. explain the C14 traces
2. explain the DNA traces
3. explain lack of amino acid racemization
You and I will have the chance to see if credible unassailable refutations can be offered, and if not, it would seem to me the question of the time of death of the fossils should remain open.
Unlike Kairos Focus at UD, I will invite opposing viewpoints from qualified scholars.
From the OP:
So even if life has been on earth for millions of years, and the earth is not 6000 years old, that just doesn’t matter? We’re back to Lord Kelvin days. I think he lost that argument.
So you’re not actually giving reasons why you’re a YEC after all?
What does that even mean?
I don’t drown if I’m wrong, it’s not life threating to be wrong about he age of the Universe. Hubble thought it was 2 billion, no big deal if there was revision, Hoyle thought it was eternal, likewise no big deal if there was a revision.
The Young Universe Case is weak, but not out of question. The distant starlight question is problematic, but getting better.
The Young Solar System case is good, better than most think.
The Young Earth Case is moderately good, the long and intermediate radiometric date case is still very problematic.
The Young Fossil Case is very strong as well as the youth of life to boot. I’ve laid out what has to be refuted in terms of the time of death. So far silence, and I expect silence because what I laid out is already reluctantly acknowledged in peer-reviewed literature by specialists in the field.
From the OP:
I beg to differ. One thing I have noticed is that you have studiously avoided bringing in theological issues. You don’t mention biblical literalism, biblical inerrancy, the fall, and you haven’t even argued for a global flood.
This has to be one of the strangest “why I am a YEC” cases I’ve ever seen.
Yes, a very nice way to erase the surface layers which contain the fossil record on the top layers and are replaced by layers from below that are without fossils. Thanks for reinforcing my point the fossil record should have been washed erased. 🙂
From the OP:
Rapid burial with minerals and water, not rapid burial under rocks.
No one thinks that rocks fell on these creatures and buried them and that’s how fossils were formed. Do they?
There isn’t substantial trace of C14 or DNA in fossils. The tiny handful of examples pushed by YEC charlatans are all easily explainable by recent contamination. The oldest DNA ever recovered is about 700K years which is way younger than the 3+ billion years life has been on Earth,
Fossils are not “buried in ” 65 MYO rock. With a few rare exceptions they are an integral part of the rock and consist of minerals which have replaced the original organic material. I can’t believe you’d act so dumb as to not know how fossils are formed.
1. Contamination of a few rare samples.
2. The oldest DNA recovered is around 700K years and is highly fragmented due to age degradation.
3. I have no idea what that blithering is suppose to mean.
Except the layers below do contain multicellular fossils, all the way back to the precambrian over 650 million years ago.
The rules prohibit me from suggesting you’re being deliberately dishonest so you must want everyone to believe you’re incredibly ignorant of basic geology and paleontology.
Salvador, do you honestly believe that the fossils of the burgess shale at 7600 ft elevation were actually fossilized at that elevation? If not, how did they arrive at that elevation?
I provided peer-reviewed evidence there is substantial enough trace of C14 in fossils as measured by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry. Coal counts as one class of fossil does it not? There are other fossils with C14 in them, but researchers just give up looking for it because these “contaminants” seem everywhere where they shouldn’t be and data disagreeable to mainstream beliefs is just swept under the rug rather than getting the scrutiny it deserves.
Who is in denial now over physical evidence! Not me.
No, you didn’t. You C&Ped the usual YEC drivel with contaminated coal samples. Where are all the other animal fossils like dinosaurs that supposedly have C14 in them? I’ve only ever seen one YEC group try to C14 date dino fossils and their specimens were so contaminated they got dates 11,000 years apart (from 39,000 to 28,000 years) for pieces of the same animal. 😀
LOL! Now we get the usual YEC lie ” lots of fossils have C14 but scientists are too afraid to test them!”
Your YEC arguments started out pathetic and are getting worse by the hour Sal.
It gets worse?
The most charitable thing I could say here is “?”.
Citation, please. You should support that claim; (let’s highlight it)
Let’s see some specifics.
PS, Sal,
Are you conceding on the age of the Earth? Do you accept that the idea that the Earth is a few thousand years old is overwhelmingly refuted by a mass of consilient evidence?
I second this question. Sal, do you accept radiometric dating is valid and can correctly show ages in the millions to thousands of millions of years age range? Yes or no, please commit to an answer.
Astrochronology by itself shows the earth to be well over a 100 million years old, and it’s based on completely different phenomena, isotopic changes reflecting climatic changes due to earth’s rotational and orbital changes. Unsurprisingly, astrochronology also shows radiometric dating to be reliable beyond 100 million years ago. YECs have no explanation for how these isotopic changes occur “during the flood.”
Of course relative dating has backed up radiometric dating, too, and while it existed before any scientific theory of evolution, only evolution actually explains why extinct creatures do not reappear in the fossil record. Couldn’t the Designer have dusted off some old designs, and just given us Cambrian trilobites again? Well, shocker, evolution explains, creationism doesn’t, creationists don’t care–because they’re not out for scientific explanation.
C-14 in ancient coal or diamonds? Sure, it’s interesting, conceivably a problem, but it’s so highly privileged by YECs over the correlated evidence for an ancient earth, ancient life, and the sequence of life expected from non-poof evolution and nothing else, that it’s clear that any possible deviation is their little prize, while dealing with the mass of evidence is really of little interest to them. I don’t know if the purported C-14 is there, but I do know that YECs reveal little interest in the fact that the dates are too ancient for their scenario, and that radiometric dating works far too well for it to be faked, or some quirk. At worst the C-14 is an anomaly against what clearly works, and should be treated as a question that we’ll live with, and at best it’s just a matter of contamination and errors to be expected at the margins.
One of the most commonsense kind of evidence for an old earth is clearly all of the vast masses of rocks that were very hot once, and are really quite cold now. Lack of good constraint on cooling means that it isn’t used for dating (radiometric dates are so much better), but it surely would be good if YECs could tell us how large-scale metamorphic zones, like the one that was in Michigan, cooled off in 6000 years or so. It’s just plain impossible by any observed thermodynamics. The drop of temperatures away from mid-ocean ridges is basically what you’d expect from the ages of the floors, although there are deviations from simple models (the younger rocks are cooler than expected from simple mass cooling–due almost certainly to water circulating through faults, etc.–that kind of thing). The upshot for YECs, is it takes millions of year for these rocks to cool, and the older rocks have indeed cooled nearly to environmental temperatures.
As for erosion, clearly that indicates a very old earth. We have mountain roots all over the older continental crust, and it’s plain absurd to think that the relatively flat Canadian shield lost its mountains over the course of a year in a flood. We have enormous amounts of sediment all over the world, no doubt much from long-gone mountain ranges whose roots are all that are left, clearly not the amount of sediment one would get from a flood. We have hydrocarbons in the form of kerogen in those sediments that would combine with the entirety of the oxygen in the atmosphere several times over–where did that come from?
Everything about the “young earth” becomes completely impossible with a little knowledge of science. But it’s good to see Sal using roughly the same sort of “reasoning” to cling to a few questions while ignoring masses of evidence for the old earth as he uses to cling to a few questions in evolution in order to deny it. There really is little difference in the way of denying the weight of the evidence in either case, the only difference is that there really is a rather greater weight of the evidence for the old earth (as, basically, all of the evidence for evolution is evidence of the old earth, but there is also a great deal of evidence for the old earth that is quite independent of life and its evolution). Anything that might question the best fit to the evidence is valued over all of the other evidence, and in both cases, it’s really a negative “argument,” which lacks any significant evidence either for the young earth or for design/creation.
Glen Davidson
stcordova,
Contamination, probably. Meanwhile, what about all the evidence from isotopes that aren’t C14? That’s a suspiciously large lump under your carpet.
Oh, qualified scholars! I’d best leave it up to them to deal with your qualified case, then.
Just to make a couple of very simple observations:
1. Woolly mammoths are never found associated with tropical vegetation. The idea that they’re eating a fig leaf and are then buried by a blizzard is pretty ludicrous.
2. The vast majority of fossils are found in marine environments. Historically, much of the continents have been below sea level. They aren’t going to be continuously eroding, when sediment is being deposited on top of them. Even fossils of terrestrial organisms are usually found in depositional basins, where sediment collects more than it eroded away. Sea levels rise and fall, continental crust rises and falls as well. The landscape does not simply passively erode to the sea.
Quite the exhibition of cherry picking.
Sal, all your questions have been answered directly to you many times. Nothing written here will change one iota of your belief.
The abysmal in ignorance you display in this thread is curable. But just as we can’t force you to look at *all* the evidence and consilience we can’t force you to want to learn. Dave Hawkins is more likely to change his mind than you.
Yes.
Sal is widely known over the years. Many of us have seen it all before. Not necessarily in detail, but the overall pattern is clear.
Sal,
Do you accept the ice cores that have a continuous record going back ~600,000 years?
RodW,
There are also unbroken, well-anchored dendrochronological sequences for some regions which go back some 14,000 years. But, you know, we may be dealing with a trickster deity who creates spurious ice layers and tree-rings to test our faith.
What you all need to understand is that Salvador does not care about the evidence for the age of the earth. To him it’s irrelevant. About the oddest YEC position I’ve ever seen, but that’s his position.
Of course we have a blatant case here, as always, of starting with a ludicrous but non-negotiable foregone conclusion, and trying to FORCE FIT whatever can be forced (a tiny sample of ambiguities, anomalies, and lies) and simply ignoring all the rest.
If I’d been indoctrinated from infancy that the moon is made of green cheese, this is exactly how I’d deal with the moon rocks the astronauts brought back. I’d ignore everything about the rocks except for a few elements also found in cheese.
And most interesting, at least to me, I’d go to a site where the sheer idiocy of my brainwashing was obvious to all, and take it for granted that I’d be taken seriously, on the grounds that I’m RIGHT. I HAVE to be right. Nothing else can be considered.
Watching an intelligent person wracking his brain to find new and creative ways to trick himself is kind of sad, but clearly thousands of hours of research have gone into it. Other than that, nothing to see here.
One big difference is here he can’t change people’s posts and add words to make it appear they agree with him like he did on his Young Cosmos blog. To this day that remains the most dishonest behavior I’ve ever come across on the web.
Contaminated? I elaborated why the contamination argument is suspect, especially for hard fossils.
If you choose to turn a blind eye, you’re more than welcome to. Btw, you think by the way you can force a teaspoon of contaminant into a solidified object by accident? 🙂 Not likely. Do you not understand, in site contamination cannot be a good explanation because the contaminant itself would become C14-free in short geological time scales because of C14 half life?
You didn’t address my analysis along those lines, just gave non-scientific dismissals. Suit yourself if that satisfies your belief system. I gave you evidence, I gave secular viewpoints on the matter and you offered only you incredulity, not actual credible physical mechanisms.
There are a large number of these anomalies in the literature if you’re willing to look. I provided one, or do you think I can’t provide more? 🙂
Contamination is always claimed, never demonstrated. And some do not think it is contamination, not the least of which is the TalkOrigins website.
RodW,
No I don’t accept ice core date personally, but it is not my field and I wouldn’t tell other creationists to dismiss it out of hand.
What I have put forward is 300,000,000 year old fossils have youthful markers. If the fossils are shown to be not more than 1 million years old, I think the creationists are closer to the truth than evolutionists.
That is your conjecture, I gave reasons it is not credible. You’re invited to offer an opposing analysis.
Such as? Can you be specific.
If you invoke the isotopes in the rocks, I already pointed out the illogic of dating the time of death by the isotopes in the rocks.
C14 is important because of its relatively short half life and the fact it is in the atmosphere and is thus incorporated into biological parts of life.
RATE’s idiocy with the contaminated coal has already been beaten into a fine pink mist. It’s easy to find a dozen rebuttals online for anyone still bored enough with your YEC horsecrap to look.
I notice you dodged all the other questions about these ridiculous C14 dating claims too. What a surprise.
You also still keep running from the question do you accept radiometric dating as accurate and that it shows an accurate age for geologic strata and an old Earth?
Please answer the question.
Please provide the published scientific research that shows a 300 million year old fossil with youthful markers. Since you agree the fossil is 300 million years old which dating method do you agree is correct to get that age?
Going meta for a second. What are the odds that all of these lines of consilient evidence (that is very widely accepted) are wrong?
Coal is a 300,000,000 million year old fossil according to mainstream theory.
Oh really, like the Uranium Thorium mechanism? Funny, the requite concentration of these substnaces is never stated.
In site contamination? The problem is the contaminant itself becomes C14 in geologically short time frames and if the contamination is continuous it would lead to the “compounding interest” problem described above, and if non-continuous, that would lead to the absurdity of nature conspiring to fool us by arranging a world-wide contamination at just the right time.
In process contamination? Like putting a teaspoon of contaminant into a solidified object by accident?
As far as the list of other fossils, this is mostly from peer-reviewed literature which was compiled by Paul Giem. Giem also critiques the 3 suggested avenues of contamination and shows that though there might be some contamination, such contamination cannot account for the C14 anomalies.
P Giem, C14
I asked you which mainstream dating method you accept that dates coal bearing strata to 300 million years.
The rest of your usual C&Ped YEC bullshit can safely be ignored until you start answering questions.
Low for YEC given the evidence in hand, but irrelevant to fossil time of death.
How is the age of the universe, earth and rocks be a conciliant line of evidence for the time of death of a fossil?
How does one establish the time of death of a creature? Not by the age of the Earth or rocks it’s buried in I hope!
I don’t accept the 300 million year date, the 300 million year date is affixed to the carboniferous era by the mainstream.
And from Talk Origins
K Hunt’s explanations fais as I demonstrated:
1. from peer reviewed literature for the radioactive sources
2. analysis of the actual amount of contaminant needed to be forced into a solid sample
3. the “compounding interest” problem of in site contamination
None of which you’ve refuted. You might choose to continue your content free assertions, but it’s not a rational refutation, just noise.
Fossils aren’t “buried” in rocks. They’re integral parts of the rocks where the organic parts of the original specimen were replaced through mineralization.
Knock off the moron YEC act and tell us which radiometric dating methods you accept.
Then how old is the strata the coal is found in? If you’re too ignorant and don’t understand radiometric dating techniques just say so.