The Dover trial

[USincognito]

Instead of hearing a lot of pretty good possible arguments I've seen Darwinians have massive meltdowns over this.

Bahahah! I'm sure you "see" that, but that's not actually what's happening. The response from science advocates ranges from eye rolls to laughter to explanations as to why Austin's dishonest stunt isn't worth the paper the results were printed out on.

Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals

Considering that the half-life of potassium-40 (40K) is fairly long (1,250 million years, McDougall and Harrison, 1999, p. 9), the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old (Dalrymple, 1991, p. 93). A few thousand years are not enough time for 40Ar to accumulate in a sample at high enough concentrations to be detected and quantified. Furthermore, many geochronology laboratories do not have the expensive state-of-the-art equipment to accurately measure argon in samples that are only a few million years old. Specifically, the laboratory personnel that performed the K-Ar dating for Austin et al. Specifically, personnel at Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, performed the K-Ar dating for Austin et al. This laboratory no longer performs K-Ar dating. However, when they did, their website clearly stated in a footnote that their equipment could not accurately date rocks that are younger than about 2 million years old ("We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y."; also see discussions by Bartelt et al.).​

Austin's dishonest stunt was the same as timing a 50 yard dash with a calendar and then claiming that stopwatches weren't reliable.

 

[mark kennedy]

Great example, Mark. I read a brief reference about this, but you've filled the details in well. Thank you.

Always glad to help another Creationist along, it's not always easy to break down the details into something conversational. I have learned so much about genetics from the subject matter I don't really mind how the conversations tend to go in circles. It's just always fascinated me how they can avoid the obvious.

Just notice the seething satire of this post.

Bahahah! I'm sure you "see" that, but that's not actually what's happening. The response from science advocates ranges from eye rolls to laughter to explanations as to why Austin's dishonest stunt isn't worth the paper the results were printed out on.

Austin's dishonest stunt was the same as timing a 50 yard dash with a calendar and then claiming that stopwatches weren't reliable.

So a scientist finds a fossil embedded in some kind of lava dust, or something along those lines. He sends it to the lab and the fossil is found to be a million years old. It could just as easily be ten. I rest my case.

Grace and peace,
Mark

 

[Astrophile]

Then why can't they answer a simple question?

I'll tell you what, let's try another topic just as an example:

In June of 1992, Dr. Austin collected a 15 lb. block of dacite from high on the lava dome. A portion of this sample was crushed, sieved, and processed into a whole rock powder as well as four mineral concentrates. These were submitted for potassium-argon analysis to Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, MA, a high quality, professional radioisotope dating laboratory. The only information provided to the laboratory was that the samples came from dacite and that "low argon" should be expected. The laboratory was not told that the specimen came from the lava dome at Mount St. Helens and was only 10 years old. ("Is the Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens Really a Million Years Old?")
​

Guess what they got back from the lab?

What can one observe about these results? First and foremost is simply that they are wrong. A correct answer would have been "zero argon" indicating that the sample was too young to date by this method. Instead, the results ranged from 0.35-2.8 million years! Why is this? ("Is the Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens Really a Million Years Old?")​

Instead of hearing a lot of pretty good possible arguments I've seen Darwinians have massive meltdowns over this. He is just making a point, the lava is only ten years old. Good luck getting a straight answer on this one or anything else for that matter. I don't really know what they think they are trying to accomplish here but one thing is clear, they are not trying to help Creationists understand science.

Grace and peace,
Mark

So why do you think that the dacite sample yielded an age of 0.35-2.8 million years? Do you think that potassium-40 in this rock sample experienced accelerated decay during the twelve years between 1980 and 1992, so that it produced as much argon-40 as it should have done during >350,000 years?

Or do you think that there was a small quantity of residual argon trapped in the rock that produced a zero-point shift of <2 million years; this is obviously a large error for Holocene or Pleistocene rocks but would be unimportant for Mesozoic or earlier rocks.

Or could it be simply experimental error, the impossibility of measuring the tiny amount of argon produced in twelve years by a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 1.251 billion years?

 

[essentialsaltes]

Instead of hearing a lot of pretty good possible arguments I've seen Darwinians have massive meltdowns over this.

Not really. Potassium Argon has a billion-year half-life. It is not a suitable technique for young samples. The lab that did the work said as much on its website. "We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y."

If you use the wrong tool for the job, you get bad results. The result was inaccurate? This is no great discovery -- the lab warned Austin it would be.

 

[mark kennedy]

Not really. Potassium Argon has a billion-year half-life. It is not a suitable technique for young samples. The lab that did the work said as much on its website. "We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y."

If you use the wrong tool for the job, you get bad results. The result was inaccurate? This is no great discovery -- the lab warned Austin it would be.

He didn't tell them what to use, he just made some observations about it and let them figure it out for themselves. The reason this makes sense is because most of the time people aren't going to know much about the samples, that's why you get it tested. These are not the only samples he sent for testing, they always come back old.

The testing is bogus, if the sample was too young to test then why didn't the test reveal that. The presuppositions are wrong, it's as simple as that.

 

[essentialsaltes]

He didn't tell them what to use

Baloney, when you hire a contract lab, you tell them what to do, just as your own source relates: "These were submitted for potassium-argon analysis to Geochron Laboratories".

 

[mark kennedy]

Baloney, when you hire a contract lab, you tell them what to do, just as your own source relates: "These were submitted for potassium-argon analysis to Geochron Laboratories".

This proves one thing and suggests several others. First the process of becoming molten lava doesn't set the clock to zero. Four different minerals are tested showing ages between ,37 to over two million years old. I think the reading is probably accurate but I don't believe in a young earth. I don't care much about cosmology or geology, they are irrelevant to the doctrine of Creation. What does interest me is the dating of fossils, invariably they come up with comparable dates. The process of fossilazation actually mineralizes the bones. So when you date a fossil you don't get a date for when this is tested, all you get is the age of the minerals that it was fossilized with.

 

[essentialsaltes]

This proves one thing

Yes, your statement was false.

and suggests several others.

Yes, that you want to quickly abandon any of your false statements that have been exposed, and then throw out six more in its place.

 

[dmmesdale]

Not all science deals with the origin life. Medicine and engineering for instance. To the extent though that a science touches on the origin of life, then it can't be (from a secular standpoint) extricated from evolution. Yes, I plead guilty to an interpretation of Scripture confirming God-created life.

They are trying to explain reality without God including origin of life here by appealing to naturalistic causes as the only answer accepted as scientific. Imaginary tribunals out there saying what is and what is not science. Origin of life and unguided evo is about as exact as voodoo, relative to your examples above. Historical offers explanations, not lawlike descriptions describing particular circumstances.

''Did life arise from by undirected processes, or did a designing intelligence play a role? Surely such questions are not settled by defining one of the competing hypotheses as ''unscientific'' and then refusing to consider it.'' Stephen C Meyer.

That was one of their strategies in Dover, and they got away with it.
Study Shows Federal Judge Copied ACLU Text in Dover Intelligent Design Ruling | Evolution News
Study Shows Federal Judge Copied ACLU Text in Dover Intelligent Design Ruling

December 12, 2006, 12:13 AM

The key section of the widely-noted court decision on intelligent design issued a year ago on December 20 was copied nearly verbatim from a document written by ACLU lawyers, according to a study released today by scholars affiliated with the Discovery Institute.
“Judge John Jones copied verbatim or virtually verbatim 90.9% of his 6,004-word section on whether intelligent design is science from the ACLU’s proposed ‘Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law’ submitted to him nearly a month before his ruling,” said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.


“Ironically, Judge Jones has been hailed as ‘an outstanding thinker’ for his ‘masterful’ ruling, and even honored by Time magazine as one of the world’s ‘most influential people’ in the category of ‘scientists and thinkers,'” said West. “But Jones’ analysis of the scientific status of intelligent design contains virtually nothing written by Jones himself. This finding seriously undercuts the credibility of a central part of the ruling.”