It's often fun sport to make fun of the claims of creationists, but every now and then they come up with a pile of convoluted drivel that is designed specifically to confuse people into listening. The approach seems to be "let's make it so confusing and throw in so many scientific terms that we'll trick people into thinking it's really science."
Dating The Earth's Age
The article linked above is exactly what I'm talking about. Read it if you dare, but allow me the indulgence of sharing their glaring sleight of hand.
Their argument is all about radioactive decay and its use in dating rocks. We know how fast certain elements decay, so we can measure how much of the elements have decayed in certain rocks and we can come up with a reasonable date as to when the rock was formed. This has been a solid and respectable science for quite a while now, but the creationists have come up with what they seem to think is the achilles heel.
How do we know that radioactive decay has remained constant over the years? They argue that we are making a huge assumption and a leap of faith when we assume that the rates of decay are the same now as they always have been. In fact, they argue that the rates of decay have actually slowed significantly and that they were much, much faster in the past. Because of this, our dating of the rocks has given the rocks an artificially old age.
Put aside the fact that we can see stars that are hundreds of millions of light years away (meaning that the light that we see was necessarily emitted hundreds of millions of years ago). Nevermind that we can use tree rings to date areas of the earth to far, far older than the 10,000 year maximum age that creationists cling to desperately. Nevermind that the Grand Canyon took millions of years to carve out. Nevermind that the Sumerians were brewing beer more than 10,000 years ago. Nevermind that creationists argue for a beginning of the earth right about the same time that their precious book was being written. Nevermind that plate tectonics reveals a gradual drifting apart of the continents that would have taken millions of years. Nevermind that we don't find fossils of modern day animals in any older deposits. Nevermind that pretty much all scientists in the world who have studied and worked in areas relating to Geology, Evolution, Biology or Paleontology agree on the 4.5 billion year old estimate. Nevermind that DNA evidence has shown that humans and chimpanzees split off the same evolutionary tree branch millions of years ago and that all DNA evidence has already put the nail in the coffin of anti-evolutionists claims. Nevermind that EVERYTHING WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT SCIENCE SUPPORTS A 4.5 BILLION YEAR OLD EARTH!
Nevermind all that. No, you see the creationists have revealed that the major flaw in our reasoning is that we make the assumption that radioactive rates of decay have remained constant and we didn't consider that maybe they were really, really fast before Noah's flood but slowed down to modern speeds afterward, sometime before we figured out how to measure them.
Okay, I'll grant that we make this assumption. It's an assumption based on the FACT THAT WE HAVE SEEN THAT RATES OF DECAY REMAIN CONSTANT OVER TIME, but it's an assumption nonetheless. Nevermind that we also "assume" that the far side of the moon isn't covered in cheese doodles. Nevermind that we "assume" that worms don't gamble in tiny underground casinos. Let me ask the creationists this question though. If rates of decay have actually changed over the years, why do you assume they've slowed down? I feel like assuming that they actually sped up and the earth is really more like 300 gazillion years old. Go ahead. Prove me wrong.
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