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Date Posted: 14:40:38 06/12/99 Sat
Author: David C. Wise
Subject: Re: Time CHECK
In reply to: daniel 's message, "Re: Time CHECK" on 12:33:53 06/10/99 Thu

> As I have stated many times, especially to you, I do
> not claim to be a scientist. ...
Yes, I know that already and I acknowledge it. I fully realize that you are simply repeating the conclusions that you have been spoon-fed, as is the case for most creationists who follow creation science.

But that is irrelevant because what I have been asking does not require you to be a scientist nor to personally verify or validate those claims. I am asking for what you have been told that those answers would be, not what you have yourself found them to be. Surely it should require virtually no scientific expertise to read a statement like "This caused the decay rate of Xx to change by x%" and to relay that information on to somebody else. And I would have thought that your copies of "Creation ex Nihilo Technical Journal" would contain several articles on this subject. And of course, if none of the articles state what decay rates have been observed to change and by how much, then it should require no scientific expertise to simply state that fact.

Indeed, I would be surprised if they were to give such details and I would be surprised if Gary Parker were to give you such details (or if even he had ever been given them). I have tried to find those figures on the Web; several pages repeat your claim, but none of them would give any details. After all, if the effects of the change means that a rock is dated at one billion years old when it is really only a mere 500 million years old, then that would still do nothing for somebody trying to prove that rock could be no older than 10,000 years. In that case, they would not want to publish the actual figures, but instead make vague statements about the unreliability of the dating methods in order to mislead the public into believing that that is evidence for YEC. Which is what I've been seeing for several years.

> ... In the above case, Keven
> brought up RMD and I knew that Gary said that there
> are certain conditions that can cause changes to RMD.
This is not the only time that you have used this claim, though it is the only time that I have seen you attribute it to Gary Parker. Remember that you told Ed [Ceaa151b@aol.com]:

"We know, however, of several kinds of events which could have disturbed the timer or the rate at which it has run. The development of the industrial age, great storms on the sun, and variations in cosmic radiation are examples of such disturbances."

> That is it. You can draw any conclusion from my
> writings as you desire.
True enough.

However, part of the question is why you have repeated this RMD claim. Obviously, you believe that it supports your YEC position. Or, rather, you expect it to support your position that the earth is no older than something to the order of 10,000 years.

Your umbrage at being asked this simple direct question is most puzzling. Your support and allegience to YEC is well known and I would be surprised to see you deny it, no matter how many times the cock crows. Why should you be so reluctant to state whether and why you would think that a particular claim supports YEC?

Look, I'll make it easier for you; I'll make it multiple choice.

Given a rock dated at one billion years, do you:
1. claim that the decay rate changed enough to mean that that rock is really only 10,000 years old?
or
2. claim that the decay rate changed enough to mean that that rock is really only 10 million years old?
or
3. claim that the decay rate changed enough to mean that that rock is really only 950 million years old?
or
4. claim something entirely different [in which case, please state what that is and how it supports YEC].

Is this format more amenable?

> There is significant problems with the overall aspect
> of dating, and that you are not ignorant of. I do not
> care if we focus on C-14 or K Ar or any other number
> of isotopes. ...
For example, C-14 is produced in the atmosphere, so the date can be thrown off if organisms take it in from other sources, such as fresh-water mollusks appearing to be thousands of years old because they were using "old" carbon from disolved limestone. Also, C-14 is produced by cosmic-ray bombardment, so the amount of C-14 produced is affected by the strength of the earth's geo-magnetic field. About 3000-4000 years ago (I don't recall exactly at the moment), the geo-magnetic field was weaker than it is now, so specimens from that time are carbon-dated as YOUNGER than they actually are, the opposite of what your position requires (doubly so, since I believe you also use the geomagnetic-decay claim).

> .... As far as I know the parent daughter
> ratio cannot be known, and there are assumptions made
> to even allow the process of RMD to move forward.
Does it need to be known? In calculus, whenever you integrate a function you always get a "constant of integration" whose actual value is usually not known. But that almost never matters, because you usually work with a definite integral, in which case the constant of integration comes out in the wash [ie, c - c = 0].

Similarly, if you were to just apply the basic formula [age = halflife * log_2(1 + D/P)], then you would need to know the amount of daughter element. But that is not the method that is used, but rather the isochron method. In the isochron method, you select different minerals in the rock and you plot the ratios of parent/daughter and of non-radiogenic-isotope/daughter (eg, Rb-87/Sr-86 vs Sr-87/Sr-86). This handles the question about the original amount of daughter. In addition, loss or gain of either the parent or daughter is easily detected, since the points then become non-colinear. Since the slope of the plot line is used to calculate the age, non-colinear points do not give you a false age, but rather NO age.

Again, I refer you to:
Age of the Earth FAQ
[<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html]">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html]</a>

Isochron Dating FAQ
[<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html]">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html]</a>

"Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective" by Dr. Roger C. Wiens,
[<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://asa.calvin.edu/ASA/resources/Wiens.html]">http://asa.calvin.edu/ASA/resources/Wiens.html]</a>

> Bunch o stuff removed about metalanguage....
Just one more thing, a technical caveat about posting to this forum and ones like it.

The text we enter is converted to HTML, mainly thorough the appending of the line-break tag (<BR>) at the end of a line or paragraph. Any text you enter between a < and a > will be interpreted as an HTML tag and, since it corresponds to no known tag, will not be displayed by a browser.

Over the years, I have developed my cyber-metalinguistical tags on CompuServe fora and in email. My convention is to enclose them in a < and a >; e.g. <gr> for "grin". Obviously, as one can read in my last posting, my tag was unreadable, though you could read it if you were to view the HTML through a "View Source" (or whatever your browser might call it).

On the plus side, we should be able to format our messages with HTML tags, <U>such as my having underlined this clause</U>. I also experimented later by including a link.

> > Daniel, do I need to remind you that I have said that
> > there are a number of serious creationists who are
> > making honest attempts to find actual scientific
> > evidence supporting YEC? And I believe that I have
> > also told you that most of them are very bothered by
> > the ICR and its ilk (which I believe includes the
> > Australian creationists who include the Ex Nihilo
> > people) and by they damage being done through their
> > creation science.
>
> Please provide a list of these "creationists" so that
> I can learn from them.
>
What? Now you're doubting that "there are a number of serious creationists who are making honest attempts to find actual scientific evidence supporting YEC"?

You could start with Dr. Kurt Wise (no relation, I'm sure -- several different Germanic surnames have been anglicized to "Wise"). His degrees are BA Geology from University of Chicago, MA Geology from Harvard, PhD Invertebrate Paleontology from Harvard (studied under S.J. Gould). He is Associate Professor of Science at Bryan College in Dayton, TN, and Director of Origins Research. His bio page is at <A rel=nofollow target=_blank HREF="http://www.bryan.edu/faculty/data/WiseK.htm">http://www.bryan.edu/faculty/data/WiseK.htm</A>. Even though he is a YECist, he has not been shy about taking other YECists to task for committing factual errors. Nor has he been afraid of scientific evidence contrary to a young-earth; at an earlier International Conference on Creationism (ICC), he presented a paper showing that the amount of time required for granite plutons to cool far exceeds the 10,000-year time-frame required by YEC. In the closing presentation at the 1998 International Conference on Creationism, he reviewed the state of the creation model in various fields:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
"Astonomy? No creation model exists. Biology? Same. Paleontology (his own field)? Same. He thinks a couple of other fields, such as teh development of a Flood model, are making slow progress.

"Despite this seemingly gloomy summary, Wise sent people away fired up. His message was that creationists have an enormous amount of work to do, and it is time for them to get cracking." ("The 1998 International Conference on Creationism" by Robert Schadewald, NCSE Reports, Vol 18 No 3, May/June 1998, pp 24-25).
</BLOCKQUOTE>

In the same article, Schadewald described having heard Wise's presentation at the 1986 ICC entitled "How Geologists Date Things" and being impressed that it was "absolutely straight Geology 101, except for a few debunking asides ('You know how creationists often claim that geologists use circular reasoning, that the rocks date the fossils and fossils date the rocks? Well, that's wrong.' And he explained why.) That was 12 years ago. Since then, Kurt has labored tirelessly, in public and private, by example and persuation, to convince his creationist colleagues to face the facts and find new ways to interpret them." In an earlier presentation:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
"[Wise] told the audience that evolution is a powerful theory, and that anyone who claims otherwise simply doesn't understand evolution. He said point blank that if it weren't for his religous beliefs -- if he had only the scientific evidence -- he would accept evolution himself."
</BLOCKQUOTE>

Schadewald characterizes Wise and other serious creationists (eg, Paul Nelson and John Mark Reynolds) as the "Young Turks" working against the ICR "Old Guard" in order to set a higher standard. Schadewald has watched their progress since 1983, over the course of four ICCs and six other major creationist conferences. The 1986 ICC included a "basic creationism" track, which some creationists referred to as the "wacky track." After the 1990 ICC, which was marginally better, the ICC organizers (the Pittsburgh Creation Scinece Fellowship (CSF)) established a refereeing system to eliminate outright shoddiness, while the Young Turks convinced the CSF that "evolution-bashing never has advanced and never will advance a real 'creation model.'" As a result, "[a]nyone whose only exposure to creationism is a Gish Gallop would not have recognized a single presentation at ICC98."

Schadewald concludes:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
"On one point [Schadewald and Frank Lovell vis-à-vis the creationist attendees] found complete agreement: precious little of the ICC-style creationism has filtered down to the grassroots level. Duane Gish, Gary Parker, Kent Hovind, Walter Brown, Donald Chittick, and others still spout the same old stuff in seminars and debates, and it is endlessly regurgitated at Sunday schools, Bible clubs, and on the Internet. The new-generation creationists are painfully aware that most of the popular creationist literature is dreck. Although they cannot (and should not) prevent anyone from publishing anything, a move is afoot to establish some sort of clearinghouse that will award a seal of Clean Creation Science (or whatever) to books that meet the new standards. Moreover, they intend to commission someone to write an up-to-date replacement for Henry Morris' <CITE>The Genesis Flood</CITE>, which they hope then will go mercifully out of print, along with the equally valuable works it spawned. Even with a serous effort by dedicated people, it will take decades to purge the nonsense, and it may not be purgable at all."
</BLOCKQUOTE>

Other names you might try are:
1. T. Fritsche, who gave a paper entitled "The Impact at the Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary".
2. Robert H. Brown of the Seventh-day Adventist Geoscience Research Center. He focused his attention on the Asuka meteorite and the fact that six different radiometric dating methods all yield the same date within a few percent. He argued that the concordant dates must mean something.
3. Paul Nelson, philosopher of science.
4. Phillip W. Dennis, industrial research physicist.
5. Danny Faulkner, "perhaps the world's only young-Earth creationist astronomer with a secular academnic appointment in astronomy." He reviewed the states of conventional and creationist astronomy and said that "although creationists have partial and/or hypothetical alternatives to some of the conventional ideas, the fact is that no creationist astronomy model exists."

> In the end Dave, I believe that your intellectualism
> will be your one downfall. I assume that you are
> someone who actually accepts absolute truth.
>
> Do you believe that all truth is relative? Do you
> believe that absolutely?
>
> If you are a truth seeker, and honestly desire truth...
>
> Then you ought to seek truth from those that not only
> claim to "know" the truth, to have "heard" the truth,
> but most importantly you ought to seek out the one
> that claimed, not to know it ot to have heard it, but
> to actually be it.
>
> Has anyome ever claimed to BE the truth?
>
> If so, then one who cares to know the truth and
> literally claims to be a seeker of truth, should prove
> the authenticity of their beliefs by confronting the
> one that claimed to BE truth.
>
> If the one that makes such an extraordinary claim can
> be proved a fool, then the foolishness can be
> forgotten, but if truth is absolute then you will find
> HIM. Prove you are a seeker of truth. Ask...,
> Knock...., Seek....
>
Daniel, a religion that has to rely so heavily on false claims, as you and other proselytizers demonstrate Christianity to rely on creation science, shows that it is a stranger to truth.

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