GravitonSurge said:
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*sigh* You've got to be kidding me. How old are you? Have you ever taken a chemistry class? Radioactive decay. The half-lives of certain elements, such as Carbon and Uranium-238, can be used for geological dating. You could conduct such experiments yourself to prove it, if you had any semblance of ability to think and act for yourself. I am not impressed by someone stumping some insignificant dumbass professors. Even the stupid manage to get into the educational system sometimes... as shown by the ridiculous and asinine concepts such as 'intelligent design'. "Give me a break."
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carbon dating is not an accurate form of dating.
Carbon dating is a good dating tool for some things that we know the relative date of. Something that is 300 years old for example. But it is far from an exact Science. It is somewhat accurate back to a few thousand years, but carbon dating is not accurate past this. Thirty thousand years is about the limit. However, this does not mean that the earth is 30 thousand years old. It is much younger than that.
Because of the earths declining magnetic field, more radiation (which forms C-14 is allowed into the earths atmosphere.
The man who invented Carbon dating knew that atmospheric carbon would reach equilibrium in 30,000 years. He assumed that the earth was millions of years old, and that it was already at equilibrium. However each time they test it, they find more c14 in the atmosphere, and have realized that we are only 1/3 the way to equilibrium.
- What does this mean? It means that based on c14 formation, the earth has to be less than 1/3 of 30,000 years old. This would make the earth less than 10,000 years old! )
***Carbon dating is based on the assumption that the amount of C14 in the atmosphere has always been the same. But there is more carbon in the atmosphere now than there was 4 thousand years ago.
Since carbon dating measures the amount of carbon STILL in a fossil, then the date given is not accurate. Carbon dating makes an animal living 4 thousand years ago (when there was less atmospheric carbon) appear to have lived thousands of years before it actually did!
What was the original amount of Carbon in the atmosphere???
A great book on the flaws of dating methods is "Radioisotopes and the age of the earth" (edited by Larry Vardiman, Andrew Snelling, Eugene F. Chaffin. Published by Institute for Creation Research; December 2000)
Dating methods are based on 3 unprovable and questionable assumptions:
1) That the rate of decay has been constant throughout time.
2). That the isotope abundances in the specimen dated have not been altered during its history by addition or removal of either parent or daughter isotopes
3) That when the rock first formed it contained a known amount of daughter material
("Radioisotopes and the age of the earth" pg v)
We must recognize that past processes may not be occurring at all today, and that some may have occurred at rates and intensities far different from similar processes today.
( "Radioisotopes and the age of the earth" pg vii)
First, for carbon-14 dating to be accurate, one must assume the rate of decay of carbon-14 has remained constant over the years. However, evidence indicates that the opposite is true. Experiments have been performed using the radioactive isotopes of uranium-238 and iron-57, and have shown that rates can and do vary. In fact, changing the environments surrounding the samples can alter decay rates.
The second faulty assumption is that the rate of carbon-14 formation has remained constant over the years. There are a few reasons to believe this assumption is erroneous. The industrial revolution greatly increased the amount of carbon-12 released into the atmosphere through the burning of coal. Also, the atomic bomb testing around 1950 caused a rise in neutrons, which increased carbon-14 concentrations.
The great flood which Noah and family survived would have uprooted and/or buried entire forests. This would decrease the release of carbon-12 to the atmosphere through the decay of vegetation.
No carbon-14 existed immediately after creation, because carbon-14 accumulates with time. The preflood earth had more land area and less sea area, because about half of todays water was under the earths crust. Therefore, what little carbon-14 accumulated before the flood was diluted with the carbon-12 in the vast amounts of lush vegetation growing on the earth, most of which was buried during the flood to become our coal, oil, and methane deposits.
Third, For carbon-14 dating to be accurate, the concentrations of carbon-14 and carbon-12 must have remained constant in the atmosphere. In addition to the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, the flood provides another evidence that this is a faulty assumption. During the flood, subterranean water chambers that were under great pressure would have been breached. This would have resulted in an enormous amount of carbon-12 being released into the oceans and atmosphere. The effect would be not unlike opening a can of soda and having the carbon dioxide fizzing out. The water in these subterranean chambers would not have contained carbon-14, as the water was shielded from cosmic radiation. This would have upset the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12.
To know if carbon dating is accurate, we would have to know how much carbon was in the atmosphere in the beginning, and also how long it has been increasing, or decreasing. Since no one was there, no one knows for sure. It's like trying to figure out how long a candle has been burning, without knowing the rate at which it burns, or its original size!
Carbon dating is frequently an embarrassment to Scientists.
Here are some Carbon 14 dates that were rejected because they did not agree with evolution...
*Living penguins have been carbon dated and the results said that they had died 8,000 years ago! This is just one of many inaccurate dates given by Carbon dating.
*The shells of living mollusks have been dated using the carbon 14 method, only to find that the method gave it a date as having been dead for 23,000 years!(Science vol. 141 1963 pg. 634-637)
*The body of a seal that had been dead for 30 years was carbon dated, and the results stated that the seal had died 4,600 years ago! ("The Illustrated Origins Answer Book" by Paul Taylor)
*What about a freshly killed seal? Well, they dated one of those too, the results stated that the seal had died 1,300 years ago. (Antarctic Journal vol. 6 Sept-Oct 1971 pg. 211)
Antarctic seawater has a low level of C14. Consequently organisms living there dated by C14 give ages much older than their true age.
*A lake Bonney seal known to have died only a few weeks before was carbon dated. The results stated that the seal had died between 515 and 715 years ago. (Antarctic Journal, Washington)
*Shells from living snails were dated using the Carbon 14 method. The results stated that the snails had died 27,000 years ago. (Science vol. 224 1984 pg. 58-61)
*Ancient human skeletons, when dated by this new accelerator mass spectrometer technique, give surprisingly recent dates. In one study of eleven sets of ancient human bones, all were dated at about 5,000 radiocarbon years or less!
R. E. Taylor et al., Major Revisions in the Pleistocene Age Assignments for North American Human Skeletons by C-14 Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, American Antiquity, Vol. 50, No. 1, 1985, pp. 136140.
*The potassium-argon method was used to date volcanic material in this next example:
"Scientists got dates of 164 million and 3 billion years for two Hawaiian lava flows. But these lava flows happened only about 200 years ago in 1800 and 1801.
("Dry bones and other fossils" by Dr. Gary Parker)
Radiocarbon dates that do not fit a desired theory are often excluded by alleging cross-contamination of the sample. In this manner, an evolutionist can present a sample for analysis, and tell the laboratory that he assumes the sample to be somewhere between 50,000 years old and 100,000 years old. Dates that do not conform to this estimate are thrown out. Repeated testing of the sample may show nine tests that indicate an age of 5000 to 10,000 years old, and one test that shows an age of 65,000 years old. The nine results showing ages that do not conform to the pre-supposed theory are excluded. This is bad science, and it is practiced all the time to fit with the evolutionary model!
Humans are naturally biased. We tend to see what we want to see, and explain away unwanted data.
Perhaps the best description of the problem in attempting to use the Carbon-14 dating method is to be found in the words of Dr. Robert Lee. In 1981, he wrote an article for the Anthropological Journal of Canada, in which stated:
"The troubles of the radiocarbon dating method are undeniably deep and serious. Despite 35 years of technological refinement and better understanding, the underlying assumptions have been strongly challenged, and warnings are out that radiocarbon may soon find itself in a crisis situation. Continuing use of the method depends on a fix-it-as-we-go approach, allowing for contamination here, fractionation there, and calibration whenever possible. It should be no surprise then, that fully half of the dates are rejected. The wonder is, surely, that the remaining half has come to be accepted
. No matter how useful it is, though, the radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually the selected dates.
The accuracy of carbon-14 dating relies on faulty assumptions, and is subject to human bias. At best, radiocarbon dating is only accurate for the past few thousand years. As weve seen though, even relatively youthful samples are often dated incorrectly. The Biblical record gives us an indication of an earth that is relatively young. The most reliable use of radiocarbon dating supports that position. This method of dating, overall, tends to be as faulty and ill conceived as the evolutionary model that is was designed to support.
http://contenderministries.org/evolution/carbon14.php
http://www.creationscience.com/onlin...html#wp1729594
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/carbondating.html