RE: [asa] Plot of radiometric dates

This doesn't sound like RTB or Hugh Ross at all. My earliest publication of
his is "The Fingerprint of God," published in 1989 and did not question
radiometric dating results. I think you are getting apologists mixed-up.
Hugh Ross relies on conventional C-14 dates in his apologetics, in dating
human artifacts, not fossils, well beyond 2500 BC.

Steve
=========================================

  -----Original Message-----
  From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
Behalf Of Jon Tandy
  Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 7:06 AM
  To: ASA List
  Subject: [asa] Plot of radiometric dates

  Years ago, about 1990, my parents attended a seminar by Hugh Ross.
According to my recollection (which arguably could be incorrect) one of the
points that they came back with was a claim that if you plot all the
measured ages obtained from radiometric dating (or was it specifically
Carbon-14 dating?) of various material and fossil samples, the measurements
go back to around 2500 B.C., then suddenly shoot exponentially up into the
millions of years. The implication was that something dramatically happened
(i.e. worldwide flood?) at about that time which skewed the decay processes
or our measurement of them, and thus reliance on those dating methods is
questionable before that time.

  For those knowledgeable about RTB, is this something that was in the past
taught by RTB? If so, is it still taught? More generally, is this a claim
that anyone has run across, and what is its basis? I could provide several
answers based on my knowledge of the processes involved, but I suspect the
claim (if I'm remembering it anywhere close to accurately) is pretty well
bogus.

  For instance, Carbon-14 dating is only good back to about 50,000 years and
has been calibrated well past 10,000 years with tree ring data, etc. After
that, radioactive dating kicks in, and I'm not sure of the lower limit of
its reliable measurement range, but its measurements surely do extend well
into the millions or billions of years. Does radioactive dating allow
reliable measurements in the range that would overlap on the low side well
below 50,000 years?

  I also suspect that the "statistic" of the plot mentioned above may be an
obvious consequence of plotting known measurements on a linear scale, where
the time axis necessarily has to include billions of years. Thus all the
measurements in the 10,000 BC to present range would necessarily occupy a
pretty flat area next to zero, in comparison with the scale of billions of
years obtained by other measurements.

  Jon Tandy

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Received on Thu Oct 30 13:01:32 2008