Carbon 14/Radiometric Dating and etc. Part two

First, announcements and such...

I have previously stated the following:
  • Belief in a young Earth is not necessary to be a Christian.
  • Belief in Darwinism does not disqualify one from being a Christian.
  • Belief in YEC is the most logical position based on the wording of the Bible.
  • In my opinion, belief in YEC is far and away the most logical view based on evidence.
  • Young Earth Creationism is a scientific discipline based on evidence.
  • The Bible is evidence. It is one piece of evidence only, but a strong one.
  • Naturalism is not "scientific" but rather an assumption made that is metaphysical rather than scientific in nature.
  • Accepting the possibility of the supernatural does not automatically include it, but rather simply allows for that possibility.
  • The Discovery Institute is not a YEC organization and many of their membership are most definitely NOT Christians. They are an organization that studies the Intelligent Design of organisms and in fact all material things.
  • I have not ruled out talkorigins as a source because of any reason other than the fact that they post information they know is incorrect in order to confuse or fool the ignorant.
  • Family Research Council is not a scientific organization and is never linked to any scientific posts.
  • I have also ruled Dr. Dino out and a few other sites that ostensibly promote YEC because they will post knowingly false information.
  • Whereas I have posted things that I later discovered were incorrect (and said so) I do not intentionally post false data and have no plan to begin to do so.
  • Therefore when a commenter begins saying I lie intentionally, readers, he is trying to draw attention away from the subject at hand. So if a commenter says that I am lying, be sure to re-read the post because there is something in there he is afraid that you will believe.
Rules of engagement:
  • If I or one of my commenters correctly quotes another source and that source turns out to be false, we should acknowledge that mistake made by the source. I will not call creeper a liar for posting things from talkorigins, I simply refuse to pay attention to them and it would appear that creeper feels the same way about FRC. Fair enough.
  • Swearing or pornography of any kind detected on the threads will be deleted. A commenter who disagrees with me will not be banned or erased, but keep the language civil even if the argument is intense.
  • I admit fully that I have a worldview and that worldview has changed over time. If you read this blog for very long and do not yet understand that you have a worldview then you are not paying attention. Know thyself!


What about carbon dating? (Illustrations available at weblink)

Here are a few excerpts from the pdf:

• How does the carbon ‘clock’ work?
• Is it reliable?
• What does carbon dating really show?
• What about other radiometric dating methods?
• Is there evidence that the Earth is young?

PEOPLE who ask about carbon-14 (14C) dating usually want to
know about the radiometric ( Also known as isotope or radioisotope dating)
dating methods that are claimed to give
millions and billions of years—carbon dating can only give
thousands of years. People wonder how millions of years could be
squeezed into the biblical account of history.

Clearly, such huge time periods cannot be fitted into the Bible without
compromising what the Bible says about the goodness of God and the
origin of sin, death and suffering—the reason Jesus came into the world
(see Chapter 2).

Christians, by definition, take the statements of Jesus Christ seriously.
He said, ‘But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and
female’ (Mark 10:6). This only makes sense with a time line
beginning with the creation week thousands of years ago. It makes no
sense at all if man appeared at the end of billions of years.

We will deal with carbon dating first and then with the other dating
methods.



How the carbon clock works

Carbon has unique properties that are essential for life on Earth. Familiar
to us as the black substance in charred wood, as diamonds, and as the
graphite in ‘lead’ pencils, carbon comes in several forms, or isotopes.
One rare form has atoms that are 14 times as heavy as hydrogen atoms:
carbon-14, or 14C, or radiocarbon.

Carbon-14 is made when cosmic rays knock neutrons out of atomic
nuclei in the upper atmosphere. These displaced neutrons, now moving
fast, hit ordinary nitrogen (14N) at lower altitudes, converting it into
14C. Unlike common carbon (12C), 14C is unstable and slowly decays,
changing back into nitrogen and releasing energy. This instability makes
it radioactive.

Ordinary carbon (12C) is found in the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the
air, which is taken up by plants, which in turn are eaten by animals.
So a bone, or a leaf of a tree, or even a pieceof wooden furniture,
contains carbon. When 14C has been formed, like ordinary carbon
(12C), it combines with oxygen to give carbon dioxide (14CO2), and
so italso gets cycled through the cells of plants and animals.

We can take a sample of air, count how many 12C atoms there are for
every 14C atom, and calculate the 14C/12C. 14C is gained by living things
but lost after death.


Upper atmosphere conversion of 14N to 14C 14C in carbon dioxide taken
up by plants 14C regained as animals eat plants. Some loss of 14C by decay ratio.
14N Loss of 14C by decay and no replacement from eating 14N After death:


What about carbon dating?

Because 14C is so well mixed up with 12C, we expect to find that
this ratio is the same if we sample a leaf from a tree, or a part of your body.

In living things, although 14C atoms are constantly changing back
to 14N, they are still exchanging carbon with their surroundings, so the
mixture remains about the same as in the atmosphere. However, as
soon as a plant or animal dies, the 14C atoms which decay are no longer
replaced, so the amount of 14C in that once-living thing decreases as
time goes on (Figure 1). In other words, the 14C/12C ratio gets smaller.

So, we have a ‘clock’ which starts ticking the moment something
dies

Obviously, this works only for things which were once living. It
cannot be used to date volcanic rocks, for example.
The rate of decay of 14C is such that half of an amount will convert
back to 14N in 5,730 ± 40 years. This is the ‘half-life’. So, in two halflives,
or 11,460 years, only one-quarter will be left. Thus, if the amount
of 14C relative to 12C in a sample is one-quarter of that in living organisms
at present, then it has a theoretical age of 11,460 years. Anything over
about 50,000 years old should theoretically have no detectable 14C left.

That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years. In fact,
if a sample contains 14C, it is good evidence that it is not millions of
years old. However, things are not quite so simple. Firstly, plants discriminate
against carbon dioxide containing 14C. That is, they take up less than would be
expected and so they test older than they really are.Furthermore, different
types of plants discriminate differently. This also has to be corrected for.2

2. Today, a stable carbon isotope, 13C, is measured as an indication of the level of discrimination
against 14C.

~


Secondly, the ratio of 14C/12C in the atmosphere has not been
constant—for example it was higher before the industrial era when the
massive burning of fossil fuels released a lot of carbon dioxide that was
depleted in 14C. This would make things which died at that time appear
older in terms of carbon dating. Then there was a rise in 14CO2 with
the advent of atmospheric testing of atomic bombs in the 1950s.3 This
would make things carbon- dated from that time appear younger than
their true age.

Measurement of 14C in historically dated objects (e.g. seeds in
the graves of historically dated tombs) enables the level of 14C in the
atmosphere at that time to be estimated, and so partial calibration of the
‘clock’ is possible. Accordingly, carbon dating carefully applied to items
from historical times can be useful. However, even with such historical
calibration, archaeologists do not regard 14C dates as absolute because
of frequent anomalies. They rely more on dating methods that link into
historical records.

Outside the range of recorded history, calibration of the 14C ‘clock’ is not possible.4
Other factors affecting carbon dating
The amount of cosmic rays penetrating Earth’s atmosphere affects the
amount of 14C produced and therefore the dating system. The amount
of cosmic rays reaching the Earth varies with the sun’s activity, and with
the Earth’s passage through magnetic clouds as the solar system travels
around the Milky Way galaxy.

The strength of the Earth’s magnetic field affects the amount of
cosmic rays entering the atmosphere. A stronger magnetic field deflects
more cosmic rays away from the Earth. Overall, the energy of the Earth’s
magnetic field has been decreasing,5 so more 14C is being produced now than in
the past. This will make old things look older than they really are.

3. Radiation from atomic testing, like cosmic rays, causes the conversion of 14N to 14C.

4. Tree ring dating (dendrochronology) has been used in an attempt to extend the calibration
of carbon-14 dating earlier than historical records allow, but this depends on temporal
placement of fragments of wood (from long-dead trees) using carbon-14 dating, assuming
straight-line extrapolation backwards. Then cross-matching of ring patterns is used
to calibrate the carbon ‘clock’—a somewhat circular process which does not give an
independent calibration of the carbon dating system.

5. McDonald, K.L. and Gunst, R.H., 1965. An analysis of the earth’s magnetic field from
1835 to 1965. ESSA Technical Report IER 46-IES, U.S. Government Printing Office,
Washington, D.C., p. 14.

What about carbon dating?~71

Also, the Genesis Flood would have greatly upset the carbon balance.
The Flood buried a huge amount of carbon, which became coal, oil, etc.,
lowering the total 12C in the biosphere (including the atmosphere—plants
regrowing after the Flood absorb CO2 which is not replaced by the decay
of the buried vegetation).6 Total 14C is also proportionately lowered at
this time, but whereas no terrestrial process generates any more 12C, 14C
is continually being produced, and at a rate which does not depend on
carbon levels (it comes from nitrogen). Therefore the 14C level relative
to 12C increases after the Flood. So the 14C/12C ratio in plants/animals/
the atmosphere before the Flood had to be lower than what it is now.

Unless this effect (which is additional to the magnetic field issue just discussed)
were corrected for, carbon dating of fossils formed in the Flood would give
ages much older than the true ages.

Creationist researchers have suggested that dates of 35,000–45,000
years should be recalibrated to the biblical date for the Flood.7 Such a
recalibration makes sense of anomalous data from carbon dating—for
example, very discordant ‘dates’ for different parts of a frozen musk ox
carcass from Alaska and an inordinately slow rate of accumulation of
ground sloth dung pellets in the older layers of a cave where the layers
were carbon dated.7

6. Taylor, B.J., 1994. Carbon dioxide in the antediluvian atmosphere. Creation Research
Society Quarterly 30(4):193–197.

7. Brown, R.H., 1992. Correlation of C-14 age with real time. Creation Research Society
Quarterly 29:45–47. Musk ox muscle was dated at 24,000 years, but hair was dated at
17,000 years. Corrected dates bring the difference in age approximately within the life span
of a musk ox. With sloth cave dung, standard carbon dates of the lower layers suggested
less than 2 pellets per year were produced by the sloths. Correcting the dates increased
the number to a more realistic 1.4 per day.

~

Okay, the above is only about one-third of the article, which you can read by following the link. A similar article is found below:

~

A handbook for students, parents, and teachers countering the latest arguments for evolution

by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.

How old is the earth?

First published in Refuting Evolution, Chapter 8

For particles-to-people evolution to have occurred, the earth would need to be billions of years old. So Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science presents what it claims is evidence for vast time spans. This is graphically illustrated in a chart on pages 36–37: man’s existence is in such a tiny segment at the end of a 5-billion-year time-line that it has to be diagrammatically magnified twice to show up.

On the other hand, basing one’s ideas on the Bible gives a very different picture. The Bible states that man was made six days after creation, about 6,000 years ago. So a time-line of the world constructed on biblical data would have man almost at the beginning, not the end. If we took the same 15-inch (39 cm) time-line as does Teaching about Evolution to represent the biblical history of the earth, man would be about 1/1000 of a mm away from the beginning! Also, Christians, by definition, take the statements of Jesus Christ seriously. He said: ‘But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female’ (Mark 10:6), which would make sense with the proposed biblical time-line, but is diametrically opposed to the Teaching about Evolution time-line.

This chapter analyzes rock formation and dating methods in terms of what these two competing models would predict.

The rocks

The vast thicknesses of sedimentary rocks around the world are commonly used as evidence for vast age. First, Teaching about Evolution gives a useful definition on page 33:

Sedimentary rocks are formed when solid materials carried by wind and water accumulate in layers and then are compressed by overlying deposits. Sedimentary rocks sometimes contain fossils formed from the parts of organisms deposited along with other solid materials.

The ‘deep time’ indoctrination comes with the statement ‘often reaching great thicknesses over long periods of time.’ However, this goes beyond the evidence. Great thicknesses could conceivably be produced either by a little water over long periods, or a lot of water over short periods. We have already discussed how different biases can result in different interpretations of the same data, in this case the rock layers. It is a philosophical decision, not a scientific one, to prefer the former interpretation. Because sedimentation usually occurs slowly today, it is assumed that it must have always occurred slowly. If so, then the rock layers must have formed over vast ages. The philosophy that processes have always occurred at roughly constant rates (‘the present is the key to the past’) is often called uniformitarianism.

Uniformitarianism was defined this way in my own university geology class in 1983, and was contrasted with catastrophism. But more recently, the word ‘uniformitarianism’ has been applied in other contexts to mean also constancy of natural laws, sometimes called ‘methodological uniformitarianism,’ as opposed to what some have called ‘substantive uniformitarianism.’

It should also be pointed out that uniformitarian geologists have long allowed for the occasional (localized) catastrophic event. However, modern historical geology grew out of this general ‘slow and gradual’ principle, which is still the predominantly preferred framework of explanation for any geological formation. Nevertheless, the evidence for catastrophic formation is so pervasive that there is a growing body of neo-catastrophists. But because of their naturalistic bias, they prefer, of course, to reject the explanation of the Genesis (global) flood.

However, a cataclysmic globe-covering (and fossil-forming) flood would have eroded huge quantities of sediment, and deposited them elsewhere. Many organisms would have been buried very quickly and fossilized.

Also, recent catastrophes show that violent events like the flood described in Genesis could form many rock layers very quickly. The Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington state produced 25 feet (7.6 meters) of finely layered sediment in a single afternoon!1 And a rapidly pumped sand slurry was observed to deposit 3 to 4 feet (about 1 meter) of fine layers on a beach over an area the size of a football field. Sedimentation experiments by the creationist Guy Berthault, sometimes working with non-creationists, have shown that fine layers can form by a self-sorting mechanism during the settling of differently sized particles.2,3

In one of Berthault’s experiments, finely layered sandstone and diatomite rocks were broken into their constituent particles, and allowed to settle under running water at various speeds. It was found that the same layer thicknesses were reproduced, regardless of flow rate. This suggests that the original rock was produced by a similar self-sorting mechanism, followed by cementing of the particles together.4The journal Nature reported similar experiments by evolutionists a decade after Berthault’s first experiments.5

So when we start from the bias that the Bible is God’s Word and is thus true, we can derive reasonable interpretations of the data. Not that every problem has been solved, but many of them have been.

Conversely, how does the ‘slow and gradual’ explanation fare? Think how long dead organisms normally last. Scavengers and rotting normally remove all traces within weeks. Dead jellyfish normally melt away in days. Yet Teaching about Evolution has a photo of a fossil jellyfish on page 36. It clearly couldn’t have been buried slowly, but must have been buried quickly by sediments carried by water. This water would also have contained dissolved minerals, which would have caused the sediments to have been cemented together, and so hardened quickly.

The booklet Stones and Bones6 shows other fossils that must have formed rapidly. One is a 7-foot (2m) long ichthyosaur (extinct fish-shaped marine reptile) fossilized while giving birth. Another is a fish fossilized in the middle of its lunch. And there is a vertical tree trunk that penetrates several rock layers (hence the term polystrate fossil). If the upper sedimentary layers really took millions or even hundreds of years to form, then the top of the tree trunk would have rotted away.

Ironically, NASA scientists accept that there have been ‘catastrophic floods’ on Mars7 that carved out canyons8 although no liquid water is present today. But they deny that a global flood happened on earth, where there is enough water to cover the whole planet to a depth of 1.7 miles (2.7 km) if it were completely uniform, and even now covers 71 percent of the earth’s surface! If it weren’t for the fact that the Bible teaches it, they probably wouldn’t have any problem with a global flood on earth. This demonstrates again how the biases of scientists affect their interpretation of the evidence.

Radiometric dating

As shown above, the evidence from the geological record is consistent with catastrophes, and there are many features that are hard to explain by slow and gradual processes. However, evolutionists point to dating methods that allegedly support deep time. The best known is radiometric dating. This is accurately described on page 35 of Teaching about Evolution:

Some elements, such as uranium, undergo radioactive decay to produce other elements. By measuring the quantities of radioactive elements and the elements into which they decay in rocks, geologists can determine how much time has elapsed since the rock has cooled from an initially molten state.

However, the deep time ‘determination’ is an interpretation; the actual scientific data are isotope ratios. Each chemical element usually has several different forms, or isotopes, which have different masses. There are other possible interpretations, depending on the assumptions. This can be illustrated with an hourglass. When it is up-ended, sand flows from the top container to the bottom one at a rate that can be measured. If we observe an hourglass with the sand still flowing, we can determine how long ago it was up-ended from the quantities of sand in both containers and the flow rate. Or can we? First, we must assume three things:

Hourglass illustration

An hourglass ‘clock’ tells us the elapsed time by comparing the amount of sand in the top bowl (‘Parent’) with the amount in the bottom bowl (‘Daughter’).

  1. We know the quantities of sand in both containers at the start. Normally, an hourglass is up-ended when the top container is empty. But if this were not so, then it would take less time for the sand to fill the new bottom container to a particular level.
  2. The rate has stayed constant. For example, if the sand had become damp recently, it would flow more slowly now than in the past. If the flow were greater in the past, it would take less time for the sand to reach a certain level than it would if the sand had always flowed at the present rate.
  3. The system has remained closed. That is, no sand has been added or removed from either container. However, suppose that, without your knowledge, sand had been added to the bottom container, or removed from the top container. Then if you calculated the time since the last up-ending by measuring the sand in both containers, it would be longer than the actual time.

Teaching about Evolution addresses assumption 2:

For example, it requires that the rate of radioactive decay is constant over time and is not influenced by such factors as temperature and pressure—conclusions supported by extensive research in physics.

It is true that in today’s world, radioactive decay rates seem constant, and are unaffected by heat or pressure. However, we have tested decay rates for only about 100 years, so we can’t be sure that they were constant over the alleged billions of years. Physicist Dr Russell Humphreys suggests that decay rates were faster during creation week, and have remained constant since then. There is some basis for this, for example radiohalo analysis, but it is still tentative.

Teaching about Evolution also addresses assumption 3:

It also assumes that the rocks being analyzed have not been altered over time by migration of atoms in or out of the rocks, which requires detailed information from both the geologic and chemical sciences.

This is a huge assumption. Potassium and uranium, both common parent elements, are easily dissolved in water, so could be leached out of rocks. Argon, produced by decay from potassium, is a gas, so moves quite readily.

Anomalies

There are many examples where the dating methods give ‘dates’ that are wrong for rocks of known historical age. One example is rock from a dacite lava dome at Mount St Helens volcano. Although we know the rock was formed in 1986, the rock was ‘dated’ by the potassium-argon (K-Ar) method as 0.35 ± 0.05 million years old.9 Another example is K-Ar ‘dating’ of five andesite lava flows from Mt Ngauruhoe in New Zealand. The ‘dates’ ranged from <>

What happened was that excess radiogenic argon (40Ar*) from the magma (molten rock) was retained in the rock when it solidified. The secular scientific literature also lists many examples of excess 40Ar* causing ‘dates’ of millions of years in rocks of known historical age. This excess appears to have come from the upper mantle, below the earth’s crust. This is consistent with a young world—the argon has had too little time to escape.10

  • If excess 40Ar* can cause exaggerated dates for rocks of known age, then why should we trust the method for rocks of unknown age?

Another problem is the conflicting dates between different methods. If two methods disagree, then at least one of them must be wrong. For example, in Australia, some wood was buried by a basalt lava flow, as can be seen from the charring. The wood was ‘dated’ by radiocarbon (14C) analysis at about 45,000 years old, but the basalt was ‘dated’ by the K-Ar method at c. 45 million years old!11 Other fossil wood from Upper Permian rock layers has been found with 14C still present. Detectable 14C would have all disintegrated if the wood were really older than 50,000 years, let alone the 250 million years that evolutionists assign to these Upper Permian rock layers.12[Update: see also Radiometric dating breakthroughs for more examples of 14C in coal and diamonds, allegedly millions of years old.]

According to the Bible’s chronology, great age cannot be the true cause of the observed isotope ratios. Anomalies like the above are good supporting evidence, but we are not yet sure of the true cause in all cases. A group of creationist Ph.D. geologists and physicists from theCreation Research Society and the Institute for Creation Research are currently working on this topic. Their aim is to find out the precise geochemical and/or geophysical causes of the observed isotope ratios.13 One promising lead is questioning Assumption 1—the initial conditions are not what the evolutionists think, but are affected, for example, by the chemistry of the rock that melted to form the magma. [Update: it turned out that Assumption 2 was the most vulnerable, with strong evidence that decay rates were much faster in the past. See the results of their experiments in Radioisotopes & the Age of the Earth volumes 1 and 2.]

Evidence for a young world

Actually, 90 percent of the methods that have been used to estimate the age of the earth point to an age far less than the billions of years asserted by evolutionists. A few of them:

  • Red blood cells and hemoglobin have been found in some (unfossilized!) dinosaur bone. But these could not last more than a few thousand years—certainly not the 65 million years from when evolutionists think the last dinosaur lived.14
  • The earth’s magnetic field has been decaying so fast that it couldn’t be more than about 10,000 years old. Rapid reversals during the flood year and fluctuations shortly after just caused the field energy to drop even faster.15
  • Helium is pouring into the atmosphere from radioactive decay, but not much is escaping. But the total amount in the atmosphere is only 1/2000 of that expected if the atmosphere were really billions of years old. This helium originally escaped from rocks. This happens quite fast, yet so much helium is still in some rocks that it couldn’t have had time to escape—certainly not billions of years.16
  • A supernova is an explosion of a massive star—the explosion is so bright that it briefly outshines the rest of the galaxy. The supernova remnants (SNRs) should keep expanding for hundreds of thousands of years, according to the physical equations. Yet there are no very old, widely expanded (Stage 3) SNRs, and few moderately old (Stage 2) ones in our galaxy, the Milky Way, or in its satellite galaxies, the Magellanic clouds. This is just what we would expect if these galaxies had not existed long enough for wide expansion.17
  • The moon is slowly receding from earth at about 1½ inches (4 cm) per year, and the rate would have been greater in the past. But even if the moon had started receding from being in contact with the earth, it would have taken only 1.37 billion years to reach its present distance. This gives a maximum possible age of the moon—not the actual age. This is far too young for evolution (and much younger than the radiometric ‘dates’ assigned to moon rocks).18
  • Salt is pouring into the sea much faster than it is escaping. The sea is not nearly salty enough for this to have been happening for billions of years. Even granting generous assumptions to evolutionists, the seas could not be more than 62 million years old—far younger than the billions of years believed by evolutionists. Again, this indicates a maximum age, not the actual age.19

A number of other processes inconsistent with billions of years are given in the booklet Evidence for a Young World, by Dr Russell Humphreys.

Creationists admit that they can’t prove the age of the earth using a particular scientific method. They realize that all science is tentative because we do not have all the data, especially when dealing with the past. This is true of both creationist and evolutionist scientific arguments—evolutionists have had to abandon many ‘proofs’ for evolution as well. For example, the atheistic evolutionist W.B. Provine admits: ‘Most of what I learned of the field in graduate (1964–68) school is either wrong or significantly changed.’20 Creationists understand the limitations of these dating methods better than evolutionists who claim that they can use certain present processes to ‘prove’ that the earth is billions of years old. In reality, all age-dating methods, including those which point to a young earth, rely on unprovable assumptions.

Creationists ultimately date the earth using the chronology of the Bible. This is because they believe that this is an accurate eyewitness account of world history, which can be shown to be consistent with much data.

Addendum: John Woodmorappe has just published a detailed study demonstrating the fallacy of radiometric ‘dating,’ including the ‘high-tech’ isochron method: The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1999).

References and notes

  1. S.A. Austin, Mount St. Helens and Catastrophism, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, 1:3–9, ed. R.E. Walsh, R.S. Crowell, Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 1986; for a simplified article, see K. Ham, I got excited at Mount St Helens! Creation 15(3):14–19, June–August 1993. Return to text.
  2. Don Batten, Sandy stripes, Creation 19(1):39–40, December 1996–February 1997. Return to text.
  3. P. Julien, Y. Lan, and G. Berthault, Experiments on Stratification of Heterogeneous Sand Mixtures, Journal of Creation 8(1):37–50, 1994. Return to text.
  4. G. Berthault, Experiments on Lamination of Sediments, Journal of Creation 3:25–29, 1988. Return to text.
  5. H.A. Makse, S. Havlin, P.R. King, and H.E. Stanley, Spontaneous Stratification in Granular Mixtures, Nature 386(6623):379–382, 27 March 1997. See also A. Snelling, Nature Finally Catches Up, Journal of Creation 11(2):125–6, 1997. Return to text.
  6. Carl Wieland, Stones and Bones, (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, Inc., 1994). Return to text.
  7. R.A. Kerr, Pathfinder Tells a Geologic Tale with One Starring Role, Science 279(5348):175, 9 January 1998. Return to text.
  8. O. Morton, Flatlands, New Scientist 159(2143):36–39, 18 July 1998. Return to text.
  9. S.A. Austin, Excess Argon within mineral Concentrates from the New Dacite Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens Volcano, Journal of Creation 10(3):335–343, 1986. Return to text.
  10. A.A. Snelling, The Cause of Anomalous Potassium-Argon ‘Ages’ for Recent Andesite Flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, and the Implications for Potassium-Argon ‘Dating,’ Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, ed. E. Walsh, 1998, p. 503–525. This document lists many examples. For example, six were reported by D. Krummenacher, Isotopic Composition of Argon in Modern Surface Rocks, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 8(2):109–117, April 1970; five were reported by G.B. Dalrymple, 40Ar/36Ar Analysis of Historic Lava Flows, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 6(1):47–55, 1969. Also, a large excess was reported in D.E. Fisher, Excess Rare Gases in a Subaerial Basalt from Nigeria, Nature Physical Science 232(29):60–61, 19 July 1971. Return to text.
  11. A.A. Snelling, Radiometric dating in conflict, Creation 20(1):24–27, December 1997–February 1998. Return to text.
  12. A.A. Snelling, Stumping old-age dogma, Creation 20(4):48–50, September–November 1998. Return to text.
  13. Institute for Creation Research, Acts and Facts 27(7), July 1998. Return to text.
  14. C. Wieland, Sensational dinosaur blood report!Creation 19(4):42–43, September–November 1997; based on research by M. Schweitzer and T. Staedter, The Real Jurassic Park, Earth, June 1997, p. 55–57. [Update: see Squirming at the Squishosaur and the linked articles for more recent evidence of elastic blood vessels in T. rex bones.] Return to text.
  15. D.R. Humphreys, Reversals of the Earth’s Magnetic Field During the Genesis Flood, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, vol. 2 (Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, 1986), p. 113–126; J.D. Sarfati, The earth’s magnetic field: evidence that the earth is young, Creation 20(2):15–19, March–May 1998. Return to text.
  16. L. Vardiman, The Age of the Earth’s Atmosphere: A Study of the Helium Flux through the Atmosphere (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1990); J.D. Sarfati, Blowing old-earth belief away: helium gives evidence that the earth is young, Creation 20(3):19–21, June–August 1998. Return to text.
  17. K. Davies, Distribution of Supernova Remnants in the Galaxy, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, ed. R.E. Walsh, 1994, p. 175–184; J.D. Sarfati, Exploding stars point to a young universe, Creation 19(3):46–49, June–August 1998. See also How do spiral galaxies and supernova remnants fit in with Dr Humphreys’ cosmological model? Dr Russell Humphreys himself explains …. Return to text.
  18. D. DeYoung, The Earth-Moon System, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, vol. 2, ed. R.E. Walsh and C.L Brooks, 1990, 79–84; J.D. Sarfati, The moon: the light that rules the night, Creation 20(4):36–39, September–November 1998. Return to text.
  19. S.A. Austin and D.R. Humphreys, The Sea’s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, Vol. 2, 1990, 17–33; J.D. Sarfati, Salty seas: evidence for a young earth, Creation 21(1):16–17, December 1998–February 1999. Return to text.
  20. Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science, A Review by Dr Will B. Provine; available online from (cited 18 February 1999). Return to text.


Email Post