Here is today's article from CMI:

Can the relative timing of radioisotope dates be applied to biblical geology?
by Michael J. Oard
http://creation.com/can-the-relative-timing-of-radioisotope-dates-be-applied-to-biblical-geology

Here are some "quotes" from it, with my comments under them.*

"The idea of using relative radiometric dating as a template for biblical earth history mostly sandwiches 4.567 billion years of uniformitarian history into 377 days of biblical earth history."

That is not even Anne Habermehl, since she is placing all of the radio dated timeline in post-Flood history. But as I will be seeing, there are others than she in the field.

And most who think that most of the million years dated things are from the Flood (as opposed to post-Flood or sometimes pre-Flood) are also not into using their relative dates as a relative timeline.

Carbon dates of Flood material usually do give about the same relative time : 20,000 - 50,000 BP.

I personally like to make the carbon dated place of the Flood be more precise, around 35,000 or 37,000 BP.

Now, I'll leave carbon dates for a moment and follow Oard's text:

"Both Baumgardner and Snelling make assumptions about the earth’s past outside of the Bible that drive their version of natural history and our ability to date its details by converting secular dates. One assumption is that the chronostratigraphic timescale is reliable. This allows them to claim the pre-Flood/Flood boundary is at or near the base of the Cambrian, and remain confident that this correlation point is valid all over the earth."

We are dealing with very different things when it comes to carbon dates and when it comes to chronostratigraphy.

With carbon dates you find one sample which dates as 40,000 BC, is a Neanderthal, and you ask if he or she died before the Flood, and you find another sample which carbon dates 15,000 BC and you feel confident it was after the Flood. The dates are related to the remaining content of C-14 as compared to the overall content of C, mostly C-12. The fudge factor behind the non-Biblical or Anti-Biblical Dates is how much the carbon 14 level rose.

That is one fudge factor which I am perhaps in today's world uniquely involved in circumscribing with relative constraints. On my view, anything which carbon dates 15,000 BC, unless it's an object which can be explained by reservoir effect, close to ice caps, must for instance be AFTER Flood but also BEFORE Exodus or even Abraham. When exactly is up for debate, and I am doing, not just one table but diverse tables, which are meant to give different options, some of which can then later be eliminated (though not from my writings) as not the true one because contradicting this or that or other certain fact from Bible, Tradition or History.

Chronostratigraphy, on the other hand, is a vicious circle in which two ends of one state (US) can have two types of fauna, one dinosaur and one pelykosaur, and then the excavated layer with the pelykosaur be considered as "lower" because it contains a fossil presumed to be "older" than the dinosaur.

"Thus, the Paleozoic is the ‘early Flood’, the Mesozoic is the ‘middle Flood’, and parts of the Cenozoic are the ‘late Flood’."

This is totally wrong, a pelykosaur is "late Palaeozoic (Permian)" or possibly "early Mesozoic (Triassic)", while a dinosaur is "Mesozoic" (especially "mid" or "late", i e "Jurassic" or "Cretaceous").

But the strata are NOT (and any familiarity with vertebrate palaeontology can tell you that, but it seems rare in CMI!) over and under each other on some one site where you find the dino higher or the pelykosaur lower. In other words, the evidence as we have it for vertebrate palaeontology is perfectly (at least for land vertebrates) compatible with having come there by the dinos and pelykosaurs simply having been buried fairly quickly in their natural habitat. The situation is a bit as if today's most typical fauna were buried and replaced by some which is now untypical, our mammals would be a matter for cryptozoology or palaeontology, and someone finds a wolf and a reindeer here and a moose and a bear there, and a third place, they find a wold with a bear and moose, but you never find moose with reindeers.

The reason as we know it is that reindeers and moose don't do the same habitat.

And then some palaeo considers wolf as extending over both "reindeer period" and "moose period" while reindeers are "index fossils" for the "reindeer period" only, moose and bear for the "moose period" only.**

The thing for sake of which geologists tend to overlook this is that, if you find the pelykosaur in a layer buried under some clearly other non-fossil layer of rock, that layer of rock gets the same name as a fossil bearing layer elsewhere.

If under the dino you find a non-fossil bearing layer of rock (at least as far as you are looking) it will tend to be labelled as a layer considered "older" where it bears fossils elsewhere, perhaps the layer of the pelykosaur.

This is why it is vital to distinguish the three meanings, the ideological and the two different empirical ones when dealing with chronostratigraphy. That is a "timescale" which should be reconstructed as a map, not one which should be squeezed.

Why datings by Ka-Ar tend to confirm it, at least somewhat, would probably be that many are discarded (this I trust CMI and other creationists on) but where the non-discarded ones do give a relative "timescale" it may well be because of argon dissipating later and therefore more in higher layers of lava. I don't pretend to have investigated that part, you are free to make experiments on it totally independently of any research I were to do, I have just given the general idea.

BUT, with all this, C-14 is a separate issue and therefore poses a separate challenge, one result of which may well be a squeezable time-scale.

"Humphreys makes much of the plot of radiometric dates over time,2 originally collected by Woodmorappe.9 It shows a roughly linear relationship between dates and the stages of the geological timescale (figure 2)."

[cited : Humphreys, D.R., Accelerated nuclear decay: a viable hypothesis? In: Vardiman, L., Snelling, A.A. and Chaffin, E.F. (Eds.), Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: A Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative, Institute for Creation Research, Dallas, TX, and Creation Research Society, Chino Valley, AZ, p. 342, 2000.
Woodmorappe, J., Radiometric geochronology appraised; in: Woodmorappe, J. (compiler), Studies in Flood Geology, Institute for Creation Research, Dallas, TX, pp. 147–175, 1999 [available from CRS Books].]

I suspect this is about non-carbon dates, and I suspect the easy way to get a solution is to do studies in lava flows and dating of lava.

"However, a closer look reveals that the dates vary by around 200 Ma and include outliers that are billions of years too old! One example of an outlier is the 1.3 Ga Rb-Sr isochron age for lava that erupted after the Flood on the northwest rim of the Grand Canyon.10 It is obvious that the precision of relative dates is far from satisfactory to be used for absolute biblical dates."

This very clearly has no bearing on carbon dates, since these do not involve dating ages of that magnitude.

"Making sense of relative dates and converting old dates to young ones, especially in light of the temporal asymmetry of the Flood, is crucial to the whole enterprise. Earth’s history extends over 6,000 years. The Flood, which produced the bulk of the sedimentary rock record, comprises only one of those years. Thus, advocates of relative dating must know when to convert old dates to years of non-Flood history, and also to days of Flood history. Thus, the location of the pre-Flood/Flood boundary becomes crucial."

No, I don't think so.

In Yacoraite, the Cretaceous as well as the Palaeocene layers are both from the Flood. Between them, there is probably (I got no answer when writing to them) a layer of Iridium.

In Karoo, the Permian, Triassic and Jurassic layers are all from the Flood. They are found side by side, and where you find Permian surrounded by Triassic faunal types, the Permian part is considered an "outcrop".

The thing is that Cretaceous and Palaeocene snails in Yacoraite, and in Karoo, the Permian Gorgonops torvus, the Jurassic Aardonyx celestae, the Triassic Eucnemesaurus fortis were all typically buried at roughly same time in the Flood in the places where they had been living.

I tried to get this through and got an answer that this research might be a good thing for later when we know more about two and three dimensional distribution of fossils, but the thing is we DO know them, if we look at palaeontology instead of looking at geology. I know this, I went through online resources. Obvious exception, marine fauna, where you do actually find trilobites clearly below (ordinary sense of the word) an Elasmosaur - as in Bonaparte Basin, as I found out in a debate.

The lacuna in my research, so far, is for where palaeontological finds are made by oil drillers rather than bone diggers. But I suspect they would all claim to have "all steps of geological column" and insofar as they could substantiate that, it would all be marine fauna steps. Whereever palaeontologists are digging, it is my picture which has so far emerged.

Unfortunately, Oard keeps overlooking this, as his words indicate:

"Therefore, until we have a better understanding of the placement of the pre-Flood/ Flood boundary, relative dating will not yield precise dates for the Flood, and the proposals of both Baumgardner and Snelling need further work."

He is still looking for a chronostratigraphical unit where you can say "these fossils are from Flood, these from after Flood". Presumably all valid kinds (as opposed to trasngenics horrors) are there both before and after Flood, because they were all on Noah's Ark.

I am not sure if Gorgonops got aboard the Ark, but then I am not sure if Gorgonops was a creature of God in roughly same form as God created it on day six, or some experiment gone horribly wrong in transgenics.

I am sure that "Jurassic" Tyrannosaur like Creatures did live both before and after Flood. I am sure that "Cretaceous" Brachiosaur like creatures (technically Sauropods***) were there both before and after Flood. Meaning, some Jurassic and Cretaceous are really Flood layers, some would rather be post-Flood layers.

When a dino carbon dates to 28,000 BP, I am for my part getting post-Flood vibes from the date.

This doesn't mean there are no pre-Flood lives and Flood burials in dinos of same type.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Friday after
Laetare Sunday
31.III.2017

PS : I am somewhat distracted this morning and early afternoon. Partly due to sleep privations (not voluntary on my part), partly due to a "hypno binge" as I term those occurrences in my life.

I have documented it on this and subsequent posts on a new blog, termed adult content (I don't want children under 13 reading about this, at least not without parental advise):

Blog 37, on Auto Hypnosis Experience : I Katherine Anne, Interactive Induction
https://hgl-hypno-journal.blogspot.fr/2017/03/i-katherine-anne-interactive-induction.html

I mentioned this distraction, because it explains why I didn't before signing mention why I place a carbon date limit for Flood at after "40,000 BP". Neanderthals being replaced by a purely "homo sapiens sapiens" or "anatomically modern man" population corresponds fairly well to Europe having in pre-Flood times been populated by men not of Noah's kin, mostly (with perhaps some exceptions, hence the earliest Cro-Magnon in Europe), but all died off in the Flood and were replaced by people who descend from Noah.

Now I have said this, and excuse me forgetting it./HGL

* In other words, quotes in quotation marks and italics, "like this", my comments no quotation marks and no italics, like this. ** And palaeoontolgists, if anything like today, would be saying "moose developed from reindeer, so reindeer period is the older of the two" or "reindeer developed from moose, so moose period is the older". *** Technical term for Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus and the rest : Theropoda. I feel there is some symbolism in discovery of T Rex in 1905 by one Osborn - there is an Osborne who wrote a play I had to read, Look Back in Anger and 1905 was when Norway "divorced" from Sweden which it had been in personal union with since 1814.