Expert: John J. Shea - 12/29/2004

Question
I asked a creationists about current dating methods and this is what he said, is what he's saying valid?
You are  repeating some claims by the evolutionists that are simply NOT TRUE.   "scientists use several dating methods which all coincide with the same age"  They don't tell you they select those that agree and throw away MANY others that don't agree.  "dating methods on the fossil records on the continents seems conclusive"  NOT TRUE!!!
Dr. John Morris, a geologist, explains in easy-to-understand terms how true science supports a young Earth. Includes a critique of major dating methods. Filled with facts that will equip layman and scientist alike. Transparency masters are provided in the second half of this book. Use them in your Sunday school, church or youth group to challenge and teach.  




Radioactive dating in general depends on three major assumptions:

1.                  When the rock forms (hardens) there should only be parent radioactive atoms in the rock and no daughter radiogenic (derived by radioactive decay of another element) atoms;

2.                  After hardening, the rock must remain a closed system, that is, no parent or daughter atoms should be added to or removed from the rock by external influences such as percolating ground water; and

3.                  The radioactive decay rate must remain constant.

Radiometric dating methods make assumptions that have been proven to be inconsistent.  If any of these assumptions are violated, then the technique fails and any ‘dates' are false.  Leaching, varying isotope ratios, etc. indicate the methods at best are unreliable.  Dr. Steve Austin at ICR tested rocks from the bottom and top of Grand Canyon.  Three of the four methods showed that the bottom rocks were younger than the top rock an IMPOSSIBLE conclusion.  The radiological methods date rocks that were liquid and are now solid.  These rocks do not contain fossils.  The fossil bearing rock is sedimentary (laid down under water in Noah's flood).  Evolutionists consistently disregard radiometric dates that conflict with their time scheme.  If a date doesn't support evolution they throw it away.  See John Morris' "Young Earth" and the book “Bone of Contention” for a detailed study of “missing links of apes to men.



Carbon Dating is a method that is often cited to “prove” evolution.  It does not because:

1) as a method it can only extend to 50,000 years not millions of years,

2) C14 can only date tissue not fossils (stone impressions of bones).  When you find (some have been found) real dinosaur bones it is a testimony to creation because biological tissue won't last millions of years.  

3) Carbon 14 has not come to balance in the atmosphere indicating a young not old atmosphere.


Answer
Dear Eric
There are so many things wrong with this, I scarcely know where to begin.  The cardinal assumptions (1-3) about radiometric dating that your creationist correspondent cites are correct, and they hold true for most applications of the major dating methods we use to reconstruct earth history (i.e., potassium-argon, uranium-series, radiocarbon).  It is not true that geologists discard MANY dates that disagree with previous ones.  It is the case that occasionally contamination, bad preparation, or mechanical errors result in one or two dates in a much larger series of dates for a particular rock sample being discordantly young or old.  What the creationist fails to point out is that if their young chronology was true, then ALL the dates should be young, not just one or two that are explicable in terms of contamination or processing errors.  When the results of radiometric dating studies are published in the scientific literature, they typically include ALL the dates, regardless of how well they fit with prior hypotheses about the age of the samples.  Then in the discussion section of the paper the authors explain why outlying dates might be rejected.  Other scientists who disagree with these arguments can then examine the evidence and make their own case for accepting the discordant dates.

Applying more than one dating method to the same rock formation is not the exception, it is the rule in geochronology. Agreements among different dating systems are what we scientists call "independent verification".  The more lines of evidence that point to the same conclusion, the surer you can be that your conclusion is valid.  (Like having both fingerprints and DNA in a crime scene analysis.)  It is true that popular summaries of geological dating (like high school or college textbooks) might list a single value for a geological event, for the purpose of simplicity or presentation, but if you dig into the mainstream scientific literature, you will easily enough find the actual dates accompanied by their lab numbers, the proportions of radioisotopes upon which they are based, the assumptions of the dating model, and the debate about the validity of the dates.

Grand Canyon Study by the ICR's Steve Austin?  Never heard of it.  Were this finding of reversed chronology in the "Grand Canyon" valid, and more to the point, replicated by other scientists it would have been a headline paper in Science or Nature. That it isn't speaks volumes about its validity.  ICR publishes all kinds of silly pseudo-scientific sounding stuff that takes issue with some of the minor problems with geology, paleontology, and anthropology, magnifying them through rhetorical tricks into allegedly fatal  flaws.  But what they consistently fail to point out that when real scientists discover these mistakes they work hard to fix them, or, failing that to modify their hypotheses accordingly.  Creationists, in contrast, are still pushing the same 3000-year old Genesis-based cosmogenic myth, in spite of the fact that nearly every major discovery in biology, chemistry, geology, history, and anthropology has proven their account of human origins wrong over and over.  This is why, when you step back from the debate and look at the behavior of the participants with an anthropologist's eye, you instantly recognize that "creation science" is a faith-based argument, not science.  It is just as immune from being proven wrong to its adherents as are the tenets of any of the world's religions.

Their comments on radiocarbon dating are gibberish.  Inasmuch as Willard Libby won the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering the principle of radiocarbon dating, you'd think that such flaws as are claimed here would have been discovered in the review process for that award.

For a good take on these issues, see Niles Eldredges' book, The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism.  The title pretty much says it all.
Cheers,
John Shea