Posted: Jan 25, 2013 1:44 am
I remember being told sagely at a religious youth group meeting when I was about sixteen (hey, I was there for the girls and the bowling nights... 
), that a "team of explorers had taken a freshly killed seal and subjected it to radio carbon dating, and it showed (hahaha) that it had actually died 300 years before!". The person reading this from some religious magazine laughed and said how stupid the whole idea of carbon dating was.
I pointed out that I had never heard it being used to "date" something supposedly "freshly killed" (and how a team of "explorers" would have a radio carbon dating setup in the field was another question...), and that also, if you are talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of years, 300 years plus or minus is almost literally nothing.
A lot of the more fervent believers in the meeting could not understand how 300 years could be meaningless...but they also believed whole heartedly that the Earth was only about 6000 years old...
), that a "team of explorers had taken a freshly killed seal and subjected it to radio carbon dating, and it showed (hahaha) that it had actually died 300 years before!". The person reading this from some religious magazine laughed and said how stupid the whole idea of carbon dating was.I pointed out that I had never heard it being used to "date" something supposedly "freshly killed" (and how a team of "explorers" would have a radio carbon dating setup in the field was another question...), and that also, if you are talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of years, 300 years plus or minus is almost literally nothing.
A lot of the more fervent believers in the meeting could not understand how 300 years could be meaningless...but they also believed whole heartedly that the Earth was only about 6000 years old...