Radiometric Dating & the Age of the Earth: Bible History vs. Secular Science

Genesis Apologetics

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00:10

This is one of the most heated battles this whole dating issue. Well, that's because time is at the foundation for everything evolutionary theory teaches.

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Look, just read this section right here. Geologists now use radioactivity to establish the age of certain rocks and fossils.

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This kind of data could have shown that the earth is young. If that had happened, Darwin's ideas would have been refuted and abandoned.

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Instead, radioactive dating indicates the earth is about 4 .5 billion years old. Plenty of time for evolution and natural selection to take place.

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Wow, it seems that the foundation of evolutionary theory sure depends on radiometric dating.

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Radiometric dating is used to support the belief that millions of years exist for evolution to happen.

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Yep, and like they said, the entire age of the earth rests upon radiometric dating. It sure seems that they're putting a lot of faith in something that they can't actually test through direct observation.

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After all, plenty of assumptions go into these calculations. If it were to be disproved, their whole world view would seem to collapse.

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Without billions of years, you can't have biological evolution or geological evolution on earth.

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Pretty epic, eh? So, based on their dating methods, they've come up with an age for each section of the geologic column that we find on the very next page.

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And based on that, they determine the age of the earth to be about 4 .5 billion years old.

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Actually, the age of the earth is based on the dating of certain meteorites. They assume these meteorites formed at the same time as the earth and that dating the meteorites will give us the age of the earth.

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With that as a start, they then construct the ages of the layers in the column based primarily on the layers of volcanic ash and igneous rock.

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Rocks contain radioactive material called the parent element, or isotope, which decays into a non -radioactive stable product known as the daughter element, or isotope.

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Okay, I remember now. So, it's like the ice that slowly melts into the water. Yeah. And in the biology book, there's a chart here that shows potassium -40 decaying into argon -40.

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Okay, I see. So, based on how we can measure it today, we assume that every 1 .3

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billion years the amount of potassium -40 decreases by half. Right, a radioactive half -life.

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So, when they discover a rock, they can measure the amount of parent material and the amount of daughter product and using a chart like this, determine how old it is.

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So, what's wrong with this method? Well, the methods measure only the amounts of isotopes in the rock.

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This is good science because it is observable and repeatable. It just gives the ratio of one element to another.

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But the age is an interpretation of those measurements, not an observation. And that interpretation assumes answers to all kinds of untested questions.

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What if the rock already had a daughter isotope in it from the very beginning? Or what if the rock gets contaminated? Or what if the rate of decay was rattled at some point in the past?

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What was the original ratio of parent to daughter isotope? One must assume no parent or daughter material was added or removed from the rock and that the rate of decay has always been constant over millions and millions of years.

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Are those assumptions wrong? I mean, if you start with false assumptions, you could get really bad dates.

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Well, many scientists think they are. And our textbooks don't even tell us about all the assumptions required to date the rock.

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But the most convincing evidence is all the crazy dates they get with radioisotope methods. I wonder if our teacher even knows all the assumptions behind radiometric dating.

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To be fair, there are lots of dates that agree with one another. But there are many examples of different mineral components of a rock giving very different radiometric dates.

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And very often, different isotope systems give different ages for the same rock.

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So how can you know which one is the right age, if any? And then there are rocks we know the age of, where we watched it cool from lava, that give radically older dates.

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Really? Yeah. A lava flow in a volcano of the North Island of New Zealand that happened in 1954 was dated to be 3 .5

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million years old. Wow, that's really off. A volcanic bomb that blew out of Mount Stromboli in Italy in 1963 was dated at 2 .4

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million years old. And that dated much older than it really was. A 10 -year -old rock from Mount St.

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Helens lava dome dated to 350 ,000 years and older. If we can't trust radiometric dating on rocks that we can see formed, then how can we trust radiometric dating on rocks that we can see formed?

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Rocks that supposedly formed a million years ago. I know, right? With all the overwhelming evidence that it doesn't work consistently,

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I'm surprised that they present it with such confidence in our textbooks. Jane, it goes back to the original quote we read in the book.

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If they're wrong about dating rocks, then the entire evolutionary theory crumbles to pieces. That's true. None of us were there to verify the assumptions.

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But God has provided a written account of history. And if you tally up all the chronologies and time cues in the

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Bible, the Earth is about 6 ,000 years old. So we trust God's word instead of man's fallible dating methods.

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It's like it says in Job 38 .4. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding.

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It's like God saying, you weren't there. Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?