Quote:
Originally Posted by slave4him
The 1997–2005 RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) research project at the Institute for Creation Research (co-sponsored by the Creation Research Society) demonstrated that creationists could support a larger-scale collaborative research effort, particularly if it delivered significant breakthroughs on a key challenging issue. The primary focus of this research effort was the radioactive methods for dating rocks that supposedly yield age estimates of millions and billions of years and thus provide support for the claimed multi-billion year age for the earth.
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Hi slave4him, thanks for posting. My intial response when I see ICR material is the embarassment that I felt when I used to promote this stuff. I started out on this topic many years ago as a YEC who was simply trying to understand the "Age of the Earth" debate. I was involved in full time ministry at the time so naturally my research was coming out in my preaching as well. I had to do a lot of catching up to even understand most of the questions that were being put forth.
The RATE program began after it was pointed out repeatedly by "evolutionists" that the YEC's arguments on radioactive decay rates were all based upon a deliberate twisting of a footnote in a Univ. textbook by ICR staff. The footnote dealt with the proper methods in collecting samples for testing. For example, if you visit a Hawaiin volcano and take up a lava sample that was known to have been deposited 100 years ago - you should collect only lava from that flow. To instead collect a xenolith (a rock "from elsewhere" that was carried along by the flow) and claim that your sample is "100 years old" is to be intentionally deceptive.
Of course after reading that, the ICR staff immediately went out collecting xenoliths from a variety of places. Hawaii, Mount Saint Helens, etc. I have a pic at home of ICR "scientists" gleefully picking out gravel from a mudflow at Mount Saint Helens. They then shipped the gravel "samples" to a lab and got back dates in the millions of years. Yet the mudflow was created in 1981. They trumpeted that for 20 years before they were called "liars" enough times that they had to go back to the drawing board.
The RATE, program was the result of that. I'm breaking this post up to avoid overwhelming folks with too much info at once. In the next post we'll take about RATE. But for starters, remember that RATE was necessary because ICR staff had been caught repeatedly in a lie.
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