Trusting the geological column?

Question

Seeing as fossils are not actually dated by carbon dating, but by their position in the geological column, and how the geological column is dated by the fossils that are found in it, can we really cliam the earth is millions of years old?

The geological column was invented by hutton and lyle in the 1850's. They asssigned layers and fossils with ages of 70 million years old and more.Such as the happily seen swimming calelocant. Seeing as they did not possess any scientific techniques in the 1850's to date anything even up to 250,000 years, how can we still rely on this geological column when it's a flawed scientific standard of over 150 years.

The fossil record is not concrete proof of anything evolving, it's concrete proof of fossils. They have found fossilised hats and cowboy boots, indicating that fossilisation and petrification is a process that requires certain conditions and not millions of years

Discuss...

Geomatic i have 2 bachelor degrees, i understand evolution perfectly which is why i raise these questions,

if uranium has a half life lets say of over 34,000 years, and no one has lived or got data to account for a passing of 34,000 years, how do we know it has a half life of 34,000 years

even if it was as short as 2000 years
having dropped atom bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki, how come people are living there now 60 years later without suffering the harmful effects of a radiation blast that happend in the 1940's.
I think someone had bnetter check those halve lives again

kennny, we cant possibly account for 4.6 billion years, please refer to my earlier point about half lives, therefore one can only hope or have faith in billions of years

if we cant account for billions of years, but yet make calculations using billions of years this is clearly not science and this makes me worried

Answer 1

No. The time scale on the geological column comes from uranium-lead, potassium-argon, argon-argon and a dozen other radiometric methods, as well as thermoluminescence, fission track and other methods.

The half life of the 238U - 206Pb series is 4.46 billion years. Other are shorter. These are experimentally observed. No, you do not have to wait 4.46 billion years. You only have to measure the rate of decay.

Importantly, all the methods, based on different logarithmic decay curves, produce the same ages for the same rocks. Mathematical "proof".

Scientists are NOT stupid, nor are they in some conspiracy against you for some paranoid reason.

Stratigraphy is the basis of the multi-trillion dollar oil industry. They're not interested in something that is wrong either.

Answer 2

Carbon dating can only be used for specimens a few tens of thousands of years but many seem unaware of the many other dating methods available which can yield ages measured in millions or billions of years.

While the Hutton and Lyle columns model is, as you say, about 150 years old, it has since been modified in the light of new evidence. The general principle of that model still works well but has been refined over the years - as are all good scientific methods.

Petrification is a process that does indeed require certain conditions. No it may not require millions of years to take place but why would a fossil found in layers of rock millions of years old, as determined by dating methods, be anything but a similar age to that rock?

Why, why, why must these pages be strewn with what appear to be supernaturally inspired misquotations, half truths and disinformation from the religious? Your motivations may be understandable but that does not make them respectable. It certainly does not make you right either!

The claim that the Earth is NOT billions of years old is extraordinary. It is extraordinary in that it flies in the face of well documented, peer-reviewed, repeatable, testable evidence. Such extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Alas, I hear none...

Answer 3

I am not going to write reams and reams about what has already been said. But (as a practising geologist) I need to make one point exactly clear. The geological column is a reality. That's not to say that it is fully understood in all places; we are talking about hugely complex geological processes here that operate over immense periods of time on a world-wide basis.

I also need to clarify an important point re: the significance of fossils, that is commonly (and incorrectly) asserted by young-earth creationists. GEOLOGISTS DO NOT DATE FOSSILS BY THEIR POSITION IN THE GEOLOGICAL COLUMN. GEOLOGISTS DO NOT DATE THE GEOLOGICAL COLUMN BY THE FOSSILS FOUND IN IT. Geologists use fossils to establish a framework for the correct order of strata, that's all. This was first done by William Smith, not Hutton & Lyell. It is not circular reasoning! The age of the rocks is calculated / estimated by other means - in particular by numerous radiometric means (e.g. Potassium - Argon, which has a very long half life) on appropriate igneous rocks that are found in conjunction with the fossiliferous layers.

The reason why the fossil record is demonstrably so "incomplete" can be explained very easily by (1) poor preservation (very few organisms actually end up getting fossilized), (2) erosional gaps or unconformities caused by tectonic activity or changes in sea level with time, and (3) widely varying rates of evolutionary change (it depends on environmental change, stress, etc, and ultimately, may lead to mass extinctions).

As someone has already said, petroleum geologists base their whole technique on stratigraphy i.e. knowledge of the geological column. It's an expensive thing to drill wells; the industry would not and could not cling to techniques that we know to be false! Countless successess testify to the validity of the underlying science!

PS the guy who is quoting Stephen Gould in a young-earth creationist context is simply wrong. Go read his books! Gould might not be a traditional "darwinist" but he is certainly a believer in evolution! Darwin established his theory over 100 years ago; the science has moved a long way forward since then!

Answer 4

The age of the earth is an interesting question. I think it would have to correspond closely with the age of our sun. In other words the accretion disk which formed the sun formed the planets about the same time. So you see we know how old the sun is by calculating the amount of fuel it has divided by it's rate of consumption. It's like figuring out how much gas you have left in the tank of your car. So we know how much fuel the sun has used up and how much it has left and we arrive at the conclusion that it is somewhere between 4 and 5 billion years old. Now as I said before since the planets were formed about the same time by the same event that caused the sun we can reasonably come to the conclusion that it too is billions of years old.

So if that doesn't do it for you there is also plate tectonics. No disrespect intended but the continents all used to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle hundreds of millions of years ago until tectonic activity forced them apart. Antartica and India were once one landmass,and after they broke apart India slowly collided with Asia to create the Himalayan mountain range. How do they know it took this long because the plates move at comparatively small increments. People don't have to live for an eternity to know that this happens,they just have do make mathematical calculations.

Geomatic 7000,KennyB and timeponderer have all given you excellent answers. You don't have to believe anything we say. You don't have to believe anything you can't see with your own eyes. So you can believe the earth is flat if you want to,that is your decision. Nuff said.

Answer 5

1) Its Lyell

2) We use Uranium and Lead isotopes to find the age of the Earth, not fossils.

3) Hutton and Lyell's work has been very, VERY revised.

4) You do not understand evolutionary processes OR fossilization processes.

5) Uranium has a half life of 1.3 billion years. We figure this out by doing something called "math".

6) Bachelor's degrees in what?

7) I refuse to argue any further. If you didn't realize the truth with all your vast "education", you won't realize it now.

8) A theory is not an unproven assumption. It is a set of statements that attempt to explain natural phenomenon that have not been falsified by repeated testing. That's the scientific definition.

9) There are tons of transitional fossils. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

10) Believing in evolution doesn't mean you can't believe in creation and vice-versa.

Answer 6

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part5.html

Answer 7

You are absolutely corect friend....most evolution laymen don't realize the truth of what you are saying...but truthful evolutionists agree with you.

example:

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply"
(J. O'Rourke in the American Journal of Science).


**It is amazing to me that laymen who push evolution theory so vehemently don't even know what most evolutionary scientists have said about the fossil record....that there ARE NO TRANSITIONAL FOSSILS.

Even Charles Darwin was honest when he confesses in 'Origin of Species'; " But as by THIS THEORY innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we NOT find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" -Charles Darwin

To the above fact, even the most world renown (evolutionary) biologists agree...." New species almost always appear suddenly in the fossil record with NO intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks in the same region. The fossil record with its abrupt transitions OFFERS NO SUPPORT for gradual change". - Stephen J. Gould (Natural History , June, 1977, p.22)

"The extreme rarity (of transitional forms) in the fossil record persists as the 'trade secret' of palentology. The evolutionary tree (diagarms) that adorn our textbooks is.....NOT the evidence of fossils". - Stephen Gould (Natural History, 1977, vol.86, p.13)

"Evolution REQUIRES intermediate forms between species and paleontology DOES NOT provide them" (David Kitts, paleontologist and evolutionist).

According to Scripture NOTHING evolved but everything was created "AFTER THEIR KIND"....which is directly consistent with the fossil record.

The thing to remember is that evolution is just a theory, a speculation, an unproven assumption....and NOT supported by the fossil record.