Johnny said:
No, corroboration was the more accurate term. "Corroborating evidence is evidence that tends to support a proposition that is already supported by some evidence."
What you learned in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation, which is unrelated to the subject at hand. Correlation is the strength of relationship between two variables. For example, in medicine, defect X may often appear with defect Y, but this does not mean that defect X causes defect Y. Little to do with dating methods. Corroboration was more accurate.
Leave it to you to try and discount and play down the strength of corroborating evidence. Only a creationist would ever attempt such a feat. Misapplication of a concept with some ambigous statement of what you learned when you were in school in is a must in this situation.
When scientists use a comparison of the results of one dating method with another they are engaging in
correlation of the two results. Depending on the underlying
cause this may be a corroboration or it may not, depending on the
cause of the correlation.
My point was only that there is a
cause as to why the two methods give similar results, and that
cause may not be that they are both giving an age that is roughly correct.
There is a logical and sensible reason why dating laboratories usually ask for an estimate of the age of a sample prior to its being dated. However, a double blind test is used in medical testing to avoid the known bias introduced when people know in advance what they are looking for. This is not a
major reason for my skepticism of long age dating methods, but it may contribute to helping to mask exceptions that if they were pursued more rigorously to find answers would cast light on reasons why most radiometric methods inherently give long age results and hence why they roughly correlate.
There are other reasons for my not believing
dogmatically in long age radiometric dating that are related to our inability to have a
direct way of corroborating long age determinations such as we find in the short age C-14 tree ring case.
And of course scripture does give sufficient information in the geneologies to allow us to be
certain that it is teaching that humans have been on the Earth only a short while. This was a good enough clue for me to begin to doubt that long age radiometric dating is as infallible as some try to tell us.
In other words, I treat this disconnect between scripture and scientific age determinations as a "wakeup call" left by God to tell us to withhold final judgment on this matter until scientists "dig deeper". After all, correcting previous errors or assumptions as new evidence arises is said to be "what science is all about" (or so I was told by someone here).
