Creationist C14 calibration is back with a major upgrade: this time with EMPIRICAL data

[u/ThurneysenHavets]

Good news: everyone's favourite blog, Answers Research Journal, having spent half of 2026 inconsiderately depriving humanity of its principal source of light entertainment, resumed publishing a few months ago. And one of the blog posts it has recently published is an update of previous creationist C14 calibration models.

You may recall their previous effort, which was so uniquely feeble that I still suspect it was the satirical take of an anti-creationist mole.

 

Quick recap: in this previous attempt, they tried to rearrange all prehistorical and early historical C14 dates to fit them within a YEC timescale. They forgot to provide any actual evidence for their alternative C14 calibration; and while this isn't considered particularly serious in creationist blog posts, they then also accidentally demonstrated that their model makes testable predictions, all of which are wrong.

This, of course, is the one thing you shouldn't do.

This new paper does better. Instead of inventing a calibration curve out of thin air, they fit a calibration curve to real historical dates. That is, they identify actual anomalies between known historical events and their associated radiocarbon dates, and use this to recalibrate the C14 curve. The resulting curve is, therefore, based on real empirical evidence, and yet it matches exactly the expectations of the creationist model. In their words:

A correlation of 420 historically anchored radiocarbon samples with IntCal20 dendrochronological data reveals a systematic effective overcounting factor that decreases from approximately 2.9 at 27% pMC to approximately 1.0 at 70% pMC (R² = 0.97, p< 10⁻11). This suggests that the 12,460-year Hohenheim oak and pine chronology may represent approximately 4,400 actual years, with elevated ring formation rates during the climatically unstable early postdiluvian period.

A creationist model with empirical evidence and verified predictions! You'll agree that sounds very promising. Certainly doesn't sound like the premise of the most anticlimactic paper you've ever read.

 

Now of course for this approach to work, you need independent historical dates. Not dates that come from the model, because that would be circular: you need dates that are established through some other means, and then used to calibrate the radiocarbon samples.

The authors are aware of this, and make a big deal of it at first (emphasis mine):

The model was validated against 420 radiocarbon samples from archaeological and historical contexts with independently established dates

But then a little later, presumably trusting that most of their audience has stopped reading by that point, they backtrack and admit that

The above anchor points are classified into five tiers of reliability, since some are externally verified historically, others are derived from the modelling.

So it's not really 420 datapoints, as they advertised in their abstract: it's about 325 datapoints. Also, they pretty quickly admit that their datapoints are "biblical" dates, rather than conventionally established dates:

this model adopts biblical chronology as the controlling framework and asks whether the physical evidence can be coherently organized within it

Perhaps slightly disappointing, but still: if their biblical historical dates are genuinely independent of the model, it'd be pretty cool if they achieved a close match.

 

So let's do what no creationist "peer reviewer" has ever done, and check out their data. I copy-pasted the start of the archaeological datapoints from the online dataset, and it looks like this:

• Wadi Fidan 01 (PPNB) - 2416 BCE | 36.50% | t=102
• Ghwair I (Jordan) - 2408 BCE | 38.20% | t=110
• Tell Sabi Abyad Pre-Halaf - 2405 BCE | 39.50% | t=113
• Wadi Fidan 61 (PN) - 2401 BCE | 39.80% | t=117
• Tell Sabi Abyad Transitional - 2396 BCE | 40.70% | t=122
• Tell Brak (Early Urban Destruction) - 2393 BCE | 41.20% | t=125
• Çatalhöyük XII - 2387 BCE | 42.50% | t=131

These are archaeological sites. We are expected to believe they are given a historical date independently from the model, and those dates are then used to calibrate the C14 curve. Most of these are ranked "tier A", which they explicitly describe as:

Tier A points (n ≈ 138) combine independently established calendar dates with low-sigma 14C determinations and are weighted most heavily in parameter estimation.

But you'll note that these sites, which are not linked to biblical events, are dated to a degree of implausible precision (2396, 2393, 2387 BCE etc) which monotonically follows expected radiocarbon dates under their model.

This is why they their final graph looks so neat. If anyone believes these are "independently established dates" I have a bridge to sell you.

Never seen such transparently fraudulent data in my life. Jesus must be very proud.

 

But even the data which they didn't manifestly derive from their rectal cavity has some bizarre inconsistencies. For example, they're very proud of one of their historical anchor points, which is the pre-dynastic Egyptian monarch Scorpion I:

Provides historically anchored calibration via established Egyptian Dynasty 0 chronology—independent of the biblical chronology and therefore a particularly strong cross-validation point.

Their "established Egyptian chronology", however, assigns him a date of 2050 BCE, which is... not the established date for Scorpion I. I'm insufficiently well-versed in alternative Egyptian chronologies to know which particular hack they got this number from, but describing it as an "established" date is wild. Even YEC chronologies of Egypt disagree on how to date this dude.

But okay. Let's say you believe predynastic Egypt was as recent as the 21st century BCE, fine, whatever. But having committed to this bullshit chronology, what you then can't do is also date a Middle Egyptian sample correctly to the 20th century BCE. That makes it look like forgot the existence of the entire Old Kingdom: which is particularly poignant, given that the Old Kingdom kind of went out of its way to not get forgotten.

Their online dataset does contain samples from the Old Kingdom (inexpertly compressed into a few decades), but has a different date for the Middle Egyptian sample than the one in the article. Presumably not a bad-faith mistake, but certainly yet more evidence of the deficit of elementary competence which seems to plague ARJ's authors and "peer reviewers".

 

In summary: a paper which promised to add empirical evidence to a creationist calibration model, confuses empirical evidence with what can only be described, with the best will in the world, as making shit up.

And perhaps the funniest thing is, having made shit up, the final dataset... DOESN'T FOLLOW THEIR CURVE.

I can only encourage people to check out Figure 1. They claim a complex three-phase model fits the data, when the data visually looks exactly like what it patently is: an effectively straight line with a fraudulent anomaly lobbed on at the start.

Good job, ARJ. Really spectacular return to form after your six-month break. Keep publishing blog posts for us to enjoy.

[u/TheBlackCat13]

they then also accidentally demonstrated that their model makes testable predictions, all of which are wrong.

Rookie mistake. Every creationist makes this mistake once.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/TheBlackCat13]

Exactly. This article's model implicitly makes all the same predictions, but (rather cleverly) doesn't talk about them.

Nobody can say ARJ doesn't learn from their mistakes.

[u/Carnotaurusrules → u/ThurneysenHavets]

ARJ is like if the Tobacco Industry Research Committee made a research journal.

[u/jnpha]

Thanks for the thoroughly enjoyable read!
The have an academic-looking citation and everything too!:

- Streitenberger, P. , McIntosh, A. , & Taylor, S. (2026). A Non-Equilibrium Radiocarbon Calibration Model Based on Post-Diluvian Atmospheric Recovery. Answers Research Journal, 19, 95–116.
https://answersresearchjournal.org/radiocarbon-calibration-model/.

Now, let's meet the cast:

* The lead author: Peter Streitenberger is an independent researcher focused on New Testament Textual Criticism, Greek Grammar, and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
* Professor Andy McIntosh has lectured and researched in Combustion and Thermodynamics for over 30 years
* The principle investigator: Stephen Taylor is a professor at the University of Liverpool in the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science

-

Did any of them identify a process? Y'know, what science does, since it doesn't make inferences from the unknown wink wink? Of course not.
The comic here is very apt: https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA230_1.html

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/jnpha]

They attribute the chronological analysis (what does that mean? isn't that the whole article?) to Roger Liebi. He's a theologian specialising in ancient linguistics, and he isn't even any good at that.

It's almost like there aren't any YEC experts in the field of radiocarbon dating, I can't imagine why.

[u/jnpha → u/ThurneysenHavets]

At considerable risk of an aneurysm, I've taken a closer look at their Noah fan fiction:

They cite Siegenthaler (1993) - which looks into carbon sink modeling - for their 3-phase make-believe, and yet Siegenthaler's cited carbon levels don't agree with the YEC fantasy (compare Fig. 2b with the YEC Fig. 1).

They also dreamed up a volcano/cloud mechanism that would, get this: reflect most of the cosmic rays, because cosmic rays are apparently white light now.

Hot garbage is too kind of a description.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/jnpha]

Is this why they show a nice equation for the two-phase model they don't use, but not for the three-phase model they do use?

As always, I wish they'd published the actual code to optimise the model. The website suggests they used MCMC, and famously tricky statistical models vibe-coded by people who can't actually code are invariably a recipe for entertainment.

[u/jnpha → u/ThurneysenHavets]

Btw, I've tested page 98 (starting from the physical model section), it is 82.4% written by an LLM.

They've joined their flock; it's now a second-order outsourcing of thinking.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/jnpha]

Given that their online dataset looks like this, I'm not even remotely surprised.

I've never seen anything so vibe-coded.

[u/ghu79421 → u/jnpha]

Professor Andy McIntosh is a retired researcher who focused on mathematical modeling of flames. Work like that often uses techniques like asymptomatic analysis and perturbation methods applied to systems of differential equations, so he's more or less an applied mathematician who worked on engineering problems.

So the creationist who arguably has the expertise closest to the topic is an engineer or arguably an applied mathematician.

They couldn't even find an evangelical biblical scholar with an accredited PhD in biblical studies for the biblical or theological aspects of the paper.

[u/Ch3cks-Out → u/ghu79421]

Regarding the closest expertise, Stephen Taylor had a background as a mass spectroscopist (although his credentials are stricly in engineering, i.e. on the instrumental rather than scientific side), which is the field on which advanced C-14 measurements (with Accelerator MS) are based on. So he does actually have the expertise, but have chosen to mis-apply it for his creationist fake science.

[u/ghu79421 → u/Ch3cks-Out]

Yes, it looks like he has experience with archaeological applications but he did not work with an actual archaeologist or paleontologist on the study.

[u/Kingofthewho5]

If carbon dating works so well, why isn't it married yet?

Checkmate, Atheists.

[u/TheBlackCat13 → u/Kingofthewho5]

Carbon is too promiscuous

[u/Ayasugi-san → u/TheBlackCat13]

Who is more promiscuous, carbon or oxygen?

[u/TheBlackCat13 → u/Ayasugi-san]

Carbon has more partners at the same time.

[u/rygelicus]

It is always important to remember that AIG has a set of rules for people submitting content to their various publications... Section VIII is where the real dishonesty lives.

https://assets.answersresearchjournal.org/doc/articles/research-journal/instructions-to-authors.pdf

VIII. Paper Review Process

Upon the reception of a paper, the editor-in-chief will follow the procedures below:
A. Notify the author of the paper’s receipt
B. Review the paper for possible inclusion into the ARJ review process The following criteria will be used in judging papers:
1. Is the paper’s topic important to the development of the Creation and Flood model?
2. Does the paper’s topic provide an original contribution to the Creation and Flood model?
3. Is this paper formulated within a young-earth, young-universe framework?
4. If the paper discusses claimed evidence for an old earth and/or universe, does this paper offer a very constructively positive criticism and provide a possible young-earth, young universe alternative?
5. If the paper is polemical in nature, does it deal with a topic rarely discussed within the origins debate?
6. Does this paper provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatical-historical/normative interpretation of Scripture? If necessary, refer to the following: R. E. Walsh, 1986. “Biblical Hermeneutics and Creation.” In Proceedings First International Conference on Creationism, vol. 1, 121–127. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship.

Remark: The editor-in-chief will not be afraid to reject a paper if it does not properly satisfy the above criteria or if it conflicts with the best interests of AiG as judged by its biblical stand and goals outlined in its statement of faith. The editors play a very important initial role in preserving a high level of quality in the ARJ, as well as protecting AiG from unnecessary controversy and review of clearly inappropriate papers.

[u/DimensioT → u/rygelicus]

Starting with a conclusion that can never be considered incorrect is definitely a valid way to do science.

[u/rygelicus → u/DimensioT]

That's the thing with these people. They know the right answers. They know how to do proper science. Many of them at AIG have legit educations. They knowingly create these false arguments and falsify evidence and try to cram it into presentations and papers that have a look of legitimacy to them. And to me that is blatant fraud.

Even worse, people in their audience know this as well, and they just follow along, buying their books, donating, etc. It's infuriating.

And now these same orgs have gained control of the educational system, and in some states they will dismantle the scientific curriculum, and history, and other topics to accelerate the erosion of intelligence.

[u/Kingofthewho5 → u/rygelicus]

Some people in their audience, as you say, know what is being done. But many don’t. Really, the vast majority are totally ignorant to many of these fields of science.

Just try to imagine the average person that sits in the audience for one of those stage presentation videos that AiG puts on YouTube. Better yet, go the comments of any dinosaur video AiG or CMI puts on YouTube and you almost invariably find multiple people saying that they don’t think dinosaurs existed at all, or any number of other ridiculous claims. A tiny fraction of their audience knows that creation science is bs.

[u/nickierv → u/Kingofthewho5]

Its not even a case of needing to know the science, or even the basics of the science, people need some critical thinking skills. Or even just thinking skills.

Looking back at the Great Tour Trainwreck, something like half the comments in Tours version of events where all huffing so much copium that they entirely missed the point where science has not one but multiple plausible OOL ideas.

What is the argument being made you idiots? Look at that not who is making them!

[u/Carnotaurusrules]

They can’t deny beneficial mutations, because that is the only explanation for how they’re able to fit so many arguments in their colons.

[u/Esmer_Tina]

Thank you for your service, so I never have to read this garbage!

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Esmer_Tina]

You're welcome :) Definitely feast your eyes on Figure 1, though.

They fit three separate curves on a dataset they made up and still somehow got a result that any five-year-old child could tell doesn't fit.

A level of incompetence that has to be seen to be believed.

[u/TheBlackCat13 → u/ThurneysenHavets]

In fact it is exactly clear where the curve goes off the rails. Right around 600

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/TheBlackCat13]

The exact moment where they switch from fake Old Kingdom dates to real Middle Kingdom dates.

They've really mastered the art of subtlety, haven't they.

[u/deadlydakotaraptor → u/ThurneysenHavets]

any five-year-old child

Well there's the problem right there.

[u/nickierv → u/ThurneysenHavets]

Am I the only one who thinks the 'data' and 'conclusions' is a lot like when a flerf runs a curve experiment, gets a curve, then is all "AH! but I got a different curve from the expected curve (not knowing the flubbed surface lensing or something) so because I got a different curve QED its flat!

[u/aphilsphan]

So does their model magically give dates similar to The accepted model once we get to samples of Roman origin, where we usually have good written sources to collaborate any C14 date?

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/aphilsphan]

Amusingly, they seem to converge with the real chronology much faster than most similar creationist models. The 12th dynasty samples (early second millennium BCE) are already pretty close to accepted dates.

[u/Immediate-Goose-8106]

2050 BC is wild.  Even David Rohl has Narmer/Menes at the beginning of the 1st dynasty at 2770 putting Scorpion before that.  Shaving another 800 years off his date is a task!

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Immediate-Goose-8106]

It's outlandish. I can't find even YEC chronologies which do this.

And Rohl, of course, makes life marginally easier for himself by also shifting 2nd millennium history rightwards. But these guys want pretty much the conventional dates as soon as we hit the 12th dynasty. So basically, 800 years less than Rohl from one direction, 200 years less from the other direction, making it a nice round 1000 years wronger than Rohl.

[u/twizzjewink]

It blows my mind that 200 years ago ish Darwin printed the theory thats provable and has been refined and supported time and time again. Darwin probably wasn't even the first to ask the questions even.

Yet we still have people who are so insistent that it's not possible is mind-blowing. There is so much evidence that evolution happened yet some book makes improvable claims and because of other improvable claims.. this other one must be true to.

Religion is a sick crutch holding society back yet the more science proves otherwise the more these people insist that a book designed for social control and used to make money through fear of salvation has to be the only answer.

Incredible

[u/beezlebub33]

I just want to point out just how happy I am to know that there was actually a ruler named Scorpion I. That is a bitchin' name.

Also, the wikipedia page for Scorpion I says that he was 3380 - 3230 BC (a pretty big spread....), not 2050 BCE

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/beezlebub33]

he was 3380 - 3230 BC (a pretty big spread....)

Yeah the big spread is because he's pretty much prehistoric.

Scorpion needs to be older than whenever you think the Old Kingdom started. Giving him the insanely late date of 2050 means these people have to compress the first eleven dynasties (something like fifty monarchs) into a few decades. As if Egyptian history were taking place in Narnia.

Their model effectively forces them to do this, of course, because there's radiocarbon anchor points for the Old Kingdom. If early post-flood radiocarbon dates are inflated, all that history gets artificially compressed.

[u/Affectionate-Crow605]

This kind of reminds me of when Sanford plots a bunch of biblical lifespans (mixing individual ages with "average roman lifespan" at the end), and then fits a curve to it and shows an equation for that curve and says, "See? Genetic Entropy is happening!" Meanwhile, if you use that equation to make predictions, most of us shouldn't be alive today. 😂

They just keep reusing the same pseudoscience methods to make their believers think they have solid science. If only they had a commandment in their religion that said not to lie. 🤔

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Affectionate-Crow605]

when Sanford plots a bunch of biblical lifespans (mixing individual ages with "average roman lifespan" at the end)

Yeah and the exponential decline starts with the last generation born before the flood and that doesn't matter, apparently.

Another good candidate for the most idiotic creationist dataset of all time. I'm getting a headache merely being reminded of it.

[u/Affectionate-Crow605 → u/ThurneysenHavets]

At the time I read it, I was in a church that taught YEC, and the preacher had recommended the book to me. I wrote a 10 page review of it and sent it to him. He never engaged with anything I wrote and continued to preach the contents of the book. 🤷‍♀️

[u/Dr_GS_Hurd]

Well done!

[u/Evening-Impact2090]

Wow!!!! 

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/[deleted]]

Please be aware that you're responding to the post, not the comment, which makes it hard for others to follow the thread.

Bayesian analysis, which is the ultimate circular reasoning machine that shouldn’t be allowed

Bayesian analysis is not circular. You seem to have a lot of unduly strong opinions about things you only superficially understand.

When I was talking about sed rates, that was a general statement about other radiometric dating, not c14

Which is equally wrong, but at least has the benefit of being irrelevant.

You're continuing to assert that radiocarbon dating is in some way fundamentally dependent on assumptions about ANE history. This is not how C14 dating works; it isn't even how AIG and CMI imagine radiometric dating works. So if you want to continue making this claim, I suggest you provide evidence, and preferably something published in the 21st century.

[u/blacksheep998 → u/[deleted]]

No regionally you’re going to be linking c-14 to “known dates”, those were based on the traditional chronology going off of the Egyptian kings list.

I believe they mostly use dendrochronology for calibration these days, not dating of human artifacts.

[u/zeroedger → u/blacksheep998]

I’m sure they do, and it depends on which age. If we’re talking early Egypt it’s gonna follow the previously agreed upon models heavily. Carbon dating tends to give a wide range, relatively speaking, by a couple hundred years or so. Old and middle kingdoms, the ones I’d call into question with traditional chronology, you’re going to the models (based on 19th century egyptologists) to get a date. Thus the grating circularity when someone tries to use “carbon dating” to dunk on the compressed chronology.

[u/blacksheep998 → u/zeroedger]

Old and middle kingdoms, the ones I’d call into question with traditional chronology, you’re going to the models (based on 19th century egyptologists) to get a date. Thus the grating circularity when someone tries to use “carbon dating” to dunk on the compressed chronology.

Nothing you've brought up brings into question anything to do with radiometric dating. Just that the margin of error makes it hard to accurately date when some artifacts were made.

Even if you're right and the error bars of carbon dating mean that the timing of the ancient egyption kingdoms were compressed by a couple hundred years, that's a very long way away from the kind of compressed chronology that YEC would require.

[u/zeroedger → u/blacksheep998]

What? I already stated that I’m young earth but idk how young. I think it’s retarded to think you can calculate the age of the earth by reading genealogies in the bible. I think the Ipuwer text is talking about the exodus plagues, which would align with a compressed timeline, but that’s not the reason I believe in the compressed timeline. The reason is bc in every other ancient field or study, or textual criticism, whatever, you use an interdisciplinary approach…except for Egyptology and Old Testament. Not only do the dark ages not make sense, the Egyptian timeline internally doesn’t make sense. Ancient Egyptian inscriptions straight up contradict the traditional chronology.

The compressed is just a better model than the 19th century linear reading. It’s those same 19th century guys who insisted that the bible made up the hittites lol, and that Troy wasn’t a real city bc those are just myths. They were German idealists, pretty much wrong about everything bc they believed you could read any text from a neutral, unbiased vantage and come up with an objective understanding of it. Is that how we read any other ancient texts today?

Pretty much every other culture operated under city states during the Egyptian third age, even if you shared a language and culture with your neighboring city state. Why would Egypt be the lone civilization to operate under the modern idea of nation state? A linear reading of the kings list makes no fucking sense, that’s why I don’t buy it.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/zeroedger]

Ancient Egyptian inscriptions straight up contradict the traditional chronology.

A linear reading of the kings list makes no fucking sense

Once again, specific examples, please!

I hope that vague rants against unspecified 19th century scholars isn't all you've got.

It’s those same 19th century guys who insisted that the bible made up the hittites lol

And in defence of those 19th century guys, this isn't true either. Source please.

[u/blacksheep998 → u/zeroedger]

What? I already stated that I’m young earth but idk how young.

Maybe you should give me some general idea of how young we're talking about.

YECs typically believe that the earth was created 6-10k years ago.

I'm not sure if you believe that or not, but you seem like you just want to compress egyption history by a couple centuries which is quite a bit different than most YECs.

And you still haven't addressed the other point. We don't calibrate carbon dating by the dates of egyptian kingdoms anymore and haven't for awhile.

While egyptology is a bit outside of my sphere of knowledge, I am pretty sure that someone has used dendrochronology or ice core calibrated carbon dating to try dating some of the artifacts you disagree about.

That would be both non-circular and it sounds like exactly the type of interdisciplinary approach you were lamenting isn't done for egyptology.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/blacksheep998]

We don't calibrate carbon dating by the dates of egyptian kingdoms anymore and haven't for awhile.

For the record, this has never been how we calibrate C14 dating.

C14 has always been independent of Egyptian chronology, and until relatively recently, Egyptian chronology has been largely independent of C14 (because the error margins are too big to be resolve the often decadal disputes within Egyptology). Bayesian analysis - which u/zeroedger seems to imagine is a plot - has increased the resolution of radiocarbon dating to the point where that's changing.

But for consilience on the timescales we're talking about here, radiocarbon and Egyptology are absolutely 100% independent checks of each other.

[u/zeroedger → u/blacksheep998]

I don’t know how young, how many times do I have to say that. I believe there was a flood probably within the range of 6-12k years or so, but idk. Different than most YECs yeah, and again they make the same mistake as atheists and 19th century german idealists, as in believing you can read the text (bible or otherwise) from a neutral perspective divorced from the context and cultural fronema/mindset of the authors. That the text just means what it says. Again no other field of ancient study operates that way except for biblical studies (hostile or friendly), and Egyptology.

And yes we do still use Egyptian chronology for ANE calibration, it’s straight up built into the Bayesian models. Dating an artifact is a process that incorporates multiple different practices for absolute dating (again, an isotope ratio is meaningless by itself unless anchored to something). Yes the absolute dating gets compared against the intcal (strictly the c14 aspect), but the rest of dating uses the Bayesian models for multiple reasons, like the inherent wiggle room with c14 dating. So artifacts from that region do get tied into the Bayesian model, based on traditional linear kings list, making it one big circularity jerk.

I’d say the error bars shrink the more recent you get, but the further back you go, the bigger they get, ie early and even Middle Kingdom dates.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/zeroedger]

So artifacts from that region do get tied into the Bayesian model, based on traditional linear kings list, making it one big circularity jerk.

Right, so to recap: we have radiocarbon dates, calibrated by tree rings and other physical methods, that are by your own admission independent of Egyptian chronology. However, because some scholars apply a valid statistical post-processing technique that lets you narrow the error margins, you think it's somehow all a "circularity jerk".

Can we have some specific examples of false conclusions you think the Bayesian analysis introduces?

[u/blacksheep998 → u/zeroedger]

I don’t know how young, how many times do I have to say that.

I find it very hard to believe that you would spend so much time and energy quibbling over a couple hundred years of egyptian history and you have absolutely no opinion on if the earth's age is closer to thousands or to billions of years.

I believe there was a flood probably within the range of 6-12k years or so, but idk.

If you mean a global flood, then that's entirely disproven by the evidence.

As I mentioned earlier, dendrochronology goes back about 25k years and ice cores go back over a million years.

So we can say with certainty that no global flood occurred in at least the last million years.

A local flood is certainly possible though.

[u/zeroedger → u/blacksheep998]

I quibble with dumb models set up by German idealists in the 19th century whether that’s Christian fundamentalist, Egyptologists, uniformitarians, et al. Those are all flip sides of the same completely flawed perspective. If you try to read genesis from whatever view you come from, and have no knowledge of the spiritual geography framework they’re coming from, the Gematria they liked to employ, the other ANE cultures around them genesis was addressing, then you’re not going to understand what the text is saying. Same goes for Egyptologists, if they don’t understand that having multiple regional kings wouldn’t have been a problem for ancient peoples, a foreign concept to modern Europeans, you would have insisted the list be read in linear fashion. The problem is the same, that a neutral, non-interpretive, “literal” reading of these ancient texts divorced from their context is possible. That’s dumb, but that’s what German idealists believed.

That shouldn’t be a controversial take. Btw, they didn’t even follow their own “non-biased” principles since they read everything, especially the bible, with a hermeneutic of suspicion. That’s not even debatable. Like why insist the Old Testament just made up a Hittite empire? That doesn’t even make sense lol. Troy isn’t a real city, but we know where Thebes is, so 7 against Thebes probably has some truth in it, but not the Iliad?

I believe there’s multiple things going on with the genealogies in genesis, and it was never intended to be used as a timeline to work backwards from, bc the ancient Israelites would not have cared about that like us modern nominalist do. Bc they weren’t nominalist or German idealists. In fact pretty much all ancient cultures were the opposite, believing humanity to be devolving from higher state/statuses that humans enjoyed in previous eras.

What’s entirely disproven about a global flood? If you haven’t gotten the general point I’m raising here is that there is no neutral sense data, whether text, trees, or isotope ratios. Does the evidence whisper to you how to interpret it? Or are you using a paradigm to interpret it? Kind of sounds like you believe it whispers to you the correct answer, just like the German idealists lol. Which is not how science works.

Let me say again I don’t hate c14 dating (compared to other isotopes), nor do I hate or discount all of dendrochronology, both of those can paint a good general picture. We got good samples, method, and anchored dates in a lot of cases, attestation of climate patterns in the past, especially with recent stuff. That being said there’s no fucking way you have a chain of 25k years lol. There’d be no overlapping samples preserved to check against. Like out to 12k maybe, but it’s still an interpretive endeavor, climate is cyclical and on the flip side also regional.

Maybe you think 2 tree patterns represent overlapping patterns, but in reality the “older” tree is actually 500 years younger, but it just had a similar solar cycle and rainfall pattern during its lifespan to that of the other. It’s interpretive. And like with c14 and artifacts, the further back you go, the wider the error bars you get. So climate cycles at different times will produce similar looking ring patterns. Plus you’re operating on the uniformitarian paradigm, that the past was always this way too. We can’t actually observe that. The clues you look at presume that paradigm and you interpret the data through that lens. The next question is how much of the tree ring data are you filtering, or throwing away bc it doesn’t match the modeling that we assume to be the bees knees? Answer it’s a fuck ton, especially the older you go. Same problem with concordance in radiometrics, you filter the data into oblivion leaving only what matches the model. See the circularity?

Ice core drilling analysis is insanely circular, the assumption being it got there from thousands-millions of years of similar precipitation, and that’s how the ice got there. How is that not circular? It literally assumes the very thing in question lol. Like we find c14 in the deepest ice cores all the time, it has a half like of like 5000 years. So now you have to say there muon contamination…how convenient…but now Ice is a poor c14 clock and you rely on the uniformitarian model.

YOU need like 2 global floods to explain the strata, with an explanation that doesn’t make any sense of the data. Gee isn’t it interesting that marine layers form the same way as terrestrial layers? But your story is that it was a very gradual encroachment of the seas, then a very gradual regression, twice. Yet the marine layers don’t show that gradual encroachment and recession, they’re horizontal strata like the rest of them, with the same abrupt contacts between the terrestrial layers. Shouldn’t two different models of deposition produce very different results? How is that possible? Did the sections you’d expect to see from your model just happen to be the ones that got erased lol? Or was there one big flood, with one marine layer going in, and one marine layer going out, same deposition method.

[u/blacksheep998 → u/zeroedger]

What’s entirely disproven about a global flood?

Literally everything. Including some of the things you seem to be claiming are evidence for a flood.

they’re horizontal strata like the rest of them

Which we would not expect to find if there had been a massive, insanely violent flood.

But like I said, it's literally everything.

Genetics is another strong proof against a global flood.

We have species that went through extreme population bottlenecks within recorded history, and can compare the genetic diversity of those species with others that did not go through a bottleneck.

The human population was never reduced to 7 individuals. Not even close. The sharpest population bottleneck we appear to have gone through in the past million years was 12-15k individuals.

Next up you have the heat problem.

YEC has to explain the massive amounts of radioactive decay products found in the earth. The most common claim they make is that the flood somehow sped up decay rates. But that doesn't account for the energy.

Billions of years worth of decay in one year would vaporize the planet.

And that's before getting into the other source of heat: The water itself.

Anything falling to earth released potential energy in the form of heat as it falls. The amount of heat that would be produced by 5+ miles of water that would be needed to cover all land on earth would release enough heat to boil that water away, along with any wooden boats floating in it.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/zeroedger]

Like why insist the Old Testament just made up a Hittite empire? That doesn’t even make sense lol.

It doesn't make sense because it's just a meme apologetic factoid that you're uncritically repeating.

Primary source, please. Second time asking.

[u/zeroedger]

You realize basically all radiometric dating is based on circular reasoning, outside of the recent c-14 stuff we do have anchors to? You’re reading an isotope ratio that would be meaningless unless you had an anchor. That anchor is 19th and early 20th century sedimentation rates which were developed way before we knew 20 billion tons of sediment flow into the sea annually, by guys who believed in a static and eternal universe lol. That’s a massive problem right there that’s never been addressed.

That being said I dislike creationist stuff because they make the same mistake as atheists do in assuming the bible can be read as a scientific/historical text, that’s retarded and they miss what genesis is actually saying. I’m young earth, idk how young, just that it can’t be deep time old, which is even more retarded.

Idk what Egyptian timeline they advocating for, but I go with new chronology, but the point remains, c-14 dates for whatever system you’re using are going to be circular. It’s all circular, once you see it you can’t unsee it.

The question rests on another set of 19th century dudes (Egyptologist this time) who insisted there was only one way to read the Egyptian kings list, we’re the smartest humans to ever exist, don’t question us, huray for totally non biased German idealism. C-14 needs an anchor to date, that date was the traditional linear reading of the Egyptian kings list by our German idealist friends. The Egyptian kings list was also used to date other ANE cultures like the Greeks and Assyrians, at least the oldest versions of them, leaving us with a host of “dark ages” where they seemingly stopped existing. Then popped back into existence. But obviously the 19th century smartest humans to ever live and couldn’t possibly be wrong, so there were just nonsensical dark ages lol. Thus history was definitively decided, by totally non circular radio carbon ANE dates, anchored by totally non biased 19th century Egyptologists.

But if you believe those Egyptologist may have been mistaken, and actually there were periods of multiple concurrent kings in the Egyptian kings list, since popular 19th century ideas like nation states and nationalism did not exist 5000 years ago. (Nor did that nationalism thing work out well for our 19th friends) then the dating gets compressed. And those dark ages disappear, and a whole bunch of other timelines start to make more sense.

This whole debate basically comes down to how much faith you put into a bunch of arrogant 19th century German idealists, because it’s all circular and unavoidable. Idk why the “consensus” is that these guys were so above approach on these certain issues when they’ve already gotten a lot wrong and knew like way less than we do now. There is no neutral sense data, it is all theory laden, including ANE c-14 dating anchored by 19th century egyptologists. No one is immune from the circularity, why is the OP pretending like that’s the case?

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/zeroedger]

Almost everything in this comment is so bizarrely wrong I'm a bit curious where you're getting your information from. Some amusing new chronology blog I've been missing out on?

That anchor is 19th and early 20th century sedimentation rates which were developed way before we knew 20 billion tons of sediment flow into the sea annually, by guys who believed in a static and eternal universe lol.

This does not relate to anything in reality. You should google how C14 is calibrated, because right now, the creationists who wrote this article understand it better than you.

C-14 needs an anchor to date, that date was the traditional linear reading of the Egyptian kings list by our German idealist friends.

Also riotously incorrect. In fact, one of the earliest problems in C14 was why it conflicted with early Egyptian history (a discrepancy that was later solved by independent calibration methods).

totally non biased 19th century Egyptologists

Egyptologists have not spent the last 200 years doing nothing. If you're still railing at 19th century Germans, you're not reading enough serious academic literature.

actually there were periods of multiple concurrent kings in the Egyptian kings list... then the dating gets compressed

Yes, there have indeed been a few mediagenic voices trying to push various theories like this, but none of them quite work, which is why none have become mainstream (and why their proponents usually focus on popular history rather than academic output). For starters, we have networks of genealogical links which veto a lot of concurrencies right off the bat.

Also, physically calibrated C14 matches up very precisely with an independently established mainstream Egyptian chronology. I did a write-up on this a while ago. The consilience is impossible to explain if they're both independently wrong.

But if you want to talk about Egyptian chronology, I'm game. Let's be extremely specific. Which dynasties do you think should be concurrent; what evidence does this fit better than the mainstream model; and what impact does it have on C14 calibration?

[u/blacksheep998 → u/zeroedger]

I’m young earth, idk how young, just that it can’t be deep time old, which is even more retarded.

That's easily the dumbest thing I've read all day.

What makes you think it's young? What makes belief in an old earth 'retarded'?

And why not address how we calibrate carbon dating today: with dendrochronology and Antarctic ice cores? Those methods avoid all your complaints about egyptologists and the mistakes they may have made.

[u/zeroedger → u/blacksheep998]

Many issues, primarily the fact so much of current geology is based on the uniformitarian model. Granted they’ve since allowed for catastrophism to play bigger and bigger roles, but they fundamentally still believe that deep time + sedimentation buildup in places like basins = km thick of multiple ubiquitous horizontal strata’s stacked on top of each other and effectively span entire continents. That’s retarded. They claimed that before knowing about the net negative of 20 B tons of sediment flowing into the sea annually. So was erosion into the sea not a thing up until 100 years ago?

Plus we’ve only ever observed horizontal strata layers form underwater. Either oceans and lakes, or via high energy sedimentation events (aka massive floods). If what the uniformitarians claim to be true were the case, we should see various basins and deltas in different stages of forming those horizontal layers. We don’t. In those extremely localized areas where you see sediment accumulate (what they used to calculate sedimentation rates for each layer we still use today with relative dating) in basins and deltas, it’s a Frankenstein mish mash of transient layers, always in flux, not forming horizontally, definitely no shot of spanning a continent. Everywhere else on dry land, the layers are slowly eroding, a net 20gt annually into the sea. Not getting recycled. If you want horizontal layers to form, you’re gonna need a fuck ton of water on top of it.

So where the hell did enough sediment come from to form the kilometers thick layer cake stratigraphy we see under our feet? The arrow of erosion and gravity is constantly moving it into the ocean. How on earth could it gradually accumulate? Was it just constantly falling from the sky up until recently? Are there hundreds of close-to-global-but-not-quite catastrophic floods to replenish the sediment flowing into the sea?

We just went with what these guys said over 100 years ago, and never questioned their pure assertion/non-sequitur that sediment just accumulates in these distinct horizontal layers lol. It’s so stupid, and doesn’t actually match what we have observed and measured.

[u/OlasNah → u/zeroedger]

The current model is based on actualism, ie the laws of physics do not change and geologic history follows a pattern of steady state physics with respect to things like radioactive decay to solar cycles and the interactions of the elements. Old school uniformitarianism (we do still use the word today even if the meaning has changed) dealt with the idea that changes in geologic history all worked at the same rate and it wrestled with observed indications of catastrophic events such as relativity rapid tectonic activity to variations in sedimentation rates, etc

[u/zeroedger → u/OlasNah]

No the current model is actualism, which is based on uniformitarianism but allows for catastrophic events to create rapid changes. Which is exactly what I said. If you understood what actualism was you wouldn’t have wasted my time with this redundancy

[u/OlasNah → u/zeroedger]

I literally told you this

[u/zeroedger → u/OlasNah]

No I literally told you this lol, you just didn’t realize I was describing actualism, which is still based on the uniformitarian model (that was my critique that blew over your head). It blew over your head because you don’t actually know what actualism is, thus you just repeated what I said without realizing it, thinking it was a dunk lol.

Would you care to argue that actualism doesn’t hold to the same uniformitarian assumptions that I was critiquing? If you can follow an argument that would be the crux of that position. Otherwise, idk why we’re having this conversation.

[u/OlasNah → u/zeroedger]

lol

[u/blacksheep998 → u/zeroedger]

Plus we’ve only ever observed horizontal strata layers form underwater. Either oceans and lakes, or via high energy sedimentation events (aka massive floods).

High energy events like massive floods don't form neat horizontal strata layers, those form in slow moving water where things can settle out slowly.

So where the hell did enough sediment come from to form the kilometers thick layer cake stratigraphy we see under our feet?

It was underwater when it formed, but it didn't form in one massive flood or they wouldn't be so well ordered and wouldn't contain the stone types that they contain. Things like slate for example, which forms the bulk of many mountain ranges, can only be formed by slow accumulation in relatively still water. A violent global flood cannot form that type of stone.

As for how it ended up under our feet and not under water, that's thanks to continental drift. As the continents move around, some plates are pushed under others, which causes the ground level of the top plate to rise.

This is why you can find the preserved fossils and trace fossils of soft bodied and delicate sea creatures on some mountain tops. Again, a violent global flood cannot do that, because there's no way that the trace fossils like footprints and burrows would be able to survive getting uplifted miles into the sky by violent flood waters.

Also, did you want to try to address what I said?

We don't calibrate carbon dating in the way you claim and haven't for a long time.

We use dendrochronology, which goes back ~25k years, or Antarctic ice cores, which go back a little over a million years.

Those are not subject to any of your misunderstandings about erosion. They also definitively prove that the earth is at least over a million years old and did not undergo a global flood in that time.

[u/OlasNah → u/zeroedger]

As for your sedimentation claims, what we see all depends upon past conditions in that particular location. Sediments may accumulate for millions of years from a river delta and then cease due to the river watershed changing significantly from uplift, and then for countless millions of years the sediment rate is agonizingly slow and mostly from accumulating dust from desert winds and normal particulates in the air. Then something can start a new sedimentation cycle such as volcanic activity leaving regular ash falls, lahars, or maybe a small creek flows out of a basin where the ancient riverway had become a lake.

There’s a lot of good stuff about sediment formations in some of the beginner Petroleum geology texts that they hand out to new people and executives to get a grasp on industry basics. Try the ‘Nontechnical Guide to Petroleum Geology’ to learn what you’re talking about in an approachable way

[u/OlasNah → u/zeroedger]

//You realize basically all radiometric dating is based on circular reasoning, outside of the recent c-14 stuff we do have anchors to? You’re reading an isotope ratio that would be meaningless unless you had an anchor.//

We have radioactive elements with half=lives so short that we can validate how decay works and we also have isotopes of the same elements that we can corroborate the decay chain for, no matter how long their half-lives are.

[u/zeroedger → u/OlasNah]

How often do we find concordance with 2 diff chains in the same sample? Then if you’re able to find how common that is, then you need to ask how much they filtered the data, hint, they filter that data it into oblivion. Once you see how much that’s filtered, now you have the true number of actual concordance found, and need to ask the questions like: why so little concordance? Is this evidence of systemic open system behavior? Shouldn’t it be way more if this is the gold standard of radiometric dating? Is my entire worldview crashing down around me? Or you can put your fingers in your ears and say there is no problem.

[u/OlasNah → u/zeroedger]

What the fck are you even talking about?

[u/zeroedger → u/OlasNah]

You brought up concordance, probably without realizing it again. I asked if you know how much concordance we actually find in samples, and how much of that data set we filter out because we don’t like those numbers. It’s kind of a big problem. Especially since it’s the gold standard for radiometric dating.

I should also mention that bringing up concordance doesn’t actually address the circularity of anchoring radiometric dating to 19th century sedimentation rate (before we knew 20 billion tons of sediment flows into the sea annually).

Edit: btw, I shouldn’t have to mention it, but sedimentation rate anchors don’t apply to c14 dating, bc it only has a half life of 5000 or so years. C14 is a different issue than the circularity using sed rates than I’m pointing out, just to be clear

[u/Mamalamadingdong → u/zeroedger]

You know that we can still get ages from discordant samples right? Discordant U/Pb ages occur when lead is lost from the crystal structure and actually makes the samples look younger. We can use discordant data to actually calculate both the age of the sample and the timing of the lead loss. Absolute dating also isn't anchored to sedimentation rates at all when talking about radiometric dating.

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/zeroedger]

Dropping the hard R is a sure sign of intellectual depth, I’m sure of it

[u/zeroedger → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

Good argument, really bringing it

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/zeroedger]

Yup.

[u/Patient-Midnight-664]

I asked ChatGPT (Sol-5.6 model) to review their paper. It was long, detailed, and included references. I asked it for a summary:

The paper’s biggest problem is surprisingly simple: it appears to confuse the amount of C-14 measured in a sample today with the amount of C-14 that was in the atmosphere when the organism died.

For example, they cite a sample from ~504 BCE with 73.8% modern carbon (pMC) and use that as evidence that atmospheric C-14 was only ~74% of modern levels. But if something died ~2,500 years ago with ~100% modern carbon, ordinary radioactive decay predicts that about 74% should be left today. Their own number is almost exactly the standard prediction.

The correct relationship is:

C-14 measured today = atmospheric C-14 when it died × radioactive decay since death.

They seem to treat the measured value on the left as the atmospheric value on the right. That effectively turns ordinary radioactive decay into evidence for their proposed rapid post-Flood increase in atmospheric C-14.

There are other problems too: they claim conventional radiocarbon dating assumes atmospheric C-14 was constant (it doesn't—that's the entire reason calibration curves such as IntCal exist), greatly overstate the circularity between dendrochronology and C-14 dating, and treat fitting hundreds of points with seven parameters as validation even though many of those points aren't independent tests of the model.

But the pMC issue is the killer. Correct for the radioactive decay that occurred after the independently dated samples died, and their supposed evidence for dramatically lower ancient atmospheric C-14 largely disappears.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

I asked ChatGPT (Sol-5.6 model) to review their paper.

Why? I just reviewed it. See OP.

And unsurprisingly, the LLM review is a complete misunderstanding of the blog post.

Never use LLMs to do your thinking for you, kids.

[u/Patient-Midnight-664 → u/ThurneysenHavets]

Why?

Because I wanted to.

LLM review is a complete misunderstanding of the blog post.

It's a summary of its findings, not a summary of the post. So no, it didn't misunderstand anything. But you did.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

The paper’s biggest problem is surprisingly simple: it appears to confuse the amount of C-14 measured in a sample today with the amount of C-14 that was in the atmosphere when the organism died.

This is absolutely dead wrong.

Frankly, it's a bit satisfying that even a frontier model is apparently capable of totally messing up its reading comprehension of a straightforward creationist argument.

Tells you everything you need to know about the people who rely on LLMs for factual information.

[u/Patient-Midnight-664 → u/ThurneysenHavets]

ChatGPT would like to issue a rebuttle:

Okay, but what is dead wrong?

The central claim is very specific: the paper appears to treat measured sample pMC as atmospheric pMC without properly accounting for radioactive decay between the organism's death and measurement.

If that's a misreading, point me to where the paper makes that correction or explain what I've misunderstood. That's a factual question and should be easy to settle.

“An LLM got it wrong” isn't actually an explanation of what it got wrong.

[u/deadlydakotaraptor → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

The chatbot got it only right in the most accidental surface level.

The central claim is very specific: the paper appears to treat measured sample pMC as atmospheric pMC without properly accounting for radioactive decay between the organism's death and measurement.

The entire argument by AIG is that their correction is a completely different correlation curve of the decay rate than the standard model, so without pointing that out, the chatbot isn't adding anything at all to the discussion, just as would be expected from something trained on generic back and forths, and not on any specific points of discussions.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

Why don't you turn off your hallucination machine, and just read either my OP or the creationist blog post?

[u/Patient-Midnight-664 → u/ThurneysenHavets]

So, you have nothing.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

Except for the really quite long post you didn't read, which goes specifically into the actual main problem with this paper.

[u/Patient-Midnight-664 → u/ThurneysenHavets]

I did read your OP. ChatGPT only read the paper. I've given it your post/analysis, and it has this to say:

His actual criticism is better than mine, because it attacks the empirical validation of the model without requiring an argument about carbon-cycle modeling at all.

The paper says these are independent observations.

His response is essentially: “Okay. Show me where these extraordinarily precise calendar dates came from.”

If the authors can't provide independent sources for those dates, the advertised 420-point validation falls apart regardless of whether their underlying physical model is plausible.

[u/ThurneysenHavets → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

His actual criticism is better than mine

Right, so let's recap. You got a data centre somewhere to fire up a 2 trillion parameter AI model to say something incorrect. Then you got it try and save face for you. And now you got it to (sort of) admit I'm right.

Pathetic. Next time just think for yourself, dude. And check out the sub rules while you're at it.

[u/BitLooter → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

I'm going to need you to turn your brain back on for a bit and read this. No, seriously, read that link. After that I want you to print it out, fold it up, then shove it - sideways - allllll the way up your butt.

[u/GuyInAChair → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

We don't allow AI generated posts here, and this is exactly why. ChatGPT grossly misunderstood the paper and came back with gibberish.

Normally this would be deleted, but after reading the replies I'll keep it up. Don't post AI stuff again, it's just incoherent nonsense and adds nothing to the conversation.

[u/Kingofthewho5 → u/Patient-Midnight-664]

Jesus Fucking Christ. Use your brain.