Tuesday 15 October 2019

Mockery Is The Appropriate Response

Silly Billies

Radiometric dating is all the rage these days.  Here is the University of Waikato's take on this important tool used to establish precisely just how old rocks are:

Radiometric measurements of time

Since the early twentieth century scientists have found ways to accurately measure geological time. The discovery of radioactivity in uranium by the French physicist, Henri Becquerel, in 1896 paved the way of measuring absolute time. Shortly after Becquerel's find, Marie Curie, a French chemist, isolated another highly radioactive element, radium. The realisation that radioactive materials emit rays indicated a constant change of those materials from one element to another.

The New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, suggested in 1905 that the exact age of a rock could be measured by means of radioactivity. For the first time he was able to exactly measure the age of a uranium mineral. When Rutherford announced his findings it soon became clear that Earth is millions of years old.
We now have hard scientific data which enable us to measure with accuracy and precision the date of rocks.  Wowee. 

Not so fast.
  Sceptics have been spoiling the broth, so to speak.  Perfidious beyond measure, they have taken rocks whose date/age is known and submitted it for official radiometric measurement of how old those rocks "actually" were.  They have done so on a "blind test" basis.  That is, they have not disclosed the actual dates of the rocks.  They have merely said, "It's over to you boys.  What do you think?  What does radiometric dating show the actual age of Rock X or Sample Y to be?"

Mount St Helens erupted in 1980.  Scientists know the actual date of the rock created  in the eruption.  We know it is only 39 years old, if measured from the initial eruption in 1980.  Dr Steven Austin "sent samples of the growing dome in the crater of Mount St Helens back to a secular laboratory for radiometric dating.  The lava dome started to form after the massive eruption in 1980.  He obtained dates ranging from 340,000 to 2.8 million years.  The lava had cooled only about 10 years before--the true data." [Michael J. Oard, The Deep Time Deception: Examining the Case For Millions of Years (Powder Springs, GA: Creation Book Publishers, 2019), p. 108.]  The clarity with which one claims that the earth is actually millions of years old is shown to be a nonsense.

It turns out that different methods of "dating" produce vastly different results.  But never mind.  It all goes to show that the earth is gazillion years old.  What's a few billion years amongst friends, eh.  It's "clear that the earth is millions of years old"--or, at least it is to the University of Waikato.

Dr Andrew Snelling ran a similar blind test on cooled lava from Mount Ngauruhoe in New Zealand. 
Snelling tested the cooling of modern (that is, witnessed) lava flows from Mount Ngauruhoe in northern New Zealand and received dates as high as 3.9 billion years old.  [Ibid., p. 108.]
Moreover, once again different methods of dating produced markedly different results.
One method dated the (lava) flow up to 3.5 million years old, another to 3.9 billion years old!  There is a vast difference between "millions" and  "billions", and none of these samples should have yielded dates more than a few hundred years old.  [Ibid.]
What a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.  Walter Scott.

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