Evolutionists

bpmurray

A couple of weeks ago on my way home from the US, on one leg of th ejourney, I sat next to quite a pleasant woman who had problems with my belief system: I doubt that she had ever met a non-believer before! Anyway, she gave me an interesting pamphlet entitled "Does CARBON DATING disprove the BIBLE?" (hopefully pictured above).

There are a number of ideas that this uses to undermine the concept of radio-carbon dating. Unfortunately I don't have enough hard information to counter these, but I'm guessing that the folk here have. Some of these are listed below. If I ever get enough time, I'll post the entire text.

EDIT: Just found the PDF - http://www.answersingenesis.org/radio/pdf/Carbondating.pdf

So I only need to ask the experts to help with the rebuttal of this pamphlet, please.

pH

http://www.talkorigins.org/

Will answer any specific points in there you think are valid, though I have not seen a full rebuttal of that pamphlet.

If any his more silly claims were true, Dr Don Batten could be a nobel prize winner. As a scientist of sorts he knows the correct way to research and present evidence, mass media pamphlets are not the way to do it.

You can claim anything you want in the media, we've seen irresponsible claims (recent Korean cloning and Utah cold-fusion)but it's not real science until papers have been peer reviewed and results replicated independently, then however grudgingly (yes scientists are human too) the results will be accepted.

A scientist would genuinely see no need to rebutt this pamphlet any more than they would feel the need to rebutt Harry Potter. If Don was to publish any of that stuff in a peer reviewed journal then the scientific community would respond.

There are a number of ideas that this uses to undermine the concept of radio-carbon dating.

Which ideas in particular do you find compelling? as TBH the whole thing was very tedious to read and nothing stood out for me.

Binomate

I brought up the subject of the rate at which cosmic rays enter the the earths atmosphere and whether or not it was a constant, due to solar flares etc. to a physicist and I think what he said to me is that it varys so little that it is irrelivant. We were doing a mathematical model for the carbon14 dating of a round table in some castle.

bpmurray

Agreed, not much of this is compelling, but I've never read up on this area. so i'm uncertain of the stuff that he uses as the basis for his arguments,giving rise to questions like these:

* What is the approximate current ratio of C14 to C12? At what levels can C14 be detected? Would naturally ocurring levels of C14 have decayed to immeasurable levels after 50000 years as he claims?
* Is C14 created by irradiation in the upper levels of the atmosphere? Do the levels vary? Have they increased because of nuclear testing?
* Do plants discriminate against C14? If so, how does this impact the accuracy of C14-dating?
* Do volcanoes emit lower levels of C14 than the surrounding area?
* He claims that Ar dating of rocks from lava flows in '40s, '50s and '70s give results of 0.27-3.5Ma, so he suggests that the excuse that the Ar hadn't enough time to escape undermines all Ar-dating results. How would one respond to that?


BTW, responding to these claims with "they'd never get past a peer review" is absurd: the large number of people who believe this, and those who believe in mystics / faith-healers / homeopathy / pick-your-favourite are more swayed by those who speak directly to their fears & beliefs, rather than those that take the ivory tower approach. While the peer review is the only truly correct way to address such issues, I believe that it is a totally inappropriate response when presented with such popularist material.

What is important is to provide a freely-available response that specifically addresses each & every one of the arguments, not merely by gainsaying his points, but by providing the true basis for the scientific argument.

pH

BTW, responding to these claims with "they'd never get past a peer review" is absurd: the large number of people who believe this, and those who believe in mystics / faith-healers / homeopathy / pick-your-favourite are more swayed by those who speak directly to their fears & beliefs, rather than those that take the ivory tower approach. While the peer review is the only truly correct way to address such issues, I believe that it is a totally inappropriate response when presented with such popularist material.

Have a look at this :

http://www.soulinvitation.com/indexdw.html
How much is 'right' and who really could be arsed debunking it?

I agree with you in a way. The best response to the intellectual dishonesty of these people is to rebutt in the same manner, just make up a load of rubbish that contradicts their rubbish and publish it. Let them spend time debunking 1000's of crap pamphlets that would be circulating and they'd soon get the message.

I disagree with your 'absurd' comments, have a read here for a *simplified* view of the process:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html

Science is not progressed by debate, nor by educating the masses. The most important thing you could teach the man on the street to do when confronted with a pamphlet like this would be to look for references and publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

ps the talk orgins has a reasonable amount of info about this stuff

bpmurray

Thanks, pH. The talkorigins link is excellent, and it references a bunch of relevant sites too.

I understand the point about soulinvitation, but it is different. It has stuff like

Consciousness is an electrically implosive jellyfish like gravity making charge field that sucks its way thru the Universe growing until it can choreograph the birth of stars sustainably - from within its own electrical FIRE! This field effect requires the environment of fractality electrically - (what you call SACRED) in order to breath charge and grow. This is because successful charge compression (the medium of all biologic information) is THE prerequisite to the efficient charge distribution/ radiance you call life and consciousness

I wouldn't know where to start, if I even could discern what on earth he's talking about. On the other hand, that carbin-dating pamphlet is standard issue for the American creationists, so undermining that specific document undermines their "official" message. This is important since a growing number of US kids are being tought this crap as part of the official "science" curriculum. That's why I wanted to make sure that I have a good response to it.

pH

On the other hand, that carbin-dating pamphlet is standard issue for the American creationists, so undermining that specific document undermines their "official" message. This is important since a growing number of US kids are being tought this crap as part of the official "science" curriculum. That's why I wanted to make sure that I have a good response to it.

I'm just far too jaded about all this. To me if someone reads that stuff and comes away thinking 'Wow all those scientists are wrong - here's the real deal' then they're already lost. No amount of scientific arguing (graphs, maths, physics and research) is likely to convince them. They believe 'X' and if this pamphlet supports 'X' then it's good.

They are in no way interested in finding an objective truth about something, merely in amassing 'stuff' that supports their position. This is very important, even if you demolish some of their evidence (which in itself is very hard) at best they will admit that *that* evidence no longer supports their belief, and quickly move to find some as yet un-rebutted nonsense.

You are making a fundamental mistake that these believers want to arrive at their beliefs through research, evidence and logic. They already know the truth (normally via some set of sacred texts). Contradictory evidence is not of any interest to them.

robindch

> This is important since a growing number of US kids are being tought
> this crap as part of the official "science" curriculum.

I would hesitate to say that it's being *generally* taught in the science classroom, the efforts of various frantic god-squads notwithstanding. The belief instead is spread principally by the self-important, belligerent and very wealthy religious industries currently operating in the USA who go to considerable lengths to indoctrinate kids that a disembodied "science" is "materialistic" or irreligious, hence that any opinions held or any facts disclosed by "scientists" are, de facto, wrong too.

Looking more closely, you'll notice that creationists seem to have a low-level belief that "facts" carry inherent biases, the direction of which can be ascertained by looking at who's producing the fact. The concept within science that a fact that stands independent of whoever's stating it seems utterly unfamiliar to them. But hardly unexpectedly so, since as a creationist, you're probably only used to debating "facts" of one kind or another from a very old, very contradictory book open to an infinite variety of interpretations, from which facts of course become instantly malleable; more akin, perhaps, to matters of opinion and able to be treated as such.

Anyhow, I agree with pH -- any attempt to unseat a belief with logic, when that belief wasn't put there with logic, is going to fail and all you'll achieve is a higher blood pressure, unless you enjoy the typing.

Zombrex

bpmurray wrote:

So I only need to ask the experts to help with the rebuttal of this pamphlet, please.

Why bother, the pamphlet does the tried and tested Creationist metiond of attempting to poke holes in a scientific theory or method, then say "well if your method has holes in it, it is just as valid as our method (the Bible), so they are equally valid. Of to the science class room"

It is very tiresome, but they keep doing it.

Of course it totally ignores that fact that even if carbon dating is totally invalid, there is still a huge amount of other evidence for the age of the Earth. And all these methods keep coming up with the same answer. If you have one method that gives you the date of the Earth it might be wrong. If you have a 100 that all give a similar answer then it is safe to assume you are doing something correctly.

And no evidence at all for the Bible age of the Earth. At all. In fact it would contradict a lot of what we know about science. Which is why Creationists try and tell us we don't actually know that much about science to start with.

In fact you have to come up with some pretty ridiculous "theories" if you try and justify the Biblical age of the Earth.

Its all nonsense.