Mr. Turney was apparently "not present" when competent geologists were explaining the basics of geology.
I could be wrong on this but, isn't carbon dating based on the "assumption" that the world is a certain age old ? If so, then isn't it a little difficult to make an irrefutable case for any of the material outlined in the blog ?
For my own interest sake, I'll look into this further.
The only assumption atomic dating makes is that the decay rates of radioactive elements are constant, and the physics folks say that's a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Carbon dating is used for organic material, and I believe is only good back to a few tens of thousands of years. To geologists, that's yesterday. 
For old rocks, radioactive isotopes with long half-lives are used.
Rocks that were formed by cooling magma are dated by the presence of radioactive waste products in the crystals of the rock's minerals that don't fit properly into the crystal structure and so would never have ended up there during cooling. Thus, they must have gotten there when a radioactive molecule that did fit was caught up in the crystallization, and later decayed.
Potassium-40 decaying to argon-40 and rubidium-87 decaying to strontium-87 are two fo the most commonly used decay pairs. So, if you can figure out how much of the parent and daughter elements you have, and you know how fast the decay happens, you can figure out how far back in time the rock had all parent, no daughter molecules, That's the solidification date.
In practice, rocks are dated using at least two different atomic decay pairs with different decay rates, because in practice this is tricky. Only if both methods give the same date, is the date considered good.
One thing you didn't mention was that the snake-like granitic intrusion was originally probably a sheet of material, more or less flat. It was squeezed into those folds long after it became solid. Think about it -- pressures that can squeeze rock like silly putty!
Thanks Karen
"One of the ways that geologists study the history of the earth or a geological feature such as the Grand Canyon is to observe the geological processes that are occurring today..."
Isn't that the whole crux of the creation/evolution debate?
Evolutionist: things are happening today as they have always happened. I can explain what I see by application of what is happening now (or in the small time-window of historical record).
Creationist: things are happening today differently than they happened in the past. What I see may be a result of some non-natural process that happened in the past (instigated by an intelligent agent).
Once a disconnect (with implied intelligent agent) is allowed, then some part of the timeline of the past is no longer a valid subject of "scientific" study. Production of isotopes, tree rings, fossils, or any other natural process is interrupted by such a disconnect, voiding their use in determining timeline or prior events. (When someone attempts to "merge" creation and science, they have to be very careful in where they attempt to draw that line.)
There's not just a dating disconnect. The YEC folks dismiss obvious structural evidence in the strata that clearly shows slow deposition over changing climates. Anyone who has spent time on the Colorado Plateau can see the obvious differences between sandstones (dune and shoreline formations), mudstones, shales, and limestones. Any layman willing to look can easily read the formation layers like a book.
A single flood incident would produce a very different sediment. The miraculous "Flood" would have to pick up and deposit entire deserts, ocean beds, tidal flats. It would have to lay them down intact and in sequence across vast regions. Fine details such as animal and insect tracks, dried and filled mud cracks, evaporite veins and dune bedding structures would have to be miraculously preserved. Fossils would miraculously be sorted - without error - to create the illusion of an evolutionary progression of lifeforms.
"Thus, the most accurate time piece known to humankind -- the atomic clock -- can be used to date the rock of the Grand Canyon"
A quibble: Rocks are dated by a nuclear "clock", not atomic. An atomic clock relies on the highly constant difference between two energy levels in the electrons of an atom. Radiometric dating relies on the statistically-constant decay rate of radioactive nuclei.
"What they conveniently fail to mention is that geologically younger rocks are near the bottom of the Grand Canyon, while geologically older rocks are near the top."
This claim needs to be directly confronted.
Creationist: "What they conveniently fail to mention is that geologically younger rocks are near the bottom of the Grand Canyon, while geologically older rocks are near the top."
WJM's request: "This claim needs to be directly confronted."
OK. This creationist claim is in all meaningful senses a total falsehood; it possesses mimimal validity in only two extremely trivial senses:
1) There are recent Tertiary & Quaternary volcanic basalts that erupted from several cinder cones around the western Grand Canyon; unsurprisingly, some of this 'young' lava flowed downhill to the bottom of the Canyon.
2) Similarly, there are erosional bits of all the Canyon's formations that have been transported by water or by landslide to the bottom of the Canyon.
Clearly, neither case of younger rocks at the Canyon bottom constitutes a contradiction of the Law of Superposition (the higher in the sedimentary pile, the younger the rock).
Nor are there any examples of older rocks occuring near the top of the Canyon, except perhaps the few carried up by hikers.
May I suggest a few minor editorial corrections?
1) It is properly termed the 'Tonto Platform', rather than the 'Tonto Plateau'.
2. "These sediments were metamorphosed by the enormous heat and pressure of volcanic action -- the result of plate tectonics.
Vulcanism produces limited quantities of 'Contact Metamorphic' rock; large bodies of metamorphic rock such as the Vishnu Schist form via 'Regional Metamorphism', without requiring vulcanism. This is indeed a product of plate tectonics: rocks are currently being regionally metamorphosed in the middle & lower crust beneath the rising Himalayas, for example, as the (Australia-)India plate continues to collide with the Asia plate.
Commenting by HaloScan
