Does anyone else find Pilgrim to be like the ultimately uneducated, lie spewing fundie?

Question

http://answers.yahoo.com/my/profile;_ylt=AsJPY6_pv514mb.CcmJRW6jd7BR.?show=616ea6a97bb1635f1f5594ca5497b699aa

Doug: Anyone with half a brain knows you are lying. Carbon dating cannot be used to find an age of 390,000 years. Guess what? You fundies lying just strengthens my resolve to debunk every last tidbit of so-called evidence you put out.
Feel free to use the Athies thing, though. I could care less, being that I am not an Atheist.

Answer 1

S/he sounds scary, that's for sure.

Answer 2

No. He is correct on the carbon dating. Ordinary carbon (12C)is found in the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air, which is taken up by plants, which in turn are eaten by animals. So a bone, or a leaf or a tree, or even a piece of wooden furniture, contains carbon. When the 14C has been formed, like ordinary carbon (12C), it combines with oxygen to give carbon dioxide (14CO2), and so it also gets cycled through the cells of plants and animals.

We can take a sample of air, count how many 12C atoms there are for every 14C atom, and calculate the 14C/12C ratio. Because 14C is so well mixed up with 12C, we expect to find that this ratio is the same if we sample a leaf from a tree, or a part of your body.

In living things, although 14C atoms are constantly changing back to 14N, they are still exchanging carbon with their surroundings, so the mixture remains about the same as in the atmosphere. However, as soon as a plant or animal dies, the 14C atoms which decay are no longer replaced, so the amount of 14C in that once-living thing decreases as time goes on. In other words, the 14C/12C ratio gets smaller. So, we have a "clock" which starts ticking the moment something dies.

Obviously, this works only for things which were once living. It cannot be used to date volcanic rocks, for example.

The rate of decay of 14C is such that half of an amount will convert back to 14N in 5,730 years (plus or minus 40 years). This is the "half-life." So, in two half-lives, or 11,460 years, only one-quarter of that in living organisms at present, then it has a theoretical age of 11,460 years. Anything over about 50,000 years old, should theoretically have no detectable 14C left. That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years. In fact, if a sample contains 14C, it is good evidence that it is not millions of years old.

uneducated?

Answer 3

A lot of that is true. I'd venture to say, most of it. I've looked up on carbon-dating. They've tested things that had a known age (example, the bones of a dead guy being some 3000 years old) and it came up as like 390,000 years or something. :\

Would you find the term "Athie" offensive?

I think it's cute.

Answer 4

You have to see this.

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-vA9Vegk7cqt9nGVJ0IHVQJ31hGXA?p=5

Answer 5

So what is the question?