Initially posed by 6days:
Now I want to think about how this plays out against an old earth, and against the recent creation model.
From old earth, we pretty much expect to see just what we actually do see – a gradual decline in C-14 levels as the samples get older and older (as determined by secondary dating schemes). And, as Kirk Bertshe (a good Christian scientist who works <worked?> at a lab that actually does Carbon dating) showed, when C-14 levels get really low, it is very difficult to eliminate all sources of contamination that skew the very old dates. In other words, measuring a ten-million-year old diamond as having an age of 50,000 years is not an indictment of C-14 dating. It just means you probably should not be using a yardstick to measure the width of a human hair.
I will speculate a bit on how observed C-14 dating is explained under creationist scenarios (which I will term as “Baumgardner” scenarios). For reasons which I can’t fathom, in the recent creation God didn’t embed nearly the ratio of C-14 to C-12 in the diamonds that he chose to have in the environment, instead He put just a smidgeon of C-14 in those diamonds. Not only that, but He pulled a similar stunt in leaving lesser and lesser levels of C-14 in a whole range of biologically derived samples, so that it looks like they have older and older C-14 dates, but in fact what is being measured is almost a whimsical level of C-14 in those samples.
Maybe in fact God created Tabby (Adam and Eve’s pet cat) with no initial C-14 in its system, and only as C-14 was created in the upper atmosphere and diffused down over the following centuries did the concentrations of C-14 start to rise in the biological realm. That early mouse that Tabby ate was almost perfectly free of C-14, never having lived long enough for any of the C-14 to get down into the mouse food chain. In a C-14 dating test, those early mouse bones are gonna look really old, like maybe 40 or 50 thousand years old. Later mice are going to have higher and higher levels of C-14 in them, until finally equilibrium with the rate of C-14 production is reached in the environment. And consequently, for the first few dozen generations of mice, their C-14 ages are going to slowly get closer and closer to the actual time in which they lived. (If all animals were vegetarians pre-flood, then just think of catnip instead of a mouse).
For now, I am going to leave my intrusion into the Baumgardner world at that, and invite you to offer such additional insight as you see fit. Tell me how you think the full spectrum of apparent (but not real) C-14 ages ended up in the samples that have actually been tested.
I noted that I thought his use of C13 was suspect, and he readily admitted he should have said C-12 instead:
No harm done. I will need to make one more minor change, since neither C-13 nor C-12 decay. I am modifying your mention of decay from C-13 to C-14 (whereas the other mentions of C-13 are now C-12). With that in place, now let me restate the crux of your statements:
| The test method IS accurate...we know how fast C-14 decays. But we don't know the ratio of C12/14 pre-flood. We don't know if C14 existed in creation. False assumptions about the past would make extrapolated C14 dates false also. |
From old earth, we pretty much expect to see just what we actually do see – a gradual decline in C-14 levels as the samples get older and older (as determined by secondary dating schemes). And, as Kirk Bertshe (a good Christian scientist who works <worked?> at a lab that actually does Carbon dating) showed, when C-14 levels get really low, it is very difficult to eliminate all sources of contamination that skew the very old dates. In other words, measuring a ten-million-year old diamond as having an age of 50,000 years is not an indictment of C-14 dating. It just means you probably should not be using a yardstick to measure the width of a human hair.
I will speculate a bit on how observed C-14 dating is explained under creationist scenarios (which I will term as “Baumgardner” scenarios). For reasons which I can’t fathom, in the recent creation God didn’t embed nearly the ratio of C-14 to C-12 in the diamonds that he chose to have in the environment, instead He put just a smidgeon of C-14 in those diamonds. Not only that, but He pulled a similar stunt in leaving lesser and lesser levels of C-14 in a whole range of biologically derived samples, so that it looks like they have older and older C-14 dates, but in fact what is being measured is almost a whimsical level of C-14 in those samples.
Maybe in fact God created Tabby (Adam and Eve’s pet cat) with no initial C-14 in its system, and only as C-14 was created in the upper atmosphere and diffused down over the following centuries did the concentrations of C-14 start to rise in the biological realm. That early mouse that Tabby ate was almost perfectly free of C-14, never having lived long enough for any of the C-14 to get down into the mouse food chain. In a C-14 dating test, those early mouse bones are gonna look really old, like maybe 40 or 50 thousand years old. Later mice are going to have higher and higher levels of C-14 in them, until finally equilibrium with the rate of C-14 production is reached in the environment. And consequently, for the first few dozen generations of mice, their C-14 ages are going to slowly get closer and closer to the actual time in which they lived. (If all animals were vegetarians pre-flood, then just think of catnip instead of a mouse).
For now, I am going to leave my intrusion into the Baumgardner world at that, and invite you to offer such additional insight as you see fit. Tell me how you think the full spectrum of apparent (but not real) C-14 ages ended up in the samples that have actually been tested.
atrol:
