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::: One of the main problems with Darkmind1970's post is that he's essentially explaining why radiometric dates can be wrong (because the rock material is older than when it was laid down), which is really a tacit admission, that you can't rely on radiometric dates, just as the creationists have been claiming for years! A second problem is that he essentially claims that you need to know how old an object is before you can use a dating method to see how old it is! Kinda defeats the purpose, I would think! Third, he fails to adequately explain ''why'' K-Ar dating cannot be used on young objects. If a few thousand years is insufficient to accumulate enough argon to detect, how come they detected it and were therefore able to supply a date? Surely his logic means that anything younger than 6,000 years would give an age of zero? But it didn't! His argument is self-defeating. If you date a sample at 2,800,000 years (which TerryH quoted above), according to Darkmind1970, it could be (a) 2,800,000 years old (i.e. the method works when used correctly), or (b) younger than 6,000 years (i.e. the method didn't work because it wasn't used correctly). So how do you decide which it is? If he is correct, then ''such dating methods cannot be used to demonstrate that items are more than 6,000 years old''! [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:33, 6 February 2008 (EST)
::: One of the main problems with Darkmind1970's post is that he's essentially explaining why radiometric dates can be wrong (because the rock material is older than when it was laid down), which is really a tacit admission, that you can't rely on radiometric dates, just as the creationists have been claiming for years! A second problem is that he essentially claims that you need to know how old an object is before you can use a dating method to see how old it is! Kinda defeats the purpose, I would think! Third, he fails to adequately explain ''why'' K-Ar dating cannot be used on young objects. If a few thousand years is insufficient to accumulate enough argon to detect, how come they detected it and were therefore able to supply a date? Surely his logic means that anything younger than 6,000 years would give an age of zero? But it didn't! His argument is self-defeating. If you date a sample at 2,800,000 years (which TerryH quoted above), according to Darkmind1970, it could be (a) 2,800,000 years old (i.e. the method works when used correctly), or (b) younger than 6,000 years (i.e. the method didn't work because it wasn't used correctly). So how do you decide which it is? If he is correct, then ''such dating methods cannot be used to demonstrate that items are more than 6,000 years old''! [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:33, 6 February 2008 (EST)
::::Actually I'm saying nothing of the kind. What I am saying is that K-AR dating of relatively recent events will give you somewhat fuzzy data because it's hard to be date something that's a few tens of years old when the half-life of potassium-40 is 1,250 million years. There are other forms of radiometric dating that will give better result, by using elements that have a far shorter half-life. Using K-AR dating on relatively recent material is like using a 12-inch ruler to measure the length of a bacterium.
::::TerryH - please read up on some basic vulcanology, as what I said was not outrageous. I may not have phrased it very well, as I was exhausted when I wrote it, but it's still true. You want a citation - here's one. http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm
[[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 08:44, 7 February 2008 (EST)