Genesis Impact Clip - Radiometric Dating and the Age of the Earth
1 view
Natural history museums everywhere support the theory of evolution based on deep time and radiometric dating. The idea of millions of years and evolution combine to explain the origin of all life on Earth. Random chance propels it through the magic machines of natural selection and mutations over millions of years, turning slimy organisms into worms, then tadpole-like creatures that branch into fish that eventually crawl onto land and turn into shrew-like mammals, then apes, and finally humans.
This special combo of deep time plus evolution conveniently leaves out the need for a creator—especially the God of the Bible. This way, people aren’t obligated to live by a certain moral code or lawgiver to whom they must give an account. It also removes the idea of an afterlife, like heaven or hell. Interestingly, the Bible predicted this would happen, with mankind denying a recent, supernatural Creation of a world that was later judged by a Global Flood (see 2 Peter 3:3–7):
Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’ For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the Earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and Earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.
See here for our technical video: https://genesisapologetics.com/dating/
See the full "Genesis Impact" movie here: www.genesisimpact.com
- 00:02
- I believe that radiometric dating completely debunks the theory that a god created everything out of nothing.
- 00:15
- The earth is billions of years old, which allows evolution to take place. You said in your lecture that dinosaurs lived between about 220 million years and 65 million years ago, and the human line started to branch off several million years ago.
- 00:30
- That is correct. Verified evidence. And this timeline is based on radiometric dating?
- 00:36
- Precisely. It's a tried and true method for telling the age of things. For example, the unstable isotopes in uranium eventually change into stable atoms, such as lead.
- 00:46
- And we can estimate how long this process takes. These methods are useful for dating Igni's rocks, which are formed when hot, molten rock crystallizes and solidifies.
- 00:56
- Radiometric dating is also useful for dating the ash layers in which we find the dinosaurs. Since we can't go back in time to watch these rocks get formed, or check the decay rate of these atoms over time, what are some of the assumptions that radiometric dating studies make?
- 01:12
- Well, you listed one of them, which is the rate of decay. We can only know what the decay rate is today based on what we observe in laboratories.
- 01:20
- We don't know what the decay rate might have been in the past or in different earth environments. We have to assume this.
- 01:27
- In addition to this assumption, we also have to assume the starting amount of the parent element, like uranium, and the starting amount of the daughter element, like lead, using the examples
- 01:36
- I mentioned. Again, we have to assume them to be true when we date things using radiometric dating.
- 01:42
- And if these three major assumptions are not correct, then the ages we get from the study are also incorrect.
- 01:52
- What if we took some rocks that were formed in a volcanic eruption, rocks that people actually watched right out of written history, and then dated these rocks?
- 02:02
- Shouldn't the radiometric dating age of these rocks be the same as the known age of the rock, the age we know for sure because people actually watched the rock form out of an eruption?
- 02:12
- Well, that sure seems like a fair way to test it. If the radiometric age of the rock was the same as the known age of the rock based on when people watched the rock form, it would validate the assumptions in the analysis and the process as a whole to be correct.
- 02:28
- Did you know that these types of studies have already been done, and that radiometric dating missed the known ages by millions and millions of years?
- 02:40
- What do you mean? Several studies have been done on rocks around the world to try to validate radiometric dating, and it fails.
- 02:48
- All the time. In each of these studies, the radiometric age of the rocks far exceeds the actual known ages by millions and millions of years.
- 02:58
- In fact, I know of an example. If you let me. In the 1980s,
- 03:07
- Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted and produced all kinds of volcanic material, including rock called decite, just like this one, and sent it in for radiometric dating.
- 03:17
- The results? This 10 -year -old rock showed ages from 340 ,000 to 2 ,800 ,000 years, all for a rock that we know was only about 10 years old.
- 03:31
- Okay, so we can't actually prove it. So what's the biblical idea about the age of the earth?
- 03:38
- I mean, does the Bible offer anything better? Actually, the Bible is very straightforward about this.
- 03:44
- We have clear genealogies in Genesis, which are even repeated in the New Testament, that go all the way back to Adam, the first man who was breathed into existence by God.
- 03:54
- He was made from the dust of the earth, not evolved from some ape -like creature.
- 04:00
- He was given charge over the earth, and named everything, including the apes. Within a couple thousand years later, the earth was flooded, and all life on earth was wiped out, except those on the ark.
- 04:13
- This happens to be the same time even secular historians admit that human writing disappears from the face of the earth.
- 04:21
- The strange coincidence? No doubt. So the Bible is clear that God breathed creation into existence, with all the planets in order spiraling through the universe in perfect order to sustain life.
- 04:33
- Days, nights, season, oxygen. It's all perfectly calibrated to sustain life on earth.