Phillip Diller
Member
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.
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.
