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.

DINOSAURS REFUTE MILLIONS OF YEARS

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What’s the big deal with “dinosaur soft tissue”?

It is not just dinosaur soft tissue, either, but the presence of detectable proteins such as collagen, hemoglobin, osteocalcin, actin, and tubulin that they must account for. These are complex molecules that continually tend to break down to simpler ones. If the world is billions of years old these cannot be there.

Not only that but in many cases, there are fine details of the bone matrix, with microscopically intact-looking bone cells (osteocytes) showing incredible detail. Palaeontologist, Dr. Mary Schweitzer has even recovered fragments of the even more fragile and complex molecule, DNA. This has been extracted from the bone cells with markers indicating its source such that it is extremely likely to be dinosaur DNA.

Others have reported the fast-decaying carbon-14 from dino bones—not a single atom should be left after 1 million years.

Go to http://www.creation.com for more evidence of a young earth from Ph.D. scientists.

COMPELLING EVIDENCE FOR A YOUNG EARTH

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“CURVY ROCK LAYERS UNDERMINE MILLIONS OF YEARS”, article by Gavin Cox in the latest issue of Creation Magazine. Go to http://www.creation.com to sign up for this must have creation resource.

The Bible indicates that the Flood, which lasted just over a year, was a global tectonic event, with much vertical and horizontal earth movement. This provided the forces required to mould sediments and fold rocks. Genesis 7:11 tells us how the Flood started, when “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth.” Genesis 8:1–3 tells us how the Flood ended: “And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided. The fountains of the deep … were closed … and the waters receded from the earth continually.” These verses are also describing vast global geological activity. Furthermore, Psalm 104:6–9 clearly describes Noah’s Flood: “The waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled … The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them … so that they might not again cover the earth.” Evidently, huge earth-moving forces were involved that transported vast amounts of freshly deposited, wet sediments. The Flood provides all the factors necessary to fold strata quickly.

In the Grand Canyon, the rock appears as though it has deformed like wet clay. It becomes thinner where the fold has been in tension (not showing tensional fractures), and thicker where it has been in compression (but not showing signs of being crushed). This is powerful evidence that the sediment was still wet and plastic, like clay, and not solid rock, when it was bent.

Long-agers can accept that an individual rock layer could have been wet and plastic when folded. But not when there are multiple layers clearly bent together, with the top and bottom layers supposedly separated by millions of years. This is because they know it would be unreasonable to think that rock layers would stay soft for millions of years. So, at least the bottom layer of any such folded sequence would have had to be solid when bent.

Image of folded rocks

In the Grand Canyon, where the folded strata are part of a larger formation called the Kaibab Upwarp (figure 3), the deepest layer (the Tapeats Sandstone) is supposed to be 550 million years old. The topmost of the folded layers (the Kaibab Limestone) was allegedly deposited 300 million years later. (The bottom layer is supposedly millions of years older than any of the intervening layers.) So, since they were all folded together in plastic fashion, the straightforward understanding of the evidence is that they were all still wet and pliable when folded.

Long-agers must therefore find some way around this. To preserve long ages, rocks must be seen as able to bend without breaking—in the unobservable past, over huge time periods.

Conclusion

The supposed millions of years to bend rock strata into folds is an illusion. Folded strata do not constitute evidence for vast amounts of time in the rocks. Furthermore, no one has waited for eons to watch if it really takes that long to form folds in strata. ‘Deep time’ is a philosophical idea (derived from uniformitarianism), not a scientific observation.

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

IS THE UNIVERSE AND EARTH BILLIONS OF YEARS OLD?

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Secular scientists confidently declare that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and that our earth is 4.6 billion years old. They go on to say that complex organisms showed up in the fossil record at about 540 million years ago and that dinosaurs evolved about 230 million years ago and went extinct 65 million years ago.
Modern man is said to have evolved only 200,000 years ago, and there were supposedly ‘archaic men’ prior to that, ever since we split from an ape-like common ancestor with chimpanzees about 6 million years ago. Millions and billions of years are assumed as fact and hardly anyone challenges them.

Is there room in the Bible for deep time? Where do we get the idea that the universe is billions of years old? Does ‘science’ prove the earth is old? What about radiometric dating? What about fossils?

Deep Time Deception, The

These questions, and many more, are tackled and clearly answered in The Deep Time Deception.

You will learn what the Bible has to say on the matter, how the Apostles and Jesus himself thought about it, and how Christianity has historically dealt with the issue. This book also deals with the history of how the earth went from thousands to billions of years old, at least in the minds of many people, between the Middle Ages and today. There are many different ways Christian scholars have dealt with this, especially since the 19th Century when Charles Darwin popularised the theory of evolution, but how do those ways stack up with a straightforward reading of the Bible? And how do they measure up to recent discoveries of carbon-14 in things supposedly millions of years old, like dinosaur bones, coal, and diamonds?

Christians need to read this book. In the end, The Deep Time Deception will show you that the Bible and science say the same thing: the earth is not billions, not millions, not even hundreds of thousands of years old. The Bible is a book of history, and that history is not contradicted by ‘deep time’, because deep time is a deception. You can purchase it online at http://www.creation.com