[quote]pushharder wrote:
Thanks for you post. I do sincerely appreciate it and the thought behind it. I don’t have a problem with someone like you coming on and defending your position in this manner.
Having said that you and I both know that when something is based on assumption there must be a margin for error. That margin is certainly debatable and in the cases of the distant unobservable past, intuitively and logically we know that margin is undefined and ultimately must be determined with some degree of faith.
My beef on this thread was not with the likes of you; it was with the disciples who looked at this find and their immediate first thought was to lob a grenade at a competing line of thinking. They did this with little to no knowledge of how the geological and fossil ages are established and on what thin ice, i.e., assumptions they actually rest on.
One IS a fervent ideologue when one’s first compunction after reading a news article like this is to attack creationism. It clearly shows an underlying bias and an almost religious like faith. It’s uncanny.[/quote]
You are welcome. I am not out to destroy anyone’s religious beliefs with my work and do not like it when other people try to without understanding anything about my work or science in general. Science is not about destroying religion. I also do not like it when people use junk science and intellectually dishonest arguments to try and discredit valid scientific theories to further their religious agenda. No matter what we may disagree on, you are smart enough to realize that this happens quite often. Hell, I have received many letters and e-mails (a lot of which from people who identify themselves as Christian) threatening me with harm or even death due to my work on radioactive dating.
The process of radioactive decay is based on extremely sound, and verifiable, evidence. It is not just based on measuring the decay rates of relatively shortly lived isotopes and using that data to extrapolate a value for longer lived elements. We can also measure the amount and type of daughter isotopes left after decay and the daughters of those isotopes for both long-lived and short-lived radioisotopes. If the decay rate had changed at any point in history for any element, there would be evidence of it by a discrepancy in the relative amount of the decay daughters for that element and the subsequent decay daughters of those elements. If the elements radioactive isotopes decay into have changed, there would also be a discrepancy in the amount of decay daughters. Every year, thousands of experiments are conducted (in labs and in Nuclear Physics classes) measuring the decay of radioisotopes and the elements they decay into. No discrepancies have been found that were verifiable and repeatable, which usually means an experimental error or a deliberate attempt to manipulate the experimental process. The only other explanation is that every radioisotope of every element (and there are thousands) has somehow gone through changes in their decay rates and the elements they decay into in such a way as to make it look like there is a constant decay rate for and decay daughters for every single isotope of every element. If that happened there would be evidence for it and it hasn’t been found.
You are kind of going to have to trust me on this, but there is no global conspiracy by the scientific community to fabricate evidence. We actually love proving each other’s theories wrong. Not just for the bragging rights, but if I can prove other scientists wrong, I have a good chance at getting more grant money for my own research. It makes for a very competitive work environment, but also does a good job of keeping us honest.
And yes, you are 100% right that some people do tend to view science in a religious way, usually people who do not have any real understanding or schooling in science. They tend to attack people who do not view things in the same way they do (just like people in almost any religion). Most real scientists, however, do not feel the need to do so. If someone wants to believe in a religion, that is fine with me. My best friend is a Roman Catholic priest and we do not get into fights. But if one wants to discredit scientific theories that are as well researched and have the amount of evidence supporting them as radioactive decay/dating do, you not only need to provide a possible alternative explanation, but you also need to have verifiable evidence of it.
