Old Paths Baptist Ministries


Carbon 14
What About Carbon Dating?

Radiometric Dating Methods – Are They Reliable?
"God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar;…". Romans 3:4

Is any method of dating reliable that gives millions or billions of years when the Bible indicates that God created everything about 6,000 years ago? Clearly, if we just believe that absolutely reliable book called the Bible, we must reject the fallible, changeable, thoughts of men who are opposed to God and His word. However, because we are constantly challenged by scientists, the media, schools, and other lost men with these so-called millions of years, we should at least find out the fallacies of their methods of dating.

  1. Carbon 14 (14C).

    1. Carbon is a basic element in our environment that occurs in many different forms. It is essential to life and the continuance of life here on earth. Diamonds, pencil lead, charcoal are just some of the substances that contain carbon. Carbon-14 is one of the rare forms of carbon that is formed by processes inherent in our universe. The charts that follow are simplified explanations of how 14C is formed, utilized, and used as a dating method.


      chart 2

      These charts are excerpted from and used by permission of: ©2009 Answers in Genesis. Be careful about going to this site as it is not a KJV site. Their info about creation vs. evolution is good, but their use of perversions of the Bible is not acceptable.

    2. Other Factors to Consider About C-14.
      1. Cosmic rays varies with the sun's activities and the earth's passage through magnetic clouds in space.
      2. The earth's decreasing magnetic field increases the production of C-14.
      3. The flood of Noah's time undoubtedly had a tremendous effect on the ratio of Carbon to C-14.
      4. Dating of fossils by the C-14 method can be useful as long as the above factors are considered. Remember, C-14 dating can only be used for plants or animals. Inanimate objects such as rocks which are not fossils of previously living animals or plants cannot be dated with C-14.
  2. Other Radiometric Dating Methods.
    1. Potassium to Argon, Uranium to Lead, Rubidium to Strontium and others are often used to give to rocks the ages that unregenerate scientists wish to have in order to further their agenda of trying to prove that evolution is true. Each of the parent chemical decays to the daughter chemical and the ratio of the parent to the daughter is easy to determine. However, these concentrations are not ages, just concentrations. Scientists use these to try to determine ages.
    2. All of these are based upon assumptions that cannot be proved. The Assumptions are:
      1. That they know what the isotope concentrations were at the time of solidification of the mineral into rock.
      2. That decay rates have always remained constant.
      3. That no environmental processes added or subtracted from the concentrations of isotopes in the rocks.
    3. Ages that do not line up with their million or billion of years are discarded as having been "corrupted." Examples are numerous but here are a couple that will illustrate:
      1. The fossils known as Australopithecus ramidus were found near some basalt formations and scientists used the argon method to try to date the fossils. They believed that the basalt gave ages of 23 million years, but that wasn't acceptable because it made the fossils to old. So they looked at some basalt further away from the fossils and found that 17 of the 26 samples gave them an estimated age of 4.4 million years. Much more to their liking. They rejected the old dates as being contaminated. Typical of the way the so-called lost scientific community behaves. The horror stories like this could be repeated over and over.
      2. The so-called age of a "primate" skull known as KNM-ER 1470 was initially thought to be over 200 million years old but that didn't "fit" because us humans weren't around then. So over the years KNM-ER 1470's age was selectively reevaluated until it fit in around 1.9 million years ago. Watch out for the "dating game." It will produce just what they want it to produce.
  3. Only God Knows Exactly What Happened In The Past. — Job 38:4 - Were you there?
    1. Erroneous Measurements.
      1. Scientists using the Potassium Argon method dated lava flows made by Mount Ngauruhoe of New Zealand in A.D. 1949, 1954, and 1975 as being anywhere from 250,000 years old to 3.5 million years old.
      2. Steve Austin, an ICR geologist, sampled basalt from the bottom of the Grand Canyon and lava from the top of the Grand Canyon and found that the lava at the top was supposedly 270 million years older than that at the bottom. This is an impossibility.
      3. Wood found in a lava flow in Australia was "dated" by the C-14 method as being 45,000 years old while the lava flow was "dated" as being 45 million years old.
    2. Obvious facts that are embarrassing:
      1. No source of coal found in the world is lacking C-14 yet C-14 should not last more than 50K years. Yet most so-called scientists date coal as being millions of years in age.
      2. Earth's magnetic field could not be more than 10,000 years old at it's present rate of decay.
      3. Red blood cells and unfossilized bones have been found in some dinosaur fossils.
      4. Much evidence that strata is not very old. Polystrata fossils, no erosion between rock layers, and thick layers of strata turned to rock without breaking and others.
      5. Not enough helium in our atmosphere. It only contains about 1/2000th the amount that it should contain if our atmosphere is 4.6 billion years old. Recent research on RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth) by creation scientists some of whom are associated with ICR confirms this fact conclusively.
      6. "The following is an excerpt from an article written for ICR by Frank Sherwin - Human Evolution - An Update.
        We find the track record of human evolution to be dismal - examples are:
        • Ramapithecus-a pongid or great ape, not a hominid.
        • Piltdown Man-greatest paleontological hoax.
        • Nebraska Man-extinct pig.
        • Cro-Magnon Man-indistinguishable from modern Europeans.
        • Homo habilis-In 1992 Dr. Ian Tattersall stated in Evolutionary Anthropology that: " … it is increasingly clear that Homo habilis has become a wastebasket taxon, little more than a convenient recipient for a motley assortment of hominid fossils from the latest Pliocene and earliest Pleistocene...."
        • Neanderthals-Researcher L. A. Yaroch, writing in the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 1996, stated that "the uniqueness of Neanderthals appears to have been exaggerated ... " They were fully human.
        • Australopithecus-In a 1995 biology text published by Prentice Hall, the two authors state: "At the present time, scientists cannot agree on how many species of Australopithecus there were or whether or not they were the ancestors of human beings." Perhaps one reason is because they are so apelike. Upright walking that these creatures may have engaged in is hardly reason to speculate that they were on the way to becoming human. The living pygmy chimpanzee walks upright. Australopithecus anamensis of Kenya was discovered in August 1995. However, this creature coexisted "4 m.y. ago" with another "early pre-human species" Ardipithecus ramidus, causing "conflicting interpretations" according to Worldbook Science Year, 1997
          •
        .... End of excerpt. (some formatting was added for the internet)
    3. The scientific method involves observation and repeatability. Events that happened in the past which man was not able to observe cannot be considered valid using the scientific method. Evolution and Creation are both not subject to the scientific method of proof. So who are you going to believe - God or sinful, fallible, changeable man? Man's feeble attempts to relegate God to the inner walls of a building and prove that the earth is millions or billions years old all fall short. God is!

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