| kevin the wiiite said: I have a big problem with one thing people are saying - "The bible is full of fictional stories." Explain to me the thin layer of oil found throughout the entire middle east without their being a catastrophic flood to destroy and cover up that much forested area.. Explain Josephus' writings on the destruction of the Jews by Nero. Explain the Egyptian record which tells a similar story of an enslaved people being let go by Pharaoh. Explain the remains of the city of Jericho that was sacked by the Jews in the bible. (The walls being blown down by trumpet blasts even has its basis in science with natural frequency!) Explain why 4 people would write entirely different accounts of the life of Jesus without having actually seen it. You can choose whether or not to believe in God, but the bible is as historical as any other ancient writing. (a nice parallel is the recent discovery of the city of Troy proving the historical basis of the Iliad and the Odyssey) Carbon 14 is absolutely useless as a dating technique because nobody knows how much carbon 14 you start with in ancient bone, or how much dissolves into the system while the bone turns to rock. It's much better proven that human bones don't even last 2,000 years in most cases because of all the roman tombs found with only dust where there was once a body. The oldest of bones preserved by ice where bacteria are rarely around to decompose anything are found to be about 10,000 years old. And what person would put themselves up against this evidence? One who doesn't want to submit to a higher power. It's ironic, the Democrats, who generally are less theistic, (Not to put all democrats in one box) don't want to submit to a higher power, and yet constantly increase the size of government. Oh - and you can put me in the box with the other Protestant Christians here. I don't play GTA IV and don't swear on Halo like a five year old who just learned some new four letter words. |
Well, I'm not in the business of trying to deconvert Christians, so I'm not really going to get into the first part of your post. In short to say my position would be that I wouldn't deny that there is historical credibility to some stories in the bible (as with many texts). But I would also say that much of it should certainly be taken allegorically (like the flood, which if it happened we would see evidence for a severe population bottleneck for every species, which we don't see unless we go back the KT extinction event, well before humans even walked the Earth).
But I want to talk about the rest of your post.
There is a lot of misinformation that has been going around about C-14 dating methods, most of it spread by people who want to try and deny it's accuracy.
C-14 dating is reliable, and it has been calibrated by evidence found in the field dendrochronology (which can date a 10,000 year old tree to the exact year) to show C-14 dating's accuracy is more than practical enough to be used as a dating method.
As for the initial ratio of C-14 to C-12, yes it can be determined accurately. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that uses C-14 instead of C-12 has remained constant globally for the past 10,000 years at least. The initial ratio can be determined with extreme accuracy. It's a commonly reported fallacy to say that it isn't.
There are of course exceptions that can throw off accuracy and scientists don't deny these. The main two being carbon reservoir giving false readings and dating organisms that have lived post 1944. Scientists know to avoid falling into the Carbon reservoir trap when dating something, and so this very rarely (as in never) gives false readings, because it is never used. And as for post 1944 dating, scientists don't use samples from after 1944 as nuclear testing increased the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere, and that's ok for testing things that died before then, but not afterwards.
Scientists know these pitfalls, and avoid them to maintain correct accuracy. so there really is no worry with carbon dating.
As for older samples. Carbon dating is not used because it is only good for up to 10,000 years. after that we date the igneous rock around the fossil, which again gives accurate dates.
