Radiometric dating is reliable

I would like structure my opening argument in the following manner. First, I would like to address my opponent's statement of "Radiometric dating: Should we trust it? " After I have done this, I shall move on to make what might be considered an affirmative argument. Radiometric dating: Should we trust it? My opponent makes one basic point: It works and works consistently. He argues that since we have attempted to date meteorites, and consistently come up with a date of aproximately 4.5 bllion years. This is known as Pragmatism. To simply put it, pragmatism teaches that if it works, it is true. In my refutation I will demonstrate why philosophically this is faulty way to glean epistemological knowledge. Imagine you bring your children to a new school. This school is isolated from the rest of the world, and does not have access to the information. You walk into a math class to observe and you notice that the students all believe that 2+2 is 5. They consistently come to this same conclusion, and the school has even developed its own advanced mathematic theories that incorporate the fact that 2+2 is 5. It is consistent, no matter what you do, according to the mathematic schema the school employs, 2+2 is 5. You question this, but the answer you get is "No matter what we do, when we add 2 and 2 we get 5. " You may ask, how does this relate to radiometric dating. Well, here we go. Pragmatically, the school has a system of mathematics that works. It is able to provide consistent, predictable results. What's the problem? The school has no objective way to verify if their results match reality. Now, radiometric dating suffers from the same problem. We can predictably date things, but how can we know that we are not getting 5 when we add 2 and 2? How can we know that our tests are not consistently providing the wrong answer? There is no objective means to prove that our tests that revel a solar system of 4.5 billion years old is correct. Allow me to provide another example, perhaps one that is a little more pallatable. The year is 1300 BCE, and the prevailing scientific notion about the nature of the universe is that the world is a flat disc that rests upon four columns. There a dome that covers the world and prevents the water that is outside that dome from crashing in. The sun, moon, and stars are lights that travel along the surface of that dome. Now, flash forward to the year 1540. Copernicus is utilizing a newish invention called a telescope. With this telescope he is able to objectively see that there is no water, there is no dome, and humans knew from their travels that the world is not a disk. Flash forward to today, we now objectively know that the 1300 BCE cosmology was incorrect. However, according to pragmatism, it was correct until proven incorrect. The ancients could reliably predict when the sun would rise, the relative track it would take across the sky. It worked. So according to pragmatism, it was true. Just as 2+2 is 5 for the isolated school. However, we know that 2+2 is not 5. This leads me to my affirmative argument. Skepticism: Epistemological Limitations. . http://www.youtube.com...http://www.youtube.com...Now, I am not going to argue that radiometric dating is NOT reliable. Rather, I am going to argue for the fact that we cannot definitively know at this point if it is or is not reliable. Much of what I am going to say has already been alluded to in my rebuttal to my opponent, so I will be brief. One of the oldest philosophical questions is "How can we know? " This is a basic question of epistemology. Now, for those of you who do not know, epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge. There are two basic ideas that permeate epistemological study. The first is empiricism. Empiricism is the theory that we can know what we can experince. Empiricism underlies the aforementioned pragmatism. However, a competing theory is that of skepticism. Skepticism, simply defined, argues that we cannot truly know anything, or that our abiity to know is severely limited. Quite simply put, we cannot know that radiometric dating is accurate, because we cannot know anything for sure. This is often called Radical Skepticism. While I understand that this is a difficult concept to truly grasp. I would like to submit the linked videos for your consideration. They are both views from the first Matrix movie. In both these clips, Neo is confronted with the fact that everything he thoght he knew to be real and true was actually an elaborate illusion. Isn't it possible that the universe we live in is actually an elaborate illusion? Perhaps we are a part of some alien video game. Maybe it is all a figment of your imagination. Couldn't we all be simply subjective thoughts in the mind of God? The second is the famous first fight between Neo and Morpheus. Now, on one level I include this because it is my favorite fight scene of all times. However, on a more serious matter I have included this because I want to ask the same question that Morpheus asks Neo at 3:03 in the video. Can you know objectively that this universe exists? Can you know that the universe is actually as old as our tests tell us it is? What objective means do we have to verify this? In short. .. Do you think that's air your breathing?