Temptation, in the common secular sense, seems to indicate an attraction to something.


  Temptation
  
  
  The act of tempting
  The condition of being tempted.
  Something attractive, tempting or seductive; an inducement or enticement.
  Pressure applied to your thinking designed to create wrong emotions which will eventually lead to wrong actions.
  
  
  Tempting
  
  
  attractive, appealing, enticing
  seductive, alluring, inviting
  
  
  Tempt
  
  
  (transitive) To provoke someone to do wrong, especially by promising a reward; to entice. She tempted me to eat the apple.
  (transitive) To attract; to allure. Its glossy skin tempted me.
  (transitive) To provoke something; to court. It would be tempting fate.
  


But, as with many secular concepts that overlap religious concepts, there are often explicit theological definitions which allow the terminology to fit into religious, dogmatic, and theological discussions with less ambiguity. In this case, is there any predominating Christian/theological definition?

In particular, how is temptation defined or explained in such a manner that allows Christ to have been tempted?

To clarify the problem, if Christ is to be attracted to some thing, there must be some part or aspect of Christ to which some thing appeals. More significantly, Christ, in order to be tempted, must desire that thing if we are to say He is attracted to it. And if Christ is to contain a part or aspect to which some evil may be a temptation, thus arousing a desire, there could be said to be a sinful nature or component in Christ -- a contradiction of His Godliness.

To illustrate the problem, one might select magnetism (or any natural force) as a natural analogy. For the effect of magnetism (sin) to attract (tempt) a material (person), the material must contain, at least to some extent, a magnetic (sinful) component.

Thus, if we say that Christ is tempted in this understanding, we say that He has a sinful component.

How do we Christians, Catholics, or any denomination that has a well-established concept, define or explain temptation in a non-trivial manner without requiring Christ to have a sinful nature?


Question: Is it a problem with radiometric dating that carbon 14 is found in materials dated to millions of years old?
Answer: I actually happen to know something about the "Miller Tale" as it is called. Miller "borrowed" some dinosaur bones from a museum without telling the curators or owners what he was actually intending on doing with it. He immediately took it to be $^{14}C$ dated and received a date of roughly 40,000 years. So if Dinosaur bones are supposedly 65+ million years old, why is this? I'll tell you why.

The dinosaur bones did NOT have any carbon in them. They'd been essentially completely replaced by minerals during the fossilization process. What happened was that Miller did NOT know that they were covered in a preservative made of an organic material called shellac, which is organic so it's full of carbon. This contaminated the result. What they got was a date for the shellac, not the dinosaur fossils.

Onto your questions:


So what research is being done to correct such an obvious dating flaw?
The flaw is with creationists. We've been trying to educate creationists for decades now, but willful ignorance in favor of adhering to tradition and presuppositions is far stronger than anything that can be taught.
Using this data, can a more accurate method be derived?
Yes! We have dozens of independent dating methods that have accurately dated the layers of dinosaur fossils to a very high degree of accuracy. We have also used isochron dating to test for contamination and/or how well the rocks acted as closed systems.
Or do we need another dating method all together?
Carbon dating is very accurate. I recommend you check out This Paper from 1949. It shows that objects of known age via independent methods and recordings are corroborated by carbon dating.
At what extremes of failure does it take for a scientifically approved method to become nonscientific?
At the point at which it can be shown to be false and lack point of predictive capability. An ignorant creationist who lacks an understanding of radiometric dating does not constitute evidence against a well-established and well-understood process.
And what does it say about science if dating something as 65 million years old when it is less then 100,000 years old becomes an acceptable margin of error?
I'd answer this if it were true. Unfortunately, as I said, the ignorance of creationists does not constitute evidence against radiometric dating by any stretch of the imagination.


I know this was incredibly simple and largely unscientific, but I'm dealing only with your creationist claim. I didn't know this claim was still out there. Got any other questions on radiometric dating?