[VadeRetro wrote: When they get three down, they'll have about 37 to go. Right now it's about 40 to zero for an old earth. I doubt that they intend to ever address, much less make any serious dent in, the real evidence for the age of the earth.]
If that ain't anti creationist bias I don't know what is.
Then I'm sorry that I'm going to have to go with "you don't know what is".
He wasn't declaring that it must be wrong because it's done by creationists. He was declaring that there are *mountains* (literally!) of evidence supporting the age of the Earth as being vastly older than a few thousand years, and that even proving a few of them mistaken (which the article in this thread has *not* done) leaves someone a hell of a long way to go before they might have carried away enough of the mountain in a teaspoon to be able to claim that it was actually a prairie after all.
This goes not just for creationists, but for *anyone* hoping to overturn some of the more well-established tenets of science, including other scientists.
The authors of the C14 article sought to "explain" the trace amounts of C14 by postulating a complete revision of something that's a key part of countless other studies/findings/etc., and which is itself supported by countless pieces of evidence and tests. Not only did they not even bother to explain how their "new theory" accounts for all the other things they'd be pulling the rug out from under if they were right, they didn't even really explain their own results very well -- handwaving about "changed decay rates" due to a flood (um, how?) isn't much of an "explanation".
It's as if I declared to have proven the Earth was flat after all because that helped one of my experimental results make more sense. You'd quite reasonably respond, "but, what about photos of Earth from space, and people who have sailed around the world, and globes which are consistent with geographic measurements, and all the other evidence supporting a spherical Earth?" I'd be no scientist if I responded, "hey, not my problem, I'm sure that eventually they'll figure out how to reconcile those observations with the true flat Earth" -- I'd be a crackpot.
VadeRetro's point is simply that the age of the Earth is so well established by such overwhelming amounts of evidence and so many multiple lines of independent testing that *any* study (from *any* source) which purports to modify the age a million-fold (up or down) is a) quite likely to be mistaken, and b) is going to have to spend a LOT of time (massive understatement) explaining exactly how and why all the other studies confirming the 4+ billion year age of the Earth were wrong, and why their one little argument is so ironclad that it trumps all the others which came to the opposite conclusion and have stood the test of time until now.
VadeRetro was not being anti-creationist, he was being frank about how much work (and rework of past observations) the authors will have to do if they're going to have a hope in hell of actually making their case.
If the authors are purporting to actually be doing science, they're going to have to actually *do* it, and that includes being able to deal with all evidence which appears to support the contrary, since that's part of the scientific method. And in the age-of-Earth field, that's a GIGANTIC amount.
People first began accepting that the Earth had to be a *lot* older than several thousand years back in the 1700's (NOT a typo). Note that this is long before evolution was being pondered a century later, and long before any sort of radiological dating was possible. So no, the age of the Earth is not merely an evolutionary presumption, nor critically dependent upon the validity of radiological dating. If you could somehow disprove all of evolution and all forms of radiological dating (there are many) tomorrow, it would *still* not counteract the vast amount of evidence in multiple independent lines of investigation which led people (long before Darwin) to conclude that the Earth must be at the very least many, many millions of years old. For just one trivial example, it was noted long ago that there are so many shark teeth in the ocean beds that if they had all once belonged to sharks that lived across only a few thousand year period, the oceans must have been packed as tightly with sharks as a sardine can. Unlikely.
The following might be instructive at this point -- it's the account of a young-earth creationist who went to work as a geophysicist at a seismic company, and suffered a crisis of faith when he learned how much of the evidence he saw first-hand clearly supported an old-Earth view, and how many of the things he learned from young-earth creationists were simply wrong: Why I left Young-earth Creationism by Glenn R. Morton .
Note that VadeRetro's response would equally apply, without changing a single word, to the work of an evolutionary biologist who claimed to be able to prove that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. His comment was *not* dependent upon the creationist provenance of the study. It was a statement about the standards of proper science.
THAT is what I was referring to.
Then you should be relieved to learn that it wasn't what you thought it was.
Creationists are incapable of being scientific, don't you see?
That's another topic -- would you like to get into that one now?
ahem.
Wow. Facts, data, and cogent observations all interpreted as heresy by the ICR. What a surprise - NOT.
Exactly right! And why aren't the ICR folks addressing the preponderance of evidence?
Creationists have an uncanny ability not to see contrary evidence. Which means they typically don't see most of the evidence out there. That same ex-YEC Glenn R. Morton described the evidence filtration YECs do as the operation of Morton's Demon.