Carbon dating?

iwannadie

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At work carbon dating comes up a lot, a couple religious guys are of course claiming it's all a joke and not accurate. I've been looking for some good sites that show good info on it being valid or not.

I don't want to start any kind of forum war, just looking for info on how it is accurate or bogus rather than opinions on religion.
 

Poodles

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Radiocarbon dating is used to date organic matter. It has it's limitations though (items can be contaminated and the results can show they're not as old as they really are, NOT older as some religions claim). If you want to go older, zircon is used because of it's trace amounts of radioactive material and ability to survice geologic processes.

Both cases, radioactive half life calculations are used.
 

iwannadie

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One thing someone keeps bringing up is that some boot was carbon dated and showed it was millions of years old and obviously it's a boot and not that old. To me that just shows an isolated case of someone screwing up not that carbon dating is not a valid way of testing.

I also read some where christian science is fine with carbon dating as long as you calibrate the results to take the genesis flood into account. With the calibration done they claim the carbon dating then lines everything up with the bible time line.
 

SupraMario

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I have heard the boot thing used OVER AND OVER AND OVER, and I have searched for it...and found absolutely jackshit about it. Basically it's some retarded creationist bullshit story passed along.
No one ever carbon dated the damn thing. It was also apparently found in a fking oil field....yea...

BTW here is some bullshit on it:
First the original source is gone:
http://informationcentre.tripod.com/boot.html

Then we have here a site that links to it basically puking back up the same info, with no actual sources cited OR linked.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread136252/pg1

Then here is some site that talks about it, its almost at the bottom of this page.
http://www.bibleprobe.com/creationism.htm

Which BTW is apparently in the goddamn creationist museum...yea.

Then we have the yahoo....answers guy blabing off using...ehhhemmmm Technology...to annoy sane people.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100401230116AAXbc4J

---------- Post added at 01:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:09 PM ----------

Here is another site...with 10 year old school children dribble...
http://www.baptistlink.com/dman/limestone.html

---------- Post added at 01:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:14 PM ----------

Also, the so called C-14 dating they used to "get a time line of the boot"....can only date objects up to around 50,000 years ago...so dunno how the hell they get 40million.

---------- Post added at 01:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:16 PM ----------

Here read this, its a longer form of what I just said. LOL

http://paleo.cc/paluxy/boot.htm

O and it cites its sources, unlike every damn bible humping idiot out there.
 

iwannadie

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Jul 28, 2006
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SupraMario;1567856 said:
I have heard the boot thing used OVER AND OVER AND OVER, and I have searched for it...and found absolutely jackshit about it. Basically it's some retarded creationist bullshit story passed along.
No one ever carbon dated the damn thing. It was also apparently found in a fking oil field....yea...

BTW here is some bullshit on it:
First the original source is gone:
http://informationcentre.tripod.com/boot.html

Then we have here a site that links to it basically puking back up the same info, with no actual sources cited OR linked.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread136252/pg1

Then here is some site that talks about it, its almost at the bottom of this page.
http://www.bibleprobe.com/creationism.htm

Which BTW is apparently in the goddamn creationist museum...yea.

Then we have the yahoo....answers guy blabing off using...ehhhemmmm Technology...to annoy sane people.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100401230116AAXbc4J

---------- Post added at 01:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:09 PM ----------

Here is another site...with 10 year old school children dribble...
http://www.baptistlink.com/dman/limestone.html

---------- Post added at 01:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:14 PM ----------

Also, the so called C-14 dating they used to "get a time line of the boot"....can only date objects up to around 50,000 years ago...so dunno how the hell they get 40million.

---------- Post added at 01:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:16 PM ----------

Here read this, its a longer form of what I just said. LOL

http://paleo.cc/paluxy/boot.htm

O and it cites its sources, unlike every damn bible humping idiot out there.

Awesome those are great, printing out a bunch for work tonight. Any hot topic to debate is good with me, I'm not out to convince anyone to believe in anything, just a fun discussion.

the first link doesn't work by the way...
 

SupraMario

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Mar 30, 2005
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iwannadie;1567863 said:
Awesome those are great, printing out a bunch for work tonight. Any hot topic to debate is good with me, I'm not out to convince anyone to believe in anything, just a fun discussion.

the first link doesn't work by the way...

It isn't supposed to work, because apparently the source wasn't good enough to pay for the domain.

---------- Post added at 01:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:31 PM ----------

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, no matter how satisfying or reassuring."-Carl Sagan
 

iwannadie

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Jul 28, 2006
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SupraMario;1567864 said:
It isn't supposed to work, because apparently the source wasn't good enough to pay for the domain.

---------- Post added at 01:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:31 PM ----------

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, no matter how satisfying or reassuring."-Carl Sagan

Right, I just re-read the original post and get that the link is gone haha...

---------- Post added at 11:39 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:37 AM ----------

I find the funniest thing is the guy who was going on about this boot made no mention of it being supposedly fossilized. He just kept saying the boot was carbon dated and showed it was millions of years old therefore carbon dating is inaccurate and all false.
 

GrimJack

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Well, I'll add in a few bits here.

First of all, IMO the folks trying to debunk carbon dating, are taking the wrong approach. If this place was created by an all powerful being, why exactly could it not have been created with all the evolutionary support structure that we have discovered, including carbon14 decayed to specific points already?

Second, complaining about carbon14 dating is just plain silly. What about the same methods using rubidium, thorium, potassium, argon, and uranium? The basic premise is that carbon14 dating might contradict the bible... and the fact is, it really doesn't. Even scientists who use it agree that Carbon14 dating is only accurate back about 70k years, due to it's relatively short half life. Some of those other elements, however, are the real sticklers... their half lives stretch up to nearly 50 billion years.

Furthermore, the other big problem is the fossil record. Dig into this a bit, and you'll find fossils clearly come in age layers, similar around the world, and proven thousands of times over by different people. It's a relatively simple operation to calculate how many living things were required to produce the fossils we have found ... and the math doesn't work, there's no way they could all fit on the planet in a short time frame. There just isn't enough room!

As for decent websites, those are few and far between, and trying to sort out what is run by who is a tough thing to do. As a general rule, the sites trying to disprove it are run by the church or it's supporters. The far fewer sites trying to validate it are run by the scientific community or it's supporters. The only way to make an educated decision is to read a bunch of both, note their debate points, and compare which ones are explained by their opponent.

My biggest complaint against the pro-christian sites is their accusation that the scientists involved are ignoring conflicting evidence. It's not in a scientist's nature to ignore evidence, and their system of peer review is designed to emphasize flaws that would invalidate a theory. There are, of course, exceptions to this, where greed or some other motivation becomes a controlling factor, however, there are a *lot* of scientists, and the chances of all of them (or even most!) being motivated to lie the same way is somewhere between slim and none.

Cliffs: IMO, there's no evidence that carbon14 dating is flawed, and this has no bearing on the religious debate anyway.
 

Poodles

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Gimjack brings up a good point, and was something a preacher brought up to me. Everything could have been made "in place" so to speak, and he kinda chuckled and said like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Interesting viewpoint...
 

iwannadie

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Poodles;1567880 said:
Gimjack brings up a good point, and was something a preacher brought up to me. Everything could have been made "in place" so to speak, and he kinda chuckled and said like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Interesting viewpoint...

I brought up the idea of everything created with the ability to evolve. The religious guys said yea they believe that just not when it comes to humans. Humans did not evolve they were created as is.
 

GrimJack

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Clearly humans *do* evolve, even if the bible is factually correct. Look at the different ethnic groups. How did we get those from a single pair? Furthermore, you'll notice that humans lived hundreds of years originally according to the bible, and now the average is a fraction of that.

Look at the obvious size difference between armor built in the middle ages, and the average size of men today. And that's just over the last thousand years.
 

SupraMario

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grimjack;1567900 said:
clearly humans *do* evolve, even if the bible is factually correct. Look at the different ethnic groups. How did we get those from a single pair? Furthermore, you'll notice that humans lived hundreds of years originally according to the bible, and now the average is a fraction of that.

Look at the obvious size difference between armor built in the middle ages, and the average size of men today. And that's just over the last thousand years.


logic has no place in this thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

Poodles

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GrimJack;1567900 said:
Look at the obvious size difference between armor built in the middle ages, and the average size of men today. And that's just over the last thousand years.

Yep, I remember walking around exact replicas of the 3 ships Columbus cames to America in, I was young and quite a bit shorter than but I had to duck everywhere. Hell, look at the Japanese. Since the introduction of much more meat to their diet that used to consist of mostly rice (this is all since WW2) the average has gone up a hell of a lot...