I've called Sunshine SS before as well but if it adds to your vision of me as an evil nutter then by all means think the worst.
For anyone disputing dating methods of rocks and fossils, this is a short, simple web page that gives a good basic summary:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/benton.html Here is part of what it says, particularly relevant to this discussion:
The rejection of the validity of fossils and of dating by religious fundamentalists creates a problem for them:
They cannot deny that hundreds of millions of fossils reside in display cases and drawers around the world. Perhaps some would argue that these specimens - huge skeletons of dinosaurs, blocks from ancient shell beds containing hundreds of specimens, delicately preserved fern fronds -- have been manufactured by scientists to confuse the public. This is clearly ludicrous.
Otherwise, religious fundamentalists are forced to claim that all the fossils are of the same age, somehow buried in the rocks by some extraordinary catastrophe, perhaps Noah's flood. How exactly they believe that all the dinosaurs, mammoths, early humans, heavily-armored fishes, trilobites, ammonites, and the rest could all live together has never been explained. Nor indeed why the marine creatures were somehow 'drowned' by the flood.
The rejection of dating by religious fundamentalists is easier for them to make, but harder for them to demonstrate. The fossils occur in regular sequences time after time; radioactive decay happens, and repeated cross testing of radiometric dates confirms their validity.
No one here has yet tried to explain exactly how radiometric dating is erroneous to the colossal degree that it dates things to being millions of years old when they are only 6000.
How is it stretching and twisting to summarise what you said about interpretations of the Bible as excluding the majority of Christians in the world? They accept evolution and an old earth. They see parts of the Bible as allegory or metaphor -- words that are not synonymous with lies, but different ways of seeing and understanding. And they may even reject some of the Bible, having been written by men of a past culture, as irrelevant to life today. Presumably you do this as well, unless you are striving to live according to every rule in Leviticus? Why must the creation story in Genesis be literal? Jesus spoke in parables; does it follow that they must have literally happened as well, or could there be a deeper truth that was meant to be learned from them?
Yes some rocks have been dated as being a few billion years old. Radioisotope dating is the main method used. You can also use paleomagnetics, which looks at the orientation of the magnetic crystals in rocks, reflecting changes in the strength and orientation of earth's magnetic field over time. I was reading an article on the BBC news site today about a meteorite from the moon that has been dated by modern methods which involve measuring the ratio of uranium and lead atoms in the rock's phosphate minerals. This rock was ejected as basalt from the moon 4.35 billion years ago. It's helping scientists come to a better understanding of how the earth and moon were actually formed and what the conditions on them were when they were very young.
Please, do we really need to argue about faking photos? There's any number of things that can be done to them at any stage in processing. Photos simply are not clear evidence of anything, in and of themselves.
My etiquette on forums is very good almost all of the time. Sometimes everyone, even moderators, lets things slip that they shouldn't. But on the whole I stick to the subject, do not make generalisations about people's personalities, state of sanity, or degree of godliness. You don't like the fact that I am questioning your faith and beliefs but that's what happens in forums like this. It may be uncomfortable but it isn't rude. Like I said, take your style of personal address to another forum and see how long you last there before you get booted off. You're living a charmed life here because you are free to say what you want. It does not reflect well on you when you abuse that freedom.
