Again...saying that it is a "quack site" doesn't make it a quack site.
What is the tool used to verify that the dating done to date is correct? There has to be a way to verify your evidence otherwise is simply a theory back by faith....faith that the original measurement is good.
First off all, one method has already been explained to you - the physics shows that it's correct (no faith needed), including experiments on the decay rates.
Understanding even a couple of the dozens of methods takes years of college education - so we aren't going to be able to explain them all to you in a few messages on a chatboard. It's classic Dunning-Kruger for you to think that you can doubt the methods out of sheer ignorance. If you really want to know, pick a method and we can explain, give resources, and after that you can enroll in a local University to continue learning that one method. As with all dating methods, careful methodology and examination and cross-testing of any assumptions are very important in that method, whether radioactive or not.
However, a wider point is also very relevant, and more accessible, regardless of Dunning-Kruger (perhaps).
And that's the agreement of all the dating methods. Luckily, we don’t have to rely on the results of a single dating method. There are well over forty different dating methods, both radioactive and non-radioactive, including geomagnetic polarity, Ar-Ar, dislocation content, Re-Os, fission track, coral layer, speleotherms, varves, historical documents and many more. Some are not even based on material from Earth, such as the helioseismic dating of the Sun. As shown in an earlier post, they overlap in the ages that are testable, allowing the same rock or artifact to be tested by many different methods to see if they all agree with each other on the ages of many different samples.
These kinds of tests have been done on method after method, confirming that they give accurate ages. For instance, an arrow found in lake sediment could be tested by dendrochronology (of the wooden shaft), amino acid racemization (of the sinew windings), obsidian hydration (of the arrowhead), varves (of the lake sediments it was found in), thermoluminescence (of the windings), and so on. If these different methods all gave the same age (their ranges overlapped) then it’s very likely this age is correct. It's really hard to imagine several different methods
just happening to all give the same "wrong" answer, isn't it? Creationists are left saying that a bunch of different methods, that all give the same answer, are likely to be just "happening" to all agree? So I always ask them how that is, and they can’t answer.
An example for them – I ask: Isn’t the agreement of even just three methods pretty powerful evidence? I mean, if a smashed clock at a car wreck was stuck at 5:32, a witness says she heard the crash just The Walking Dead was starting - and it starts at 5:30, the nearby security camera taped the crash at 5:28, and a receipt with a time of 4:56 was found in the car, wouldn't it be hard to suggest a time other than around 5:30 for the crash? That's only 3+ pieces of evidence (the receipt only indicates a time after 4:56), and though the measurements don't agree exactly (5:28 isn't exactly the same as 5:32), they all are consistent with a crash near 5:30. In the real world, sample after sample, in place after place, hundreds of times, dates are shown to be consistent.
In practice, the dating methods are usually tested over dozens or hundreds of samples from the same series, using two or more methods for comparison (instead of the single artifact example above). For instance, series of layered deposits in a cave may be tested simultaneously by U-Th, speleotherm, and 14C dating, with each sample giving an age using each of the three methods, with the results agreeing. In this way, many thousands of tests have confirmed these dating methods, giving us a very useful clock for our understanding of the history of our Earth.
Here is one example of data showing agreement between several methods.
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/geos462/c14FairbQSR05.gif Radiometric Dating
The key is that their creationist source is just throwing stones a single dating method. That won’t do it – the creationists have to explain why
dozens of different methods, based on often completely
different phenomena, tested over
thousands of tests on
hundreds of samples –
all “just happen” to agree with each other.
That's why this type of deep-time denying creationism violates our 9th commandment, in addition to making it harder to bring people to Christ.
In Jesus' name-
Papias
