RE: The End Of Reason: A Glimpse Behind The Curve
Carbon dating has a limitation in how many years back it can date
EDIT: Because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years, it is only reliable for dating objects up to about 60,000 years old. However, the principle of carbon-14 dating applies to other isotopes as well. Potassium-40 is another radioactive element naturally found in your body and has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Other useful radioisotopes for radioactive dating include Uranium -235 (half-life = 704 million years), Uranium -238 (half-life = 4.5 billion years), Thorium-232 (half-life = 14 billion years) and Rubidium-87 (half-life = 49 billion years).
There are many examples of how people bring in something to be dated, something that is only a few decades or centuries old in many cases, in most cases.
Maybe the simple explanation for those cases is that the samples where contaminated?
When dating things, it's important to understand the rate of decay that certain elements may have in the present. Now, in the past, however, things may have been different
Are you saying that the laws of physics were different in the past? If this is the case are there any studies that make this case for isotope dating (not just carbon dating but also dating with other elements).
How often do people date things inaccurately? How often are the dates proven wrong and in how many cases? I'm asking these questions because some people haven't taken the time to look at the statistics. If you don't already know how often, then that might be your blind spot.
So what is the argument? That the majority of scientists are inept at dating ancient fossils and/or rocks?
The argument is about the rate of decay. DO you know how the Grand Canyon was formed? But before you answer, please compare and contrast that with what happened to Mount St. Helens in 1980 in Washington State, USA. That is only one example. There are so many examples of these things. Did you see the leaves that were frozen inside the mummified mastodons? Did you see the seashells on top of mountains? How did they get there?
You'll have to point me to the leaves, but the shells on mountain tops are easy: The rocks they fossilized on were once under water.
We've dated many of these shells to be hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years old. And we can also measure the rate that tectonic plates move and the resulting creation of mountains. So once you know that the fossils are older than the mountains, it's easy to see that they died there and that the mountains later formed. This is only a mystery if you believe that both the mountains and the sea both always existed in their present forms, which we know they did not do.
Thousands of scientists disagree with you. Thousands of them. It is too bad that you pretend that those scientists do not exist.
You keep repeating that, but it doesn't matter. It's not about the numbers of people who believe X, Y or Z, but about what the evidence tells us.
I have provided evidence for my statements, you have not replied to either of my comments addressing the points that I've made, or suggested why they are not sufficient to prove the theories. Instead, you resort to telling me that someone disagrees, which is not an argument.
In case you're not aware, I've spent the better part of my working career in the space sector working at the European Space Agency (Europe's equivalent of NASA). Working with astrophysicists who can calculate the age of the Universe and the distance to stars and galaxies with measurements relying on the consistency of the speed of light traveling at known speeds which allow them to know the distances between them, again adding evidence to an old universe. I've been working with geologists and geophysicists making research instruments for experiments that are to be sent to Mars or different asteroids, as well as research results from previous probes. These too, have provided insight into the age of the age of the solar system and the different planets as well as the building blocks that make up our own. I work with biologists and chemists creating experiments, or again analyzing results from old ones, to study how life can have originated, been possible on other planets, or perhaps existing there today.
Literally 100%, not as in "most" but as in every single one, of the people I've worked with here. -which are in the thousands for the space agency alone - not just "believes" that the Earth is approximate ~4.5 billion years old, the Universe ~13.8bn, that life has evolved etc, but continues to make progress with models holding those assumptions, which would be impossible if it wasn't true.
Why are you ignoring them? You know you are wrong, right? Is this your blind spot? You seriously have no idea what I'm talking about.
@joeyarnoldvn This isn't a fair line of questioning, @fredirikaa has answered you several times, yet you ignore the answer and just repeat the same thing.
I will ask you a direct question now; name one of those scientists and explain what you're talking about, rather than repeating that people don't know what you're talking about.
Even if @fredrikaa's excellent answers aren't enough for you, they will be for many reading this, so thank you both for the excellent discourse (which I somehow missed) on this post.
Cg
Those are fair questions. Reality is complex and I don't think that we can have definitive answers for everything but we can make assertions based on our current body of knowledge. Then we find new facts that may need a new explanation that expands our understanding. I still don't see were you are going with your line of reasoning.