For the earth itself, the general means of dating relies on radiometric dating. This is done by looking at rocks which have some of a heavy mineral which is decaying and some of the daughter known to be the result of that decay. For instance, Uranium 238 will, at the present rate of decay, become Lead 206 in about 4.5 billion years. However not all of it will become lead. If you have a pound of uranium 238 (and this is purely imaginary as I don't think a full pound of pure U238 exists anywhere), then in 4.5 billion years at its present rate of decay, only 8 ounces of U238 will be there and the rest will be lead. In another 4.5 billion years, half of that, or 4 ounces, will be gone lead. In another 4.5 billion years, half of that, or 2 ounces, will be gone lead, and so on. This is called the 'half life' of an element.
So today geochronologists might find that half of the uranium in a given rock appears to have gone, and half of what would be the uranium bits is now lead. That would indicate that the rock was 4.5 billion years old.
This can be done with different elements. Two of the dating methods are rife with error potential: carbon 14 and anything with argon -- for different reasons. However an unblemished zircon crystal when dated can give some very reliable results. And the results are billions of years old when taken from what are considered the oldest rocks on earth.
So why is this wrong? In a sense, it is not wrong. Atomic dating, which is what this is a form of, measures atomic time quite well. The problem is that God, in Genesis 1:14, told us to measure time by gravity, or orbital time -- the motions of the moon around the earth, the earth on its axis, the earth around the sun, etc. This rate of 'ticking' by this sort of clock is steady and has not changed.
However there are a number of measurements which show atomic rates have not remained steady, and this is where the catch is. This has been the focus of my husband's work for many years, ever since he found a chart showing that the speed of light itself had been measured as changing for about three hundred years. These measurements were a main topic of discussion in the scientific literature until 1941 when a UC Berkeley physics professor (Birge) declared, pre-emptively, that any beliefs that there was a change in the physical constants was contrary to the spirit of science.
One wonders what spirit of science he was talking about -- certainly not a search for the truth...
My husband, Barry Setterfield, has found that when mathematics from other changing areas are applied to the rate of 'ticking' of atomic clocks, that a correction can be made to adjust them to orbital time. When this is done -- and this came as a real shock to him -- the three catastrophes of Genesis (the Flood, Babel, and Peleg's time) correspond exactly with the three major discontinuities in the geologic record (the Cambrian explosion, the Permian extinction, and the K/T boundary extinction).
Because Barry's work indicates that it was impossible for Noah's Flood to build up the entire geologic column (which is also the claim of standard geology due to the presence in the geologic column of things that took a lot of time to grow, such as sponge reefs), the standard creation organizations refuse to publish him. Because his work shows pretty definitively that this is a very young creation -- less than ten thousand years old for the entire cosmos -- secular journals won't touch his work either.
Most of it is, however, on our website at
www.setterfield.org
The Lord has also made the money available for a series of videos of his material which we have started. If you are interested in his work, the videos will be announced on our website as they are finished. The whole thing will take several years.
I hope that helps explain a little about what is going on in this field.
