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Thanks for posting the carbon dating thing... that’s what I was discussing with someone the other day.

Let’s say for instance I have a level on a refrigerator. The front is about a 16th of an inch off at the back of the level. Not a big problem, huh? Well let’s say that the level and the refrigerator are two miles long. What would be the distance between the level and the refrigerator at the end of the level then?

If something carbon dated to be 100 years old was off by say, a minute, a day and a half or even a week that would not be such a big deal. However, how far off does that put it at 200 years... 500 years... 1000 years... 100,000 years... 10 million years.

I’m far from a scientist, but how do they square that kind of innacuracy and still call it reliable? And I think the rate in carbon dating grows exponentially.

And what we cannot know or take into account is how the environment and the “evolutionary process” (to use their language) might have affected the deterioration of carbon over the millenia.

Can you tell me if I’m misunderstanding something about carbon dating?

Carbon 14 is formed in the atmosphere when cosmic rays collide with Nitrogen molecules. It is absorbed by plants and animals and if they become fossilized becomes part of the fossilized remains. It has a relatively short half-life, and after about 60,000 years is reduced to pretty much undetectable levels. There is some inaccuracy involved because you can't know when any given molecule became part of that organism. It might have stayed in the atmosphere, or existed in other organism in the food chain for thousands of years before that.

It is at best an approximation, but any dating of fossils or artifacts beyond about 45,000 years had to be done by some method other than carbon dating. Other elements have radio isotopes with much long half-lives that are more reliable for dating older samples. Carbon-14 is useful in dating organic samples within that 45,000 year range, since all organic samples contain carbon. There are cases where it has produced odd results, but hopefully you can see why we find those inconsistencies. You have to decide if it's really warranted to say that those few samples in the thousands or millions of instances of carbon dating that have been done really warrant disallowing it as a method of estimating the age of fossils or artifacts.

Earth age estimates are made based on examination of Uranium samples. Uranium goes through a process that takes billions of years on it's way to becoming lead.