JonF
Posts: 634
Joined: Feb. 2005
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| Quote (C Gieschen @ Oct. 03 2007,15:04) | | Sorry to disappoint you, you lose the bet. Look up Investigating the Earth fourth edition published by Houghton Mifflin P. 307. |
I don't have access to that book. How about an extensive quote? What you posted is wrong. It just ain't so that "the amount of parent material is assumed as there is no way to know what it was at the start" unless you are talking about one specific method rather than radiometric dating overall. And, as I pointed out, the vast majority of studies use methods that are not susceptible to that problem.
| Quote | | Constanacy now is a far cry from how it was in the past. We have no way of knowing that it has been constant all through time. |
Actually, we have many ways of knowing radioactive decay has been essentially constant; that's the point of the links I provided. Past occurrences leave traces. We've looked for the traces that changes in decay rates would leave ... they aren't there. Therefore radioactive decay rates have not changed significantly. QED.
| Quote | | Creationists have done the RATE project and found too much helium in the crystals. Of course you are welcome to point to another interpretation of the data, but all we have are competing interpretations. |
Well, we have on one hand an apparent anomaly, with some grandiose claims about the import, that are far from being supported by the data. On the other hand we have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of concordant radiometric and non-radiometric dates by thousands of researchers from thousands of different locations. That's not just differing interpretations; which one wins is clear.
The RATE group has a long way to go to establish their claims that the amount of helium they found was too much. They tested samples with complex thermal histories from an area where helium is common. They need to test lots more samples from lots more locations and establish the validity of their method. My bet is that they won't do it. They've already achieved their goal of producing some scientific-sounding rubbish that fools the sheeple ... and I also bet they know that if they investigated further they'd find that 99.99% of zircons contain the amount of helium predicted by mainstream science and their original tests ain't valid.
Where you putting your money? Supposedly they're doing RATE II ... want to bet on how many zircons from other locations get tested in RATE II?
| Quote | | The creationists, who have PhD degrees in geology can better explain isochrons than I can. |
No, actually, they can't. They haven't even tried.
| Quote | | So you have your experts and I have mine. Mine are wrong as they are in the minority? |
No, they are wrong because they don't have an explanation that fits all or even most of the data, and the feeble explanations they have offered are directly contradicted by the data. All they have, literally, is: well, it must have been a miracle. Whoops, make that lots of miracles. Good thing our God does whatever we want! From Helium Diffusion Age of 6,000 Years Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay:
"Thus our new diffusion data support the main hypothesis of the RATE research initiative: that God drastically accelerated the decay rates of long half-life nuclei during the earth's recent past. For a feasibility study of this hypothesis including God's possible purposes for such acceleration, Biblical passages hinting at it, disposal of excess heat, preserving life on earth, and effects on stars, see Humphreys (2000, pp. 333-379). The last three problems are not yet fully solved, but we expect to see progress on them in future papers."
Yeah, right, the problems that accelerated decay would destroy all life and the Earth, and the fact that stars (and lots of other evidence) clearly demonstrate that decay rates have been constant, and fact the idea of acclerated decay has been completely contradicted by hundreds of different tests ... they're just minor stumbling blocks that they hope to overcome. Well, they won't.
As soon as you say "then a miracle occurs", you're not doing science.
| Quote | | Well, Galileo stood against the Ptolemeics (the scientists of his time) and he is now known to be correct. The scientists of his day got the Church to be their big bad stick. |
That's an extremely inaccurate characterization of what happened to Galileo.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." (Carl Sagan).
You can compare creation "scientists" to Galileo when they have come up with some evidence and theories that fit it. So far creation "science" is a non-starter.
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