Welcome to Episode 10 of Foundations Restored, a Catholic perspective on origins.
I'm your host, Keith Jones.
While this series focuses primarily on the topic of evolution, the age of the earth is
addressed in this episode.
As all evolutionists admit, that if the earth isn't hundreds of millions and even billions
of years old, then there would have been insufficient time for Darwinian evolution to produce the
diversity of life now observed.
Even though we have shown that due to genetic entropy, time is the enemy of evolution and
not its friend, evolutionists claim that all difficulties with Darwinism are magically
solved given enough time.
As Kenneth Miller assures trusting high school students in his textbook, Biology, radioactive
dating suggests that earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
That's plenty of time for evolution to take place.
In our last episode we demonstrated that there is sound reason to reject the evolutionists'
claim that the so-called geological column is hundreds of millions of years old.
What remains is for us to explore the widespread claim that radiometric dating methods confirm
the ancient ages assigned to the earth by evolutionists.
This episode explains the foundational flaws of radiometric dating methods and it explores
the increasing evidence suggesting that all plant life and animal life now extinct, including
the dinosaurs, are only thousands of years old.
Yet, as you will see, the evolutionary establishment refuses to acknowledge this possibility and
on occasion has actively worked to suppress the evidence.
This provides further testimony to our claim that Darwinism and gradualism are not based
upon sound science but instead are part of a false philosophy masquerading as legitimate science.
There are a number of widely used radiometric dating methods that we will discuss in this
episode.
The most well-known method is commonly called carbon-14 dating or C-14 dating and we will
focus on this method initially.
The history of carbon-14 dating is traced to Willard Levy, an accomplished scientist
involved with the production of enriched uranium for U.S. atomic weapons during World War II.
He subsequently went to the University of Chicago where, in 1946, he developed a method
of radiocarbon dating.
He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work in 1960.
Carbon dating refers to a method for dating once-living organisms, such as trees or animals,
by measuring the content of carbon-14 in the organism's remains.
Most people have some knowledge that the method is widely used in geology, archaeology and
other fields, but they probably do not know that the method provides strong support for
the biblical chronology set forth in Genesis.
Carbon-14 dating is linked to the understanding that in the atmosphere, both C-14 and carbon-12
or C-12 combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which finds its way into the cells
of plants and animals through consumption.
While plants and animals are alive and breathing, the ratio of C-12 to C-14 remains the same
in their cells as in the atmosphere, because of the continual input of carbon from the
environment.
Once the plant or animal dies, however, the C-14 atoms can no longer be replaced and they
decay to nitrogen at a constant rate.
As a result, the ratio between C-14 and C-12 changes over time, making it possible to determine
the elapsed time since the death of the organism.
Experiments have shown that over a period of 5,730 years, half of the C-14 will convert
to N-14 or nitrogen-14.
Thus, 5,730 years is said to be the half-life of C-14.
Since the half-life of C-14 is relatively short compared to radioisotopes used in other
dating methods, C-14 dating has the benefit that it can be calibrated using organic objects
of known age, which extend to approximately 2,500 BC.
For example, to calibrate his results, Libby used wood from the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs,
whose reigns could be approximated from historical records.
Again, this calibration makes carbon dating much more reliable than several other radiometric
dating methods, having long-life isotopes that cannot be so calibrated.
But carbon dating also has a limitation due to the short half-life of C-14.
With a half-life of 5,730 years, all of the C-14 in the remains of a plant or animal should
break down into N-14 after no more than 100,000 years, meaning that no later than 100,000
years after death, there would be too little C-14 to measure when using even the most sensitive
equipment.
In fact, the practical limit of C-14 detection is closer to 50,000 years because of the equipment.
This means that carbon dating is simply unable to establish that a plant or animal is millions
of years old.
It can, however, tell us if organic objects are less than approximately 50,000 years old.
To put these limits in perspective, Dr. Paul Geim, MD, has this to say.
If the entire Earth were made of nothing but carbon-14, all but one atom would decay
to nitrogen-14 in one million years, and that atom would have a greater than 99% chance
of also decaying.
In two million years, the weight of the entire known universe in carbon-14 could decay to
nitrogen.
Thus, if there is residual activity in material considered to be 350 million years old, or
two million years old, or even 300,000 years old, the material in question is simply not
that old.
Not surprisingly, most evolution-believing scientists have shown no interest in checking
to see if the remains of plants and animals in the sedimentary rocks all over the Earth
contains carbon-14, because these materials are presumed to be radiocarbon dead, or to
contain no residual carbon-14.
However, significant amounts of carbon-14 have recently been documented as being present
in coal, in fossil fuels, and even in dinosaur bones.
These findings strengthen the grounds for skepticism about the ages of tens of millions
of years that have been assigned to organic material in the conventional geologic time
scale.
Let's discuss some of these findings.
Dr. Paul Geim has compiled the following list of C-14 detection in fossils, marble, coal,
natural gas, graphite, and other presumably old materials.
The results are impressive, especially when one considers that every measurement he cited
was reported in a reputable secular science journal.
All in all, Dr. Geim cites 78 separate instances where C-14 has been found in material that
should be radiocarbon dead.
Again, this means that the items measured must be less than 100,000 years old and, practically
speaking, are likely less than 50,000 years old.
Dr. Don DeYoung is author of a book that summarizes a series of studies performed by several scientists
who participated in the Radioisotopes in the Age of the Earth, or RATE, project.
The findings of the RATE scientists who conducted their own radioisotope research concur with
Dr. Geim's compilation of data from the literature.
For example, in at least 10 separate samples of coal and 7 samples of diamond, the RATE
scientists found measurable amounts of C-14.
Putting together, this data presents a tremendous challenge to the long-age theories of geology.
Evolutionary biologists can offer several explanations as to why there would still be
C-14 present in material that should be C-14 dead.
The first of these is machine error, but this has been rejected by researchers in the field.
Because of the nature of the mass spectrometry method of counting C-14 atoms and its multiple
points of verification of the atom's identity, it is highly unlikely that any atoms are counted
which are not actually carbon-14.
A second hypothesis is that radiation in situ, or at the site where the material was located
before being taken into the lab, caused the formation of new C-14 continuously in the
sample during its time in the ground.
According to Dr. Geim and Dr. Hugh Miller, this is highly improbable and would require
an amount of radiation equivalent to a nuclear reactor.
This radiation simply would not be generated by trace amounts of other radioactive isotopes
present in the ground.
The third and most popular hypothesis is that the material was contaminated prior to or
during the test for C-14 by the scientists who were handling the material.
This hypothesis cannot be ruled out, as preparation-dependent differences in the measured value of C-14
in samples have been reported in a significant number of studies.
However, given the tremendous care taken by the commercial labs that are involved in collecting
the data for some of the individual samples reported here, a blanket accusation of contamination
would implicate all radiocarbon dating, including that supported by evolutionists.
Also, as Dr. Geim points out,
It appears that the best data on fossil carbon with a published standard deviation with few
exceptions all cluster at about 0.15% modern carbon and are not statistically different
from one another.
It is difficult to imagine a natural process contaminating wood, whale bone, petroleum
and coal all to roughly the same extent.
When discussing possible sources of contamination in C-14 dating, diamonds make for an interesting
case study not only due to their assumed age but because they are the crystalline form
of pure carbon and are formed under enormous pressure and high temperatures far under the
earth's surface.
As a result, diamonds are the hardest natural substance on earth, making them extremely
resistant to contamination in situ.
This means that either the carbon-14 dating results of diamonds should be accepted as
accurate indicators of age or the entire carbon-14 method should be discarded under the reasoning
that if even diamonds can be contaminated and render C-14 dating meaningless, then no
C-14 results should be trusted.
Since the rate scientists found C-14 in seven separate samples of diamond, this poses a
thorny problem for evolutionary biologists.
There is also mounting evidence from carbon dating tests that extinct animals thought
to have lived hundreds of millions of years ago, lived instead only thousands of years
ago.
This includes the dinosaurs that, as we were all taught when young, supposedly lived more
than 50 million years ago.
There is now reason to doubt such ancient dates due to recent multiple carbon-14 tests
on dinosaur bones.
I can personally testify to this as I was part of a team that, over a period of years,
had 20 different dinosaur bones tested at leading carbon-dating laboratories.
These bones were recovered from various North America locations ranging from Texas to Alaska.
Amazingly, all of the dinosaur bones contained carbon-14 in the same range as the bones of
wolves, mammoths, and other creatures that are known to have lived together with man
less than 10,000 years ago.
Since no carbon-14 should have been present in the dinosaur bones if they were tens of
millions of years old, it suggests that the dinosaurs lived very recently.
This is groundbreaking information, and one naturally wonders why the results were not
widely publicized, and why this did not result in a great increase in carbon-14 testing to
confirm the results.
The answer is unsettling.
The results of our team's carbon-14 testing on dinosaur bones were presented in the proceedings
of the Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Singapore during August 2012.
Our presentation was approved in advance and clearly described the collection, pretreatment,
and carbon-14 dating of the dinosaur bones.
The members of our research team and the laboratories we employed took special care
to avoid contamination.
This included protecting the samples, avoiding cracked areas in the bones, and meticulous
pre-cleaning the samples with chemicals to remove possible contaminants.
Knowing that small concentrations of collagen can attract contamination, we compared precision
accelerator mass spectrometry tests of collagen and bioappetite, which is hard carbonate bone
material, with conventional counting methods of large bone fragments from the same dinosaurs.
If these dinosaur bones were really 65 million years old, there should not be one atom of
carbon-14 left in them.
But our findings showed again and again that extremely large numbers of carbon-14 atoms
were present.
The results were consistently obtained from different fossils, from different geographic
regions, and from different stratigraphic positions.
When I presented our research to a group of approximately 15 scientists, typical sized
audience for an oral presentation at the conference, all but two of the scientists in the audience
appeared to be of Asian background.
When the presentation was finished, none of the Asian scientists raised any objection
to the report or found any fault with the author's methodology or with the conclusions.
Only one of the non-Asian scientists employed at a European university stated that he was
shocked to hear that the researchers had found carbon-14 in dinosaur bones.
But he did not offer any reasonable explanation for the consistent results obtained from world-class
laboratories evaluating the dinosaur bones, including, in several cases, different bone
fragments of the same dinosaur bone.
Moreover, none of the scientists in charge of the biogeoscience section of the conference
offered any criticism of our methodology, results, or conclusions during or immediately
after my lecture.
The next morning, during our approved poster session, the only other person to offer a
challenge was a scientist from Nova Scotia, Canada.
He volunteered that he had been up much of the night thinking of what he would say if
he ran into us.
He argued that our data could not possibly be valid since dinosaurs became extinct at
the end of the Mesozoic period, some 65 million years ago.
He also argued that the presence of dinosaur bones deep in tightly foliated rocks in the
Rocky Mountains proved that those dinosaurs must have become extinct millions of years
ago since the slow and gradual movement of the continental land masses, which raised
up the mountains and folded the layers of sedimentary rocks, had occurred over long
ages of time.
In reality, the tightly folded sedimentary rocks, showing no evidence of cracking, strongly
suggest the rapid and catastrophic formation of the sediments and subsequent rapid uplift
of the mountains.
In short, the scientist from Nova Scotia was closed to sound experimental results and would
not even consider cross-checking our data by repeating the experiments on other dinosaur
bones.
Within two days following the delivery of our presentation that challenged the consensus
view in geochronology, all references to our presentation had been deleted from the official
conference website.
The presentations were now listed from 1 to 4, then skipped to presentation number 6,
as the inconvenient truth in our presentation had been removed.
Replies to our letters of protest to the conference directors at first indicated that they had
no idea who had deleted the presentation from the program or why, but subsequent communications
noted that the amounts of carbon-14 reportedly found in dinosaur bones would have indicated
an age of tens of thousands of years and that there was obviously an error in their data.
When one of the co-authors of the paper pointed out that no claim had been made in the presentation
regarding the age of the dinosaurs, only regarding the amount of carbon-14 in the bones, and
that the conference reviewers had accepted the paper or presentation with full knowledge
of its contents, no further reply was provided.
Fortunately, each of the more than 2,000 attendees received a CD-ROM of the conference abstracts
and schedules, including ours.
Sadly, our experience at the Western Pacific Geophysics Conference in Singapore in August
of 2012 revealed the shocking extent to which many in the scientific community are willing
to censor experimental research that exposes fatal flaws in the microbe-to-man evolutionary
hypothesis.
The experience of Dr. Seiler's team is not unique.
It is increasingly clear that there is not only a lack of openness to consider evidence
that contradicts the prevailing geologic timescale, but there is also discrimination at work.
As told in the following account, the experience of Mark Armitage, a former employee of California
State University at Northridge, supports this contention.
In May of 2012, Mark Armitage made a discovery that he had dreamed of for years.
While digging in Montana, he uncovered one of the largest Triceratops horns ever found
in the Hell Creek Formation, a legendary stack of fossil-bearing rocks that date to the last
days of the dinosaurs.
Armitage drove the horn back home to Los Angeles, California, where his microscopic examination
revealed that it contained not only fossilized bone, but also preserved layers of soft tissue.
They were brown, stretchy sheets.
I was shocked to see anything that was that pliable, he said.
In February of 2013, he published his findings in the Acta Histochemica, a journal of cell
and tissue research.
Two weeks later, he was fired from his job at California State University, Northridge,
CSUN, where he managed the biology department's electron and confocal microscopy suite.
With the help of Alan Raynock, Armitage's attorney, he filed a wrongful termination
suit against CSUN, claiming that religious intolerance motivated the dismissal.
As a young earth creationist, Armitage says that finding soft tissue in the fossil supports
his belief that such specimens date to the time of the biblical flood, which he puts
at about 4,000 years ago.
For two years, CSUN fought Armitage's lawsuit.
The suit alleges that faculty members hostile to Armitage had him fired because they could
not stand working with a creationist who had been published in a legitimate scientific
journal.
The university alleged that his firing was simply a restructuring of their biology department
and not a case of religious discrimination.
But CSUN lost its bid to have the judge who merely throw the case out of court as groundless,
and CSUN settled with Armitage for $399,500, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Alan Raynock, Armitage's attorney, hailed the settlement as precedent-setting.
We are not aware of any other cases where a creationist received a favorable outcome.
This was truly a historic case.
Subsequent to the controversy, Armitage has been on additional digs and has found more
soft tissue, but is finding it difficult to get published.
I'm clearly being blackballed.
Soft tissue in dinosaur bones destroys deep time.
Dinosaur bones cannot be old if they're full of soft tissue.
The results of the C14 experiments on dinosaur bones and the presence of soft tissue fit
perfectly with the research of Dr. Mary Schweitzer of the University of North Carolina.
The results of her research on T-Rex fossils were published in the periodical Science,
with these results made widely known when she was later featured on 60 Minutes.
In her writings and interviews, she explained that she found soft tissue and elastic blood
vessels inside of T-Rex dinosaur fossils.
The material included real blood cells and proteins, material that could not plausibly
have survived the 65 million or more years assigned to the rock formation where the T-Rex
bone was found.
Yet Matthew Carano, a dinosaur curator at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., confirmed
the authenticity of the proteins.
Here are the pieces of the protein.
If you're going to refute this, you have to explain how these pieces got in there.
It's not another molecule mimicking the protein and giving off a similar signal.
This is the actual sequence.
This was a shocking discovery, and since there is no known means through which soft
tissue would be so preserved in the outdoors for tens of millions of years, the implications
are clear.
Dinosaurs existed within the memory of mankind, and the entire geologic column dating is fatally
flawed.
Other discoveries have confirmed the findings of Dr. Schweitzer.
In 2010, paleontologists from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology found a mosasaur
fossil containing cartilage.
In 2011, a group of Swedish researchers published their discovery of soft tissue in the bones
of another mosasaur, allegedly 70 million years old.
In 2014, another group of researchers found intact, flexible proteins in worm sheaths
buried in rocks allegedly 551 million years old.
The discovery of so many pieces of organic material in a remarkable state of preservation
at every level of the so-called geological column strongly testifies to the rapid and
recent burial of these plants and animals in the sedimentary deposits of a worldwide
flood.
It is extremely interesting to observe the reaction of the mainstream scientific community
to these recent developments, because it shows just how wedded to the ancient view of the
fossil record they are.
Consider the following.
Scientists have long acknowledged that according to the laws of nature, no biomolecules could
survive for even 100,000 years in a natural environment.
Yet, an increasing number of dinosaur and other bones containing well-preserved biomolecules
have been well-documented.
Now, if you were constructing a logical argument with these two statements as your premises,
what would your conclusion be?
Would it be A. Therefore, the dinosaurs and other bones containing these biomolecules
must be less than 100,000 years old?
Or would it be B. Therefore, our understanding of the laws of nature must be wrong?
Instead of arriving at the logical conclusion that the bones weren't as old as they were
thought to be, most scientists discussing Dr. Schweitzer's finds insist that the T.
rex is 65 million years old, and that it's our understanding of the laws of nature that
have been wrong all this time.
Some critics of the research conducted by Dr. Seiler's team and the RATE project have
objected that even if their results are correct, they still contradict the biblical chronology
derived from the sacred history of Genesis.
This conflict is said to exist because the C14 ages obtained for dinosaurs are generally
20 to 40,000 years before the present, and are all in excess of the 6 to 7,000 years
suggested by biblical chronologies.
But these critics fail to recognize the effects of the Earth's magnetic field on C14 production
in our atmosphere.
Regular measurements of the strength of the Earth's magnetic field for about 200 years
shows that it is decaying exponentially.
This is relevant because a much stronger magnetic field 4,500 years ago would have
likely resulted in much less carbon-14 in the atmosphere than now occurs.
For instance, the current ratio of C14 to C12 on Earth is 1 to 1 trillion, but the ratio
may have been in the range of 1 to 3 trillion only thousands of years ago.
If so, this factor would tend to make ancient organic matter test much older than it really
is.
organisms that lived in an atmosphere with significantly less carbon-14 would have taken
in significantly less C14 when they were alive, and they would have started out with lower
levels at their death.
This could artificially age samples, and making reasonable corrections for the effect of the
Earth's magnetic field decay produces ages that generally fit within the biblical chronology.
The RATE project scientists agree with this assessment and explain.
The carbon-14 content of coal, diamonds, and many other Earth materials translate into
carbon-14 ages between 44,000 and 57,000 years based on several assumptions, dates that are
dramatically younger than their normally accepted ages, typically hundreds of millions of years.
The RATE team concludes that a key assumption used in obtaining these ancient carbon-14
ages is not correct, because the ratio of carbon-14 to total carbon was almost certainly
less during pre-flood times than it is today.
We know this from the great reservoir of fossil fuels which were buried during the flood.
Taking this pre-flood carbon distribution into account, the carbon-14 ages for coal
and diamonds is reduced to just several thousand years.
The final point to be made regarding C-14 dating results is to emphasize that the specific
results discussed in this episode are representative of carbon testing that has been done on a
great many fossils.
As Dr. John Sanford and Christopher Rupp explain in Contested Bones.
It is remarkable, but essentially everything in the fossil record contains measurable levels
of carbon-14.
This seems contrary to popular wisdom, but it is widely recognized within the carbon-14
community.
Taken at face value, this suggests that the entire fossil record is less than 100,000
years old.
Many will be offended by this idea, but like it or not, this is what the carbon-14 dating
appears to be showing.
Visitors may wonder how ages of millions of years can be assigned to fossils found in
rock strata if carbon dating has an effective limit of less than 50,000 years.
The answer is that carbon dating is not the only radiometric dating method, and in fact,
fossils are normally dated using the rocks they were found in.
These rocks are dated using alternative methods that include uranium-lead radiometric dating,
potassium-argon dating, rubidium-strontium dating, and the lead-lead method that measures
the formation of two lead isotopes, lead-207 and lead-206, from uranium-235 and uranium-238
respectively.
Most of these methods are named in terms of the parent element and the so-called daughter
element into which the parent transforms over time.
Each radiometric dating method depends upon crucial but unprovable assumptions, as we
will now explain.
We will also explain why there are sound experimental reasons to doubt these assumptions and in
turn the ancient dates produced by these methods.
Some elements come in slightly different forms or isotopes.
Some isotopes are unstable, meaning that they tend to break down into more stable forms
at a steady rate of decay.
Carbon-14, which we have already discussed, is a good example of an unstable isotope since
it breaks down into nitrogen over time.
Another example is uranium, which breaks down into lead through a multi-step process
taking very long periods of time at the currently observed rate of decay.
Radiometric dating methods utilize the notion of an element's half-life, which was previously
discussed.
This table shows the half-life of some of the more commonly used radiometric methods,
measured in billions of years.
Since the half-life of these methods is so long, they theoretically should be able to
date strata that contains fossils thought to be hundreds of millions of years old.
It is important to recognize, however, that all radiometric dating methods used to date
rocks depend on three fundamental assumptions.
If these assumptions do not hold, the resulting estimates could be in gross error.
First, that there was no daughter element in the rock at the time that it formed.
Second, that the rate of decay has been constant for the rock's entire history.
And third, that the rock has been a closed system, meaning that no parent or daughter
element has been introduced or removed.
Unfortunately, there are sound reasons to reject each of the three assumptions and therefore
there are sound reasons to reject the resulting age estimates that these methods produce.
Regarding the assumption that the decay took place in a closed system, it is known, for
example, that water and other elements can impact the initial concentration of these
parent and daughter elements in cooling or solidified rock and they can be introduced
or leached out after rock formation.
The potential impact of water on rocks is especially important since, as we have discussed,
there is good evidence that a global flood has occurred and therefore there is good reason
to reject the assumption that rock has remained in a closed system and the concentration of
parent and daughter elements has been unaffected by water.
Evolutionists like to invoke this problem when it comes to the carbon dating of dinosaur
bones by suggesting that young carbon-14 may have been introduced into the bones through
water flow.
So it is arguably already acknowledged by evolutionary biologists that the geologic
column is not a closed system as their dating method requires.
Radiometric dating relies on counting the ratio of parent to daughter element and dates
are always calculated assuming that no daughter element was present in the rock at the time
it was formed.
There is no way to know if any of the daughter element was present in the rock at its formation
so this is an assumption that is impossible to verify.
Calculations assume that the daughter element has been accumulating at a constant rate according
to its currently measured half-life, but there is no way to verify whether the rate of decay
has remained constant throughout history.
This leaves us with two more assumptions needed for the results to be trustworthy.
Since they involve the history of the rock and the geosphere they cannot be empirically
verified and neither can the ancient ages that result from the dating methods.
While evolutionists claim that there are independent methods to evaluate these dates that support
radiometric dating, these methods, like looking at the position of the rock in the geologic
column, often depend directly or indirectly on the same flawed dating methods they are
supposed to be supporting.
With the lack of outside verification and the fact that experiments have shown that
there are sound reasons for rejecting the background assumptions for radiometric dating,
there is reason to reject this method as a reasonable one for determining the age of
the Earth.
We will cite three reasons for this rejection as we continue our discussion.
Viewers may wonder how experimental data calling the results of radiometric methods
can be obtained since no one was present when the rocks were formed, since no one was there
to measure the decay rate throughout the rock's supposed multi-billion year history, and since
no one was there to witness events that could have violated the premise of a closed system
so necessary to radiometric dating.
As it turns out, we do know when some rocks were formed because we know from historical
records the year in which several volcanoes erupted and formed volcanic rock.
These rocks contain elements that can be tested through radiometric methods.
In fact, most of the hominid fossils found in East Africa have been dated by evaluating
their location relative to strata containing volcanic ash that have been dated using the
potassium-argon method.
This link between volcanic material and the supposed age of human ancestors makes the
accuracy of radiometric dating methods as applied to volcanic rock of known ages extremely
important.
If radiometric methods produce dates for volcanic rock that correspond to the historical record
of recent eruptions, it would be an indication that the method can produce reliable results,
at least in the short term.
On the other hand, if the radiometric dates of volcanic rock vary significantly from the
known date of eruptions, then it is clear that one or more of the essential assumptions
behind radiometric dating methods does not hold, and the inaccuracy of the radiometric
dating method becomes obvious.
Many radiometric dating experiments of volcanic rock that formed in recorded history have
been made.
The rock so tested is typically basalt, which is generally formed from the cooling of lava
on the Earth's surface.
Time and again, radiometric dates have produced age estimates far in excess of the actual
known age of the rock.
To provide four examples, following the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, lava that subsequently
cooled and hardened was analyzed and found to contain a quantity of argon with an estimated
age of 350,000 years old.
Lava flows from Mount Nauruhoe in New Zealand that are known to be less than 100 years old
yielded an estimated age of up to 3.5 million years old.
Radiometric testing of samples from the Hualalai Basalt that formed after the 1800-1801 eruption
of a volcano in Hawaii yield dates of 1.4 and 1.6 million years old in two dating procedures.
Finally, the basalt from Mount Nauruhoe Andesite in New Zealand that has known eruption dates
of 1949, 1954, and 1975 has been dated to between 270,000 years and 3.5 million years
old based on potassium-argon dating, and the same rock has been estimated to be 3.9 billion
years old based on lead-lead dating methods.
There is a logical reason for these strange dates in volcanic rock.
Often as magma flows over an already formed layer of rock, it is so hot that it can actually
melt the lower rock and acquire traces of the minerals found there, including daughter
elements of radioactive species that should not be present in the newly formed rock.
As explained by the rate scientists, through this sort of mixing a rock exchanges radioisotopes
and other elements with its surroundings and it may happen with magma before it cools or
with solidified rock at a later time.
One way this occurs is when magma moves upward through the rut and melts some of the surrounding
rock.
This newly melted crustal material can be assimilated or incorporated directly into
the magma.
Then, when the magma cools and solidifies, the new rock contains isotopes from the melted
crustal material.
Another potential source of rock component mixing involves the underground flow of heated
water and gaseous fluids.
At high pressure, water readily moves through rock pores and fissures and between mineral
grains.
The inevitable result is an exchange of ions or charged atoms along the fluid path.
If this is occurring regularly in the formation of volcanic rock, it calls into question all
radiometric dates obtained for this type of rock.
As the evolutionists readily admit, especially when discussing incorrect C14 dates, that
very small amounts of radioisotope parent or daughter elements can yield ages that are
significantly different than the actual age of the rock.
These and other results raise the obvious question.
If even volcanic rock of known ages cannot be reliably dated, why would any radiometric
dates be trusted to provide accurate results?
One of the important results of the RATE project involved the comparison of estimated ages
of the same geological location by alternative radiometric dating methods.
The research, led by Ph.D. geologist Stephen Austin, involved the dating of rocks recovered
from ten sites through the use of five radiometric dating methods utilized by leading radiometric
dating laboratories.
The results were astounding because for each of the ten locations tested, the predicted
ages of the same sites varied enormously, depending on the method used and even within
the same method.
For example, samples from the Bass Rapids Diabase Sill, located at the lowest level
of the Grand Canyon and conventionally assigned an age of 1.07 billion years, were dated to
between 656 million years and 1.05 billion years through potassium-argon dating.
From between 1.25 billion and 1.58 billion years using the lead-lead method.
Likewise, the Cardenas Basalt, located in the eastern Grand Canyon and conventionally
assigned an age of 1.1 billion years, was tested to range from a low of 516 million
years ago to 1.59 billion years ago, depending on the radiometric dating method used.
Finally, rocks from the Apache Group Diabase Sill in central Arizona that are conventionally
assigned an age of 1.2 billion years were dated between 656 million and 1.58 billion
years, depending on the radiometric method used.
Given the inconsistency between radiometric dating methods, one again wonders why any
trust would be placed in the accuracy of absolute dates generated from these methods.
A third reason to suspect the accuracy of radiometric dating methods and uniformitarian
assumptions is that some methods assign older dates to strata that lie much higher in the
so-called geologic column than the layers that supposedly were laid down eons earlier.
This is seen, for example, in the Grand Canyon, in which the Cardenas Basalt layer has been
dated to 1.11 billion years using the Rubidium-Strontium method, while the Bass Rapids Diabase Sill
formation has been dated to only 1.06 billion years, or some 50 million years younger than
the deposits lying above it.
Similarly, the upper layer Cardenas Basalt has been dated to 1.59 billion years, while
the lower Bass Rapids Diabase Sill has been dated to 1.38 billion years by the same method,
meaning that the lower layer is more than 200 million years younger than the higher
layer if the dating method used is to be trusted.
Clearly, something is wrong with the methodology that leads to these results and there is good
reason to believe that each of the three fundamental assumptions behind radiometric
dating has been routinely violated, as concluded by the rate scientists.
Three basic requirements were listed earlier as keys to the correct dating of rocks.
These include known initial conditions for the rock, a closed system, and a constant
rate of nuclear decay.
It appears that all three of these dating essentials commonly fail at some level.
Radioisotope data for rocks provide a wealth of information, including their relative ages
and possible interactions with their environment.
However, absolute ages of rocks are not included in this information.
Evolutionists often think they've found a way around the problems with the assumptions
they're making about radiometric dating by using a method called isochron dating.
This method takes into account a wider variety of minerals present in the rock than just
the radioactive parent and daughter elements, and usually generates a linear slope that
is supposed to be a reasonable indicator that their dates are reliable.
The problem with this method is that while it yields very precise results in many cases,
it does not always yield the same precise result, as has been demonstrated by the rate
scientists.
And this begs the question of whether isochron dating really has any relationship to the
accuracy of the results being reported, or whether it is simply recording the relative
ages and abundances of the minerals in the rock.
Isochron dates can line up quite consistently without being accurate, just as a person throwing
darts might hit the same spot every time, but not be anywhere near the bulls-eye.
There is a difference between consistency, or getting a similar result every time, and
accuracy, getting the right result, that is generally being overlooked in this aspect
of the radiometric dating debate.
Any scientific method that proves as unreliable as long half-life radiometric dating would
normally be discarded by the scientific community.
That a method this unreliable continues to be cited as one that offers proof that the
earth is billions of years old, demonstrates that ideology rather than sound scientific
methodology is driving this claim.
Moreover, there are additional procedural problems with long half-life radiometric dating
methods that we will briefly discuss.
When a fossil is submitted to a laboratory for dating, the scientist who submits the
sample is required to say where in the geological column it was found, and how old he believes
it has to be.
This is clearly a process that invites self-fulfilling prophecies to be at work.
Based on the information provided, and before any experimental dating is generated, fossil
ages are estimated according to their position in the sedimentary layers, under the assumption
that strata were laid down at a uniform rate over long periods of time.
These sedimentary layers are, in turn, dated by their relative position to strata, whose
absolute age values can be estimated by laboratory dating of radioactive minerals that may be
present.
If no radioactive minerals are present, the fossils are usually dated based on their location
in the strata relative to other index fossils that have been dated elsewhere using radiometric
methods.
But, as we have seen, none of the dates arrived at by means of long half-life radioactive
dating methods can be depended upon in the first place.
So the whole dating game is based on circular reasoning.
Interestingly, beyond the high school textbooks and claims by committed evolutionists that
the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that this is plenty of time for evolution to have
worked, experts in the field of radiometric dating acknowledge that their processes are
highly flawed, as an article in the Anthropological Journal of Canada states.
The troubles of the radiocarbon dating method are undeniably deep and serious.
Despite 35 years of technological refinement and better understanding, the underlying assumptions
have been strongly challenged, and warnings are out that radiocarbon may soon find itself
in a crisis situation.
Continuing use of the method depends on a fix-it-as-we-go approach, allowing for contamination
here, fractionation there, and calibration whenever possible.
It should be no surprise, then, that fully half of the dates are rejected.
The wonder is, surely, that the remaining half come to be accepted.
No matter how useful it is, though, the radiocarbon method is still not capable or yielding accurate
and reliable results.
There are gross discrepancies.
The chronology is uneven and relative.
And the accepted dates are actually selected dates.
In reality, if the scientific community were to set aside the failed geochronological framework
that was established in the 19th century, scientists would find that, rightly interpreted,
the C14 dating data fit very well into the chronological framework derived from the sacred
history of Genesis.
And this is the truth which materialistic science refuses to admit, for they cannot
allow a divine foot in the door.
This is the eighth consecutive episode that has focused on the so-called science behind
evolutionary and uniformitarian claims.
As explained previously, naturalistic and gradual processes are required to support
the Cartesian-Darwinian narrative that rules the scientific community, and, for that matter,
the worldviews of humanism and New Age beliefs that now dominate the Western world.
The narrative has even strongly impacted those in the church by creating doubt and division.
This is a tragic impact, considering that, as we have shown, the claims made by the Darwinists
and Gradualists fail in every discipline.
In the field of evolutionary biology, we've shown that all claimed transitional forms
and icons of evolution fail to provide support for Darwin's theory.
This failure includes the dramatic failure of the claims for human evolution.
In fact, we have shown that, due to well-supported concepts such as genetic entropy, macroevolution,
including the evolution of mankind, are not possible.
In the field of cosmology, we have shown the failure of the so-called Big Bang theory to
explain the origin of the universe, its organization, and the supposed ancient age of the universe.
We have seen that, in an effort to not allow a divine foot in the door, the Big Bang model
has been propped up by multiple theoretical concepts that have not been observed and are
best left to the field of science fiction.
We've also shown that, in the field of geology, the fossil record does not fit Darwinian expectations
and the so-called geologic column is best explained by a mammoth flood that may well
have coincided with rapid movement of the Earth's plates and extensive volcanic activity
that ushered in a single and brief ice age.
Finally, we have seen in this episode that efforts to scientifically assign an ancient
date to the geologic column have failed, and the evidence from carbon-14 dating strongly
supports the position that all extinct animal and plant life, including even the dinosaurs,
lived in very recent times.
For those open to the truth, and I would hope that this includes all Catholic viewers, the
evidence mounts to an overwhelming rejection of the Cartesian-Darwinian narrative from
a scientific standpoint.
At the same time, the biblical claims of special creation and the suggested young age of the
Earth is supported by the evidence.
Only this view achieves the harmony of natural science and God's revelation.
All Catholics should sincerely seek and embrace this harmony if they embrace the aim of the
great church scholastics such as St. Thomas Aquinas.
The conclusions reached about the scientific evidence, while foreign to many Catholic instructors
and apologists who have been deceived, are not only based on the consideration of evidence
both for and against evolution, they are also in line with the position of all the church
fathers and doctors, and also with the authoritative statements of the magisterium.
It is only through the deceptive claims made by evolutionary proponents that confusion
about origins entered, and created confusion about the proper division between historical
theology and natural science.
And while the search for truth is admirable, now that you, the viewer, have been told the
truth about evolutionary claims, it is now appropriate to consider that it is time, indeed
it is well past time, to restore the truth about origins that is foundational to so many
Catholic teachings and dogma.
If you think that truth in science doesn't matter, or that now just isn't the right time
to restore the truth, then we will continue to suffer from the ongoing destruction of
society and of the Catholic faith witnessed in recent decades.
For those who think that the truth about origins has nothing to do with these undeniable trends,
we now transition to the final three episodes that chronicle the impact of the Cartesian-Darwinian
narrative on society, and even within the Catholic Church.
May God grant you the wisdom to see that truth about origins does matter as you watch these
three episodes.
In Jesus' name we pray.