I have read a few remarks regarding c-14 dating that suggest that it is wrong. certainly c-14 dating has to be performed carefully but "wrong"? Would anyone care to comment?
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C-14: Dating or the work of the devil
- Thread starter Eddie
- Start date
It's the work of the devil. Jesus is responsible for the nuclear force in atoms (Colossians 1:17). When people use C-14 dating, they are measuring how much the devil is winning the fight against Jesus in the nucleus. Tacoman can tell you more about this.
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On a more serious note... C-14 dating has an accurate upper dating limit of about 50,000 years. It is not accurate for dates above that. For dates on the evolutionary scale, K/Ar dating as well as other methods are used.
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The "cogent" arguments against tend to be circular - The Bible says the world is 6000 years old, C-14 dating says otherwise, the Bible is always right, therefore C-14 dating is wrong.
Occassionally people will post 'evidence' of distorted results. Most of these false readings are caused by known weaknesses of C-14 dating, and can be corrected for. (I believe JohnR7 in particular likes to cite the attempted dating of a living organism. Obviously, that doesn't work too well.
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Occassionally people will post 'evidence' of distorted results. Most of these false readings are caused by known weaknesses of C-14 dating, and can be corrected for. (I believe JohnR7 in particular likes to cite the attempted dating of a living organism. Obviously, that doesn't work too well.
)
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lucaspa
Legend
Today at 09:08 AM Eddie said this in Post #5
I know. I was trying for some cogent
As Zadock says, the motivation for arguing against is circular and simple: a literal reading of the Bible says the earth is less than 20,000 years old. Radiometric dating says it's much older. Therefore radiometric dating is wrong.
What creationists do is try to use C14 outside of its admitted limitations. All methods have limitations. But creationists ignore these and say the failure of dating methods outside the limitations means that the methods themselves are faulty. A list of limitations and items C14 can't date is given at: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/carbon.html
While C14 can't measure older than 50,000 years, as Blader noted, K/Ar can't date events under 100,000 years. That's one reason why Austin's and others examples of erroneous dates for the Mt. St. Helen's eruption as reasons K/Ar doesn't work are faulty.
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gladiatrix
Card-carrying EAC member
Today at 09:08 AM Eddie said this in Post #5
I know. I was trying for some cogent
How Erroneous C-14 Dating is Used to Scam the Faithful -An Introduction to C-14 Dating
Radiocarbon dating measures the isotope C-14. Living creatures and plants get their carbon-14 from the atmosphere, not from the soil (a common creationists trick is to carry on about increases in C14 in soil and claim that this "negates" C14 dating because the levels change too much to get a reliable baseline---this is bunk!).. It is atomospheric C-14 that is being measured with C-14 dating. Plants take it in directly and animals eat the plants.
Some Useful Definitions
Here's another handy site==> Basic Concepts of Radioactivity
The upper limit of dating for C-14 is 50,000 years (the cut-off is often set to even lower limits, ~35,000 years). The half-life of C-14 is ~5730 years. This means that at the end of 5730 years the number of C-14 atoms in a sample has been reduced (decayed) by half. After 10 such time periods, there is not enough C-14 left to be reliably detectable (notice that the upper limit is set below the 10 half-lives cut-off mark). A good place to start viewing the misuse of C-14 dating by creationists is to go to this website and read sections labeled R1, R2, R3 (this FAQs page is good for answering many creationists whoppers).
Creationists are especially fond of using marine animals as "candidates" for C-14 dating. Marine animals like corals are NOT good specimens for dating with C-14 because not all of the carbon they take in is atmospheric They get part of their C-14 from the ocean bottom and carbon dissolved in the water which may have comes from an ancient limestone
Some mollusks get their carbon from dissolved limestone, NOT from atmospheric C-14 which is what the technique measures. This limestone is very old and contains little C-14. They (mollusks) in effect, "inherit" the old age of the limestone. That is why such samples cannot be reliably dated this way and creationists deliberately date samples like this using a technique that no reputable scientist would ever use. Not surprisingly one gets an erroneous date for the sample! These flawed dates are then trotted out for consumption by the ignorant and willfully uninformed. I am sure we have all heard about the living mollusk with the 2000-20,000 year old shell. Guess what, guys and dolls, this is how they got this erroneous data...by using the wrong technique.
They also use C-14 dating to "date" samples that are known by other methods to be older than 50,000 years. After this amount of time, no reputable scientist would use C-14 to date a sample because the C-14 has decayed to such an extent that the amount of C-14 in the sample is virtually gone. Here are some examples of creationists "lying for God" websites showing just how they misuse a technique to get these ridiculous dates.
A) Creationists Using Samples that are Much too Old for C-14 Dating
B) Creationists Scam: Dating a Mollusk Shell with C-14
The site above is a beaut because they date a castle with a known date of construction without telling you just exactly what part of the castle they dated (the sample one uses determines the technique). They date biological samples without telling you what part of the animal they tested (these liars often go for the stomach contents which contain items like mollusks for the seal...yes that's right, mollusks again!). And how about dating a "freshly killed" specimen, that is really too much. Cells don't all die at the same time, furthermore, again we have no idea what part of the specimen was actually tested. They admit that:
What they don't tell you is
- 1) that scientist don't just dislike it, they flat out would not use C14 to date these objects
- 2) don't tell you WHY scientists won't use this type of dating in the first place!
There are no "cogent" arguments against C-14 dating except to note the abuses of the technique by those who don't know anything about it and/or who are intent upon misusing it in an attempt to deceive others and probably themselves as well.
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gladiatrix
Card-carrying EAC member
Looks like I cross-posted with Lucaspa, who beat me to the punch!!! My apologies for the redundancy!!!
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are you serious?
actually my neat triangulation example deals with King Arthurs Round Table. It was taken down a while ago and subjected to a range of dating techniques ...
-c14
-dendrochronology
-an analysis of letters and the style of the painting
-the inscriptions
-the carpentry
Since I am preaching to the choir I will not go into the excrutiating detail that I could (the book, King Arthur's Round Table by Martin Biddle, is near at hand). It is a nice example in that it is not emotionally loaded and the methods are fairly simple to understand (the names of the knights as they appear on the table compared to contemporary documents, for example). the points are twofold:
1) son of a gun. we come up with a consistant date range
2) it vividly demonstrates the rigor of a scientific inquiry. A sample ("A" as in singular) is not spit shined and examined willy nilly with no consideration of where it came from relative to factors that might influence the outcome. Sometimes when I read critisizems of c14 dates, and science in general, the writers make it sound as though the science is equivilent to measuring the width of a board with a ruler. Wrong.
Science is hard, a fact not apprecated by some.
actually my neat triangulation example deals with King Arthurs Round Table. It was taken down a while ago and subjected to a range of dating techniques ...
-c14
-dendrochronology
-an analysis of letters and the style of the painting
-the inscriptions
-the carpentry
Since I am preaching to the choir
I will not go into the excrutiating detail that I could (the book, King Arthur's Round Table by Martin Biddle, is near at hand). It is a nice example in that it is not emotionally loaded and the methods are fairly simple to understand (the names of the knights as they appear on the table compared to contemporary documents, for example). the points are twofold:1) son of a gun. we come up with a consistant date range
2) it vividly demonstrates the rigor of a scientific inquiry. A sample ("A" as in singular) is not spit shined and examined willy nilly with no consideration of where it came from relative to factors that might influence the outcome. Sometimes when I read critisizems of c14 dates, and science in general, the writers make it sound as though the science is equivilent to measuring the width of a board with a ruler. Wrong.
Science is hard, a fact not apprecated by some.
Today at 08:48 PM Hank said this in Post #17
Ok. I'll take you on.
First C-14 dates back up to 50k years. How do we know what the actual content of C-14 in the atmosphere was back then? Or even 2k years ago?
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Yesterday at 09:17 PM Eddie said this in Post #18 (http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?postid=690974#post690974)
Since I am preaching to the choir
Personally, I think you should post it, since it would make a nice reference for anytime a creationist brings up the subject of carbon dating. Although, I notice most of the time carbon dating is referenced is often in a situation in which carbon dating does not apply, but that's besides the point.
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