Thank you for your thoughtful response. I will respond to your point 3, which seems the strongest, and incorporates your first two points:
A. If the carbon-dating of dinosaur soft tissue is correct, it could indeed overturn just about everything we know about geology, going back almost 200 years.
The important thing there is the words "if the carbon dating of dinosaur soft tissue is correct". The fact that it is
far more likely to be the result of contamination or later bacterial infusion or any number of other incorrect causes to the age is the point.
Which is more likely: every bit of evidence ever gathered about dinosaurs over the past 150 years is wrong and this one piece of questionable data is right or the other way 'round?
B. "The disavowal of thousands and thousands and thousands of other fossils we find" -- I don't understand. Cuvier who originally discovered the dinosaur fossils and recognized them for what they and Owen who coined the word "dinosaur" were creationists. So how would changing the dates back to what they were thought to be before be disavowing the fossils?
Since Cuvier we've found countless dinosaur fossils which have been effectively dated by radiometric means and stratigraphic means to be much, much, much older and in the countless more recent deposits that have been found we have never found a dinosaur fossil.
C. "The acceptance that even though no other dinosaurs have been found so young this one is." If this were true, I would agree the young age should be rejected. But I understand there have been many, from a number of different locations.
Not that I am aware of.
As I understand it Ockham's razor tells us when choosing between two theories that both explain the data, to choose the theory which minimizes our assumptions.
In this case your assumptions are:
1. Thousands of dinosaur bones found over the past 150 years have been incorrectly dated
2. After 65 million years ago dinosaurs effectively hid such that they would never be found in younger rocks
3. A more likely explanation of a lower age for this material is incorrect (contamination)
4. All radiometric dating that is
not C-14 is incorrect (which is how earlier dinosaur bones would have been dated by U-Pb or Ar-Ar, or K-Ar in marker beds above or stratigraphically near the dinosaur bones)
5. Everything we know about geology is completely wrong
What Ockham's razor ensures is that an hypothesis such as mine is more likely. My assumptions are:
1. There has been an error in this sample, a contamination.
2. Geology, paleontology and stratigraphy are all still intact.
A. Old Earth Radiometric dating assumptions
1. The decay rate stays nearly the same forever, no matter what catastrophes my have occurred in past unrecorded history.
There is very little that can effectively alter the rate of radioactive decay. It is a first order rate kinetic. The
only thing I've ever read about altering the rate of a radioactive decay was some unpublished thing in ArXiv a few years back about solar neutrino flux changing (seasonally) the rate of decay of a relatively rare Si isotope but since it was a
seasonal change the annual rate would remain the same.
2. The mitigating conditions, like changes in c14/c12 ratios, are relatively minor in recent times and have always been so.
I can't think of anything short of human testing of atomic bombs in the atmosphere that would have greatly altered the 14-C/12-C ratio.
3. Dating systems that support young earth ages will always be in error, and so need not be considered
This is mostly just based on evidence. YEC requires pretty much everything we know about chemistry and physics to be disavowed. AND almost every YEC attempt to date a rock has been shown to have massive errors (usually poor lab practices). The problem with YEC is that it starts from an assumption and only goes with that data which confirms the assumption.
I think that whether a creationist chooses a, b, or c above, his assumptions are no less minimal than those of the old earth chronologist.
No. YEC is based on a pre-set assumption that the Bible, specifically one book (Genesis) tells the true story and that all data must conform to that. The history of Geology from the 17th century to about the 19th century was our slow recognition that almost nothing in the real world looks like or behaves like it would only be 6000-10,000 years old. Once we let go of that binding then geology was able to grow and become a robust science that made sense.
