Let’s look at the first chapter of John:
“In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.” John 1:1
In order to arrive at some comfortable resting point in our minds as to whether the world was created in six days or six billion years first of all, we’re going to discuss radioactive dating methods. There are three radioactive dating methods that are most popular:
- The uranium decay method
- potassium argon method, and
- radiocarbon dating method
Now all of these methods have one thing in common, they attempt to date various processes in nature by measuring how much radioactive material is left out of a presupposed original amount.
Radioactive material decays over a period of time. You can start at the beginning and say here’s a highly active glowing lump of rock and in so many millions or billions of years later is just a dead rock and all the radio activity is gone. That’s the radioactive life of that element.
Now what the scientists do is they use what’s called a half-life. A half-life is the time it takes for half of the original lump to go dead. Now the half-life is the standard root of measure and all of these radiometric dating methods.
The Uranium Decay Method
The uranium decay method is based on uranium 238, which is one of the ingredients of an atom bomb. Now as uranium 238 decays over time, it’s continually throwing off electrons and when it throws off enough Electrons it becomes lead 206. Now the half-life, the length of time it takes one half of this original amount of uranium to decay into lead, is 4.5 billion years.
Now how do they use that in dating? They’ll come in and they’ll look at a something they want to date like a chunk of rock, maybe from the moon or something, and they’ll look in there, and they’ll say well, we’ve got so much uranium 238, and we’ve got so much lead 206 and they try to arrive at an understanding or a beginning point when it was 100% uranium 238
Then calculating against the half-life of four and a half billion years, and how much lead has now been theoretically produced by the decaying Uranium, it’s just a simple mathematical equation to come up with the amount of time It took for that much uranium to produce that much lead in the rock. And they say well it was three billion years old or it was two billion years old or whatever.
Well, there’s several problems with this. The first and foremost problem is nobody really knows how much uranium there was in there to start with. That’s the biggest problem of all because obviously if you can play games with the starting amount of uranium you can get any amount of time you want to. Now we know how much lead is in the sample because there the sample is.
So right off the method is suspect. I mean that uranium got trapped in that rock Four and a half billion years ago, or two billion, or three billion. Point is you see there was nobody around to measure it when it started you have to guess at how much was there. Now if you’re going to guess, you can guess any number you need to get the number you want It doesn’t matter that the leads fixed. If you need more time just guess this bigger if you need less time just guess this smaller. Now I consider that to be a problem, some people don’t.
Now there’s another problem with uranium 238 dating methods in that is it’s easily leached by groundwater. See rock is porous, it has lots of tiny little holes in it. The most solid rock you can imagine is porous like a sponge and when you’re talking about millions of years. Sitting down there in groundwater, you’re talking about just as porous as an open window relatively speaking. Uranium 238 dissolves in water and lead can dissolve in water. So here you’ve got this rock sample you’re trying to date and it’s been in the ground say ten million years and you’re trying to figure out how old it is and you want to use the uranium dating method. How do you know that that uranium 238 hadn’t leached out?
Over those millions of years, you think that rocks been there because it’s been laying there in the ground and over that period of time. You know there’s been water because the scientists admit that almost 98% of the rock on the earth’s surface is sedimentary rock of volcanic origin, so it’s both igneous and sedimentary. That means it was laid down by water, so water has definitely been involved in the formation of the earth’s crust, but uranium 238 is leachable by water. It can leach out… it can leach in. How do you know that 150 years ago all that uranium didn’t leach in?
What would that do to your dating method if you assume that there was so much to start with so many billions of years ago, and you calculated out the rocks 300 million years old but the uranium all leached in last century and you have no way of knowing whether it did or didn’t. You have no way of knowing how much leached out over the centuries and the Millenniums and the millions of years You have no way of knowing how much you’re how much lead leached in or leached out… remember the rock is porous
The rock has been affected by groundwater and if the evolution is to right It’s been affected by groundwater from millions, hundreds of millions, billions of years.
There’s a third fallacy, and that is there is absolutely no way in a given sample to tell whether the lead 206 actually came from uranium 238 or that it was just lead 206 to start with. Since there is no way to know it must be assumed. So, let’s assume they can guess the correct amount of uranium 238 that was there to start with. Let’s also assume that over the millions and billions of years of this permeable rock, that none of the samples leached in or out.
All assumptions, all assumptions which have to be made in every case to use this dating method. All of which are made asinine by millions and billions of years of stone soaking in groundwater, but they have to assume it or they don’t have a clock. Well, there was a guy by the name of Sydney Pete Clementson who’s a British engineer and he published a study of uranium dating on known Modern volcanic rock it was published in the Creation research science quarterly of volume 7 December 1970.
Clementson used a large sample known age volcanic rock from a diversity of locations around the earth. He used some samples from Mount Vesuvius which erupted in the autumn of 79 AD, from the Krakatoa explosion in 1883 in Indonesia. And several others which were produced in various volcanic eruptions a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred, a thousand, and even two thousand years ago, so he’d have a good scientific study sampling.
Using the most rigorous approach in the uranium lead dating method, most of the ages of the volcanic rocks that were known to be less than 2,000 years old, dated out over one billion years old. When you’ve got a rock that’s anywhere from a hundred to two thousand years old and the best method you’ve got comes up with an age of over a billion years, what can you say about that method and its trustworthiness and its validity?
Uranium lead dating is a farce, it simply isn’t applicable in trying to date the age of the earth.
The Potassium Argon Method
a second method that the scientists favor is called the potassium argon method. in this case you’ve got potassium decaying instead of uranium and when potassium decays it produces a gas called argon. So, potassium 40 decays into argon 40, which is a gas with a half-life of approximately 1.3 billion years. Now they like this because there’s lots of potassium and there’s lots of argon in the rocks.
But now remember we’re talking about millions and billions of years here that they’re trying to date. Millions and billions of years Remember also that rock is porous Rock is porous and remember that you’ve got to assume for the dating to be correct that the exact amount of potassium decayed into that exact amount of argon that you find in the sample and that none leached out or none leached in in the entire process
Now think a minute, rock is porous that means there’s holes in it. Potassium decays into gas. Can gas leak through a hole? …through lots of holes? Now if that rock has been laying there in the ground for 400 million years and this potassium has been changing and decaying into gas, don’t you suppose it’s likely that maybe that gas leaked out of some of those holes? Argon gas would hardly stay in porous rock for millions and billions of years.
Distilled water in lab test has removed 80% of the potassium from meteorite samples in four and a half hours.
Here comes a meteorite… falls out of the sky… hey, it’s got potassium in it. Let’s date it guys. Let’s wash it clean first because it got this dirt on it when it fell on the ground. So, they wash it clean, whoops, washed all the potassium away and the potassium is not a gas. It’s a solid but you see in four and a half hours you can take 80% of the potassium out of a porous rock just soaking it in water, and you’re gonna have me believe it lay down there in a subterranean well for 500 million years and we got the exact same amount of potassium We started with and the exact same amount of this gas.
Just to show you where this thing actually fits in the real world a study was made on Hawaiian basaltic rocks formed by volcanic action, Hawaiian basalts. All right, the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics went out and did a study on these rocks to try to date them by the potassium methods. Now the trick is they knew how old the rocks were because they knew when the volcanic explosions took place that produced those layers of basalt, so they knew how old the rocks were.
Now they go in to test them with the potassium argon method and see how old the test says they are. This was a sample of rocks that was known to be less than 200 years old, the eruption was recorded in historical time. That sample tested to be Approximately 22 million years old by the potassium argon method. Less than 200 years old for a fact… tested to be over 22 million years old!
They tested another sample of basalts known to have been laid down in 1801. Therefore, less than a hundred and seventy-five years old at the time of the publication of the article. That sample tested between one hundred and sixty million to as much as three billion years of age, depending on how much or how little they assumed it was in the rocks to start with. Rocks a hundred and seventy five years old and they test out by scientific evolutionary mathematical methods to be up as much as three billion years old!
There was another study done by someone other than the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics. Had much the same thing, they tested a wide sample of Hawaiian basalts known age about 200 years or less, yet they age tested up to three and a third million years. They don’t mess around testing Hawaiian basalts much anymore they don’t get the right numbers.
The Radio Carbon Method
Okay, the third method that’s used, and this is the one that’s used on the television a lot, but it’s not the one preferred most by the scientists themselves. They like the uranium decay method.
Carbon-14 (radiocarbon) is a slightly radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils; but it decays so quickly, with a half-life of only 5730 years, that none would be expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years, yet radiocarbon has been detected in ancient fossils supposedly hundreds of millions of years old. If every atom in the whole earth were radiocarbon it would decay so quickly that no radiocarbon would be left on earth after only 1,000,000 years.
Contrary to expectations, between 1984 and 1998 alone, scientific literature reported radiocarbon in 70 samples that came from fossils, coal, oil, natural gas, and marble, representing the fossil bearing portion of the geological record, supposedly spanning more than 500 million years. All contained Radiocarbon. Further analysis of fossilized wood and coal samples supposedly spanning 32 to 350 million years in age, yielded ages between 20,000 and 50,000 years. using Radiocarbon. Dating diamonds supposedly 1 to 3 billion years old similarly yielded Radiocarbon ages of only 55,000 years, and even that is too old when you realize that these ages assume that the earth’s magnetic field has always been constant, but it was stronger in the past protecting the atmosphere from solar radiation and reducing the radiocarbon production. As a result, past creatures had much less radiocarbon in their bodies and their deaths occurred much more recently.
The radiocarbon cycle is worthless when it comes to dating almost everything, except very recent ages, within the last five to seven thousand years. In fact, the accuracy of our modern dating instruments will not allow accurate estimation of much more than six or seven thousand years absolute max at the outside under perfectly ideal conditions
Then how do they get the accurate measurements again? They have to assume how much was there, and based on how much you assume was there you can produce whatever amount you need and They keep assuming until it comes out about what they thought it was, then they say yeah, we were right. The radiometric dating methods, and these are the best three, I mean these are the right at the top of the list. So, somebody wants to convince me that the Bible’s wrong and some guy from Harvard is right. He’s gonna have to do better than that.
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