Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Oh man, the things we end up discussing on this 
group    ;-)

Doing a googlewhack on dendrochronology, and 
looking at a few sites, dendrochronology has the 
same faults that beset other non-historical dating 
methods.

1) it is based on uniformitarianism. In the case of 
dendrochronology, we have no records that the 
climate has remained constant during the period 
those trees grew.

2) Only one ring is added per year. Yet it is known 
that, under the right conditions, trees can add two 
rings per year.

In the case of the bristlecone pines, from the 
articles linked to by HH, apparently the rings are 
hard to read.

Adding the three together, even if only 10% of the 
years the climatic conditions favored adding two 
rings, that would put the oldest trees as first 
generation growth after the flood, as per Ussher's 
dating. But we don't know, because we cannot go 
back to observe the climatic conditions for the 
years in question. As for older dates, even the 
linked articles admitted that they cannot be 
connected to the dates from living trees.

Bottom line, any date derived from 
uniformitarianism ought to be taken as 
questionable. That is also why they should 
not be taken as reasons to question Biblical 
dates.

Karl W. Randolph.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Harold Holmyard" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
> 
> Dear Bill,
> 
> >
> >>> 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.
> >>
> >>
> 
> HH: But this tree from the Methuselah Grove is apparently not that old.
> The figure given is five thousand years in a PBS program. However, a
> scientist has recently discovered one older, but I don't know how much:
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2817methuselah.html
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/methuselah/
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/methuselah/explore.html
> 
> HH: Actually the age seems to be 4,798 years for the well-known one:
> 
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/08/23/SC72173.DTL
> 
> 
> Yours,
> Harold Holmyard


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