Validity of evolutionary dating techniques.

McCulloch · Post by **McCulloch** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 9:48 am

In another thread,

jcrawford wrote:The creationist RATE Project has invalidated all neo-Darwinist dating techniques as far as we are concerned.

This statement is much more sweeping than the oft repeated but still unproven assertion that radiometric dating yields inaccurate results.
The question for debate then is, "Has the creationist RATE project successfully invalidated all modern evolutionary scientists' dating techniques?"

Some useful references
Pro:

Con:

steen · Post by **steen** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 1:20 pm

And, of course, dating techniques are not necessarily "Neo-Darwinist" either, so first we need to figure out (as usual) what he actually means.

Jose · Post by **Jose** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 6:53 pm

It's easy enough to look at what the RATE guys reported. It's pretty much the same old stuff. "I have a piece of data that can't be explained by normal geology." One possibility is that it actually can, but that this explanation has been ignored. Another possibility is that the methodology that produced the data was sloppy, and that more careful analysis would show this. These are the usual explanations.

And, of course, one bit of data that is inconsistent with a thousand others requires more than just saying that Everyone Else is Wrong. It requires explaining how all the other data came to be. In this case, the only way to do so is to say that god did it, and created everything so that it would look like the earth is very, very old, and that normal geology explains things very well. That trickster! What a card!

If we don't like the idea that god is out to trick us, then we'd better come up with something more reasonable. So far, normal geology is it.