WHY RADIOMETRIC DATING GIVES AGES OF MILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF YEARS

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A young age for ‘ancient’ granites

When physicist Dr Russell Humphreys was still at Sandia National Laboratories (he now works full-time for the Institute for Creation Research), he and Dr John Baumgardner (still with Los Alamos National Laboratory) were both convinced that they knew the direction in which to look for a definitive answer to the puzzle of why radiometric dating consistently gives ages of millions and billions of years.

picture – Linear accelerator used in radiometric dating.

Others had tried to find an answer in geological processes—e.g. the pattern was caused by the way the magma was emplaced or how it crystallized. This is indeed the answer in some cases.2,3 But Drs Humphreys and Baumgardner realized that in other cases there were many independent lines of evidence that suggested that huge amounts of radioactive decay had indeed taken place. (These include the variety of elements used in ‘standard’ radioisotope dating, mature uranium radiohalos and fission track dating.) It would be hard to imagine that geologic processes alone could explain all these. Rather, there was likely to be an answer that concerned the nuclear decay processes themselves.

From the eyewitness testimony of God’s Word, the billions of years that such vast amounts of radioactive processes would normally suggest had not taken place. So it was clear that the assumption of a constant, slow decay process was wrong. There must have been speeded-up decay, perhaps in a huge burst associated with Creation Week and/or a separate burst at the time of the Flood.

There is now powerful confirmatory evidence that at least one episode of drastically accelerated decay has indeed been the case, building on the work of Dr Robert Gentry on helium retention in zircons. The landmark RATE paper,4 though technical, can be summarized as follows:

  • When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas, which readily escapes from rock.
  • Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
  • By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
  • However, there is a significant proportion of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is, at first glance, surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
  • Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert on helium diffusion from minerals to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5,680 (± 2,000) years.
  • The paper looks at the various avenues a long-ager might take by which to wriggle out of these powerful implications, but there seems to be little hope for them unless they can show that the techniques used to obtain the results were seriously flawed.

The Bible clearly tells us that God created a mature universe: Adam was a man, not a baby, the trees and plants mature and on day six Adam could see all of the stars in heaven. God tells us that He stretched out the heavens at creation on day four. The Cosmos could only have been created by a being outside of His creation with miraculous powers.

Big Bang from nothing does not explain the complex ordered universe that is so evident, it is certainly not good science.

Taken from an article by Dr. Carl Weiland “Radiometric dating breakthroughs” http://www.creation.com

4. Humphreys, D. et al., Helium diffusion rates support accelerated nuclear decay, icr.org, 16 October 2003. Return to text.

DR CATCHPOOLE ON THE AGE OF THE EARTH

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Dr Catchpoole has a B.Ag.Sc. (Hons) from the University of Adelaide, and was awarded his Ph.D. by the University of New England (NSW).

“When did I realise that the earth could be no older than about 6,000 years.? The exact moment that turned my thinking around was when a simple image was put up, of Eden with layers of fossil bones in the earth beneath Adam and Eve. This showed the stark implications for Christianity if e.g. dinosaur fossils were millions of years old. That would mean there was not only death before the Fall; many fossils also show evidence of suffering, bloodshed and violence, and diseases like bone cancer. Yet after Adam and Eve were created, God called everything He had made “very good” (Genesis 1:31). I realised that it made no sense for God to have looked at tumorous dinosaur bones on Day 6, then call this very good, knowing that cancer would cause such enormous future human misery.

The Eden-on-bones scenario also raised a fundamental doctrinal issue. If we put the shedding of blood before sin, then why did God in Jesus shed blood because of sin? (Genesis 3:21, Hebrews 9:22, 10:4–10) I could see that my compromising of God’s Word by believing the secular millions of years completely destroyed the whole basis for the Atonement (1 Corinthians 15:21–22)1.

Evolutionary geneticists have themselves realised that mutations accumulate so quickly (about 60–100 per person per generation), that the human species should have become extinct at least ten times over. Evolutionary geneticist Alexey Kondrashov asks, “Why have we not died 100 times over?*

That presumes we’ve been here for the 100,000+ years of the evolutionary timeline. It’s not a problem in the Bible’s 6,000-year timeline, with only about 200 generations since Adam. We’re still going downhill fast (Romans 8:19–22), but it’s understandable we haven’t gone extinct—there simply hasn’t been enough time.

The importance of the age of the earth in presenting the gospel message is demonstrated by the following testimony of an aboriginal man.

“I’ve been locked up in every jail in Queensland, so I’ve had the Gospel preached to me more times than I can count. But I ain’t never heard the Gospel like this. Just think … we [Aboriginal people] haven’t been here 60,000 years like they tell us; we come from Noah just 4,500 years ago, and Adam 6,000 years ago—along with everyone else alive today— that’s powerful! So Christ died for everyone—whitefella and blackfella!“

*Kondrashov, A., Contamination of the genome by very slightly deleterious mutations: why have we not died 100 times over? J. Theoretical Biology 175:583–594, 1995.

Extract from article in the latest Creation magazine from CMI (www.creation.com) Creation magazine interviews former CMI speaker/scientist Dr David Catchpoole

NOAH’S FLOOD EXPLAINS ICE AGE

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Just because uniformitarian scientists accept there was an Ice Age, or many ice ages, does not mean they can explain its origin. They realize that an ice age requires much cooler summers, much more snow, and a climate change that persists for hundreds of years.

heat-trapped
 Heat trapped in the oceans after the Flood promoted high evaporation, which precipitated as snow and sleet on the continents. Ice continued to build up on the land for hundreds of years until the oceans cooled. This lessened the evaporation and so the ice sheets on the land melted back.

What would cause these factors to come together? It has been repeatedly shown that the disruption caused by the global Flood would lead naturally to this confluence.4 However, those who reject the Flood continue to extrapolate present processes millions of years into the past, processes such as climate change and variations in Earth’s orbital geometry. Over the years more than 60 theories have been proposed. Secular Ice Age expert J.K. Charlesworth said about Ice Age theories: “Pleistocene [Ice Age] phenomena have produced an absolute riot of theories ranging ‘from the remotely possible to the mutually contradictory and the palpably inadequate.”5

That was back in 1957, however, and many people believe we have made great progress since then. However, the cause of the Ice Age still is unknown, as ice age expert David Alt stated: “Although theories abound, no one really knows what causes ice ages.”6

One of the main challenges for the secular model is that colder air is also drier air. Even if they discover a cooling mechanism, the air would be too dry for enough snow to fall for an ice age. As an example, if the average summer temperature of Canada were to fall 120C (220F), the air would become 60% drier.7 But this is not a problem for the biblical model because the warm waters just after the Flood would lead to large amounts of evaporation and precipitation.

When secular scientists run their computer models to explore the Ice Age, they find it difficult for any of their models to develop an ice age. But when they force their models to decrease the amount of sunshine by 6%, snow and ice begins to build up. However, the snow and ice sometimes grows over areas that have never been glaciated, such as Tibet and the lowlands of the far north: “We now have glaciation [in their climate model], but mainly outside the area where it existed during the last ice age.”13 In stark contrast, the biblical model easily explains the lack of glaciation in these lowlands. The oceans were warm at the beginning of the Ice Age, so the land near them was too warm for glaciation, except in the high mountains.

Because secular Ice Age models ignore the effects of Noah’s Flood, they have numerous difficulties, only some of which are mentioned here. These models are unable to explain either the distribution of large ice sheets or how they developed, demonstrating that their foundational assumptions—uniformitarianism and millions of years—are flawed. However, the biblical post-Flood model provides very plausible explanations and mechanisms for the various Ice Age phenomena.

Noah’s worldwide flood also provides the explanation for dead things buried all over the world ie. the fossils, fossil fuels – oil and coal. As a result, it provides the right answer to the age of the earth. It is thousands not billions of years old. It also demonstrates God does control events on His planet and that He judged and destroyed a lawless humanity just 4000 years ago (all but eight people).

God’s word reveals that in the “last days” before Jesus returns the world will ridicule those that believe Noah’s Flood was a real event when God judged the world. Scripture reveals Jesus will return to judge the nations and He will rule and reign with the resurrected saints on this earth for 1000 years. At the end of His Millennial reign this fallen earth will be destroyed by fire. This immediately precedes the White Throne judgement of the ungodly. God then creates a new heaven and a new earth where the saints will live on for eternity. The ungodly end up in the Lake of Fire which is the second death.

“Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,  And saying, Where is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.  For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. 2 Peter 3:3-7.

4. Oard, M.J., What caused the Ice Age? Creation 36(3):52–55, 2014; creation.com/ice-age-cause.  5. Charlesworth, J.K., The Quaternary Era, Edward Arnold, London, UK, p. 1,532, 1957.  6. Alt, D., Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods, Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, MT, p. 180, 2001. 

AGE OF THE WORLD IS A CRITICAL ISSUE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE

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Dr Russell Humphreys says, “The age of the world is a critical issue for understanding the Bible and its history, and the idea of evolution over billions of years cannot tolerate a short timescale.

In his book and video, Evidence for a Young World, Dr. Humphreys reveals that there is a great deal of evidence for the short timescale given in the Bible: galaxies wind themselves up too fast, comets disintegrate too quickly, not enough mud on the seafloor, not enough sodium in the sea, the earth’s magnetic field is decaying too fast , biological materials (found in dinosaur bones) decay too fast, too much helium in minerals, and too much carbon -14 in deep geologic strata. The book and video, Evidence for a Young World are available from http://www.creation.com. In it, he is bold enough to claim “scientific evidence for a young world is the best support for the Bible’s history”.

Particle Beam accelerator at Sandia National Laboratories where Dr Humphreys was the first experimenter to use it in the mid 1980’s

In this post we will look at Dr Humphreys thoughts and predictions on Magnetic Field Decay.

The earth has a strong magnetic field and all agree that it is generated by electric current. In addition, basic electromagnetic physics says that once a current is set up, it should decay steadily. Dr Humphrey’s explains that the data supports this. “The energy of the electric current has been steadily decaying. The amount of current (in amperes) has decayed with a 1600 – year half-life. However, the magnetic field intensity varies from place to place and has sometimes behaved erratically. Archaeomagnetic measurements (magnetisations of bricks and pottery) show that the field intensity has been decaying steadily for the past 1000 years. Working backward even only 30,000 years, the electric current would have been strong enough to melt the earth! So, as Russell explains, evolutionists have tried to come up with a self-generating dynamo to keep the field going for billions of years. “Although they have used supercomputers and large laboratory experiments, they have not come up with anything more than sophisticated ‘hand waving’.

One criticism of creation science is that it makes no successful predictions. This not true, Dr. Humphreys has made a number of successful predictions that shook the scientific establishment. In particular, his predictions of the magnetic fields of the ‘gas giants’ Uranus and Neptune were proved correct by the Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew by in 1986 contrary to all the evolutionary predictions. Likewise, his prediction of the magnetic field of Mercury was confirmed by the Messenger probe in 2012.

If you are not already getting the Creation magazine (www.creation.com) then can I suggest you do. The content of this article is taken from the article in the latest edition “Physicist staunchly defends Biblical Creation” Jonathan Sarfati chats with Dr Russell Humphreys.

AGE OF THE EARTH ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE

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Two chrono genealogies in the Bible give us an age for the earth. CMI explain this well in this short video.

How old does the Bible say the earth is? Can we trust biblical chronology, and how close to an exact ‘age’ can we get? Is the Greek translation of the Old Testament a better record of the Bible’s history? These questions can be answered, but we have to think through the issues. This episode features Lita Cosner and Dr. Rob Carter. I suggest you tell your family and friends to check out Creation Talk for more great videos.

FURTHER PROOF OF A YOUNG UNIVERSE

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Age of Ceres

Check out CMI http://www.creation.com for the this story by Jonathan O’Brien.

The dwarf planet Ceres is the largest body in the solar system’s asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Recently, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft made detailed fly-over inspections of Ceres and beamed back data that shocked many scientists.

Ceres shows clear signs of being very geologically active.1 For such a small body—only 1.28% the mass of our moon—Ceres has long-age-believing planetary scientists shaking their heads in wonder. One can almost hear them asking, “Are you Cerious!?”

Ceres-Surprises
The dwarf planet Ceres 

The mystery for evolutionists is how Ceres, which they believe to be very old, can still be so hot inside.

Ceres is too far away from large planets to receive an influx of energy from gravitational effects/tidal heating, and radioactive decay can’t provide the heat over billions of years either.

Secularists believe that planetary bodies were originally molten and gradually cooled. They predicted that Ceres, a miniature world floating alone in the coldness of space, and believed to be the same age as the solar system, would have become frozen and inactive eons ago.

It appears that tiny Ceres, with its lively, hot interior, is no more than a few thousand years old. This is consistent with the Bible’s record that God formed the earth first, around 6,000 years ago.

AGE OF THE EARTH IS SUCH A CRITICAL ISSUE

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Many Christians try to reconcile the biblical age with the secular ages because there is such a massive disparity between the two – six thousand years and billions of years.  Because it is has become such a controversial issue most Bible Colleges have retreated from dealing with the subject and yet it is such a critical issue to belief in God’s Word. This CMI video does an excellent job of showing how simply it can be shown that the evidence in the rock layers supports a massive catastrophic event in the past that totally changed the earth’s topography and buried millions of things quickly (many are relevantly intact) in rock layers all over the earth. Suddenly, the billions of years have vanished and so has evolution. The Bible describes such an event and most civilisations around the world have such an event (Flood story) recorded in their history. 

OTHER HELPFUL RESOURCES:  1. Refuting Compromise https://creation.com/s/10-2-575,   2. The Age of the Earth DVD https://creation.com/s/30-9-534  3. What the Bible and Science Say About the Age of the Earth https://creation.com/s/30-9-55

A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW ESSENTIAL TO A VIBRANT FAITH

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Americans who identify as Christian but do not profess to know Christ personally as Savior — now comprise 54 percent of the U.S. population.

 Sadly, a Biblical world view is held by a declining number in denominational churches:

20% of those who attend evangelical Protestant churches.

16% of those who attend charismatic or Pentecostal churches .

8% of those who attend Protestant churches.

1% of those that attend Catholic churches

George Barna, research director at the Cultural Research Center based at Arizona Christian University, went on to explain that the dominant values in the United States today are acceptance, comfort, control, entertainment, entitlement, experiences, expression, freedom, and happiness. Those contemporary values highlight the profound contrast from previous eras in which a more widely accepted biblical worldview yielded civic duty, hard work, humility, faith, family, moderation and the rule of law.

Education at government schools and universities has been hostile to a biblical worldview ever since Darwinian evolution replaced biblical creation as the explanation for the existence of the Cosmos and more specifically Earth.

The age of the earth is a momentous issue. The Bible clearly teaches a young earth and fortunately the evidence supporting the Biblical view is now strong. Ministries such as Creation Ministries, Creation Research Institute, Answers in Genesis, all with a strong team of PhD scientists with distinguished careers are doing a great job. I am most familiar with CMI http://www.creation.com and can strongly recommend it as a source of information and resources.

Why is the age of the earth such a critical issue? You can’t have death and suffering before mankind which is the case with evolution.

God’s Word tells us there was no death prior to THE FALL. Adam and Eve’s SIN (rebellion against God – disobeyed His commandment not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. The consequences of doing so was death (spiritual then physical).

Two important creation issues you need to make yourself familiar with are:

1. The role Noah’s Flood in determining the age of the earth. It was a devastating worldwide flood that totally changed the geomorphology of this planet. It also buried billions of dead things quickly all over the world. What do we find? Billions of dead things in the fossil record, many intact demonstrating rapid burial, along with fossil fuel (oil) in abundance.

2. Genetic Entropy demonstrates that the human genome is deteriorating due to the accumulation of mutations. It has been irreversibly deteriorating since THE FALL and the rate of deterioration is such that human race is headed for extinction. The work of distinguished geneticist Dr John Sanford (invented the gene gun) and author of the book Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome has shown that the rate of deterioration is such that man could not have been on this earth longer than 6,000 years. Evolution cannot explain how complex information was formed in the genome in the first place and it has no answers on how to keep it there. Life is not going up, up up. It is going down, down, down.

MORE EVIDENCE FOR A YOUNG EARTH

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Dinosaur-bone-cellsBone cells discovered by Schweitzer, showing classic appearances including nuclei and connecting fibrils—from a Brachylophosaurus allegedly 80 million years old!

Following the most rigorous tests and checking of data, many evolutionists now admit the existence of such dinosaur soft tissue and organic material in not just one or two specimens, but well over thirty. They now have to explain how extremely delicate structures could have been preserved over incredibly vast time periods.

E.g, In 2009, researchers reported that they had found the fossilised remains of a fish brain—dated at 300 million years by evolutionary standards. John Maisey, the lead author, found it remarkable that brain tissue was preserved by fossilisation, since it consisted mainly of water.
Then, in 2016, researchers studying the remains of an Iguanadon-like creature reported not just fossilised brains, but unfossilised brain tissue. Dated by evolutionists at 133 million years, this fossil from Bexhill, England, was discovered more than a decade ago but only recently analysed. It was found to contain unfossilised protein fragments—brain tissue, fine capillaries, collagen structures, and the membrane that surrounds the brain. The authors attributed the brain tissue preservation to the highly acidic, low-oxygen environment in which it was found. However, such an acidic environment should have sped up rather than slowed the breaking down of brain tissue and protein.
How long can brain tissue last?

The existence of soft issue in fossils is hugely problematic to the idea that these fossils are millions of years old.

Believing proteins could last for tens of millions of years takes enormous faith. According to a report in the science journal The Biochemist, even if collagen were stored at 0°C, it would not be expected to last even three million years.8 But such is the power of the evolutionary paradigm that many choose to believe the seemingly impossible rather than accept the obvious implication, that the samples are not as old as they say.

8 Roach, J., Oldest fossil brain found in “bizarre” prehistoric fish, news.nationalgeographic.com, March 2009.
Brasier, M.D. et al., Remarkable preservation of brain tissue in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian
dinosaur, Geol. Soc. London Spec. Publ. SP448.3, October 2016 | doi: 10.1144/SP448.3

HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?

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Who cares about the age of earth? The evolutionists care about it a lot as there whole story is based on billions of years. This presentation presents considerable credible evidence for a young earth.

Whose interpretation of the facts will you believe?

Your eternal destiny depends upon knowing the truth and only God’s Word reveals the truth as given by the Creator of the Cosmos. If you have not read my recent post “What is Truth?” can I suggest you do so even before you watch this video.