googlef87758e9b6df9bec.html A Sure Word: Still Another Lie that Evolutionists Tell

Monday, March 25, 2013

Still Another Lie that Evolutionists Tell


A few years ago, I wrote “Five Lies that Evolutionists Tell.” A few months ago, I added a “6th Lie That Evolutionists Tell.” Would it be too tired theme if I were to now add a 7th? Perhaps I should throw in some of Eugenie Scott's whoppers and just make a Top Ten list. Nah. Maybe I'll do a top ten list later. For now, let's stick to a 7th lie that evolutionists tell.

This lie comes from Talk Origins' “Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions” (FABNAQ). Actually, these questions have been answered many times on the net so even the title is a lie so the following question is a lie within a lie. Anyway, here it is:

Why is there the remarkable coherence among many different dating methods -- for example: radioactivity, tree rings, ice cores, corals, supernovas [sic] -- from astronomy, biology, physics, geology, chemistry and archeology?

The lie in the question rests in the premise that there is a “remarkable coherence among many different dating methods.”

Before I go any further, there's something I cannot let pass without comment. “Radioactivity” is not a dating method. Neither are “corals” nor “supernovas.” It's a typical tactic of evolutionists to spout off technical sounding words as though they're making an argument. The technical term for this fallacy is argumentum verbosium. These words might sound scientific but they don't mean anything in the context in which they are used.

Of course, I think I know what they're trying to say; when they say, “coral,” for example, they probably mean that we can observe how rapidly coral grows and then we can try to extrapolate backward to determine how long it's been growing. But then again, perhaps they are intentionally misusing the word in order to give the impression that “coral,” all by itself, is evidence for their theory. They could have said, “radiometric dating, dendrochronology, the growth rate of coral, etc...” but they didn't. They have used these words incorrectly – either out of ignorance or intentionally. So we not only have a question where the premise is a lie, the question doesn't even make sense anyway. By using these words this way, they put creationists in the position of seeming to argue against “radioactivity” rather than the veracity of “radiometric dating.”

Moving on now, let's get to the fundamental premise of the question. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no “remarkable” coherence of different dating methods. Such a coherence only occurs when evolutionists interpret the data according to their theory. In other words, evolutionists begin with the assumption that their theory is true, they arrange the data to fit the time lines they've already assumed to be true, then they pat themselves on the back because the data seems to support their theory.

Do you think I'm kidding? Let's look as some of the “dating methods” that TO suggested are remarkably cohesive. Dendrochronology studies tree rings to estimate the age of a tree or grove. It's a little more sophisticated than just counting the rings. Dendrochronology can only estimate to a maximum age measured in thousands of years. Astronomy is the study of stars. Scientists have developed theories concerning the life cycle of stars and all theories suggest that the life of stars is measured in millions or billions of years. So tell me, exactly how remarkably do “supernovas” comport with “tree rings”?

Likewise, archeology studies human history. Human civilization, according to evolutionary theory, only goes back a few hundred thousand years. Many radiometric dating methods are not considered accurate on samples less than a few million years old. It seems obvious that these dating methods do not support each other.

TalkOrigins also suggested that dating methods within biology correspond with other disciplines like geology. I imagine that it does as long as scientists date fossils according to where they appear in the geological column. They might date a certain species of dinosaur to 80 millions years ago, for example. If later, the same species is found in rocks believed to be 120 million years old, the age of the dinosaur is simply inflated to match the new data. A 50% error in the previous estimate isn't enough to cause doubt in the minds of scientists. The headlines will read something like, “New find shows x-species is older than previously thought” and scientists will continue touting the alleged coherence of their dating methods.

But just how reliable is radiometric dating anyway? Rocks formed during the eruption of Mt St Helens in 1986 were dated using Potassium-Argon dating and yielded ages between .35 million and 2.8 million years old. In this case, radiometric dating could not even corroborate the known age of these rocks!

In another case, Andrew Snelling had commissioned a secular lab to test some fossilized wood that had been encased in basalt. Carbon dating on the wood yielded an age of 37,500 years. However, K-Ar dating on the basalt yielded an age of 47.5 million years. So which is the correct date – 37,500 or 47.5 million years?

The seeming coherence of different dates is also propped up by the willingness of evolutionists to completely ignore data that contradicts their theories. A few years back, I wrote about trace fossils (human footprints) found in volcanic ash in Mexico. Radiometric dating on the ash yielded an age of 1.3 million years. This doesn't fit at all with evolutionary theory which says modern humans are only around 200,000 years and didn't arrive in Mexico until around 40K years ago. The only way to make the data seem to jibe is to assume 1) the ash is not really 1.3 million years old (thus admitting the radiometric date isn't valid), 2) modern humans were really in Mexico 1.3 million years ago, 3) somehow, modern footprints were recently left on ash that is 1.3 million years old, or 4) they aren't really footprints no matter how much they look like footprints.

This post has gone on a little too long but I have to mention carbon dating. As I've said already, many radiometric dating methods are only considered accurate on samples that are more than a few million years old. Carbon-14 (14C) has a half life of only 5,730 years and so is used to date organic materials less than 100,000 years or so. After 100,000 years, there should be no 14C left in the sample. The RATE research project at the Institute for Creation Research found 14C to be virtually ubiquitous. For example, they found detectable amounts of 14C in coal samples yielding a carbon date between 48-50K years for coal believed 40-320 million years old according to conventional dating methods. They also dated diamond samples – believed to be 1-2 billion years old – to be only 55,000 years old according to carbon dating.

TalkOrigins' question is sort of like the old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” It suffers from a flawed premise. The only thing in common between many dating methods is that scientists have carefully arranged the data to force it to fit their theory.

3 comments:

Steven J. said...

There are ten questions on that list; perhaps you could do a series of posts answering the other nine.

Oh, and please forgive the length of my reply; you raise a lot of disparate points.

To address the first question you raise, the article seems aimed mainly at young-earth creationists. These various dating methods agree at least in yielding dates incompatible with most YEC chronologies. Archaeologists, for example, have constructed chronologies based on king lists that ca. 2400 BC (when most YECs put Noah's Flood) both Egypt and Mesopotamia had thriving civilizations that continued right through the flood without noticing it. Carbon-14 dating of Egyptian artifacts is in close agreement with the results of these lists.

Coral reefs are not quite the same as coral colonies; they are formed from fragments of coral "skeletons" that are cemented together to form a sort of rock. Coral reefs build up at ca. an eighth of an inch a year or less, and there are reefs that are well over a thousand feet thick, and it seems very unlikely that the sort of global catastrophe (complete with motorboat-fast continental drift!) posited by YEC "flood geologists" would allow any coral reefs to be older than the flood. So you have reefs that would take a hundred thousand years to build up versus a chronology that allows them maybe five thousand.

Tree rings, likewise, provide chronological evidence going back only ca. 11,000 years -- which, again, is at least twice as far back as most YECs put Noah's Flood. Supernovae have been observed in galaxies determined, based on the brightness of those novae and of Cepheid variables, to be millions of light-years away. To see such things, of course, implies an origin to the universe at least millions, not thousands, of years ago.

I'm not quite sure what your point about dating dinosaurs is. Are you talking about redating a single specimen, or about finding that a single species lasted 40 million years? That would be a very long time for a dinosaur species to last (four million years would be more typical), but by itself does not "inflate" any ages. Of course, I'm also not quite sure what you mean by "species;" creationists have been known to use the term when it would be more appropriate to speak of a "genus" or even "family."

Note that an all-powerful God could easily have arranged for radiometric dating, on a young Earth, to consistently yield dates of no more than a few thousand years (yes, for some long-lived isotopes, that would mean in effect "somewhere between five million years ago and yesterday afternoon," but it would still be possible to say "much less than a hundred million years ago). It's not enough, as the article points out, to argue that for reason A, all carbon-14 dates older than 6000 years might be spurious, and for reason B, the same might be true for uranium-thorium dating, and so on to reason Z, why coral reefs might form at warp speed. You need to offer some reason why an all-powerful Creator left so many different methods that all, read in the most obvious and sensible way, imply dates incompatible with YEC.

Steven J. said...

Potassium-argon dating works by heating a sample in a vacuum chamber and measuring the expelled argon, comparing it to the amount of radioactive potassium still in the sample. Note that argon makes up about 1% of the atmosphere, and that no vacuum, particularly those made in laboratories, is perfect. So residual argon from the atmosphere is added to the argon from the sample, which significantly distorts the results if the expelled argon is very small in amount (as it would be from a sample less than a few million years old).

Carbon-14 is made from nitrogen-14 that has absorbed slow-moving neutrons. In the atmosphere, this is the result of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, but neutrons are also generated by some modes of radioactive decay. Nitrogen is a common contaminant of diamonds (up to 1% of a diamond's atoms) and of coal. So I would suppose that C-14 in trace amounts in diamonds and coal were formed in situ recently rather than being as old as the specimens themselves. I don't think this is likely to be a significant contributor to errors in dating, e.g. old trees or bones less than 25,000 years old (though note that it would make them appear younger than they actually are if it did affect them).

The Talk.Origins FAQ has an article on Snelling's "wood" embedded in sandstone. It notes that the lab which dated the sample could not identify the substance Snelling called "wood." Whatever it was, it was porous, and the carbon-14 could well have been from, e.g. bacteria that had colonized the whatever-it-was rather than from the porous stuff itself.

I looked at your post about the Mexican ash footprints. The prints don't look, really, very much like human footprints. The suspicions of mainstream paleontologists that they are not, in fact, human ichnofossils seems to me well-founded, and imprints of unknown origins in million-and-a-half year old rock is of course no problem for old-earth chronologies.

RKBentley said...

Steven J,

Thanks for commenting. As usual, you've touched on a lot of points which I'll not be able to address in a single reply. I'll hit the highlights.

You said, “There are ten questions on that list; perhaps you could do a series of posts answering the other nine.”

It's tempting. I might try but I'm really having trouble finding the time to blog. I'll think about it.

You said, “the article [FABNAQ] seems aimed mainly at young-earth creationists. These various dating methods agree at least in yielding dates incompatible with most YEC chronologies.”

That wasn't the question. TO specifically asked why the various dating methods agreed with each other – not that they conflicted with YEC estimates.

You said, “Archaeologists, for example, have constructed chronologies based on king lists that ca. 2400 BC (when most YECs put Noah's Flood) both Egypt and Mesopotamia had thriving civilizations that continued right through the flood without noticing it.”

Yes, I know that secular dating is at odds with YEC estimates and YEC dates for Egyptian chronologies conflict with secular estimates. Likewise, secular dates for the age of fossils conflicts with YEC estimates. But, again, that's not the point of this post.

You said, “Carbon-14 dating of Egyptian artifacts is in close agreement with the results of these lists.”

This is more to the point of this post. As you know, there is a certain amount of circular reasoning going on with these dates. If they date an artifact via 14C dating, then they assign the same date to all artifacts associated with it. Of course, they try to corroborate 14C estimates with any available historical data but they certainly work with the data to make the dates agree. The margin of error in 14C dating is usually exploited to the advantage of making the dates align.

You said, “Coral reefs are not quite the same as coral colonies.”

TO said only, “corals” as though the word itself is a dating method. BTW, I just read about an article in Science Daily that said the growth rate of coral in cloudy water (like water stirred up by rivers emptying sediment into the ocean) can grow at a rate of 1.3 cm per year. At that rate, 4500 years is more than enough time for even the largest reefs to have formed since the Flood.

You said, “I'm not quite sure what your point about dating dinosaurs is.”

I'm talking about the seeming “agreement” of different scientific disciplines like biology and geology. They will always agree if one slavishly bows to the dating methods used by the other. By the way, do you remember the lie Dawkins told when he said evolution could be falsified if just a single fossil is found in the wrong place?

You said, “It's not enough, as the article points out, to argue that for reason A, all carbon-14 dates older than 6000 years might be spurious, and for reason B, the same might be true for uranium-thorium dating, and so on to reason Z, why coral reefs might form at warp speed. You need to offer some reason why an all-powerful Creator left so many different methods that all, read in the most obvious and sensible way, imply dates incompatible with YEC.”

“Spurious” wasn't quite what I was going for. The thrust of my argument was that there isn't the “remarkable” coherence that's alleged by TO. The 14C detected in diamonds yielded a different date than the estimated secular age of the diamonds; the dating of rocks from Mt St Helens could not corroborate their known age; the wood that dated younger than the rock it was found in; and what about the LiveScience report (1/13/2011) that claimed to find LIVING bacteria in crystals supposedly 34K years old? I'm sure you can find explanations for all these but they are merely ad hoc stories aimed at preserving the “remarkable” coherence of dating methods. It seems hardly remarkable at all.

Thanks again for visiting and for your comments. God bless!!

RKBentley