I recently had a brief correspondence with another scientist who happens also to be a Christian (Dr. Keith B. Miller, Dept. of Geology, Kansas State University.) Unfortunately, Dr. Miller is too busy to respond to your rebuttal point by point, although he did provide some general information supporting the current consensus on the age of the Earth that I would be happy to provide to you upon request.

Although I feel no particular burden to find you an opponent for this debate, and so do not intend to contact any more scientists on your behalf (although I will leave this thread open in case anyone qualified would like to respond) I would like to share a final observation stemming from it:

I am struck by the fact that this is really not a debate between non-believers and believers, but between evolutionists (regardless of faith) and Young Earth Creationists. I happen to be both a non-believer and an evolutionist, but to conflate one with the other is making a serious mistake. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Christianity is a mass of schisms, neither able to agree upon how humans can be saved nor upon the right way to lead one’s life— truly “a house divided against itself.” Similarly, it is divided on the issue of the origin of species, and that is simply because the Bible provides no credible alternative to modern science. To a biblical literalist this doesn’t matter, because you accept whatever the Bible says a priori and insist that all other observations be forced to conform, no matter how tortured the logic.

Fortunately, if history is any indicator, the schisms will continue until Christianity adapts completely enough to modern understanding that people who believe as you do end up as rare a minority as flat earthers (and as influential.)

Hey, I’m an optimist.

Thanks for your response! You’ve got another reader for your blog here.

Robert

I love this quote, I do dearly love it because it’s pure unadulterated bullshit. In fact, I just blogged on this today

http://scienceantiscience.blogspot.com/2007/02/radiometric-dating-getting-age-you-want.html

Cheers

Joe Meert

Thank you for your response. I am going to invite Dr. Berger to respond. But as I do not wish my blog to become an open-ended forum for young-Earth/old-Earth debate, I am going to lay down a few rules.

1) Responses are optional. Lack of response from either viewpoint should not be considered a concession of any point made by the other. Similarly, the failure to refute the any/all content of linked web pages and other cited works shall not be considered a concession to those works.

2) I will allow up to three more responses, two from the old-Earth viewpoint and one from the [edit] young-Earth viewpoint, finishing with an old-Earth viewpoint, since Douglas, a person holding the young-Earth viewpoint started this. This means each viewpoint will have had three chances to speak.

3) Rebuttals can be made by any knowledgeable person of the given viewpoint. I will only allow serious, thoughtful rebuttals in this thread. Anyone else may make brief comments, but I reserve the right to delete any comments I think derail or otherwise detract from the debate.

First, the objections to radiometric dating seem to be demanding a mythical “crucial experiment.”

No they don’t. We have many examples of radiometric dating gone wrong. We have exposed many flaws in the process that evolutionary scientists use to come up with very old dates. We have a large body of evidence that demands an explanation.

Most scientific statements are based on a preponderance of the evidence; well-established ones are based on an overwhelming convergence of evidence.

And evolution/old-earth views are not based on an overwhelming convergence of evidence.

It’s much less likely that a whole bunch of competent people will make a whole bunch of mistakes.

What about all of the Greek scientists and others up till Copernicus and Galileo who believed in geocentricism? You constantly hear about scientists who overcame the objections of the entire scientific community to prove their theories. I’m not saying that this is always the case; I’m just saying that there have been cases when a whole bunch of competent people have been wrong. Further, when you have many scientists basing their views on one man’s book that was faulty, and accepting it in spite of practically the entire scientific community before that man, you can end up with problems.

But that’s just preliminaries, now for the meat.

If the object is thought to be more than a hundred thousand years old, there’s no point in looking for C-14 because it’ll all be gone.

This guy is very honest, I like him. Most evolutionists won’t mention that you can’t get millions of years with Carbon dating because the carbon-14 will all be gone, decayed into carbon-12. Thus you cannot get any dates higher than 50,000 years. Those ages that are above the age that Bible lays down are easily accounted for by various things.

On the other hand, you probably can’t get a reliable K-Ar date on something much younger than about half-a-million years old; the result would be indistinguishable from background.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. The juice is coming though…

The estimated age is established by (for example) where you find the item: is it in an undisturbed Etruscan tomb (about 2500 ya)? a modern-human stone-age encampment in Europe (at least 4000 ya, perhaps as much as 60,000 ya, but almost certainly no older than 100,000 ya)? a rock stratum containing a triceratops skeleton (between 65 and 75 millian ya)?

I love this. It’s a classic example of circular reasoning. I’ve read about stuff like this but haven’t seen it until now. The conclusions on the dates are interesting as follows:
The Etruscan tomb is fine, since that is supported by the writings of ancient historians.
The modern-human stone-age encampment is even okay, since it actually is 4000-6000 ya.
But the rock stratum containing a triceratops skeleton is the funny one. They assume that the skeleton is 65-75 Ma because the evolutionary paradigm that they fit the skeleton into says that dinosaurs died out long before humans. This isn’t answering the question of how do we know that the triceratops died 65-75 million ya? It just says that it’s that old because it’s that old according to us. I would like to know how Mr. Berger gets the date of 65-75 Ma for the skeleton. The way it usually goes is that they say the skeleton is old because the rock layer is old. The rock layer is old because the skeleton found in it is old.

If you get a radiometric date that’s wildly different than your estimated date, the evidence is diverging and you need to go back and look at everything again.

Once again, I appreciate this person’s honesty, but most scientists do not go back and look at everything again. They just discard the samples as junk and try again until they find a “good” date. There are many cases where a significant percentage of the samples show dates that are wildly different than the estimated date. There are likely many, many more discarded samples that have gone undocumented.

In general the fact that we are having difficulty establishing where a number (say, an age) lies within a certain range (say, 15,000 to 50,000) doesn’t mean it’s just as likely to be wildly outside that range (say, 4,000).

We don’t say that. We say that the original result of 15,000 to 50,000 ya was faulty because of either the procedure, the history of the sample, or the assumptions of the person who got that range. We say that that age is wrong for various reasons, and point out that 4,000 ya is a more likely age for various reasons.

Mr. Berger still did not answer the contention that scientific objectivity is torn askew by the form demanding an estimated age.

Again, thanks for the linkage, I hope to talk to further on this subject. I’ll come back for more discussion.