Why Dating Methods are Flawed

One of the main arguments in opposition to the Biblical Creation Account is the idea of "millions of years". The Biblical account simply does not allow for more than a few thousand years. So how can dinosaurs be millions of years old, rocks even older and yet have the Bible's claim of only a few thousand years be true? Simply put, they can't both be true. So, how does one believe the Bible over secular, evolutionary-based science? Lets see how the dating methods work.

When a fossil bone is found, it has no date on it. How it is dated is usually based on what layer of rock it is found in. How the rock is dated is usually based on what fossils are found in that layer of rock. The only thing that breaks this circle are various dating methods.

Contrary to popular belief, this does not include Carbon 14 dating because Carbon 14 is only able to date things a few tens of thousands of years old. So other radioisotopes are used. There are various ones, but they all work the same. They know these isotopes break down. So they measure the amount of the first isotope (the parent) verses the amount of the second isotope (the daughter), figure out how long it takes for one to turn into the other and from that they can see how long it would take to accumulate the amount of the daughter isotope that is found in the sample. Here, let me demonstrate.

Here we have two bottles connected by two caps. These caps have a hole in the middle so when connected as shown, drops of water will pass from the top bottle to the bottom bottle. Now, we can measure how much water is in the top bottle (the parent) and how much is in the bottom bottle (the daughter). We can measure the volume of the water drop and how fast that it drops. With some simple math we can then calculate how long it would take for the amount of water measured in the bottom bottle to have dripped down from the top bottle and therefore we would know how long ago the process started. All very simple, makes sense, right? This is basically how all the dating methods work. So how is this method flawed?

Simple. Let me ask you some questions. Looking at the picture, can you tell me...
1) How much water was in the top bottle when I started?
2) How much water was in the bottom bottle when I started?
3) At any point, was any water added or removed from either bottle?
4) At any time did anything happen to change the rate of the dripping (squeezing the bottle, laying them on their side, etc) or the size of the drop (hole made bigger or blocked by something in the bottle)?

Correctly answering each of these questions is crucial to correctly calculating the time it took for the change to take place. From the sample provided, you cannot answer any of those questions. You can guess, but guessing is not science. This is the same problem secular scientists have. They first guess that the parent element was 100% and the daughter was at 0%. They then guess that nothing contaminated the specimen that might have added or taken away some of one of these elements. They then guess that nothing happened over millions and millions of years that could have changed the rate at which the conversion happened. They support these guesses by saying that in the last 50 - 75 years that these rates have been recorded, nothing has happened, but to assume that means that nothing has happened in 100 million years is not scientific.

So what happens when these methods are applied to rocks of known age? Meaning rocks newly formed in recent volcanoes? They fail 100% of the time. Secular scientists claim this is because you cannot use a test that measures by the scale of millions of years to measure something only a few thousand years old because the method would fail. However, if the entire world were only a few thousand years old as Scripture says, then dating rocks by these methods would fail exactly as observed.

Do not let scientific words like "radio-isotopic decay" and "Potassium-argon" scare you. The principles are simple, as is pointing out why they are impossible to believe. It takes far more faith to believe in the unprovable, unknowable guesses of secular scientists' than to trust God to know how He created everything.

In His service... Arthur Smith