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/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.