The Theory of Evolution

[IGotTheCottons]

Um... Yeah... I've got multiple sources at the bottom of my post supporting why the dating techniques. Several of them are strictly scientific (as in, no Christians were involved in writing them). Try reading the post, and checking some of the sources before making such a cocky post.

[DaZEED&ConFuseD]

Um yea, you still haven't answered my question... why are these dating techniques still used if they are that flawed?

What about ice core sampling? This technique doesn't require radioactive and it disproves your old earth theory. So talk your way out of that one.

I repeat science itself would have corrected the problem IF there was in fact a problem, for that is the nature of science. We can throw links and sources at each other all day and it still wouldn't matter. BUT i bet none of your sources have the support of the scientific community with their arguements. Have any of your sources been able to show the scientific community the light and have made any progess.... I highly doubt it and I wonder why......

I have read your post and it seems to me zylark bested you... but thats my opinion.

You just won't admit your wrong because you know if you are wrong then the bible can't be literally interpreted and creationism takes a heavy blow.

[IGotTheCottons]

Wait, so you wouldn't have to go and do anything for yourself, I went and found the post I've been talking about...

Originally Posted by IGotTheCottons

The most important method is uranium dating, of course, since it not only is the first one used historically, but also the one against which others have been calibrated. The uranium method has been used to assign a so-called "absolute time" date to the earth's supposed oldest rocks, and thus is the main support for the widely accepted idea that the earth is about 4.5 to 5 billions years old. Such radiometric ages are used especially for Precambrian rock, since there is no paleontologic control on the dating in these rocks...

1.) The Uranium Methods.

Actually, the uranium method is a whole family of dating methods, all based on the decay of uranium and its sister element thorium through long decay chains into lead and helium. The process is called "alpha decay," in which the alpha particles (which are really positively charged atoms of helium gas) escape the nuclei of the parent atoms at rates which seem statistically to be constant.

Three decay chains are involved: (a) Uranium 238 decays into Lead 206 plus 8 helium atoms, with a half-life of 4.5 billion years; (b) Uranium 235 decays into Lead 207 plus 7 helium atoms, with a half-life of 0.7 billion years; (c) Thorium 232 decays into Lead 208 plus 7 helium atoms, with a half-life of 14.1 billion years. In a given deposit containing these elements, it is usual to find all of these isotopes together (this is not always true, but is typical), in conjunction with a fourth isotope of lead, Lead 204, which is believed to have no radioactive parent and is therefore called "common" lead. Furthermore, many or all of the intermediate products in the three decay chains will be present, ideally in equilibrium amounts. Some of these include radium, radon gas and another important lead isotope, Lead 210.

Without entering into the technical details of the use of various lead age methods from these data, it is immediately obvious that the three assumptions discussed are invalid for these methods. There are, therefore, serious difficulties, if not outright fallacies, in the lead age determinations, and some of these are discussed briefly below.

1.) Uranium minerals always exist in open systems, not closed.

Uranium is easily leachable by groundwater, for example. The intermediate element, radon gas, can easily move in or out of a uranium system. There are, in fact, various ways by which the components of this type of system can enter or leave it.2 One of the chief authorities on radioactive dating, Henry Faul, said: "Uranium and lead both migrate (in shales) in geologic time, and detailed analyses have shown that useful ages cannot be obtained with them. Similar difficulties prevail in attempts to date pitchblende veins. Here again much chemical activity is known to take place and widely diverging areas can be measured on samples from the same spot." 3

Remember, that unless the system is known to have been a closed system through all the ages since its formation, its age readings are meaningless.

With so many factors pressing to upset the balance of components in such a system, it is no wonder that the several age-calculation methods available for each system much more than not yield "discordant" ages.

An even more important phenomenon by which these balances can be upset is that of "free neutron capture," by which free neutrons in the minderal's environment may be captured by the lead in the system to change the isotopic value of the lead. that is, Lead 206 may be converted into Lead 207, and Lead 207 into lead 208 usually constitutes over half the lead present in any given lead deposit. Thus, the relative amounts of these "radiogenic" isotopes of lead in the system may not be a function of their decay from thorium and uranium at all, but rather a function of the amount of free neutrons in the environment.4

That this problem is quite serious has been shown conclusively by Dr. Melvil Cook,5 who has analyzed two of the world's most important uranium bearing ores (e.g., in Katanga and Canada) with this in view. These ores contain no Lead 204, so presumably no common lead. They also contain little or no Thorium 232, but do contain significant amounts of Lead 208. The latter could therefore have come neither from common lead contamination, nor from thorium decay, and so must have been derived from Lead 207 by neutron capture. But then the calculations for such neutron reactions to make this correction, according to Dr. Cook, in effect will show that literally all of the so-called radiogenic isotopes of lead found in uranium-thorium systems anywhere can be accounted for by this process alone. Thus, none of them need have been formed by radioactive decay at all, and consequently the minterals may all be quite young, with essentially zero age!6

2.) The uranium decay rates may well be variable.

Writers on this subject commonly stress the invariability of radioactive decay rates, but the fact is these rates, as well as all others, are subject to change. Since they are controlled by atomic structure, they are not as easily affected as other processes, but factors which can influence atomic structures and processes can also influence radioactive decay rates.

The most obvious examples of such a factor is cosmic radiation and its production of neutrinos. Another would be the free neutrons discussed above. If anything happens to increase the incidence of these particles in the earth's crust, there is no doubt that radioactive decay rates would be accelerated.

Phenomena such as these would be generated by such events as the reversal of the earth's magnetic field or supernova explosians in nearby stars. Since such phenomena are commonly accepted now as having occured in the past, even by uniformitarian astronomers and geologists, there is a very real possibility that radioactive decay rates were much higher at various intervals in the past than they are at present. That this possibility is being considered seriously is evident from the following comment by Dr. Fred Jueneman, who is director of research for the Innovative Concepts Association.7

"Being so close, the anisotropic neutrino flux of the super-explosion must have had the peculiar characteristic of resetting all our atomic clocks. This would knock our Carbon-14, Potassium-Argon, and Uranium-Lead dating measurements into a cocked hat! The age of prehistoric artifacts, the age of the earth, and that of the universe would be thrown into doubt."8

3.) The daughter products were probably present from the beginning.

There is no way of being sure that the radiogenic daughter products of uranium and thorium decay were not present in these minerals when they were first formed. This possibility is most evident in the case of modern volcanic rocks. Such rocks, formed by lava flows from the earth's interior mantle, commonly contain uranium minerals and these, more often than not, are found to have radiogenic, as well as common, leads with them when the lava first cools and the minerals crystallize.9

Sidney P. Clementson, a British engineer, has recently made a detailed study10 of such modern volcanic rocks and their uranium "ages," as published in the Soviet geophysical journals and other papers, and has shown that in all such cases the uranium-lead ages were vastly older than the true ages of the rocks. Most of them gave ages of over a billion years, even though the lava rocks were known to have been formed in modern times. This is clear, unequivocal evidence that, as Clementson says: "Calculated ages give no indication whatever of the age of the host rocks."11

Now, wait a minute... Doesn't evolution teach that at one time the whole earth was molten, and then eventually cooled? Now, if this were so, wouldn't the same processes that have taken place in these lava flows that have tested to be over a billion years old (when they were known to have formed in recent history) also have taken place during the cooling of the earth? And wouldn't this give the earth a much older apparant age? Seems plausable to me.

Since, in those cases of igneous rocks whose age is actually KNOWN, the uranium method gives ages which are aeons too large, and since other uranium minerals are normally found in igneous rocks formed by the same kind of process, therefore it is very probable that their uranium "ages" also will be aeons too large, for the same reasons. Why should uranium ages be assumed correct when applied to rocks of unknown age when they are ALWAYS tremendously in error when calculated on rocks of known age?12

Some of the sources cited for the original post are:

M.A. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models (London: Max Parrish and Co., Ltd., 1960), pp. 53-60.
Frederick Jueneman, "Scientific Speculation," Industrial Research (September, 1972), p.15.
S.P. Clementson, "A Critical Examination of Radioactive Dating of Rocks," Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol7 (December 1970), pp. 137-141.
and
Ibid.

[DaZEED&ConFuseD]

What makes that article right and mine wrong? If what these authors are saying is true then why hasn't it been tested and proven? I've found few sites that haven't been creationist pages that talk about the flaws.

So what makes what you are presenting so right? The fact that you produce an article with a credible sources? I'm going to keep saying you are wrong until the majority of scientists can agree that in fact the dating methods are wrong. So far it hasn't been proven, otherwise SCIENTIST WOULD NOT STILL BE USING THOSE DATING TECHNIQUES. Perhaps it will be proven that these dating techniques are in fact flawed. But that hasn't happened right yet so you can't claim it to be true.

You didn't answer my other questions about the dinosaurs.

[IGotTheCottons]

Um, the fact that there's even a discrepancy between non-Christian scientists (you said you found very few - that would indicate that there are some out there) among whether or not the results are reliable would be enough to get me to doubt. If scientists can't agree on it, then how do we know that they are right? Why is it still being used? Because they're used by those who think the results are accurage. Obviously those who don't think they're accurate will not be using them, now will they?

There are several examples given in that article that show how the rates can be accelorated, or something can be given the appearance of great age, but in fact, be very young. You refuse to accept hard evidence because you refuse to believe anything that would prove a young earth. And you quickly dismiss it with "it's biased" or something of the like - even though it was a solid, SCIENTIFIC study, using the SCIENTIFIC method.

Why aren't dino's alive today? I dunno... There's a lot of stuff that was alive back then that isn't alive today. Who's to say they didn't go extinct sometime after the flood? And I guess you didn't pay any attention when I was talking about Locke Nesse. There's a pretty large amount of people who believe that the Locke Nesse monster is a dino (or a whole family of dinos)... So they could still very well be around today.

[DaZEED&ConFuseD]

So the fact there's a discrepency between a handful of nonchristian scientists proves it to be right? There's a discrepency between christians scientists as well. Wouldn't that prove the exact same thing?

If scientists can't agree on it, then how do we know that they are right? Why is it still being used?

Well it's not like there are many scientist who agree with on the dating flaws cottons. Only a small minority do. Why is it still being used? That was my million dollar question to u, and the whole point of our little debate. However, since you seem uncapable of answering that question, i will answer it. It is still being used because there hasn't been enough evidence to make dating techniques obsolete.

I never dismissed your article as biased, i was asking you what made your article more correct than mine. You still really haven't answered me on that one.

So wouldn't it make sense that whatever killed the MAJOERITY ( the lock ness monster still hasnt been proven, just like your dating flaws, but i'll let you have old nesse) of dinosaurs would have also killed man. BUT wait i thought noah would have saved the dinosaurs if they were killed by the flood! BUT wait there's more! I thought noah saved every animal. So if there was a flood, the story of noah's ark is wrong, b/c there's a lot of extinct animals that noah was supposed to save.

[IGotTheCottons]

Originally Posted by DaZEED&ConFuseD

So the fact there's a discrepency between a handful of nonchristian scientists proves it to be right? There's a discrepency between christians scientists as well. Wouldn't that prove the exact same thing?



Well it's not like there are many scientist who agree with on the dating flaws cottons. Only a small minority do. Why is it still being used? That was my million dollar question to u, and the whole point of our little debate. However, since you seem uncapable of answering that question, i will answer it. It is still being used because there hasn't been enough evidence to make dating techniques obsolete.

I never dismissed your article as biased, i was asking you what made your article more correct than mine. You still really haven't answered me on that one.

So wouldn't it make sense that whatever killed the MAJOERITY ( the lock ness monster still hasnt been proven, just like your dating flaws, but i'll let you have old nesse) of dinosaurs would have also killed man. BUT wait i thought noah would have saved the dinosaurs if they were killed by the flood! BUT wait there's more! I thought noah saved every animal. So if there was a flood, the story of noah's ark is wrong, b/c there's a lot of extinct animals that noah was supposed to save.

You obviously didn't read that article very carefully. Dating methods are based on assumptions. If you weren't there to measure the original amount of c-14 (or whatever other radioactive substance they would measure), you can't get an accurate date. Also, they have to assume that decay rates have been constant throughout the years - which there are numerous things that could accelorate the decay rates. So tell me - how is it possible to get an accurage date when you have to get a measurement based on 2 assumptions??? That's what makes my article more accurate.

And why would the story of Noah's ark be wrong if the dino's died out after the flood? If the ark story is true (which the geologic strata definately suggests is the case), then people woulda probably lived in caves for a while until they could start building up the numbers again... This is where a lot of those cave drawings would come from, and there's pics of dinos in cave drawings. WOW, isn't that amazing?

I mean, other animals have dyed off since the flood... Species are going extinct every day with deforestation... Oh wait, I guess that means Noah didn't do his job, and so therefore the flood must not have happened... PLEASE! Get real.

[DaZEED&ConFuseD]

So if you are right cottons then why don't most scientist agree with this article and once again... WHY ARE THEY STILL BEING USED.

Did you even bother to read the article I posted? It explains how dating techniques work and all the little shit that you'd probably argue against it.

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html

Just becuase a handful of scientists disagree with the dating techniques DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT. You believe just because a handful a scientists, whose information you would find on a creationists website makes what you claim is right. IT DOESNT WORK LIKE THAT. Thats just stupid to assume because some scientists disagree, they are right. Obvioulsy you don't know as much as

Sorry i screwed up with the dinosaurs. According to the bible, Noah would have saved the dinosaurs if they did live in fact before the flood, which has to be true because God created everything in 6 days. So here comes this flood and noah saves the dinosaurs along with all the other animals in his magical boat. Flood waters recede and now all the dinosaurs and other animals can thrive again. BUT wait... what happened to the majority of dinosaurs? Some global disaster would have had to wipe out the dinosaurs. And btw... we are talking about mass extinctions here... not just individual species. Please cottons, support your claim that there are cave drawings with dinosaurs in it. I would really like to see that. And dont give me a link to www.creationismisright.com or some shit like that.

[Opivy]

Hey at least cotton's article isn't a million pages long man. That thing is way too long

[IGotTheCottons]

You obviously aren't getting the point I'm trying to make... So I'm gonna break this down and make it simple for you.

Say rock A has X amount of a certain Uranium isotope that's used for radiometric dating.

Said rock A is just chillin in nature for a while, but something happens... Rock A has reactions with its surrounding environment, some of this isotope is leeched into the ground water - or something else (whatever it may be) accelorates the decay process of this Uranium isotope.

The decay process is sped up quite rapidly, and now Scientist B comes along and tests this isotope. He's testing this rock based on the ASSUMPTION that nothing happened to this rock to change the decay rates. What he doesn't know, though, is that this rock has had a little encounter with mother nature, and now APPEARS to be much older to the machines that are testing these isotopes.

This is why the methods are inaccurate, but yet they are still used. It's because they're based on ASSUMPTIONS. Scientists have to assume that the decay rates were always the same - even though there's been documented, proven ways to speed them up - thus giving the sample the appearance of a much older age.

[DaZEED&ConFuseD]

I undrestand that there are flaws and margins of errors, i'm not argueing about that. But the flaws wouldn't make it so that there's more than a 4 billion year difference.

My article goes on to explain what kind of environmental factors can happen to speed up the rate and says what scientist can do to make up for those factors. The article explains how scientists check their dates to make sure they are accurate enough. I don't care enough to go through my article and copy and paste the parts. Thats up to you.

If you think that article is long, then there are links to other wbsites that will give explanation, which are mostly christian sites ironically. These sites admits that the earth is old and that doesn't interfere with the bible and validity of the bible.

[Opivy]

Originally Posted by DaZEED&ConFuseD

My article goes on to explain what kind of environmental factors can happen to speed up the rate and says what scientist can do to make up for those factors. The article explains how scientists check their dates to make sure they are accurate enough. I don't care enough to go through my article and copy and paste the parts. Thats up to you

Yea, scientists can check their dates to make sure they're accurate a thousand times. That will never give them the ability to figure out what the object being tested has been put through. There is no way for them to be able to tell that so they HAVE to assume that it's isotopes (or whatever for different dating techniques) have been decaying at a steady rate.


-I read some of your link. I got down to an example where they use an hour glass. The sand falls at a steady rate. As you can see they do not take into consideration any natural factors that could have happened.

[DaZEED&ConFuseD]

Well you didn't read down far enough....

[IGotTheCottons]

It's impossible to tell whether or not these factors have happened or not as whatever is being tested wasn't observed for billions of years.

Some of these processes can happen quite rapidly and give a specimen that's only a couple thousand years old a reading of billions of years old...

If you were to walk into a room and see a candle burning, would you be able to tell how tall that candle was to begin with? The answer is No... Why? Because you don't know how long it's been burning, and if it's been burning at the same speed the whole time... The same thing goes for rocks. You don't know how long it's been decaying, and you don't know if the decay rates have always been the same, so therefor it's practically impossible to tell if your dating techniques are giving you truly accurate dates or not.

[DaZEED&ConFuseD]

From: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

2. Claims that the assumptions of a method may be violated
Certain requirements are involved with all radiometric dating methods. These generally include constancy of decay rate and lack of contamination (gain or loss of parent or daughter isotope). Creationists often attack these requirements as "unjustified assumptions," though they are really neither "unjustified" nor "assumptions" in most cases.

2.1 Constancy of radioactive decay rates.
Rates of radiometric decay (the ones relevant to radiometric dating) are thought to be based on rather fundamental properties of matter, such as the probability per unit time that a certain particle can "tunnel" out of the nucleus of the atom. The nucleus is well-insulated and therefore is relatively immune to larger-scale effects such as pressure or temperature.

Significant changes to rates of radiometric decay of isotopes relevant to geological dating have never been observed under any conditions. Emery (1972) is a comprehensive survey of experimental results and theoretical limits on variation of decay rates. Note that the largest changes reported by Emery are both irrelevant (they do not involve isotopes or modes of decay used for this FAQ), and minuscule (decay rate changed by of order 1%) compared to the change needed to compress the apparent age of the Earth into the young-Earthers' timescale.

A short digression on mechanisms for radioactive decay, taken from <CK47LK.E2J@ucdavis.edu> by Steve Carlip (subsequently edited in response to Steve's request):

For the case of alpha decay, [...] the simple underlying mechanism is quantum mechanical tunneling through a potential barrier. You will find a simple explanation in any elementary quantum mechanics textbook; for example, Ohanion's Principles of Quantum Mechanics has a nice example of alpha decay on page 89. The fact that the process is probabilistic, and the exponential dependence on time, are straightforward consequences of quantum mechanics. (The time dependence is a case of "Fermi's golden rule" --- see, for example, page 292 of Ohanion.)
An exact computation of decay rates is, of course, much more complicated, since it requires a detailed understanding of the shape of the potential barrier. In principle, this is computable from quantum chromodynamics, but in practice the computation is much too complex to be done in the near future. There are, however, reliable approximations available, and in addition the shape of the potential can be measured experimentally.

For beta decay, the underlying fundamental theory is different; one begins with electroweak theory (for which Glashow, Weinberg and Salam won their Nobel prize) rather than quantum chromodynamics.

As described above, the process of radioactive decay is predicated on rather fundamental properties of matter. In order to explain old isotopic ages on a young Earth by means of accelerated decay, an increase of six to ten orders of magnitude in rates of decay would be needed (depending on whether the acceleration was spread out over the entire pre-Flood period, or accomplished entirely during the Flood).

Such a huge change in fundamental properties would have plenty of noticeable effects on processes other than radioactive decay (taken from <16381@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> by Steve Carlip):

So there has been a lot of creative work on how to look for evidence of such changes.

From: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html#page%2019

Some people have tried to defend a young Earth position by saying that the half-lives of radionuclides can in fact be changed, and that this can be done by certain little-understood particles such as neutrinos, muons, or cosmic rays. This is stretching it. While certain particles can cause nuclear changes, they do not change the half-lives. The nuclear changes are well understood and are nearly always very minor in rocks. In fact the main nuclear changes in rocks are the very radioactive decays we are talking about.

There are only three quite technical instances where a half-life changes, and these do not affect the dating methods we have discussed.

1. Only one technical exception occurs under terrestrial conditions, and this is not for an isotope used for dating. According to theory, electron-capture is the most likely type of decay to show changes with pressure or chemical combination, and this should be most pronounced for very light elements. The artificially-produced isotope, beryllium-7 has been shown to change by up to 1.5%, depending on its chemical environment (Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 171, 325-328, 1999; see also Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 195, 131-139, 2002). In another experiment, a half-life change of a small fraction of a percent was detected when beryllium-7 was subjected to 270,000 atmospheres of pressure, equivalent to depths greater than 450 miles inside the Earth (Science 181, 1163-1164, 1973). All known rocks, with the possible exception of diamonds, are from much shallower depths. In fact, beryllium-7 is not used for dating rocks, as it has a half-life of only 54 days, and heavier atoms are even less subject to these minute changes, so the dates of rocks made by electron-capture decays would only be off by at most a few hundredths of a percent.


As an example of incorrect application of these conditions to dating, one young-Earth proponent suggested that God used plasma conditions when He created the Earth a few thousand years ago. This writer suggested that the rapid decay rate of rhenium under extreme plasma conditions might explain why rocks give very old ages instead of a young-Earth age. This writer neglected a number of things, including: a) plasmas only affect a few of the dating methods. More importantly, b) rocks and hot gaseous plasmas are completely incompatible forms of matter! The material would have to revert back from the plasma state before it could form rocks. In such a scenario, as the rocks cooled and hardened, their ages would be completely reset to zero as described in previous sections. If this person's scenario were correct, instead of showing old ages, all the rocks should show a uniform ~4,000 year age of creation. That is obviously not what is observed.

3. The last case also involves very fast-moving matter. It has been demonstrated by atomic clocks in very fast spacecraft. These atomic clocks slow down very slightly (only a second or so per year) as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. No rocks in our solar system are going fast enough to make a noticeable change in their dates.

These cases are very specialized, and all are well understood. None of these cases alter the dates of rocks either on Earth or other planets in the solar system. The conclusion once again is that half-lives are completely reliable in every context for the dating of rocks on Earth and even on other planets. The Earth and all creation appears to be very ancient.





One of them is from a site that promotes evolution [ first one] and the second is from a Christian scientist site. So who is right? These sites disagree with your claims. There are plenty more links for my side. I'm guessing most of your links are from creationists sites. I've found plenty of Christian scientist sites that support an old earth and agree with the dating techniques.