I remember reading about it as a kid, in 1990s creationist books that were attempting to argue that carbon dating couldn't be trusted and the world was actually only 6,000 years old.

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bmenrigh a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah I grew up in a religious household. A reoccurring theme was about how scientists didn't have a clue about most things. Carbon dating was high up on the list of stuff "scientists were wrong about".

	▲	not2b a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but for their young earth creationist beliefs to be valid, the errors from carbon dating would need to be far larger than the errors caused by effects described in this article, and other means of dating would need to be ignored.

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noduerme a day ago | parent | prev [-]

So like... finding carbon older than 6000 years was proof that the whole science was bunk? That's some circular reasoning, alright.

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GJim 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But.....

God created that carbon to make it look like the Earth is older than 6,000 years.

(Yes, an American I met did make this argument to me regarding the fossil record. There is no helping some people.)

	▲	chistev 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's called Omphalos hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis

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mrguyorama 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, the point is that you can't trust anything a scientist says. It's literally reliant on a giant conspiracy theory that most of society is controlled by a secret war between satan and god and scientists (and leftists and democrats and and and) are on the side of satan and trying to turn you away from gods light.

Remember that America has a large, large population of fundamentalist christians. Remember that The USSR was nominally an atheist state. The US pretended to be more "godly" to contrast itself against that. That included adding bullshit like "In god we trust" on all money, making kids every single day say "Under god" to an american flag, and literal propaganda campaigns about how those godless commies were terrible and in league with satan.

The point is that you can't trust anyone other than your dad or your pastor.