Your response to RATE research finding Carbon 14 and Helium throughout the geologic column?

Question

I am curious to know your response to the studies collected by the RATE group finding significant radioactive Carbon 14 in coal, zircons, and diamond samples at varying sedimentary levels in the geologic column?

Please do not make ignorant statements such as RATE scientists are cheating on the data they submitted, or these PhD scientists (geology, physicists, etc.) are not scientists and are ignorant because they are not specialists in chronology (i.e. evolutionists) but are Young Earth Creationists.

mnrlboy, Thanks. There should be no C14 or helium, unless it is contamination or the strata is thousands not millions of years old. CSW, Look up the RATE research on Internet. Results: thousands not millions. Joachin, Sketicism is good, prejudice is bad. The problem is you do not trust any "scientist" that tries to get their evidence to fit their preconceived notion, unless it fits your preconceived notion. Evolutionists have been botherd by C14 contamination in everything. Creationists were simply tying to get to the source - contamination, or does it indicate the the age assumptions are wrong? Look it up (at ICR) read their book, check it out youself. Don't accept people's biased opinions for or against. Sorry, dating the earth always involves speculation - there are no laws. Fossils do not have dates stamped on them. Your assumption the earth is billions has not been proven, think outside the box - what if they are wrong? How do you know? New discoveries come from original thought.

Wayner, Check the latest issue of Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith, the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of evangelical Christian scientists. Also check the ASA's email list, there is extensive debate on the (biased) concl
Dr. Henry Morris and others belonged to the ASA, Henry and other scientists broke away and started the Young Earth Creation Movement, because ASA put their faith in man's theories as more authoritative than God's Word. In any conflict man's word was accepted. The ASA is not a group of Christians who believe in the infallible Word of God. They are Theistic Evolutionists, and long age "creationists." They support herasies. Both the Bible and the facts of science - as opposed to theories - support creation and a young earth. You say ICR's "biased" conclusion, saying this shows you are biased. Give facts, not ad hock opinions of belief. I have a collegues in this group: palentologist Dr. Kurt Wise and paleo researcher Glen Kuban.

Answer 1

Check the latest issue of Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith, the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of evangelical Christian scientists. Also check the ASA's email list, there is extensive debate on the (biased) conclusion of the RATE group.

Edit:
ASA is a mixture of TEs, ID followers, and YECs. Did you really want an answer to your question? Check out the debate on the ASA list. Or are you too intimidated to read from people who actually work in the field? As far as being a heresy, lets see...I don't see that a belief in a young earth is required of Christians anywhere in Scripture OR in the creeds.

I also know Kurt Wise. I know him from the Affiliation of Christian Geologists. He often comes to the meetings we have at the annual Geological Society of America meeting. Dr. Wise has admitted that the evidence for an old earth and evolution is compelling, but he does not believe it because it does not agree with his interpretation of Scripture.

Glen Kuban is NOT a young earther. He accepts an old earth and has debunked both the supposed human tracks (actually eroded dinosaur tracks) at the Paluxy River site and the supposed plesiosaur (actually a decayed whale shark carcass) hauled up by a Japanese trawler.

Of course I say "biased" - they started with their conclusions prior to their research. That's NOT the way science works. The age of the earth is a CONCLUSION. Early geologists gathering the data in the 1700s and 1800s concluded that the earth was much older than they originally thought...AND these guys were Christian clergy (like William Buckland or ) or important church members (like Hugh Miller).

Answer 2

response rate research finding carbon 14 helium geologic column

Answer 3

The carbon-dating method is based on the formation of C-14 from Nitrogen in the atmosphere. Thus it has very very limited application to material where the C-14 is sourced from the atmosphere, and where there is no reservoir effect or contamination by post-death biological or other processes.

Thus to use the carbon-dating method, you must establish that these preconditions are met.

They aren't. Carbon-14 is also a decay product of uranium (which is found in zircons and adsorbs on organic matter like coal, don't know about diamonds tho, if true - edit. I see nothing is published). Hence "carbon-dating" zircons, in particular, is a clear case of misusing the method. "Carbon-dating" coal isn't much better.

On the other hand, the radiometric methods used in geology, such as uranium-lead, potassium-argon etc etc, consistently establish the same ancient ages for suitable geological material, despite different logarithmic decay curves.

Answer 4

Jeremy,

My response is that that's pretty cool.

(If there is supposed to be some sort of implication here about the age of the earth, I'm afraid I'm not seeing it.)

Edit:
The observation this research team is making carries no relevance to the age of the earth whatsoever. Of course small amounts of C-14 are going to be found in all kinds of materials. No one would ever try to date them using C-14 to begin with because we know that they are much older using methods COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT of radiocarbon dating. You are ignoring multiple other dating techniques that show these rocks to be much more than thousands of years old, and instead pointing to the ONE technique that geologists already know (based on already established science) will yield the wrong answer. The argument you are trying to make is analogous to the following:

You try to make the case that watches are not a reliable way to tell time. After searching far and wide (and bypassing many reliable watches), you find a watch whose batteries are almost dead. It is ticking very slowly and is already hours behind everyone else's watch. You glance at the watch, read the time, and announce "Ah-HA! This watch is giving a time that disagrees with YOUR watch. I guess watches aren't a reliable way to tell time after all. And by the way, I choose to believe the time that this watch is giving me instead of the one that all the others are giving me." I try to point out that all the other watches agree with my time, and that your watch is ticking more slowly than the others and perhaps can't be trusted. But you insist "But this watch is STILL ticking, we must trust what it says."

In the materials that the RATE research team is studying, the "radiocarbon clock" has already wound down and there are only traces of C-14 left that may be from a variety of sources. You can always take those concentrations, plug them into the formula for C-14 dating, and get a number just as easily as you can carry around a watch whose batteries are almost dead. But no scientist in his right mind would trust an age from such small concentrations because it indicates that the radiocarbon clock has wound down to the point that it is useless to try and get a reliable age.

Your assumption that rocks that are actually millions of years old should contain absolutely zero C-14 is not true, and the conclusions you're trying to draw from it conflicts with so much pre-existing data that there is no way for you to support your argument even if your erroneous assumption were true.

Answer 5

Let me see it and their methodology - I don't believe them OR trust them. BTW what is "significant" C14. Also WTF is importnat about the presence of helium? By current "accepted" standards detectable C14 mostly disappears after about 50000 years, so therefore finding C14 in paleozoic coal and Cretaceous age diamonds is highly unlikely. Frankly, I do not and never will trust any "scientist" that tries to get their evidence to fit a preconceived notion instead of drawing data-driven conclusions.
For the record, I believe that God wrote the laws of physics and those laws tell us that the Earth is 4.55 billion years old, and that finding C14 in anything older than 50k years is not possible unless the samples have been contaminated or adulterated.

As for ignorant statements - IMHO your's are....please stay on the religious nut board and leave science to those with open minds.

Answer 6

What are you trying to say? What was the conclusion of their work from that study?