10. Bad Dating Methods
This tract will discuss some pretty heavy science. Hopefully, I’ll be able to present this in a way that anyone can understand. If I talk under your knowledge, sorry, but not everyone may have your level of understanding.
Radiometric Dating
How does it work?
It’s all about atoms. Atoms are the tiny building blocks that make up everything in the universe. God designed them to be the foundation of all matter—whether it’s the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the stars in the sky. All matter is either liquid, solid or gas.
Each atom has three main parts: protons (positive charges) and neutrons (no charge) in the center, called the nucleus, and electrons (negative charges) that zoom around the nucleus like a cloud. Protons and electrons balance each other out, making most atoms neutral overall.
Inside the nucleus, the protons naturally push against each other because positive charges repel, just like trying to push the positive sides of two magnets together. But neutrons are like glue, helping to hold the protons together through a powerful force that God created to keep atoms stable. If there aren’t just the right number of neutrons to balance the protons, the nucleus becomes unstable.
When this happens, the atom might try to fix itself by losing extra pieces or energy from its nucleus. This process is called radiation, and we call such atoms radioactive. Around the nucleus, electrons are attracted to the protons, and if their numbers don’t match, the atom becomes unbalanced or ionized. Stability comes from the perfect mix of protons, neutrons, and electrons working together—just as God intended.
Radiometric dating is a method scientists use to estimate the age of rocks, fossils, or other materials. It’s based on how some radioactive atoms inside the material slowly change over time into different atoms, like a clock.
Here’s how it works: Some elements, like uranium or carbon, are unstable and break down at a steady rate, releasing tiny bits of energy or particles—this is called radioactive decay. Scientists measure how much of the original radioactive atom (the “parent”) is left and how much has changed into the new atom (the “daughter”). By knowing how long this process takes (called the half-life), they calculate how old the material is.
It’s like watching sand in an hourglass—measuring how much sand is left tells you how much time has passed.
The Problem With The Process
Radiometric dating works like a clock, but it assumes three big things:
1. The starting amount is known: Scientists assume they know how much of the radioactive “parent” atom and the “daughter” atom were in the material when it formed.
2. No contamination: They assume that nothing has added or removed the parent or daughter atoms over time, like heat and pressure that accelerate the process.
3. Constant decay rate: They assume the radioactive atoms have always decayed at the same steady rate and haven’t sped up or slowed down over millions of years.
These assumptions are a problem because we can’t go back in time to check them. If any of these assumptions are wrong, the results of radiometric dating are not accurate. For example, if the starting amount isn’t what scientists think, or if the decay rate was different in the past (like during a global event such as the Flood), the calculated ages could be way off.
In fact, my Broken Planet Model (BPM) tells us exactly when the irradiation occurred because it follows the Bible on this:
When Noah was 600 years old, on the seventeenth day of the second month, all the underground waters erupted from the earth, and the rain fell in mighty torrents from the sky. Rain continued to fall for forty days and forty nights. (Genesis 7:11-12)
That was in the 1656th year from the creation of the world. This means that we all know without a doubt that radiometric dating is off by billions of years. That is a huge error!
The fact is, no one knows how much of an atom was in the sample because no one was there with the tools to measure it. And the presence of heat and pressure also change the readings wildly. This made the decay rate speed up quite a bit.
This means that we cannot trust radiometric dating at all. But we can trust the Bible and its timeline, which absolutely is not the same as their wild guesses and assumptions.
Carbon Dating
Another radioactive dating process is Carbon Dating. This one counts the number of a particular atom, called carbon fourteen. While it does not try to see how much one atom changed into another, it simply counts how much of a single atom (C14) is there. Carbon Dating is not as inaccurate as Radiometric Dating but it also has some potential problems with it.
Strengths of Carbon-14 Dating:
1. Works well for recent materials: Carbon-14 is useful for dating things that are up to about 50,000 years old, like fossils, ancient artifacts, and bones. It’s particularly good for things that were once alive, like plants and animals, because living organisms constantly take in carbon during their life.
2. It’s based on a clear process: Carbon-14 forms in the atmosphere when cosmic rays hit nitrogen. Living organisms absorb it, and when they die, they stop taking in carbon. The Carbon-14 in their remains starts to decay at a predictable rate. By measuring how much Carbon-14 is left, scientists can estimate how long it’s been since the organism died.
Problems with Carbon-14 Dating:
1. Assumptions about initial levels: Carbon-14 dating assumes that the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere has always been the same. However, we know that this level has fluctuated over time due to changes in the Earth’s atmosphere, the Sun, and cosmic ray activity. This can lead to inaccurate dates.
2. Contamination: If the sample being dated has been contaminated with newer or older carbon (like from soil or handling), it can mess up the results. Even tiny amounts of contamination can cause big problems.
3. Dating limits: Carbon-14 dating is not reliable for things older than about 50,000 years. After that, too little Carbon-14 remains to measure accurately, and the results become unreliable.
4. Rate of decay: The method assumes the decay rate has always been constant, but this might not have been true, especially during events like a global Flood or other environmental changes, which could have altered decay rates or the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere.
So, while Carbon-14 dating has strengths, especially for relatively recent finds, it has limitations and assumptions that can make it less reliable, particularly for older samples or those affected by environmental changes.
Other Methods
Here are a few other dating methods that have issues:
1. Ice Core Dating claims that the layers seen represent countable periods of time. But there are many problems with their assumptions using this method. For instance, most of the ice on the poles came from a single one-time event—Noah’s Flood.
2. Luminescence Dating claims to measure the amount of light released from minerals (like quartz or feldspar) when they are exposed to light or heat. This is just silly for rocks that never saw the light of day, as is the case for much of the rock layers from the Great Flood.
3. Paleomagnetic Dating assumes that they can determine the age of Earth based on variances in the apparent magnetic reversals in rocks, sediments, and ceramics. But this is highly speculative and does not account for the possibility of the Mantle being ruptured at the Flood, which could have caused all of the reversals they read.
4. Starlight Transmission is based on the speed of light and the great distances between stars and Earth. But we do not know that the speed of light is a constant, and the greatest issue we have with it is that light was already created before the stars, which puts the light where we can see it from day 6, when Adam first saw starlight.
There’s more to this, but I’m out of room.
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