One of the many shaky arguments that is held in high regard and ferociously protected by devoted evolutionists is radiometric dating. Radiometric dating is a go-to conversation-ender that they would have us believe proves what is called an "old earth," in essence, older than God says it is. There are often anomalies that arise when using radiometric dating, and they can be attributed to the fact that it is based on three unproven assumptions (not very scientific). The first assumption that radiometric dating is based upon is that current observable rates (of nuclear decay, for example) may be extrapolated into the past. Nuclear decay is the changing of a radioactive parent element into a different, or daughter, element. Radiometric dating measures the amount of decay that has occurred in a particular specimen in order to determine its age, according to current observable decay rates.
The second unprovable and unobservable assumption made for radiometric dating is that beginning values are known. In other words, it is assumed that when a rock specimen was formed (brand new) that all elements included in the specimen began with no decay.
The third assumption upon which the accuracy of radiometric dating is based is that no contaminants or environmental factors could have altered decay rates.
Now, the problem with all three of these assumptions is that they are contradicted by two types of anomalies that occur frequently. The first is that one rock specimen often yields more than one date. In other words, in one individual rock, one element will date at one age while another element in the same rock will date at a drastically different age. The other type of anomaly occurs when we observe the formation of a rock (so we know its age), but it dates at a different age. The presence of both anomalies, especially at the frequency with which they occur, means that we cannot confidently accept radiometric dates as factually accurate.
Carbon-14 dating, or radiocarbon dating, is a method that is used to date the remains of once-living specimens. Carbon-12 is common carbon. Carbon-14 is a rare radioactive isotope that decays slowly. Carbon-14 dating measures the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 found in a specimen. The decay rates should theoretically tell us the age of the specimen. In a vacuum, there would be no problem with this thinking. Carbon-14 is produced in the atmosphere when cosmic rays act upon the nitrogen in the atmosphere, causing it to decay to carbon-14. Carbon-14 constantly cycles through living organisms, always being replaced, remaining at fairly constant levels. When an organism dies, it no longer replaces the carbon-14 in its body. At this point, the carbon-14 “clock” starts ticking. After 50,000 years all of the carbon-14 in an organism will have decayed. In essence, no trace of carbon-14 can be found in an organism that died 50,000 years ago. Radiocarbon (or carbon-14) cannot exist for millions of years as carbon-14, so any fossil or rock sample containing carbon-14 cannot be millions of years old.
A few variables can alter the levels of carbon-14 in a specimen that may or may not be taken into account when dating. They usually are only taken into account when it suits the purposes of the study, hardly scientific.
Plants take up less carbon-14 than other life forms do, causing them to test older than they actually are. Industrialization and the burning of coals, oils, and gases on a large scale released tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, depleting the levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, causing organisms that died during that time to test older. Cosmic rays entering the earth’s atmosphere affect the amount of carbon-14 produced. The earth’s magnetic field affects the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere. The energy of the earth’s magnetic field has been decreasing, allowing more and more carbon-14 to be produced, causing fossils to test older, and older all the time (McDonald). Who is to say that other events in the unobservable past did not also alter the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere. It would certainly help to explain some of the discrepancies that exist in carbon dating.
In addition, the flood would have buried a great deal of the carbon-12 in the biosphere, and would have also buried the vast majority of the organisms that replenish it. Meanwhile, carbon-14 would be continually produced. The result would be a much higher ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 after the flood than before, causing the organisms fossilized during the flood (which are the majority of fossils in existence) to appear to be much older than they actually are, based purely on carbon dating.
Other methods of radiometric dating are used in addition to carbon dating. Most methods of radiometric dating measure the ratios of parent to daughter product in rocks, assumed to begin from the time of solidification. For example, uranium-238 decays to lead-206. While it is true that we can very accurately measure these ratios, what they tell us is based on the unproven assumptions mentioned earlier. These methods of dating specimens frequently yield anomalous results.
“Researchers applied posterior reasoning to the dating of Australopithecus ramidus fossils. Most samples of basalt closest to the fossil-bearing strata gave dates of about 23 [million years] by the argon-argon method. The authors decided that was ‘too old’, according to their beliefs about the place of the fossils in the evolutionary grand scheme of things. So they looked at some basalt further removed from the fossils and selected 17 to 26 samples to get an acceptable maximum age of 4.4 [million years]. The other nine samples again gave much older dates but the authors decided they must be contaminated, and discarded them. That is how radiometric dating works. It is very much driven by the existing long-age worldview that pervades academia today" (Batten).
The example of the Australopithecus ramidus is not an isolated incident. Radiometric dating is often handled very arbitrarily by the very ones who purport to be the champions of scientific integrity, all the while accusing Christians of being unscientific.
One documented example of flawed radiometric dating comes to us from New Zealand's Mt. Ngauruhoe. Known lava flows from Mt. Ngauruhoe occurred in 1949, 1954, and 1975. Their radiometric dates ranged from .27-3.5 million years (Snelling). If radiometric dating yielded wrong dates from observable events, can they be trusted to yield correct dates for unobservable events?
Another documented example of flawed dating comes from the Grand Canyon.
“Geologist Dr. Steve Austin sampled basalt from the base of the Grand Canyon strata and from lava that spilled over the edge of the canyon. By evolutionary reckoning, the latter should be a billion years younger than the basalt from the bottom. Standard laboratories analyzed the isotopes. The rubidium-strontium isochron technique suggested that the recent lava flow was 270 Ma older than the basalts beneath the Grand Canyon—an impossibility" (Batten).
The very existence of the various forms of coal stands in stark contradiction to the amount of time that we are told that it takes for them to form. Coal, graphite, and diamonds, which are supposed by those who believe in an "old earth" to be millions of years old, contain carbon-14. Now, remember that carbon-14 only exists as carbon-14 for up to 50,000 years. So, according to the "old earth" worldview, coal, graphite, and diamonds cannot exist (Lowe).
Another alleged "proof" that the Earth is billions of years old is the layers of sedimentary stratification that we can see when we encounter a cliff face. As was discussed in a previous session, we have observed stratification take place in a matter of weeks during the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption, so we know that it does not necessarily take very long at all, especially under catastrophic circumstances. We also discussed polystrate fossils, which stand in defiance of millions of years. Another piece of evidence that supports rapid stratification is the fact that there exist many examples of several layers of sediment that have bent together, some into a hairpin, without cracking. The absence of cracks can only mean that the layers bent together and that they were still soft when they bent. All of the layers being pliable can only mean that they settled quickly, not over the course of millions of years.
Astronomy also points to the glory of God. One notable piece of evidence is found in the type of supernovae that we find in our galaxy. Supernovae are exploding stars. In the event of a supernova, the remnants (SNRs) should continue expanding for hundreds of thousands of years. In our Milky Way galaxy and its satellite galaxies, there are no widely expanded, therefore very old, (stage 3) SNRs. There are very few stage 1 (moderately old) supernovae in these galaxies (Davies). The logical conclusion is that our galaxies are young.
Whenever you are told that man arose on his own, remember that "the heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands."
Sources:
- Batten, Don, David Catchpoole, Jonathan D. Sarfati, and Carl Wieland. The Creation Answers Book: Answers to over 60 Commonly-asked Questions in 20 Categories. Eight Mile Plains, Qld., Australia: Creation Ministries International, 2006. Print
- Davies, K., Distribution of supernova remnants in the galaxy, Proc. 3rd ICC, pp. 175–184, 1994.
- Lowe, D.C., Problems associated with the use of coal as a source of 14C free background material, Radiocarbon 31:117–120, 1989.
- McDonald, K.L. and Gunst, R.H., An analysis of the earth’s magnetic field from 1835 to 1965. ESSA Technical Report IER 46-IES, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., p. 14 1965.
- Snelling, A.A., The cause of anomalous potassium-argon ‘ages’ for recent andesite flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, and the implications for potassium-argon ‘dating’, Proc. 4th ICC, pp. 503–525, 1998.