Creationis comment on the distribution of isotopes on earth: Quote: ...if they actually decayed. The alternative is that there is some other reason for having more of the daughter isotope present at placement. End Quote. My reply: You are right to be sceptical - everytime - when there is only one aspect of evidence that leads to one conclusion. But if there is unrelated evidence, or better said diverse evidence that is essentially only related by the very effect they show us, and if all these diverse evidence leads to the very same conclusions - take or give some percent for inaccuracies, contamination or whatever in a tiny scale - then you can be pretty sure that something is correct. In the case of radio decay: We can measure the temperature inside the earth. Not exactly the temperature at the exact center, but we get a picture by many diverse measurements, by direct temperature measurements in deep gold mines all over the world etc. Then we can measure earth quake waves, their distribution, their speed. And in hot, waterlike magma speed of sound (the same as for earth quake waves) is different from speed in cold stone. So all in all we know pretty much about temperature inside the earth. Similar is valid for the helium we can measure in natural gas. It is well established it is kind of frozen alpha radiation. So we have a measurement of the amount of radiation. As well we find the amount of radio isotopes in lava etc. All of this can be calculated - even if at the end of many equations there might be accumulated errors of - say - 10% or even more, we get the big picture. And most of all we find the distribution of all known isotopes in nature. In our nuclear reactors we found about 300 different isotopes. Some are abundant in nature, some are not. The magic edge seems to be a half life of about 200 milllion to 700 million years. Unless there are well known processes that create new isotopes on a daily basis, like with C14, there is one accurate rule that was never found broken in nature: Has the isotope half life below 200 million years? You will not find it on earth. Does it have half life longer then 700 million years? You will find it. What does this tell you? I think creationists are so obsessed by claims of to improbable to be random chance, but here this is exactly what I would argue! 300 Isotopes and all are well fitting to an earth age of over 4 billion years. Random chance? If this is no evidence for an old age of earth, some almighty creater deliberately tries to trick us.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 20:23:53 +0000
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