Hoops wrote:If you're referring to his C-14 article, I think his point is that c-14 dating ... uh.... techniques make assumptions that aren't warranted. I'm not sure why he would address other techniques in an article specific to c-14 dating.
What bothers me is that a lot of young-earth creationists I have read attack C-14 dating (vastly overstating the inaccuracy, as I said), as if C-14 is the only method of dating. It's not, and it really doesn't apply at all to old fossils (over about 50,000 years).
Dendochronology (tree rings) is a good example. It's remarkably simple: because tree rings correspond to weather and other patterns, you can match ring series on a younger tree with corresponding rings on an older tree (this is called anchoring). You can chain these samples back in time, until of course you run out of samples. Fully anchored samples can take us back about 11,000 years. So, even on its own, dendochronology shows an earth age almost twice the age that young-earth creationists insist upon.
One can combine other methods, such as sedimentary evidence and radiological dating, with dendochronology to go much farther back than that. For example, you might find a piece of petrified wood in a layer of sediment that you know dates to a certain approximate date, cross-check that approximate date with overlapping radiological dating, and then use the rings in the petrified wood to go back from there. Yes, it's approximate, but given three different methods, it's a fairly safe bet that the approximate date is correct.
So, to maintain a young earth age, one must deny the validity not only of C-14 dating, but of all radiological dating, tree rings, glacial ice cores, starlight distances, and sedimentary layers of rock. All this just because one insists on a literal reading of a text.
I don't understand it.