Carbon Dating Bogus Says Friend

[rainonacongadrum]

My fundamentalist Christian friend said carbon-14 dating is "bogus" and that dating anything after 50,000 years becomes really sketchy. When I type in "accuracy of carbon dating" I get links to a bunch of Christian websites saying the same thing so I'm having trouble finding information. Links:

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c007.html

http://www.allaboutarchaeology.org/i...curate-faq.htm

http://contenderministries.org/evolution/carbon14.php

http://www.allaboutarchaeology.org/i...curate-faq.htm

http://www.areavoices.com/christian/?blog=6424



So, is carbon-14 dating bogus?

[CallMeIshmael]

[ QUOTE ]
is carbon-14 dating bogus?

[/ QUOTE ]

nah

[flipdeadshot22]

lol

[kerowo]

Isn't 50k enough to send the young earth folks packing? Aren't they claiming around 3k or something? I never really paid them much attention because I'm not a maroon.

[Zeno]

Information link on radiocarbon dating techniques by the geeks that do it:

Radiocarbon Dating

-Zeno

[Siegmund]

Like all dating methods it has its limitations. One of them is that it gets harder and harder to find enough C14 the older the object is; it's not a hard boundary at 50ka, but that's a fair enough ballpark for where it becomes very hard for small objects.

It is true that C14 concentrations depend on various things including the intensity of the sun during the time the plant or animal was alive. This has fluctuated on the order of 10%, and a conversion table of "carbon years" to "real years", based on C14 study of tree rings, has been calculated. At one time, Creationists claimed that before the Great Flood, with all that water in the atmosphere, it was always cloudy and the necessary radiation was blocked out, causing 6,000-year-old objects to appear much older than it was. This has been debunked by nice neat series of tree rings, pond sediments, and ice layers going back much more than 6,000 years. (On a related note, we really did wreck the accuracy of tritium dating of groundwater by exploding fusion bombs in the atmosphere in the 50s. Oops.)

One that isn't mentioned too much is fractionation of the carbon isotopes. If you are dating wood that was buried by a volcanic eruption, for instance, the charcoal will look a little bit too old and the boiled and recondensed coal tar above it will look a little bit too young. Doesn't work on petrified wood, and eventually becomes unreliable on wood exposed to seawater for a long time, because of the dissolved carbonates equilibrating with the carbon in the wood.

These are known limitations, and they will be acknowledged in reputable carbon-dating studies. They'll tell you how many pieces of wood they tested, what range of dates they got, which direction the likely biases are, what conversion from carbon years to real years they used, and so on. They are not reasons to say that it doesn't work - because it does.

[hemstock]

So radiocarbon dating works to find ages as old as 58k years. Don't christian's believe that the earth is like 7000 years old?

[Zeno]

[ QUOTE ]
So radiocarbon dating works to find ages as old as 58k years. Don't christian's believe that the earth is like 7000 years old?

[/ QUOTE ]

Some Christians believe the earth is a very young age but that is really a small minority of the Christians on the planet. These minority "fundamentalists" make a lot of noise out of proportation to their number and do a general disservice to Christianty by concentrating their energies on something that is not central to or that meaningful to the Christain Gospel.

-Zeno, The Antipope

[rainonacongadrum]

So if it's accurate up to 60k is it fair to say that stuff dated past that is just pure hootnanny or what can reasonably be said about what's dated to be older than 60k years?

[rainonacongadrum]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So radiocarbon dating works to find ages as old as 58k years. Don't christian's believe that the earth is like 7000 years old?

[/ QUOTE ]

Some Christians believe the earth is a very young age but that is really a small minority of the Christians on the planet. These minority "fundamentalists" make a lot of noise out of proportation to their number and do a general disservice to Christianty by concentrating their energies on something that is not central to or that meaningful to the Christain Gospel.

-Zeno, The Antipope

[/ QUOTE ]

According to Christian Answers:

People who ask about carbon-14 (14C) dating usually want to know about the radiometric[1] dating methods that are claimed to give millions and billions of years—carbon dating can only give thousands of years. People wonder how millions of years could be squeezed into the biblical account of history.

Clearly, such huge time periods cannot be fitted into the Bible without compromising what the Bible says about the goodness of God and the origin of sin, death and suffering—the reason Jesus came into the world (See Six Days? Honestly!).

Christians, by definition, take the statements of Jesus Christ seriously. He said,

“But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6).

This only makes sense with a time-line beginning with the creation week thousands of years ago. It makes no sense at all if man appeared at the end of billions of years.

We will deal with carbon dating first and then with the other dating methods.

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I'm not sure what age he claims the earth to be but it's likely he arrived at the whole "bogus" conclusion, at least in some part, due to his faith.