How Old Is The Earth?

The age of the Earth has great significance in the debate between Creation and evolutionism. If the Earth is billions of years old then evolutionists will claim that life is just the result of natural chemical reactions and countless ages of gradual improvements guided by natural law. If, on the other hand, the Earth is relatively young then evolution doesn't have a leg to stand on. Both Creation and evolutionism have unavoidable religious implications: if Creation is true then there is a Creator with Whom we have to do, but if Creation is not true then life as we know it is a flash in the pan that will soon be extinguished in the Heat Death of the Universe and all that we have accomplished will mean nothing.

So, a profound question lurks in the wings, demanding to be answered: What can science tell us about the age of the Earth? The simple answer is NOTHING! Obviously, there was no human witness to the beginning of the Earth, and in spite of the genius of man we cannot state with certainty how or when that happened. Science, guided by philosophical naturalism, has invested untold billions of dollars and man-hours attempting to answer the question. But try as they might they have not, and cannot. The branch of science that deals with unseen past events is called forensic science, which doesn't prove anything to be true or false. It attempts to narrow the field of possible answers to the one that seems most likely. Hard science deals with trying to establish the truth based on observation, testing and falsification. What I want to consider in this thread is the various methods that scientists use to try to chart Earths' past history, and why they fail.

The two principle methods of dating artifacts are carbon and non-carbon radiometric analysis. Carbon dating is generally used to establish the age of a once-living specimen. Non-carbon dating is generally used to attempt to date objects that were not living things, or the fossilized remains of creatures that have completely mineralized.

Today I'll deal with carbon dating. Carbon 14 is an unstable form of carbon that forms in the upper atmosphere when an energetic free neutron collides with a nitrogen atom and displaces a proton. Over time the carbon-14 atom will revert back to nitrogen, having a half-life of about 5,730 years. Carbon-12 is a stable form of atmospheric carbon and the ratio of C-14 to C-12 in our atmosphere is approximately 1 to 1 trillion. Since living things exchange carbon with their environment through breathing and eating, etc., they should contain in their tissues carbon at the same ratio as the air. So, if the C-14 to C-12 ratio in a specimen is 1 to 2 trillion, then it is assumed that the C-14 has gone through one half-life cycle and hence the specimen is about 5,730 years old. On the surface this seems to be reasonable, but there are a number of factors that call this method into question:
1. We can't know what the ratio of C-14 to C-12 was at the time the specimen died. The amount of both forms of carbon are effected by above-ground nuclear explosions, volcanic eruptions, solar activity and the strength of Earths' magnetic field. All of these factors are variable, and with respect to the magnetic field we know that it is weakening with a half-life of about 1,400 years. That means that in the past the magnetic field would have been a far more effective shield against cosmic radiation, and consequently C-14 formation would have been less than it is today. It has been calculated that it would take about 30,000 years to go from zero C-14 to equilibrium, and we aren't there yet.
2. We can't know if the rate of decay of C-14 has been constant over time.
3. Even with AMS technology we can't detect the presence of C-14 in specimens more than 100,000 years old. And yet we find measurable C-14 in coal and even in diamonds, both of which are claimed to be hundreds of thousands to millions of years old.
4. Tests have been done on specimens whose true ages were known, and with disastrous results. The shells of living snails gave a C-14 age of 26,000 years!

So, the next question is: If the test method doesn't give you a correct result when you know the true answer, why would you ever trust the result when you can't know if it is right or wrong? And then there are the matters of specimen contamination and equipment calibration. The bottom line is that C-14 dating is inherently unreliable. Next time we'll consider the non-carbon radiometric methods and see if they are any more credible than C-14.

 

Phillip: Now we'll consider the non-carbon methods of dating artifacts. There are many different mechanisms that can be used in this process, but we'll look at only two as they share many of the same issues as all the others. First we will discuss the uranium to lead method, considered to be the gold standard of dating methods. Then we'll look at potassium to argon. These two methods are widely used all over the world.

Uranium 238 decays into lead 206, a stable isotope, with a calculated half life of 4.5 billion years - approximately the age of the Earth by evolutionary reasoning. The basic idea is to measure the amount of U238, the amount of Pb206 and the quantities of the 13 intermediate daughter products and calculate how long it would have taken for the decay process to have produced them.
The first problem with this method is that we don't know the initial conditions of the specimen. So scientists are left with having to estimate what amount of the thorium, radon, radium, lead, polonium and other elements in the sample are the result of uranium decay, or are incidental.
Secondly, scientists have to assume that the rock in question has effectively been a closed system the entire time if its existence. This is a very serious issue as many elements can be leached into or out of rocks quite easily. Is it possible to know with certainty that no Pb206 has been added to the specimen over the course of thousands or millions of years? I think not. And if even a tiny amount of lead has been added or removed then the result of the researcher's calculations will be wrong.
Third, can we know with certainty that the decay rate of U238 has remained constant through out Earth's history? The answer is NO! One evolutionist put it this way: "There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and the events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man".
Lastly, can we know with certainty that all of the daughter products in the specimen are the result of uranium decay? Again, the answer is NO. Of course, in the formulation of scientific hypotheses, some assumptions are unavoidable and necessary, and testing is supposed to eliminate the guesswork. And some of the radiometric methods involve more than ten assumptions. So, how is that working out...

What about K-Ar (Potassium to Argon). The process is similar, although potassium has a shorter half-life and decays into Argon 40 and Calcium 40, but all the same problems must be dealt with. In fact, in one respect, K-Ar is even more questionable than U238 in that one of the daughter products (argon) of potassium is a gas which leaches very easily.

So, can we know whether these or any of the other methods is reliable? The simple answer is YES, we can know, and NO they are not reliable. It's really simple, we subject specimens of known age to the test and see if the test comes up with the right answer.

Specimens of lava from an eruption of Mt. Ngauruhoe in New Zealand about 60 years ago produced these results:
K-Ar age range: 270,000 to 3.5 million years old.
Rb-Sr age: 133 million years old.
Pb-Pb age: 3.9 billion years old.

Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics tested samples of lava from an eruption approximately 200 years ago. The result: The samples dated 3 billion years old.

Dr. Steven Austin harvested samples from the lava dome that formed on Mt. St. Helens after the 1980 eruption and asked a lab to date them. He was told by the lab that they would not perform the tests unless he first told them how old he thought they were. He simply responded that he thought that they were not old. The lab results gave an age range of 350,000 to 2.8 million years.

But wait, it gets worse: Joan C. Engles said "It is now well known that K-Ar ages obtained from different minerals in a single rock may be strikingly discordant". So, which, if any, of the ages produced is right? A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada) said: "In conventional interpretation of K-Ar age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale". So there you have it, using the presumed old age of the Earth as your guide to estimate the age of the Earth. This is not good science; it is circular reasoning.

So the question naturally follows: If a test doesn't give accurate results when you know what the correct age is, why would you trust the test when you can't know if the results are right or wrong? (Hint: you will trust it as long as it tells you what you want to hear). The sad truth is that evolutionists have sold out to an unscientific philosophy of Earth history and will accept anything that seems to validate their belief, even if they have to manipulate the results.

There is much more that could be said on this subject. I recommend Vernon R. Cupps book "Rethinking Radiometric Dating" subtitled "Evidence for a Young Earth from a Nuclear Physicist". Great Book.

Phillip

 

Phillip: I would like very much for you to explain your cryptic comment about a non-earth rock. I am not going to buy and read a book to try to understand something that seems on the surface to be ridiculous. And the Smithsonian is not a reliable source for the age of the Earth, or why radiometric dating would work on a rock supposedly from some place other than Earth when those dating methods are demonstrably unreliable. Please explain.

Phillip

 

Phillip: Here's my frustration. The post in question made an emphatic statement without an explanation, but included a link to a lengthy article. The article included a scant three and a half lines related to the statement, but the article did not conclude that the age of a moon rock establishes the age of the Earth. As I pointed out earlier in this thread radiometric methods of dating are demonstrably unreliable, and that would be true for moon rocks just as they are for Earth rocks. Also, the assumption that the age of a moon rock would be more reliable because they would not have been subject to erosion and sedimentation is completely absurd since we can't show that the moon is the same age of the Earth in the first place. If the post by 37818 had accurately portrayed the information from that link I would have simply ignored it.