Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Steve Miller wrote:-

>I know of know of no facts that mankind is > 6K years old.

How about some trees? There's a bristlecone pine from the
Methuselah Walk in California that was 7,980 years old in 1979.
Its hard to have a tree is older than the earth it lives on :-)
It survived Noah's flood too! I've worked on that data and
the famous Campito Mountain bristlecone pine data too. It's
not quite as old -- 5,405 years in 1969.

>All the radioactive dating methods assume a constant rate of radiation
>into the earth's atmosphere, which is a false and unreasonable assumption

Nonsense. They assume no such thing. Radioactive dating methods are
calibrated with things of known age. One of the reasons its so hard
to date the arrival of Maori in New Zealand is that their arrival
occured at one of the periods where the amount of C14 increases
with increasing age. Its right there in the calibration curves.
There is no silly assumption of constant C14 formation rate.

It would be helpful if people who know diddly-squat about science
would confine themselves to Hebrew on this list. After all, that's
why we founded this list back in `92.

Now back to lurking.

Bill Rea, IT Services, University of Canterbury \_
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