Hey Joe, now I know who you are. Changed the Avatar hey??

Christianity gave modern systematized science to the world. I didn't say that no scientists existed prior to this time.

Newton, Linnaus, Hooke, Kepler, Pastuer, Steno, Kepler etc.

The simple fact of the matter is that in order to reach the conclusion the earth is roughly 6000 years old, you have to ignore mountains of data and you know it Dan. The potentially contrary results you provide here are not really an indictment of radioactive isotope dating, as there are certainly many good explanations for them, beginning with experimenter's error. They can't change the fact that there are millions of other observations that clearly support radioactive dating and the method is not controversial at all in the scientific community. Here is a good link that discusses the many scientific findings that point to a very old age for the earth:

www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html

One quotes from the above link:

"Can We Really Believe the Dating Systems?

We have covered a lot of convincing evidence that the Earth was created a very long time ago. The agreement of many different dating methods, both radiometric and non-radiometric, over hundreds of thousands of samples, is very convincing. Yet, some Christians question whether we can believe something so far back in the past. My answer is that it is similar to believing in other things of the past. It only differs in degree. Why do you believe Abraham Lincoln ever lived? Because it would take an extremely elaborate scheme to make up his existence, including forgeries, fake photos, and many other things, and besides, there is no good reason to simply have made him up. Well, the situation is very similar for the dating of rocks, only we have rock records rather than historical records. Consider the following:

* There are well over forty different radiometric dating methods, and scores of other methods such as tree rings and ice cores.
* All of the different dating methods agree--they agree a great majority of the time over millions of years of time. Some Christians make it sound like there is a lot of disagreement, but this is not the case. The disagreement in values needed to support the position of young-Earth proponents would require differences in age measured by orders of magnitude (e.g., factors of 10,000, 100,000, a million, or more). The differences actually found in the scientific literature are usually close to the margin of error, usually a few percent, not orders of magnitude!
* Vast amounts of data overwhelmingly favor an old Earth. Several hundred laboratories around the world are active in radiometric dating. Their results consistently agree with an old Earth. Over a thousand papers on radiometric dating were published in scientifically recognized journals in the last year, and hundreds of thousands of dates have been published in the last 50 years. Essentially all of these strongly favor an old Earth.
* Radioactive decay rates have been measured for over sixty years now for many of the decay clocks without any observed changes. And it has been close to a hundred years since the uranium-238 decay rate was first determined.
* Both long-range and short-range dating methods have been successfully verified by dating lavas of historically known ages over a range of several thousand years.
* The mathematics for determining the ages from the observations is relatively simple.

The last three points deserve more attention. Some Christians have argued that something may be slowly changing with time so all the ages look older than they really are. The only two quantities in the exponent of a decay rate equation are the half-life and the time. So for ages to appear longer than actual, all the half-lives would have to be changing in sync with each other. One could consider that time itself was changing if that happened (remember that our clocks are now standardized to atomic clocks!). And such a thing would have to have occurred without our detection in the last hundred years, which is already 5% of the way back to the time of Christ.

Beyond this, scientists have now used a "time machine" to prove that the half-lives of radioactive species were the same millions of years ago. This time machine does not allow people to actually go back in time, but it does allow scientists to observe ancient events from a long way away. The time machine is called the telescope. Because God's universe is so large, images from distant events take a long time to get to us. Telescopes allow us to see supernovae (exploding stars) at distances so vast that the pictures take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to arrive at the Earth. So the events we see today actually occurred hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago. And what do we see when we look back in time? Much of the light following a supernova blast is powered by newly created radioactive parents. So we observe radiometric decay in the supernova light. The half-lives of decays occurring hundreds of thousands of years ago are thus carefully recorded! These half-lives completely agree with the half-lives measured from decays occurring today. We must conclude that all evidence points towards unchanging radioactive half-lives.

Some individuals have suggested that the speed of light must have been different in the past, and that the starlight has not really taken so long to reach us. However, the astronomical evidence mentioned above also suggests that the speed of light has not changed, or else we would see a significant apparent change in the half-lives of these ancient radioactive decays.

Doubters Still Try

Some doubters have tried to dismiss geologic dating with a sleight of hand by saying that no rocks are completely closed systems (that is, that no rocks are so isolated from their surroundings that they have not lost or gained some of the isotopes used for dating). Speaking from an extreme technical viewpoint this might be true--perhaps 1 atom out of 1,000,000,000,000 of a certain isotope has leaked out of nearly all rocks, but such a change would make an immeasurably small change in the result. The real question to ask is, "is the rock sufficiently close to a closed system that the results will be same as a really closed system?" Since the early 1960s many books have been written on this subject. These books detail experiments showing, for a given dating system, which minerals work all of the time, which minerals work under some certain conditions, and which minerals are likely to lose atoms and give incorrect results. Understanding these conditions is part of the science of geology. Geologists are careful to use the most reliable methods whenever possible, and as discussed above, to test for agreement between different methods.

Some people have tried to defend a young Earth position by saying that the half-lives of radionuclides can in fact be changed, and that this can be done by certain little-understood particles such as neutrinos, muons, or cosmic rays. This is stretching it. While certain particles can cause nuclear changes, they do not change the half-lives. The nuclear changes are well understood and are nearly always very minor in rocks. In fact the main nuclear changes in rocks are the very radioactive decays we are talking about."

Of course, non-radioactive dating methods also point to an old age for the earth and agree with radioactive dates where we can test them. Here is another quote from the same link above:

Non-Radiometric Dating Methods for the Past 100,000 Years

We will digress briefly from radiometric dating to talk about other dating techniques. It is important to understand that a very large number of accurate dates covering the past 100,000 years has been obtained from many other methods besides radiometric dating. We have already mentioned dendrochronology (tree ring dating) above. Dendrochronology is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of non-radiometric dating methods. Here we will look briefly at some other non-radiometric dating techniques.

Ice Cores. One of the best ways to measure farther back in time than tree rings is by using the seasonal variations in polar ice from Greenland and Antarctica. There are a number of differences between snow layers made in winter and those made in spring, summer, and fall. These seasonal layers can be counted just like tree rings. The seasonal differences consist of a) visual differences caused by increased bubbles and larger crystal size from summer ice compared to winter ice, b) dust layers deposited each summer, c) nitric acid concentrations, measured by electrical conductivity of the ice, d) chemistry of contaminants in the ice, and e) seasonal variations in the relative amounts of heavy hydrogen (deuterium) and heavy oxygen (oxygen-18) in the ice. These isotope ratios are sensitive to the temperature at the time they fell as snow from the clouds. The heavy isotope is lower in abundance during the colder winter snows than it is in snow falling in spring and summer. So the yearly layers of ice can be tracked by each of these five different indicators, similar to growth rings on trees. The different types of layers are summarized in Table III.

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Ice cores are obtained by drilling very deep holes in the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica with specialized drilling rigs. As the rigs drill down, the drill bits cut around a portion of the ice, capturing a long undisturbed "core" in the process. These cores are carefully brought back to the surface in sections, where they are catalogued, and taken to research laboratories under refrigeration. A very large amount of work has been done on several deep ice cores up to 9,000 feet in depth. Several hundred thousand measurements are sometimes made for a single technique on a single ice core.

A continuous count of layers exists back as far as 160,000 years. In addition to yearly layering, individual strong events (such as large-scale volcanic eruptions) can be observed and correlated between ice cores. A number of historical eruptions as far back as Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago serve as benchmarks with which to determine the accuracy of the yearly layers as far down as around 500 meters. As one goes further down in the ice core, the ice becomes more compacted than near the surface, and individual yearly layers are slightly more difficult to observe. For this reason, there is some uncertainty as one goes back towards 100,000 years. Ages of 40,000 years or less are estimated to be off by 2% at most. Ages of 60,000 years may be off by up to 10%, and the uncertainty rises to 20% for ages of 110,000 years based on direct counting of layers (D. Meese et al., J. Geophys. Res. 102, 26,411, 1997). Recently, absolute ages have been determined to 75,000 years for at least one location using cosmogenic radionuclides chlorine-36 and beryllium-10 (G. Wagner et al., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 193, 515, 2001). These agree with the ice flow models and the yearly layer counts. Note that there is no indication anywhere that these ice caps were ever covered by a large body of water, as some people with young-Earth views would expect.

Table III. Polar ice core layers, counting back yearly layers, consist of the following:

Visual Layers


Summer ice has more bubbles and larger crystal sizes


Observed to 60,000 years ago

Dust Layers


Measured by laser light scattering; most dust is deposited during spring and summer


Observed to 160,000 years ago

Layering of Elec-trical Conductivity


Nitric acid from the stratosphere is deposited in the springtime, and causes a yearly layer in electrical conductivity measurement


Observed through 60,000 years ago

Contaminant Chemistry Layers


Soot from summer forest fires, chemistry of dust, occasional volcanic ash


Observed through 2,000 years; some older eruptions noted

Hydrogen and Oxygen Isotope Layering


Indicates temperature of precipitation. Heavy isotopes (oxygen-18 and deuterium) are depleted more in winter.


Yearly layers observed through 1,100 years; Trends observed much farther back in time

Varves. Another layering technique uses seasonal variations in sedimentary layers deposited underwater. The two requirements for varves to be useful in dating are 1) that sediments vary in character through the seasons to produce a visible yearly pattern, and 2) that the lake bottom not be disturbed after the layers are deposited. These conditions are most often met in small, relatively deep lakes at mid to high latitudes. Shallower lakes typically experience an overturn in which the warmer water sinks to the bottom as winter approaches, but deeper lakes can have persistently thermally stratified (temperature-layered) water masses, leading to less turbulence, and better conditions for varve layers. Varves can be harvested by coring drills, somewhat similar to the harvesting of ice cores discussed above. Overall, many hundreds of lakes have been studied for their varve patterns. Each yearly varve layer consists of a) mineral matter brought in by swollen streams in the spring. b) This gradually gives way to organic particulate matter such as plant fibers, algae, and pollen with fine-grained mineral matter, consistent with summer and fall deposition. c) With winter ice covering the lake, fine-grained organic matter provides the final part of the yearly layer. Regular sequences of varves have been measured going back to about 35,000 years. The thicknesses of the layers and the types of material in them tells a lot about the climate of the time when the layers were deposited. For example, pollens entrained in the layers can tell what types of plants were growing nearby at a particular time.

Other annual layering methods. Besides tree rings, ice cores, and sediment varves, there are other processes that result in yearly layers that can be counted to determine an age. Annual layering in coral reefs can be used to date sections of coral. Coral generally grows at rates of around 1 cm per year, and these layers are easily visible. As was mentioned in the uranium-series section, the counting of annual coral layers was used to verify the accuracy of the thorium-230 method.

Thermoluminescence. There is a way of dating minerals and pottery that does not rely directly on half-lives. Thermoluminescence dating, or TL dating, uses the fact that radioactive decays cause some electrons in a material to end up stuck in higher-energy orbits. The number of electrons in higher-energy orbits accumulates as a material experiences more natural radioactivity over time. If the material is heated, these electrons can fall back to their original orbits, emitting a very tiny amount of light. If the heating occurs in a laboratory furnace equipped with a very sensitive light detector, this light can be recorded. (The term comes from putting together thermo, meaning heat, and luminescence, meaning to emit light). By comparison of the amount of light emitted with the natural radioactivity rate the sample experienced, the age of the sample can be determined. TL dating can generally be used on samples less than half a million years old. Related techniques include optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL). TL dating and its related techniques have been cross calibrated with samples of known historical age and with radiocarbon and thorium dating. While TL dating does not usually pinpoint the age with as great an accuracy as these other conventional radiometric dating, it is most useful for applications such as pottery or fine-grained volcanic dust, where other dating methods do not work as well.

Electron spin resonance (ESR). Also called electron paramagnetic resonance, ESR dating also relies on the changes in electron orbits and spins caused by radioactivity over time. However, ESR dating can be used over longer time periods, up to two million years, and works best on carbonates, such as in coral reefs and cave deposits. It has also seen extensive use in dating tooth enamel.

Cosmic-ray exposure dating. This dating method relies on measuring certain isotopes produced by cosmic ray impacts on exposed rock surfaces. Because cosmic rays constantly bombard meteorites flying through space, this method has long been used to date the ' flight time' of meteorites--that is the time from when they were chipped off a larger body (like an asteroid) to the time they land on Earth. The cosmic rays produce small amounts of naturally-rare isotopes such as neon-21 and helium-3, which can be measured in the laboratory. The cosmic-ray exposure ages of meteorites are usually around 10 million years, but can be up to a billion years for some iron meteorites. In the last fifteen years, people have also used cosmic ray exposure ages to date rock surfaces on the Earth. This is much more complicated because the Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere shield us from most of the cosmic rays. Cosmic ray exposure calibrations must take into account the elevation above sea level because the atmospheric shielding varies with elevation, and must also take into account latitude, as the magnetic shielding varies from the equator to the poles. Nevertheless, terrestrial cosmic-ray exposure dating has been shown to be useful in many cases.