How old is Earth?

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Sis Barnett wrote of a Sunday school lesson where it is related that:

> supposed "fossils" had been found...

Please forgive me if I detect a bit of skepticism regarding the
existence of fossils, but the field behind my house in Texas is
absolutely *filled* with fossils of trilobites and cuttlefish.  They
are unmistakenly entire critters, not just some vague outline of a
portion of a tooth or something, yet they are made of stone.  I've dug
'em up and held 'em myself.  I could paint them the right colors and
they'd look alive.

> they came across a set of bones
> that their carbon dating testing told them were "millions" of years old. 

Carbon dating is only good for a few thousand years, and only on
organic remains (i.e. dating old camp-fire remains, leftovers, wooden
artifacts).  For fossils, other methods of radiometric dating are
done.  Note also that C-14 and K-Ar dating methods don't have a
"built-in" check, whereby other radiometric methods do (the ratio
of three isotopes are checked, rather than just two).

An understandable discussion on radiometric dating can be found at:

  http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/isochron-dating.html

A mathematical proof is also presented on that page, for those who are
so inclined (I happen to be so inclined).

> The farmer, being a honest man, had to tell them that the bones
> they had found, actually belonged to his prize-winning hog that had died
> about ten years earlier.

I'm rather skeptical of this account since fossils are easily
distinguishable from bones.  Fossils are not merely old bones, but
actual stone.

Certainly there have been instances of mistaken identity and even
outright fraud in paleantology.  Who can forget Piltdown man?

But not every instance of fossils found in a field is a case of ten-
year-old hog's bones.

> Kind of goes to show that you can't believe
> everything that "THEY" say is true, huh?

True, but the entire basis of scientific thought is peer review:
results of experiments are published.  If others are not able to
reproduce the experiments, the results are not accepted.  Every
discovery, hypothesis, and theory is subject to review and, if
the evidence warrants it, rejection.

Some of the "THEY"'s are some personal friends, college buddies who are
now doing serious research.  The best man in my wedding, for example,
is a researcher specializing in mammalian paleantology.  If there is a
grand conspiracy to invent facts in order to confound mankind into
believing there is no God, my friends have not made this conspiracy
known to me.

>   By the way, since we are on the subject, am I the only one around here
> that believes that God doesn't have to have a reason for everything...

Amen!

God is good, ain't he!

Richard "talk.origins" Masoner