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So Apostle Paul places it in causal order

1. Christ
2. those who are in Christ

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You've wandered far from home trying to prove the unprovable. Causes are necessary for effects and to say effects happen before causes is illogical.

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This would breach one of the basic principles in physics - causality, which says that a cause must come before an effect. source

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I'm sure you are aware of a lab at Princeton that has demonstrated the speed of light being exceded by having light exiting before it enters?

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Originally posted by Laika

Merry Christmas 2003 everyone! Only two shopping days until Christmas Day.

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Yes, I realize that was what is commonly said. Many accept the practice of radio-carbon dating as an accurate measurement for tens of thousands of years, but it just isn't. You see once you have determined its most accurate reading (3000-4000 years) there is an extrapolation process that must proceed to give larger dates. That process includes presuppositions and theories. In other words...

A x B = C A being the accuracy of radio carbon dating, B being the presuppositions of aging based on world view, and C being the result. As you can see B determines C, and is unverifiable.

The field of radiocarbon dating has become a technical one far removed from the naive simplicity which characterized its initial introduction by Libby in the late 1940's. It is, therefore, not surprising that many misconceptions about what radiocarbon can or cannot do and what it has or has not shown. Here are four myths borrowed from a colleague that help explain. Particularly number 4.

MYTH #1. Radiocarbon is used to date the age of rocks, which enables scientists to date the age of the earth.

Radiocarbon is not used to date the age of rocks or to determine the age of the earth. Radiocarbon is not suitable for this purpose because it is only applicable: a) on a time scale of thousands of years and b) to remains of once-living organisms (with minor exceptions, from which rocks are excluded).

MYTH #2 Radiocarbon dating has established the date of some organic materials (e.g., some peat deposits) to be well in excess of 50,000 years

Some organic materials do give radiocarbon ages in excess of 50,000 'radiocarbon years.' However, it is important to distinguish between 'radiocarbon years' and calendar years. These two measures of time will only be the same if all of the assumptions which go into the conventional radiocarbon dating technique are valid. Comparison of ancient, historically dated artifacts (from Egypt, for example) with their radiocarbon dates has revealed that radiocarbon years and calendar years are not the same even for the last 5,000 calendar years. Since no reliable historically dated artifacts exist which are older than 5,000 years, it has not been possible to determine the relationship of radiocarbon years to calendar years for objects which yield dates of tens of thousands of radiocarbon years. Thus, it is possible that materials which give radiocarbon dates of tens of thousands of radiocarbon years could have true ages of many fewer calendar years.

MYTH #3. Samples of coal have been found with radiocarbon ages of only 20,000 radiocarbon years or less, thus proving the recent origin of fossil fuels.

It is not difficult to see how such a claim could arise, however. There are two characteristics of the instrumental measurement of radiocarbon which, if the lay observer is unaware, could easily lead to such an idea.

First, any instrument which is built to measure radiocarbon has a limit beyond which it cannot separate the signal due to radiocarbon in the sample from the signal due to background processes within the measuring apparatus. Even a hypothetical sample containing absolutely no radiocarbon will register counts in a radiocarbon counter because of background signals within the counter. In the early days of radiocarbon analysis this limit was often around 20,000 radiocarbon years. Thus, all the researcher was able to say about samples with low levels of radiocarbon was that their age was greater than or equal to 20,000 radiocarbon years (or whatever the sensitivity limit of his apparatus was). Some may have mistaken this to mean that the sample had been dated to 20,000 radiocarbon years.

The second characteristic of the measurement of radiocarbon is that it is easy to contaminate a sample which contains very little radiocarbon with enough radiocarbon from the research environment to give it an apparent radiocarbon age which is much less than its actual radiocarbon age. For example, a sample with a true radiocarbon age of 100,000 radiocarbon years will yield a measured radiocarbon age of about 20,000 radiocarbon years if the sample is contaminated with a weight of modern carbon of just 5% of the weight of the sample's carbon. It is not too difficult to supply contaminating radiocarbon since it is present in relatively high concentrations in the air and in the tissues of all living things including any individuals handling the sample. For this reason special precautions need to be exercised when sampling materials which contain only small amounts of radiocarbon.

Reports of young radiocarbon ages for coal probably all stem from a misunderstanding of one or both of these two factors. Measurements made using specially designed, more elaborate apparatus and more astute sampling-handling techniques have yielded radiocarbon ages for anthracite greater than 70,000 radiocarbon years, the sensitivity limit of this equipment.

MYTH #4. Continuous series of tree-ring dated wood samples have been obtained for roughly the past 10,000 years which give the approximate correct radiocarbon age, demonstrating the general validity of the conventional radiocarbon dating technique.

Several long tree-ring chronologies have been constructed specifically for use in calibrating the radiocarbon time scale. By radiocarbon dating a piece of wood which has been dated by counting the annual growth rings of trees back to when that piece of wood grew, a calibration table can be constructed to convert radiocarbon years to true calendar years. Of course, the table, so constructed, will only give the correct calibration if the tree-ring chronology which was used to construct it had placed each ring in the true calendar year in which it grew.

Long tree-ring chronologies are rare (there are only two that I am aware of which are of sufficient length to be of interest to radiocarbon) and difficult to construct. They have been slowly built up by matching ring patterns between trees of different ages, both living and dead, from a given locality. As one might expect, the further back the tree-ring chronology extends, the more difficult it becomes to locate ancient tree specimens with which to extend the chronology. To alleviate this problem it seems, from the published literature, to be a common practice to first radiocarbon date a large number of potential tree specimens and then select those with appropriate radiocarbon age for incorporation into the tree-ring chronology. Such a procedure introduces a bias into the construction of the tree-ring chronology for the earliest millennia which could possibly obscure any unexpected radiocarbon behavior.

It is not clear to what extent this circular process has influenced the final tree-ring calibrations of radiocarbon. Efforts by creationist scientists to obtain the raw data from which the oldest tree-ring chronology has been constructed to investigate this possible source of bias have so far not met with success. Until the raw data does become available for general scrutiny, creationists are clearly justified in maintaining a high degree of skepticism.

In any event, the calibration tables which have been produced from tree rings do not support the conventional steady-state model of radiocarbon which Libby introduced. Rather, they lend support to the idea that significant perturbations to radiocarbon have occurred in the past.

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Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men;
yet they cannot fathom
what God has done
from beginning to end.

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