Jim V
Carbon dating really has nothing to do with creationism.
Carbon dating is only valid to about 50,000 years.
Some 'young-earth creationists' have misunderstood or misused carbon dating procedures and facts to make an argument for their YEC view.
Here is a link to an article from a Christian who is a geologist (Los Alamos National Laboratory) explaining radiometric dating:
http://www.reasons.org/files/articles/non-staff-papers/roger_wiens_radiometric_dating.pdf
adiman83
Creationists use carbon dating in an attempt to "prove" that geological dating is not reliable. For that purpose, they use some VERY well known limitations in that dating method.
But what they don't know, or choose to forget, is that C-14 dating is not the only method and not the most precise one. Not by a long shot. There are other radiometric dating methods with far longer ranges than C-14 and far smaller margins of error (in the order of only 1 - 2%). For example, our planet was dated with the U-Pb (uranium - lead) dating method, which has a range of 4.5 BILLION years and an error of only 0.1 - 1%. For our planet's age, that is an error of only 50 million years (out of 4.5 billion).
David at Your Service
It is simply impossible to prove that a dating technique that is shown to work for something known to be 1000 years old, works the same for something 100,000 or one million years old. Anything past the known calibrated date is based on unproven/unprovable assumptions, and gross extrapolation of the data.
In the real world, gross extrapolations of the data rarely if ever work, as shown in the examples below.
If I bend a coat hanger wire one way and it doesn’t break, and then the other way and it doesn’t break, does that mean that if I bend it back and forth one thousand times it won’t break?
If I put a hundred-pound weight on the end of a diving board and it deflects one inch, and then I put a two-hundred-pound weight on the end and it deflects two inches, does that mean if I put a 100,000-pound weight on the end, it will deflect 1000 inches, or will it just break?
If I energize some particles with one million volts and they accelerate to 1% of the speed of light, and then I energize those particles with two million volts and they accelerate to 2% of the speed of light, does that mean that if I energize those particles with 110 million volts they will accelerate to 110% of the speed of light (or travel 10% faster than the speed of light)?
But where ancient dating techniques, even with their flaws and limitations, do come in handy is comparing items. They are like a broken scale. The scale may show one baby weighing 217 pounds and another baby weighing 218 pounds. Obviously the scale does not show the actual weight of the baby, but we can rightfully conclude that the two babies weigh about the same.
And this is where C14 dating is useful. It may not show accurate dates of things tens of thousands of years old, but it can show that two things are about the same age. When it is used on dino bones, it shows the bones to be the same age as ancient human bones, thus showing that dinosaurs and humans at one time lived at the same time--and thus totally destroying evolutionism.
Most mainstream scientists will C14 any and all bones, except for dino bones because the findings contradict evolutionism. Those few that have tested the bones were fired from their jobs. Such testing is "forbidden science".
sandy d
Creationism was imagined long before science was invented, so right there is the problem we have today we cannot make any new laws or any changes in our past observations with out any religions crying foul because that discourages peoples religious beliefs to throw out their imaginings and keep on praying!!! That is life it changes all the time!!!
Dogstar Ascendant
One is a scientific tool and the other is a fairy tale. I see very little overlap or need to apply one to the other. We don't need horticulturists to tell us that pumpkins can't turn into carriages in order to know that Cinderella never actually happened.