In 1980, Mount St. Helens (in Washington State, USA) erupted, blasting the top and side off the mountain. Then, as volcanoes do, it began to rebuild. In 1992, samples of new volcanic rock—KNOWN to be only about 10 years old—were dated using standard radiometric dating techniques (3 samples from the same rock, 350,000 years, 900,000 years, and 2,800,000 years). The results were eye-opening. Radiometric dating is not all it’s cracked up to be! In fact, it’s fair to ask: “Can radiometric dates be trusted at all?” Join geologist Dr Tas Walker for a discussion of the Mount St. Helens eruption and its aftermath, the fundamental flaws in radiometric dating methods, and the relevance of the age of the earth to people’s view of the world.
TIMESTAMPS ⌛ 00:00 Teaser 00:40 Introduction: What’s the deal with Mount St. Helens? 02:33 Dating rocks from Mount St. Helens 04:34 Assumptions underlie radiometric dating 05:57 Three samples, three dates: 350,000 – 2.8 million years 07:36 Story-telling accompanies radiometric dating 11:10 How can we get ACCURATE dates? 12:29 How were the Mount St. Helens dates received? Handling objections 17:05 Carbon dating gives good evidence for a YOUNG earth! 18:37 The only way to be sure of the age of something 19:58 Different kinds of radiometric dating 21:19 Radiometric dating seems so SCIENTIFIC – How can it not be right? 23:00 What to do when the dates don’t fit the expectations 27:56 Is it okay to publish dates/perspectives that don’t match existing expectations? 31:51 The age of the earth is a critical part of people’s worldview 33:38 So, what do long-age geologists think of Mount St. Helens? 35:55 Other lessons from Mount St. Helens: 36:09 → Geologic layers can be deposited rapidly 36:59 → Erosion can happen rapidly 38:02 Geologists are now more accepting of catastrophism, but won’t let go of long ages 39:17 In conclusion: The age of the earth matters to both the biblical and the naturalistic worldviews
Returning to a no-frills practice of following Jesus will be good for all of us. We will remember what our faith is all about. This is why in the last days before Jesus returns He needs to purify His church. Apostasy in denominational churches is rife as demonstrated by the acceptance of gay marriage and homosexual pastors. They no longer believe in the inerrancy of God’s Word. Like the world, they have been caught up in the evolutionary myth of billions of years of Earth’s history. They no longer believe that God judged mankind with the worldwide flood of Noah’s day and yet it is the only explanation for the existence of billions of dead things buried quickly all over the world, including the fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas (the result of buried forests). They have discounted both Noah’s flood and the short timescale of Scripture determined by Genesis 1-11. When you study geology from a biblical standpoint and use the geological model of the Flood to connect the real-world observations of geology you discover it is superior to the prevailing old-earth frameworks in explaining the data. (Biblical Geology 101 by Michael Oard and Robert Carter 2021).
An exciting training development, one which could help us prepare for church without buildings, has gained great popularity in the body of Christ over the past several years by readying people for possible service on the mission field, particularly among Muslims. TOAG, or “Training Ordinary Apprentices to Go,” (Global Mobilisation Network). It seeks to teach people to “do church” in small group settings, away from large worship gatherings that will not be available abroad. Participants spend ten months learning how to reach unreached people groups and develop an authentic community in a small group setting. Families with children are welcomed in, and future workers for Christ are much better prepared than earlier generations of believers. I’ve heard from a few that have participated in TOAG that it is difficult, yet rewarding. The method’s founders state the goal of the training: During TOAG, interns learn to be a Kingdom Community without including Western structures that often hinder movements. They experience life in community with other interns, something more akin to the Book of Acts. By taking them out of present ecclesiastical structures, which include powerful (& professional) music, well-crafted homilies (by highly trained professionals) in safe, comfortable surroundings (expensive buildings), interns experience first-hand what is and is not required for believers to be a ‘Kingdom-Community,’ experimenting with simple, organic structures capable of sharing the life-changing power of God’s Kingdom and reproducing into movements. … These are just some of the reasons why many Americans benefit from the hands-on learning experience of TOAG.
We need to prepare for the prophesied persecution that is coming and expect God to grow us through it as never before. Literally, millions of Christians around the world can testify to this truth, as Paul testified clearly in this Scripture.
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” Romans 5:3-5:
Whether you use TOAG or some other training method you need to get with like-minded believers who understand the times and get into step with what God is calling us to do in these last days to make sure we complete the Great Commission in the community where God has placed us.
Check out http://www.lastdaysovercomer.org for the free ebook Prepare for the Last Days – Fulfilling God’s Purposes at the End of the Age.
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.
THE GEOLOGY TRANSFORMATION TOOL – A new way of looking at your worldby Tas Walker
Like the recent article Compelling Evidence for a Young Earth this article by Tas Walker is taken from the latest Creation Magazine http://www.creation.com.
Perhaps you have seen a report in the media about a rock outcrop ‘800 million years old’ and wondered how that fits with the history of the Bible. One confronts the same puzzle when reading about a fossil dinosaur that lived in ‘Jurassic’ times. Or we may visit a tourist site with a sign that speaks about a volcano forming ‘25 million years ago’.
If you would like to see your world from a biblical perspective, the simple diagram in figure 1 is what you are looking for. It allows you to work out a first, ballpark understanding of how each situation you encounter relates to the true history of the universe, that is, to the history presented in the Bible.
Diagram 1: Geologic Column adapted to show Noah’s Flood sequence
The right side of the diagram has three vertical arrows, which show how these rocks relate to biblical history. The first arrow (green) indicates which rocks formed in the first 150 days of Noah’s Flood as the floodwaters were rising. The second arrow (blue) indicates which rocks formed in the last 220 days of Noah’s Flood as the waters were falling and the continents were rising. The third arrow (yellow) indicates which rocks have formed in the 4,500 years since the Flood ended.
You will notice at the top of the diagram that the biblical arrows overlap, and that at the bottom the green arrow is shown dotted. This is to indicate that there is uncertainty in these areas. The main reason for the uncertainty is that there is not a one-to-one relationship between the rocks on the geological column and biblical history. That is because uniformitarian geologists place the rocks into the geological column using criteria that assume Noah’s Flood never happened. However, the rocks must be understood using criteria based on biblical history, which includes the Creation and Flood events.
When we do examine the geology using biblical criteria, we discover that the geological column provides a general Flood order. However, there are many exceptions and the relationship is highly non-linear. As illustrated in figure 1, most rocks (the Precambrian, Paleozoic, and Mesozoic) formed as the floodwaters were rising on the earth. These are generally of very large scale, both in thickness and geographical extent. The second part of the Flood, when the waters were receding as the continents uplifted, mainly involved huge erosion on the continents. The receding floodwaters deposited the eroded material at the continental margins. Local deposits did occur on the continents but very late in that period, after most of the water had gone.
Easy to use
The figure is easy to use. All that is required is to locate on figure 1 the ‘date’ in millions of years for your example. Then you simply check where it sits on the arrows of biblical history. Let’s look at the examples mentioned above.
For the rock outcrop 800 million years old we see on figure 1 that it fits between the numbers 541 and 2500. To the left, on the column this corresponds to the ‘Proterozoic’ as well as the ‘Precambrian’. To the right, on the biblical interpretation, this corresponds to the period when the waters of Noah’s Flood were rising, and quite early in this period. Given that the waters of Noah’s Flood were rising for 150 days, 800 million years would correspond to the first month or two of the Flood, which occurred some 4,500 years ago.
For the fossil dinosaur that lived in the ‘Jurassic’, we see that this fits between 145 and 201 million years ago. It is part of the groupings called the ‘Mesozoic’ and the ‘Phanerozoic’. On the biblical interpretation to the right we can see that this also corresponds to the time when the waters of Noah’s Flood were rising, but later than the rock described in the previous example. Its position on the arrow indicates that this would have been as the waters were approaching their peak, perhaps a month before that, which would be about four months after the Flood began, 4,500 years ago.
For the volcano ‘25 million years’ ago, we see that it corresponds to the ‘Oligocene’, which is part of the ‘Paleogene’, the ‘Tertiary’, the ‘Cenozoic’, and the ‘Phanerozoic’. On the biblical interpretation to the right we can see that this corresponds to the 220-day (approx. 7-month) period when the waters of Noah’s Flood were falling. This was as the continents were being uplifted, causing the floodwaters to flow off the land into the expanding oceans. This would have been a few months into that period after the waters peaked, which would put this some 8 months or more after Noah’s Flood began, 4,500 years ago.
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