Conversations With Touchstone: Theists, Scientists, & Fairy Giraffes With Butterfly Wings

Science deals with things that are extended in time and space, and insofar as The Big Questions are supernatural or whatever, they are not approachable by science.

The bare-faced lie that is currently being perpetrated on American evangelicals generally is at least an interesting one.  It's that the Bible is itself a form of science, and simultaneously a "fact" that can be interpreted as reasonable persons interpret other facts. 

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Radiometric Popcorn II: Isochrons

Isochronic dating [....] measures the decay / transformation of some isotope that is different from the "main" isotope we measure, but which produces the same "daughter" element. Not popcorn in most cases.

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Radiometric Popcorn

A couple of years ago, a friend on the Sonlight Forums, asked this in a thread she created about the age of the earth:

"I guess my biggest question would be about Carbon-dating. I'm guessing that this is a major factor in determining the age of the earth? So how can we know if this is fact or fiction?"

Having been asked that a number of times, and always struggling to come up with a way of discussing radiometric dating in a way that would effectively introduce the basic concepts for those without a lot of background in that area of science, I came up with the following response:

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