Debate Draft

Dave, whether you can make the software work or not is totally irrelevant to this debate. We are debating whether dendrochronology is circular or valid science.

In this, my next to last post, I submit Morton’s Demon, one last scientific paper with some dating information and the idea of redemption. My final post, after Dave posts his rebuttal to this post or, possibly some evidence in support of his position that dendrochronology is not only circular but not even valid science (hey, a guy can dream can’t he?), will, I hope, tie together what I think are the salient features of this debate and summarize my arguments in support of my three points.

Morton’s Demon (link here) is an analogy made by an ex-YEC, Glen Morton, a geologist. I only need an excerpt for my purposes but, to give you full advantage, feel free to use any part of it.

Morton’s demon was a demon who sat at the gate of my sensory input apparatus and if and when he saw supportive evidence coming in, he opened the gate. But if he saw contradictory data coming in, he closed the gate. In this way, the demon allowed me to believe that I was right and to avoid any nasty contradictory data…

… Morton’s demon makes it possible for a person to have his own set of private facts which others are not privy to, allowing the YEC to construct a theory which is perfectly supported by the facts which the demon lets through the gate. And since these are the only facts known to the victim, he feels in his heart that he has explained everything. Indeed, the demon makes people feel morally superior and more knowledgeable than others. …The … victim does not understand why everyone else doesn’t fall down and accept the victim’s views…

… He can make people believe that radioactive dating doesn’t work even if you show them comparisons of tree rings compared to radiocarbon dating. He can make people ignore layer after layer of footprints and burrows in the geologic column (see http://home.entouch.net/dmd/burrow.jpg ) and believe that burrowing can occur and animals can walk around unimpeded during a global flood… He can make people believe that 75,000 feet of sediment over an area 200 by 100 miles can be deposited in a few hundred years, and he can make people believe that Noah trained animals to poop into buckets on command. …

… But unlike Maxwell’s demon, Morton’s demon doesn’t expend any energy–he gets his victim to expend it for him. He can get his victim to expend massive amounts of intellectual energy figuring out how to convince the world that they are wrong. The victim will spend hours reading supportive books or searching through scientific literature noting only those portions which support the YEC position. And the victim will spend lots of energy trying to convince others to come see things the way they do. Thus, the demon gets its victims to spend energy to help it spread the infection.

1. I propose the title you so enthusiastically supported, “Dendrochronology: Circularity or Valid Science?” demonstrates your infection by Morton’s Demon. I posit that, were dendrochronology not valid science, the alternative would be “is it religion” or “is it marketing” or some such thing. But I know a secret. First we need to determine if dendrochronology is valid science. And I know how to do that. You would too if you weren’t infected with the demon.

Your important-sounding headlines make you look a bit foolish upon occasion. Do you do that on purpose? The only conclusion I can draw from your title is that your untenable position needs rhetorical support because you don’t like the results you get from Google. I imagine you feel very comfortable in your diagnosis since you believe there is no contradictory data. The fact that you began your opening post with the statement “WRITTEN RECORDS ARE THE MOST ACCURATE…” demonstrates quite clearly that you in no way understood a single thing I wrote in my opening post. Being so sure of your own position that you fail to note mine demonstrates that you have strong faith in your position and a hell of a blind spot. I imagine my inability to come to understand and agree with your position baffles you. After all, you see the world clearly, right? Why do you think I don’t see the same thing? Do you think I am biased? Deceived? Trying to keep my job? Do you ever wonder if I might be Satan himself, come to lure fools to hell and to test your faith sorely? Do you wonder if I just might actually be right and that Earth (may we ever find others willing to share revelry in Her name) might be much older than 10,000 years and there was no flood? No matter. Now that I raised the questions, feel free to help me make my point in both your next and your final posts.

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2. Dendrochronology is a valid method of C14 dating calibration and is not circular. Dendrochronology existed before Ferguson made his master chronology expressly to provide an accurate calendrical chronology for 14C calibration. It was valid then and not circular. Ferguson’s master sequence was not verified by 14C, rather it was made to calibrate 14C readings. The data is available freely on the web. You know this because I pointed you to it and provided a list of software, much of it free, to examine it yourself. Other labs are free to examine the samples and in fact have done so as I pointed out earlier. So not only is it valid science and not circular, it is not fraudulent either despite your quite specific claims to the contrary.

I imagine you’ve expended massive amounts of intellectual energy figuring out how to convince me (and in fact, the world) that I am wrong. You freely admit to spending hours reading supportive books, in fact you post scans of multiple pages of them. You obviously pore through scientific literature noting only those portions which support the YEC position. When you use the quote in contradiction to the author’s intention you are committing the dishonest tactic known as “quote-mining”. If you were to quote Provine or Ayala or MacNeil or any other scientist who understands evolution and use that quote to try to cast doubt on evolution, you would be dishonestly quote-mining. If you were to use data that they collected and try to show how that data should be interpreted differently then that would be honest. But in that case you would not quote them at all. You would reference their data. You can’t honestly use a quote as evidence that contradicts an author’s conclusions unless you are pointing either inaccuracies or contradictions. I’m thinking as hard as I can right now and I can’t think of any exceptions to that. Also, if your interpretation of the data produced graphs that explicitly contradicted your conclusions and you continued to hold to your conclusions anyway, that too would be dishonest and a symptom of Morton’s demon.

For you to be able to imagine that dendrochronology must be circular and invalid science simply because AiG posts an article saying so is damning evidence for Morton’s demon Dave. Radiometric dating works and we know it does because the calibration curves agree. Dendrochronology was simply enlisted in 14C calibration because it can provide an absolute chronology. As were varves, corals, deep sea sediment cores, ice cores, speleotherms and the like. Dendrochronologists were already out there doing dendrochronology when Ferguson decided to make a master sequence with the express purpose of providing a calibration metric for 14C.

This paper shows how scientists approach controversial issues in radiometric dating.

Today archaeological and geological chronologies of the Last Glacial cycle are largely based on radiocarbon data, for which precise age conversion is possible in the Holocene (Stuiver and Van der Plicht, 1998) and is just as necessary in the glacial. Alongside questions concerning calendric (absolute age) models, understanding the causes for past variations of the atmospheric 14C level, and relating the Glacial 14C-calibration curve to palaeoclimate signatures presents a new challenge to scientists involved in Quaternary research. Reliable synchronizations of deep-sea records with the high resolution Greenland GRIP and GISP2 ice core time-scales (e.g. Bond et al., 1993; Voelker et al., 1998) have not merely made it possible to construct an extended Last Glacial calibration curve covering the last 50 ka, but also adequately link 14C levels derived from marine foraminifera to climate change, as recorded with highest resolution in the GRIP and GISP2 cores (Jöris and Weninger, 1998; Voelker et al., 1998). These archives show an essentially identical relative sequence of stadials (GS) and interstadials (GI) (Björck et al., 1997; cf. Johnsen et al., 1992).

Notice how they make a bold statement in the bolded part? What do you think they will do to support such a statement? Hand wave? Argue from authority? Put up a straw man maybe? Do you think they will honestly assess the problems they face and address them? Well, let’s find out:

However, the underlying age-models show differences steadily increasing with core depth, amounting to many thousands of years during the period covered by the radiocarbon method. Accordingly, 14C data derived from the marine cores and transferred to the GRIP and GISP2 ice-core time-scales must reveal alternative glacial calibration graphs. The discrepancies between the two ice core time-scales are often overlooked.

Independent age control of the radiocarbon time-scale is given by couplets of U/Th and 14C measurements on coral samples (Edwards, 1993; Bard et al., 1993, 1998). For the entire period of the Last Glacial covered by radiocarbon, the GISP2-based marine 14C calibration graph established by synchronisms with deep-sea records is in good agreement with the available U/Th-14C-coral data (Jöris and Weninger, 1998). For the Late Glacial period of GS-1 and GI-1 we, instead, prefer the GRIP chronology which seems to us more reliable (Jöris and Weninger, 2000).

Additional arguments for the reliability of the long-term trend of the GISP2 chronology are that the counting of annual ice layers is established further back for the GISP2 core than for GRIP, [b]and that the oldest part of GISP2 is synchronized with the Antarctic Vostok chronology (Meese et al., 1994; Sowers et al., 1993; Petit et al., 1999), which is itself calibrated with the orbitally tuned, stacked deep-sea SPECMAP chronological framework (Martinson et al., 1987; Sowers et al., 1993). An important marker to control the validity of the combined U/Th-GISP2-Vostok-SPECMAP time-scale is the Toba eruption some 71 ka ago at the very end of GI-20[/b] (Chesner et al., 1991; Leuschner and Sirocko, in press; Westgate et al., 1998; Zielinski et al., 1996). Records potentially useful for the construction of a Glacial 14C calibration curve are high-resolution deep-sea records and long continuous terrestrial sequences of laminated limnic sediments. Whereas 14C data derived from marine records require corrections for specific reservoir values, 14C data from terrestrial sequences do not, but here difficulties may exist in the continuity of the record and in sample taphonomy.

Among other deep-sea records, the North Atlantic core PS2644 shows the highest resolution of the 14C scale in relation to sample depth, and appropriate links to the GISP2 ice core ages have been established (Voelker et al., 1998). In PS2644 past variations in 14C-levels show up with a pattern almost identical to that recorded in other marine proxies, as well as in the U/Th-14C coral couplets. The combined data show satisfactory agreement with the smoother, geomagnetic glacial calibration curve proposed by Van Andel (1998), back to 50 ka calBC.

This is a picture of their calibration curve. (Fig. 1).

Now, I’m going to hazard a guess about a brand new science. Every year when winter comes to the northern hemisphere of Earth (may we never stray from her good graces) the sunlight becomes noticeably weaker and sets off a specific chemical reaction in exposed quartz at specific latitudes. That chemical signature begins its own isotopic degradation as soon as it moves out of that latitude. Now, if plate tectonics is correct, we should find this signature with gradually older dates as we follow a plate’s assumed motion away from the narrow latitude band where the process occurs. What do you think of that?

Feel free to respond or ignore that snippet as you wish. The actual point I’m addressing with this graph and paper is that these researchers checked their information against all kinds of different calendrical phenomena. They are arguing that their calibration curve meets the high standards required to be precise enough to provide a 14C calibration curve. Dave, all the info and work they went to was to develop one calibration curve and determine its accuracy:

We argue that the relevant glacial 14C-calibration data have sufficient precision, both on an absolute time-scale and in relation to the ice-core chronologies, to support widespread construction of age-calibrated 14C-chronologies in the Quaternary sciences.

You said you wanted to get in depth with the curves one at a time. Well, I haven’t brought this one back up yet because you, for reasons known only to the demon, chose to focus on Ferguson instead, but I will be referring to it again in my last post so you might want to read it in light of the idea I just presented:

Stuiver, Minze, Bernard Kromer, Bernard Becker and C. W. Ferguson (1986). Radiocarbon Age Calibration back to 13,300 Years BP and the 14C Age Matching of the German Oak and US Bristlecone Pine Chronologies Radiocarbon (1986) Volume 28, Number 2B: 939-943 link

3. All this reflection on your dishonesty as a symptom of Morton’s demon brings me to my third point: that Creation “Science” is based on falsehood, strangely gripping its adherents in the miasma of the demon. I want to talk about redemption.

Mark 10:45 (King James Version)
For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

Tell me Dave, from the purely human element of Jesus’ life, ignoring for the moment the offspring-of-god business, did he offer redemption for a group of people from anything besides sin? What about Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Geronimo of the Apache’s, Simone Bolivar or Caesar Chavez?

Oppression follows humanity around like a disease. Liberation nearly always requires sacrifice and often it requires blood sacrifice. The people I listed all were prepared to offer blood sacrifice and many of them indeed did offer their lives as a catalyst for the redemption of their people. Why do you suppose we honor these peoples’ sacrifices?
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Questions:
1) What value do you place on the sacrifices made by the people I listed and is it comparable to the purely human element of the sacrifice Jesus made? Why or why not?

2) Do you see Morton’s demon in anyone, creationist or scientists or some specific religion or ideology? Can you give an example and go into some detail with your answer?

3) Please read the paper I linked to (You might want to anyway, it gives some nice information on Lake Suigetsu varve count errors) and try to explain what you think the authors set out to do and whether they achieved their goal.

Draft post 6

The scientific method verifies correct hypotheses and corrects erroneous ones. Humans make hypotheses and act on them as a matter of course. We live through the experience often enough that we believe all kinds of false assumptions and act on them. The slot machine gave me seventy quarters when I put just one in that little tiny hole and pulled the lever. Slot machines produce more money than they consume. I should keep trying. Maybe it’s broken. I’ll try again. Systematic study using the scientific method will correct the hypothesis that putting money in slot machines nets a larger sum of money.

Some things lead to death drastically enough that whatever hypothesis floats around is a good one. Hey, she died when that smell came by. That smell is an evil demon. If you smell it, you will die. Ok. No one wants to test out those kinds of hypotheses. But that’s what science does. Scientists come up with countless faulty hypotheses but they’ve already learned how to deal with it. Skepticism eventually becomes instinctual once you’ve learned to view things as systems. Systems are the reason science exhibits the faith crushing phenomenon called consilience.

When your car won’t start you can assume that you don’t have gas getting to the spark plugs, air getting to the spark plugs, electricity getting to the spark plugs, compression in the cylinder or lubrication in some part of the cylinder. Intelligent design proponents love to make the analogy that god designed us like we design cars; or a whale’s artificial dick. Maybe ID proponents don’t use that last one but they should. I think the analogy works for limited purposes.

If we know how the system works, like the internal combustion four-stoke engine, then diagnosing the problem involves dividing and subdividing the systems, testing each division until a test comes back failing. The original failure, the car won’t start, prompted a scientific investigation using the scientific method. If your mechanic throws out a hypothesis that stops the investigation without solving the problem -[i]“Sorry sir, you drove through the demon in the air back over the hill. Any local could’ve tol’ you not to go that way. You see, Miss Walker smelt that air and she died. You can call Ernie over ‘t the junkyard and he’d come a’ get yer car fer ya fer prolly twenty bucks.”[/i]- you might not trust that mechanic to work on your cars. Why not? Because you know enough about internal combustion engines to know that you can fix the car.

Now remove yourself one step further. Imagine you don’t know how the internal combustion engine works but you live in America, earned a high school diploma and aren’t mentally impaired. Do you believe him? At this point in reading my diatribe the years of dogma, the learned resistance forces these words from your mouth possibly but at least into your conscious mind: “But that doesn’t have anything to do with God. This is a typical evolutionist evasive debate tactic.”

Right about A, wrong about B. It doesn’t have anything to do with God. If God keeps offices outside the system I can’t discover much about it through careful observation and testing of the mechanics of the system. I can however, discover many things about the system. B fails for that reason.

I assume you didn’t believe the mechanic. You may not know how the engine works but you recognize a system. You know that with careful observation and experiment systems eventually make sense. That intrinsic knowledge acquires a sharp focus and a series of foolproof techniques during scientific training. Foolproof means learning how to keep from getting fooled. That part of science still mystifies the uninitiated. They truly can’t imagine that scientific observation and experiment could conclude that slot machines don’t pay out a huge return. [i]“Science MUST be wrong. My cousin Roy won three hundred dollars on one of them things. I KNOW they work. I WAS THERE. They ain’t been workin’ for me lately but that’s cause I lost my dang rabbits foot.”[/i] Even if you could convince them by showing them your research, after you left they’d be saying to the lady in the next trailer over:[i] “I was THERE godammit!”[/i]

The scientist would set up the question: What killed the lady?

The scientist would set up the question: Do slot machines pay out more than they take in?

The scientist would set up the question: Why doesn’t the car start?

Those questions may appear silly or redundant but the question : Did the lady die from a stinky demon? already holds assumptions. Could that smell also lead to your car’s final journey on it’s flatbed hearse?

A scientist learns to start with a broad question and work towards understanding in a kind of a drill down fashion. This system helps him avoid stupid mistakes. Never assume. If you learn how to assume little, you are less likely to be the butt of a joke when you are shown to be wrong. Another important trick taught in scientific training is the art of isolation. A scientist tries hard not to test anything but the question he is asking. Controls and procedures absolutely must be reproducible by anyone trained in the scientific method and the specific technologies used, using only the notes of the original author.

The final piece of the process is that the trained scientist will publish only that which has been proved. The mechanic can conclude that the car does not run but he has done no research into why. The forensic investigator at first knows only that the lady died. Nothing else. If the mechanic tests the blinkers and discovers that they work, he can conclude that there is power to the electrical system but he can’t rule out an electrical problem.

The ever more specific questions create a map of the system under investigation. The discovery that a system exists at all is the triumph of the scientific method. Trying to claim a place in the system of the physical world for miracles , i.e. inputs from outside the system fell out of favor during the enlightenment as the system began to fit a schematic. Nothing has ever been observed that falls outside that schematic. Modern creationists, recognizing that fact, try to claim that the miraculous events, being fact, are in fact detectable and thus fit within the schematic. But since the schematic is being filled in with ever more detail and precision with multiple lines of investigation all reinforcing each others’ conclusions and all of the data exhibiting remarkable consilience, and as a random and unplanned consequence erasing the places in the schematic written in by ancient mythologies, those trained in science have no need to investigate these matters further because careful observation has proven them to be false.

Trying to put those failed hypotheses back into the schematic, creationists must challenge the parts of the refined schematic that erased their legends in the first place. The problem at this point in human progress lies in consilience. The entries that negate the creationist claims find support from every other line of inquiry relating to it’s functional part of the system. Science is writing the manual for the universal system. That consilience of the schematic, investigated from many angles to the point where it begins to resemble a three-dimensional net or neural net means that scientists can dismiss creationist claims out of hand because they failed long ago. There is no functional difference between knowing the mechanic is wrong and knowing the creationist is wrong.

When Mr. Douglas wondered if tree rings could be cross referenced, he began a branch of science known as Dendrochronology. When J. R. Arnold and W. F. Libby invented radiocarbon dating they too began a branch of science. Same with ice-cores, varves, speleotherms, marine sediment cores and many other similar fields of study. They were each developed for individual reasons and to place independent entries in the schematic of the physical universe. Each branch involves hundreds, possibly thousands of scientists, trained in the scientific method and educated in the accumulated knowledge of a general region of the schematic.

If any part of the schematic fails, the entire region suffers a ripple effect. There is no way to conceal a serious error for long. Other, independent inquiries will need to cross that axis eventually. To misunderstand the process enough to believe that there is any question whether a branch of science represented in independent research institutions and universities worldwide by hundreds or thousands of trained, qualified scientists with an enormous body of published work in the field is valid is a demonstration of supreme ignorance of what is being studied.

The title of this debate, your title, asks if dendrochronology is valid science. The ability to ask that question demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the process. It is, in short, retarded.

draft debate post #4

Well, I was going to avoid the direct approach but since you insist on lying, quotemining, welching and being stupid, you leave me little choice. The quotes you chose from Ferguson misrepresented his work.

From your last post:

[quote="afdave1"] What you will find is that the 7104 yr Master Sequence is composed of 17 samples represented in the graph below (from the paper).

[img][/img]

More details about the samples can be found in Table 2 from this paper, shown below.

[img][/img]

Starting with Ferguson’s abstract, I note that he says …

[quote]The [7104-year] chronology was extended backward in time by incorporating tree-ring series from living trees up to 4600 years old, as well as from standing snags, fallen trees, large remnants, and eroded fragments.[/quote]

OK. The obvious question is “How did you know that particular samples should fall in the 4600 – 7104 year old range?”[/quote]

But Dave, the tables YOU POSTED ABOVE, are examples of HOW HE KNEW! By correlation!

No matter how he arrived at his tentative dates, he arrived at his absolute dates by using ring correlation. Just before the part you quote-mined, he labels 3 statistical procedures he uses to create his master sequence. Note the parts highlighted in Yellow. The first part is methodology and the second is your quote-mine. I underlined some other non-circular shit too but at this point I’m done with Ferguson. He set the bar. Yamaguchi, if you’d bothered to read him, actually refines the process and makes it even more sensitive. I’m sorry to post such a long quote here but the context for your quote-mine is aggregious::
[IMG][/IMG]

You need to read the paper you diplodocus brained nitwit. Then read Yamaguchi and figure out what he’s saying. Hint: He’s suggesting a MORE FUCKING ACCURATE STATISTICAL TEST!

Now, since Ferguson represents the science in it’s infancy in his 1969 paper, and since all subsequent science in the field is refining the techniques, lets just clear up this one last little detail on that:

[quote]Well after careful reading, I don’t get a clear answer. But there are some clues. There is one clue in the following quote (also from the abstract) …[quote]The availability of datable wood in the 9000-year range has been indicated by radiocarbon analysis.[/quote]9000-year range? I thought we were going back to 7104 years ago. I’m not sure why he mentions this. BWE? Can you explain? Is he simply referring to later studies which extend the present 7104 year series back another 2000 years? Or is he saying that THESE samples, which are used as the basis for the 7104 year chronology are placed there because of radiocarbon analysis??

In any case, Dr. Batten’s point is well taken, whether this statement refers to THIS chronology, or to a 2000 year extension of this chronology, this is a big deal. Let me highlight this again …The availability of datable wood in the 9000-year range has been indicated by radiocarbon analysis.Wow. There it is. Right there in the abstract.

Exactly what Dr. Batten wrote…Wait a minute! I thought that Dendro was an INDEPENDENT calibration technique for calibrating Radiocarbon Dating. Now you are telling me that we FIRST determine what date range to assign to the wood by RC dating, then we turn around and use this “independent” tree sequence to calibrate RC dates??

Wow. Just wow. So it seems that Dr. Batten is right.[/quote]

So, no, it seems that Don Batten, CE, was wrong. The dating was done through statistical correlation not 14C dating. The fact that the research was done to establish an independent line of dated material that would be 14C datable is the WHOLE FUCKING POINT YOU MORONIC BLOCKHEAD.

[quote]WOW again.

Now, BWE … I am happy for you to try to show me why this is not really what it looks like it is. But what it LOOKS like is …

1) The Radiocarbon folks were eager to come up with “calibration” for their work
2) They latched on to Ferguson and his new Dendrochronology.
3) They “helped” Ferguson pick samples of the earliest possible age
4) These “early age” samples were determined to be “early age” by radiocarbon dating
5) Ferguson took those samples and matched them up as best he could
6) But as [url=http://www.treeringsociety.org/TRBTRR/TRBvol46.pdf]Yamaguchi (1986)[/url] showed later, auto-correlation of rings is a major problem, so it appears quite possible that the selected samples could fit MANY date ranges
7) The Radiocarbon people were happy because now they had their “calibration”
It seems the radiocarbon people don’t care about Yamaguchi[/quote]

1. Once again, that was the point.
2. see 1
3. I don’t care if you are stupid but I do care if you use your stupidity for evil. No they didn’t.
4. Wrong. They were picked for appearance of age and used after statistical correlation put them in the master sequence.
5. That’s what the paper was about.
6. And you are using the new, more refined and precise math to prove what exactly? That it only gets more exact?
7. Once again, right. THAT’S THE POINT YOU SMEGMA BRAINED BLOB OF CHIMPANZEE DUNG.
8. Jesus fucking Christ. Only in your bible thumped head. Yamaguchi refined the fucking technique! HE MADE IT BETTER.

I’m going to focus on Don Batten, CE, for a moment. His argument rests on equivocating two different species with radically different environmental conditions.

Here’s a quote:

[quote]“Sensitive” tree growth: * High degree of annual variation
* Wide and narrow rings intermixed through time
* Limiting growth factor (e.g., rainfall) is highly variable year to year
* Especially true for harsh sites (steep/rocky for moisture sensitivity; see figure at left)
* Reasonably sensitive ring growth is good:
o Matching patterns of relatively wide and narrows rings across trees is
easier when ample variation exists

“Complacent” tree growth:

* Low degree of annual variation
* Rings are roughly the same for many years consecutively
* limiting growth factor is not variable from year to year
* Especially true for benign sites (flat with deep soil for moisture complacency; see figure at left)
* Complacent ring growth can be difficult to crossdate:
o matching patterns of relatively wide and narrows rings across trees is
harder when not much variation exists [/quote]

From a very good primer on dendrochronology at [url=http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/skeletonplot/sensitivitycomplacency.htm] this site.[/url]. I read it and you should too you lying, quotemining, welching imbecile.

Don Batten, as a plant physiologist, even a religious one, knows this. He tried to equivocate a species with complacent growth with one with sensitive growth knowing full well that this is exactly what dendrochronologists avoid. Lying for Jesus. Despicable. That was why I referenced Ferguson. I had kid gloves on though. I was trying to gently point out that the bristlecone was chosen for specific reasons. But now that you’ve insisted on going this route, I’ll go ahead and go down it. Creationists are lying to their flock to knowingly suppress knowledge. Nothing Batten says ever again in defense of his religion carries any weight because he is a confirmed liar.

Now, you have provided no refutation of my first post which pointed out that the process is not circular because, in terms of 14C calibration, it is cross calibrated with many other phenomena. Fairbanks has that side of it covered. All the data converge on the same point.

So, my 3 questions:

1. Why did you stall with that quote-mine from Ferguson?
2. Why do all the data points in Fairbanks’ calibration curve converge on the same points? You must address this or your claim of circularity is bunk. 100% diarhea from the anus of a sick emu.
3. How can Dendrochronology and 14C calibration be circular when Fairbanks’ curves use up to 12 independent sources for 14C calibration curves?

Over to you

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