April 5, 2007
Radioisotope dating has demolished the notion that Earth is merely 6,000 years old. In retaliation, young-earthers wage an all-out smear campaign against mountains of evidence in the public domain. Their level of denial is exceeded only by the likes of Flat Earth Society. For example, the CSEM FAQ page says:
The only thing that these dating methods have proven is that they (Carbon, Ar-K, Isochron, etc.) are completely unreliable.
Right. And I suppose this is borne out by the ~900-page graduate text sitting on my desk, Isotopes, Principles and Applications. Funny I can’t find this point in there anywhere. Nor does it appear in a truly vast refereed literature (137 selected references for the K-Ar chapter alone). Ah, but CSEM explains this too:
Typically a wide range of ages are given by these methods with the date selected being the one which matches the Geologic Column.
Ok, this is really not obvious from the text; they never taught it to me in grad Geochemistry at Caltech either. I guess that’s because geochemists secretly throw out all the “bad” measurements before they report them. I’m glad a creationist was available to explain this to me - I’m sure they know better, having spent untold hours undercover as mainstream geologists witnessing the discarding of all that “bad” data. As a mere professor in planetary science with a Ph.D. from a Geological Sciences Division, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to witness such a plot. Or could it be this is a great big fib? I thought that was against the ninth commandment. Surely biblical literalists would never act thus!
Alas, creationists do in fact lie about even published radio-isotope data. Blatently. And often. And in whole books no less. I guess they think it’s for a good cause. For example, John Woodmorappe (a pseudonym) selectively quote mines the geologic literature to “prove” its unreliability (Schimmrich). He will quote one scientist out of context as disagreeing with another’s result but conveniently leave out the magnitude of the discrepancy, which is typically a few percent in the very worst cases (Hencke). I guess this is what is meant by “wide range of ages.” Indeed. “…completely unreliable.” Right. Frequently off by as much as 1%! Terrible. Proof that reported measurements of billions of years could easily refer to material no older than 6,000 years. Of course, such contextomy is a favorite creationist trick (together with misquoting altogether) going back to Henry Morris. Did you know, by the way, that the Bible actually says, “There is no God?” We have it on God’s own authority that He doesn’t exist. The reference is Psalm 14:1. There’s a simple word for this technique as practiced by creationists: lying. Future posts that compare facts about particular techniques with creationist claims will illustrate this all too well. 
Powered by WordPress
Bad Behavior has blocked 233 access attempts in the last 7 days.