[Maztachief]

Originally Posted by Sea-Agg2009

He uses the concepts taught in a basic logic class to try to prove something, except he has no base fact to base his hypothesis on, standard flaw from someone who clearly didn't pay attention in class. Here's a fact. We can carbon date rocks on earth to several billion years ago. Creationists argue that carbon dating can be somewhat skewed. Scientists will agree, in that carbon dating gives you a range of a few (around 3) thousand years. If you do the math, figure out how you go from a deviation of 3 thousand years, and magically get 6 thousand from 4 billion...

I agree with most of what you are saying but carbon dating is actually only useful up to about 60,000 years ago (although growing up my text books had always said 40k) and is only used for organic material. Carbon-14 is the radioactive isotope that we use to measure how long since the time the material stopped adding carbon to it. The idea of carbon-14 dating is that there is a certain amount in the atmosphere and plants fix it during photosynthesis in the form of sugars and such which animals eat. Animals get carbon from plants (or other animals which have in-tern eaten plants) and so there is a certain amount of carbon-14 incorporated in everything as our bodies (or whatever plant structures) work. Accumulation of it stops when the organism dies and using the half-life of the material you can get a general date for the time it existed. Carbon-14 is one of several radiometric forms of absolute dating we use but because it only has a half life of somewhere around 5700 years you'd need a huge chunk of organic material to still be around and FULL of it to date to billions of years, which just isn't the case as it is not that abundant to begin with. I'm surprised they haven't gone over dating techniques in your evolutionary biology courses? There are other techniques that can be used to date rock such as argon-potassium dating or even paleomagnetic dating which looks at the orientation of ferromagnetic materials in the rock which changes as the earth's magnetic field has fluctuated over time. I think an oxygen isotope dating may have been used on materials trapped in crystals for the earth's oldest dating.

I'm not knocking what you said or anything, I totally agree with most of your post and its good to hear someone who also reconciled their faith with science as not mutually exclusive things!