Eight PhD scientists recently released their findings on the radioisotope evidence for the age of the earth. They were called the RATE group (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth). They spent eight years on the project. They studied many radioisotopic dating methods including carbon 14. You may remember the carbon 14 dating method from your high school biology class. Carbon 14 is useful only in dating samples containing carbon which usually means plant and animal matter (though diamonds also contain carbon). Carbon 14 has a half life of only 5,730 years.
This means an object 5,730 years old should have only half the amount of carbon 14 in ratio to carbon 12 as a new object. Any object that is older than twenty carbon 14 half lives should not have any detectable carbon 14. In other words, since carbon 14's half life is 5,730 years, twenty half lives would be 114,600 years and there should be no detectable carbon 14 in a sample that old. The RATE group tested ten samples of coal which it obtained from the US Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank. The ten samples were of coal taken from coalfields all across the United States. The samples represented a wide range of standard time frames in the geologic column including the Cenozoic, Mesozoic and Paleozoic. The coal samples were considered to be tens to hundreds of millions of years old by traditional old earth standards. However, in direct contradiction to the standard old earth timeframe, all ten samples of coal had significant levels of detectable carbon 14. The fact that carbon 14 was detected in every sample of coal clearly shows that the standard old earth estimates for the age of coal are wrong by several orders of magnitude. Old earth evolutionists assume that coal deposits and their accompanying fossils are many millions of years old because evolutionary processes require millions of years.
Their presupposition of evolution distorts their ability to objectively date coal. A scientist is supposed to be objective and go to wherever the facts take him or her. Carbon 14 dating, which is a highly accredited radioisotopic dating method, shows that the coal samples could not be older than 114,600 years. The objective scientific facts point to young earth. To be fair, I will point out that the age of any object cannot be nailed down with absolute certainty because geologic dating is forensic science and deals with nonrepeatable events that occurred in the distant past. Forensic science is the type of science used by a police detective to reconstruct the timing of past events that occurred at a crime scene. Experimental science, by contrast, deals with repeatable events such as what occurs with chemicals in a test tube. Forensic science, since it deals with the past, is more subjective and open to interpretation. The ten coal samples had carbon 14 levels consistent with an age estimate of approximately 50,000 years. That 50,000 year age estimate is quite older than the biblical time frame of approximately 6,000 years.
没有评论:
发表评论