The Age of the Earth

A study of the numerous Biblical chronologies available dates the earth to a maximum of 7,700 years with most chronologies advocating an age of ± 6000 years. The Septuagint is the translation of the Hebrew Pentateuch into Greek, made in Alexandria, Egypt in the third century BC. It places the creation week at 5665 BC and the flood at 3403 BC. The discrepancy between 6000 years or the Septuagint 7700 years and the scientifically accepted age of some 4,560,000,000 years is vast by all standards. Given such vast ages, the question arises as to how scientists calculate the age of the earth? One method used we have already touched on – by applying the prin- ciple of uniformitarianism, it is believed that one can derive the age of earth’s strata.

For example, it can be observed how quickly sediments ac- cumulate in a shallow lake. Assuming that we find that the rate of accumulation is 0.1 cm/year over our study period, then we could use this figure to calculate the approximate age of a sedimentary geo- logical feature, which we consider to have developed under similar circumstances. A layer of sediment 10m thick could then have taken 10,000 years to form. Given periods of slow uniformitarian erosion, which would have removed sediment, it is easy to see that geological age can be considered vast indeed.

The conclusion reached in the above scenario is, however, only correct if the uniformitarian principle applies. What if there had been a catastrophic flood, that washed vast amounts of sediment into our shallow lake within one day? As is all too apparent from the media today, whole villages can be buried in sediment in an instant after catastrophic floods. Our assumption that the sedimentary layer

took 10,000 years to develop might be based on logic, but it need not necessarily be right. It could have formed rapidly. In fact, all models of age determination using the uniformitarian principle suffer the same restraints and can at best be used as guides. Other models besides sedimentology include the rate of orogeny (mountain uplift), erosion of continents, accumulation of volcanic ejecta, biological criteria such as mutation rates and accumulated change over time, the earth’s cooling rate, rate of build up of ocean salinity, and many more.

Interestingly, the more data is accumulated, the more the various age assumptions come into conflict with each other. In fact, recent arguments on rates of evolution have produced a storm of scientific papers in the world’s top journals where scientists are slashing millions if not hundreds of millions of years out of the geological time frame in order to fit and accommodate findings on the rate of evolutionary change. If it is acceptable in the scientific fraternity to slash millions of years out of the geochronological model, then surely it is an admittance that the time frames are not cast in stone. No uniformitarian method can give consistent results, and the development of radiometric dating techniques was seen as solution to this dilemma.

Radiometric Dating

A radioactive element is capable of changing into a new element by the emission of a charged particle. The parent isotope is thus transformed into a daughter product. This process will con- tinue until a stable element is produced. The rates of decay vary from element to element and the rate is measured in half-lives. For example, if an element has a half-life of 5730 years, as is the case for carbon-14, then after 5730 years, only half the original amount of carbon-14 will be left in any non-living carbon-containing object after this time period. In order to determine the age of a substance, it is vital that the amount of parent element and its daughter product in the sample be known. The ratio of daughter to parent together

with the half-life criteria then enables one to calculate the age of the sample. Of course, one can only determine the quantity of the parent element in the present sample; the quantity of the parent element in the past must be estimated. Knowing the decay rates and using the assumption that these decay rates have remained constant over time, the age of the material can then be determined. In other words, all methods of radioactive dating rely on some a priori assumptions, which may not necessarily be true. These are:

1. The rate of radioactive decay and half-lives has remained constant over time. This assumption has the backing of numerous scientific studies and is relatively sound; however, conditions may have been different in the past and could have influenced the rate of decay or formation of radioactive elements.

• The assumption that the clock was set to zero when the study material was formed. This requires that only the parent isotope be initially present or that the amount of daughter isotope present at the beginning is known so that it can be subtracted.

• The assumption that we are dealing with a closed system. No loss of either parent or daughter elements has occurred since the study material formed.

Let us briefly look at these three assumptions with reference to specific examples.

The Rate of Decay: Let us consider carbon-14 dating as an exam- ple. Carbon-14 is formed when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere and bombard atoms, thus releasing neutrons. When nitrogen in the atmosphere captures these neutrons, the nitrogen is converted to

carbon-14, which reacts like normal carbon-12, but is radioactive. When carbon-14 reacts with oxygen it forms carbon dioxide and mixes with normal carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the sea.

Plants utilize carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, and the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 is thus the same in the plant as in the atmosphere. Animals that consume plants or the animals that have consumed animals that consume the plants also reflect this same ratio. This status quo is maintained as long as there is a turnover of carbon in the organism or, stated otherwise, as long as the organisms are alive. After death, this ratio will, however, change, as the carbon-14 will decay and revert back to nitrogen. This decay is of a random nature and after 5730 years, there will only be half as much carbon-14 in the organism as before. After a further 5730 years, only a quarter of the original amount would remain.

Evolutionists have to assume that the rate of cosmic bom- bardment of the atmosphere has always remained constant (result- ing in the rate of carbon-14 formation) and that the rate of decay has remained constant. They thus assume that the equilibrium level has remained constant. Scientists place great faith in this dating method, and yet more than 50 % of radiocarbon dates from geological and archaeological samples of northeastern North America have been regarded as unacceptable by investigators. ¹³

Although a creationist could also not prove otherwise, there are various reasons, which could be put forward as counter arguments to the constancy of the scientific assumptions:

1. The constancy of cosmic ray bombardment might be questioned. The current high rate of entry might be a consequence of a disturbed post- flood environment that altered the carbon-14 to carbon-12 ratio. Pre-flood dates would thus have to be discarded. This shielding could be achieved by something as mundane as a higher atmospheric water content.

• An increase in the magnetic field of the earth would have shielded the earth from cosmic rays. Some scientists argue that the magnetic field of the earth has declined over time.

• Atmospheric carbon forms just 0.0005% of the current carbon reservoir – 99.66% of the earth’s carbon exists in limestone, 0.31% in oil and gas, and 0.02% in coal. Carbon-14 comes from nitrogen and is independent of the carbon-12 reservoir. If even a small percentage of the limestone deposits were still in the form of living marine organisms at the time of the flood, then the small amount of carbon-14 would have mixed with a much larger carbon-12 reservoir, thus resulting in a drastically reduced ratio. Specimens would then look much older than they actually are.

Even if the rate of decay is constant, without knowledge of the exact ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in the initial sample, the dating technique is subject to question. One of the assump- tions made in employing the radiocarbon technique is that the total biosphere is in equilibrium (infinite age condition) for C-14. This assumption would of course not take into account a possible catastrophic event, in the not so distant past, which could have radically altered the C-14 condition and which in turn would mean that equilibrium has not yet been reached.

It is generally assumed that decay rates for radioisotopes have remained constant; however, there is evidence that the decay of unstable quantum mechanical systems is non-exponential.¹⁴ It is thus quite an extrapolation to assume that the decay of radio- isotopes with high half lives is exponential, when experimental data is only available for short lived isotopes with half-lives of less than 100 years.¹⁵

Zero Reset: It is generally believed that when a volcano erupts, any daughter particles produced by radioactive decay are separated from the parent. Therefore, for example, any lead produced by previous decay when the lava was still inside the earth is separated from ura- nium by movement of the lava flow. The atomic clock is thus set to zero. Of course, one must also assume that once the lava is set, there is no movement in or out of the rock. For a time the Potassium Argon method was considered reliable until huge discrepancies were found and dates were often highly inflated. Results are accepted or rejected on the basis of whether they fit the expected age or not.¹⁶ The assump- tion that argon (which is a gas) is driven off when new formations are formed, is not valid and one cannot be sure whether the clock was set to zero. This point becomes clear when one considers that numerous dates derived by this method give timescales that are too old for even the evolutionary time scale. There is a gradient of argon in the geological column, with more argon in the older rocks and less in the younger rocks regardless of their potassium content, even in minerals with no potassium. This creates an instant time scale, which has little to do with actual geological age.¹⁷ The Rubidium Strontium method was also considered reliable until it was found that Strontium-87, on which the method depends, can be produced from Rubidium-87 by the emission of an electron but can also be produced from Strontium-86 by neutron capture. Since Strontium-87 is mobile it is not possible to tell from which source the Strontium-87 in the sample came from and the method in these grounds alone should be considered unreliable as Brooks et al pointed out:

… crystallization ages determined on basic igneous rock by Rb-Sr whole rock technique can be greater than the true age by many hundreds of millions of years. This problem of inherited age is more serious for younger rocks, and there are well-documented instances of conflicts between stratigraphic age and Rb-Sr age in the literature. ¹⁸

Uranium lead dating also shows major discrepancies. When uranium decays to lead, eight helium atoms are produced for every initial atom of U-238. Helium is a noble gas with little tendency to react with other atoms and is very small. Huge quantities of helium are, however, found in zircon crystals in magma, which has consequences for the dating of the material since this implies a time span of only a few thousand years even for formations con- sidered to be a billion years old. Both the rate of helium diffusion in a crystalline lattice and the rate of decay of uranium to lead can be determined experimentally, but the two processes yield wildly different ages for the same rocks.¹⁹

Many examples from literature show that the zero reset assumption is not always valid. Volcanic ejecta of Mount Rangi- toto (Auckland, New Zealand) was found to have a potassium-40 age of 485,000 years, yet trees buried within the volcanic material dated with the carbon-14 method to be less than 300 years old.²⁰ Recent flows from Mt. Ngauruhoe in New Zealand which occurred between 1949 and 1954 were also dated as being of an upper age of 3 million years. ²¹ Similarly, 10 year old rocks from the Mount St. Helens eruption were also dated at being between 340,000 and

• million years old.²²

A further example from a lava flow off the coast of Hawaii shows similar discrepancies. If dated with the carbon-14 method, the flow appears to be less than 10 000 to 17 000 years old, but dating with the potassium-argon method gives dates of 160 000 to 43 million years. A rock sample from Nigeria was dated at 95 million years by the potassium-argon method, 750 million years by the uranium-helium method, and less than 30 million years by the fission-track method.²³

There are numerous examples in the literature which cast doubt on the clock-reset hypothesis. If the clock is not set to zero when a deposit forms, then there can be no starting point from which to calculate the age of a deposit.

Closed System: No scientist can guarantee that any sample can be considered a closed system unless it was isolated from its en- vironment when it was formed. Elements can be transported into a sample or leach out of a sample. Different elements also have different solubilities. Again, scientists will reject ages that do not conform to the expected and will argue that the clock was not reset if the age is too old, or that isotopes were selectively removed if the age turns out to be too young. In the study on the Hawaii lava flow cited above, it was argued that entrapment of excessive amounts of argon gas had made the samples appear older than they were. Radiometric dating techniques are thus based on sound scientific principles, but rely on so many basic assumptions that the Bible- believing student need not have his faith shattered by data derived from these techniques.

Having established that even radiometric dating has its pitfalls, how much more questionable are the dates of geological features that cannot be dated radiometrically. The long ages attrib- uted to the geological column, for example, are pivotal to the theory of evolution. Without these long ages, the supposed evolutionary changes leading to the development of the earth’s complex life forms could never have taken place, yet evidence is mounting that the geological column and its entrapped fossil graveyards could have had a catastrophic origin. Tens of thousands of sedimentary layers, originally interpreted as having been deposited very slowly in shallow seas, are now considered as having been formed in minutes or hours.²⁴ If this is the case, then the geological column may not be as old as scientists believe.

The geological column with its palaeontological record is the main body of evidence cited for the theory of evolution. The order of the fossils is considered to be progressive and is cited as irrefutable proof for the theory of evolution. Since the fossil bear- ing strata cannot be dated radiometrically, the only evidence for the age of any particular layer is the presumed age of the fossils therein. This assumption is based on circular reasoning since the

age of the fossils determines the age of the strata, which in turn determines the age of the fossils. Nevertheless this is considered to be a viable dating technique. This assumption is basic to the study of fossil strata as Schindewolf already pointed out in 1957:

The only chronometric scale applicable in geological history for the stratigraphic classification of rocks and for dating geological events exactly is furnished by the fossils. Owing to the irreversibility of evolution, they offer an unambiguous time scale for relative age determinations and for worldwide correlation of rocks.²⁵

This type of circular reasoning is not only brushed aside as in the above quote, but is also openly acknowledged by the scientific fraternity as can be seen in the following statement by Rourke in an article published in the American Journal of Science:

The procession of life was never witnessed, it is inferred. The vertical sequence of fossils is thought to represent a process because the enclosing rocks are interpreted as a process. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.²⁶ A study of the strata and the fossils from a catastrophic perspective would thus drastically alter the time scales and allow for reinterpreta- tion of the data and this could make the flood model as written in the book of Genesis a contender which could be seriously considered.