Revelations

It's no secret to those of us who have been engaged in the great evolution/creation science debates over the past several years that there is some serious bad blood between the two camps. Of couse I am biased, however I can state with all honesty that the greater venum has traditionally come from the evolution side.

 

It seems like nthing is out of bounds for some of the evolution faithful, and character assassination is par for the course. And that is why I decided to make my case in relation to the evolutionary dating methods right here on The Literal Bible web site.

 

I think pretty much anyone who is reading this has an interest in the dating methods and the serious issues associated with them, and so I'm not going to go into all the different methods with explanations as to how they are perported to work.

Instead I'm going to post a list of the field representative issues involved with them, and I will show how completely unreliable these methods are and the arbitraray manner in which dates are "selected"

 

OK, so let's get this show on the road!

The following is taken in part from  Radio Metric Dating Flaws

 

OK so back in August of 1993,  geologist Dr Steven Austin and others from the Institute for Creation Research, climbed into the crater of Mount St Helens to view the lava dome.

Why does the lava dome provide an opportunity to test the accuracy of radioisotope dating?

 

There are two reasons. First, radioisotope-dating methods are used on igneous rocks—those formed from molten rock material. Dacite fits this bill. Fossil-bearing sedimentary rock cannot be directly dated radioisotopically. Second, and most importantly, we know exactly when the lava dome formed. This is one of the rare instances in which, to the question, ‘Were you there?’ we can answer, ’Yes, we were!’

 

The dating method Dr Austin used at Mount St Helens was the potassium-argon method, which is widely used in geological circles. It is based on the fact that potassium-40 (an isotope or ‘variety’ of the element potassium) spontaneously ‘decays’ into argon-40 (an isotope of the element argon).2 This process proceeds very slowly at a known rate, having a half-life for potassium-40 of 1.3 billion years.1 In other words, 1.0 g of potassium-40 would, in 1.3 billion years, theoretically decay to the point that only 0.5 g was left.

 

Contrary to what is generally believed, it is not just a matter of measuring the amount of potassium-40 and argon-40 in a volcanic rock sample of unknown age, and calculating a date. Unfortunately, before that can be done, we need to know the history of the rock. For example, we need to know how much ‘daughter’ was present in the rock when it formed.

 

In most situations we don’t know since we didn’t measure it, so we need to make an assumption—a guess. It is routinely assumed that there was no argon initially. We also need to know whether potassium-40 or argon-40 have leaked into, or out of, the rock since it formed. Again, we do not know, so we need to make an assumption. It is routinely assumed that no leakage occurred. It is only after we have made these assumptions that we can calculate an ‘age’ for the rock. And when this is done, the ‘age’ of most rocks calculated in this way is usually very great, often millions of years.

 

The Mount St Helens lava dome gives us the opportunity to check these assumptions, because we know it formed just a handful of years ago, between 1980 and 1986.

The dating test

 

In June of 1992, Dr Austin collected a 7-kg (15-lb) block of dacite from high on the lava dome. A portion of this sample was crushed and milled into a fine powder. Another piece was crushed and the various mineral crystals were carefully separated out.3 The ‘whole rock’ rock powder and four mineral concentrates were submitted for potassium-argon analysis to Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, MA—a high-quality, professional radioisotope-dating laboratory. The only information provided to the laboratory was that the samples came from dacite and that ‘low argon’ should be expected. The laboratory was not told that the specimen came from the lava dome at Mount St Helens and was only 10 years old.

 

OK so now for the results - what do we see?

First and foremost that they are wrong. A correct answer would have been ‘zero argon’ indicating that the sample was too young to date by this method. Instead, the results ranged from 340,000 to 2.8 million years!

 

There are loads and loads of similar examples where the dating is way, way off, and there are also some very highly regarded evolution scientists who admit the dating methods are all but useless, and the evolutionists simply keep testing until they get the dates which fits in with their world view.

This is just not scientific.

 

Why? Obviously, the assumptions were wrong, and this invalidates the ‘dating’ method. Probably some argon-40 was incorporated into the rock initially, giving the appearance of great age. Note also that the results from the different samples of the same rock disagree with each other.

 

It is clear that radioisotope dating is not the ‘gold standard’ of dating methods, or ‘proof’ for millions of years of Earth history. When the method is tested on rocks of known age, it fails miserably. The lava dome at Mount St Helens is not a million years old! At the time of the test, it was only about 10 years old. In this case we were there—we know! How then can we accept radiometric-dating results on rocks of unknown age? This challenges those who promote the faith of radioisotope dating, especially when it contradicts the clear eyewitness chronology of the Word of God.