Question. Can you prove the age of something with carbon dating?
Another subject that needs to be discussed is carbon dating. Many people ask me, What about carbon dating? Doesnt carbon dating, potassium argon dating, or uranium lead dating, prove that things are millions of years old? You were probably taught when you went to school that they prove the age of things by using carbon dating methods.
Let me explain how carbon dating works. In the atmosphere there is a little carbon (CO2) in the air that we breathe. There is not much of it, but we breathe in a little of it in, and your body hardly does anything with it. Generally, you create it and then breathe it back out. Plants, on the other hand, take in CO2, and it becomes part of their tissue. They make sugars and things out of the CO2. When cosmic radiation from outer space hits the atmosphere, the high energy particles change the nitrogen (our air is about 80% nitrogen) to carbon fourteen (C14), and it becomes radioactive. That doesnt mean that it listens to the radio a lot. It means its unstable relationship is going to break down. C14 only lasts a short time and then it breaks back down to nitrogen, but when it breaks down it throws off little particles. To over simplify this, if you were walking past a piece of C14 with a Geiger counter, the little particles would strike the Geiger counter, and you would hear it click. Youve seen movies where they are walking around with a Geiger counter looking for nuclear material, and it is clicking. Willard Libby received a Nobel Prize for the development of carbon dating. Willard Libby said, C14 breaks down in a predictable half life. About half of it changes back to N14 every 5,730 years. We will round it off to 6,000 for this analogy. In 6,000 years, it breaks down and half of it is gone, so if you walk past a piece of C14 that is brand new, you should get sixteen clicks per gram per minute. Therefore if your Geiger counter is registering sixteen clicks per minute, you have brand new C14. If you were able to check it 6,000 years later, half of it would be gone, and you should only get eight clicks per minute per gram. Therefore, if you are only getting eight clicks per gram per minute, you can assume that it has already gone through one half life, and it is now 6,000 years old. If you are only getting four clicks per minute, then it has gone through two half lives, so it is now twelve thousand years old. That is the principle of how carbon dating works. It is very simple and very neatly done.
Each of the radioactive elements has a different half life. C14 has a half life of 5,700 years. Uranium 235 has a half life of 700 million years. We can tell how old something is by seeing how much of the element is in radioactive form, and how much has decayed back to a normal, stable element, whether it is lead, argon, or nitrogen. This all sounds great, except the entire theory is based on a couple of faulty assumptions that cannot be proven.
This is an analogy of why carbon dating does not work. If you walked into a room and found a candle burning on a table, and you said, Mr. Hovind, who lit the candle? I would say, I dont know. I wasnt here when it was lit. We ask around to find out if anyone saw the candle being lit. Nobody saw it, but here it is burning. Well, let us figure out when it was lit. First, we measure the candle. We find out that the base of the candle holder is three inches; therefore, we subtract three inches for the base leaving seven inches of candle. It has now been established that the candle is seven inches tall. This is called empirical science. Empirical science is something that is testable and can be demonstrated. We now time the candle burning. As we watch it burn, we observe that the candle is burning one inch per hour. This is also empirical science. We now have two empirical facts. It is seven inches tall, and it burns at the rate of one inch per hour. The question is, when was it lit? Can you tell me? No. You can only tell me if you make two assumptions. Number one, how tall it was in the beginning? We do not know. Number two, has it always burned at the same rate? We do not know. Maybe it was skinnier and it burned faster.
Maybe there was more oxygen in the room, or maybe there was less oxygen in the room. Maybe the burn rate was different. If you assume that the candle was twelve inches tall, and you assume a constant burn rate, it had been burning for five hours. The answer is only as good as your assumptions.
Carbon dating is based on the assumption that the amount of C14 in the atmosphere has remained constant through all time. This is a very faulty assumption. As the magnetic field declines, more cosmic radiation gets through, and our magnetic field is getting weaker and weaker. Due to the fact that the magnetic field is decreasing, cosmic radiation causes the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights. If the magnetic field was once stronger, less radiation got through and less C14 was formed. It is true that an animal or plant today will give off about sixteen clicks per minute per gram, but 5,000 years ago when the magnetic field was stronger a brand new plant would only give off a few clicks per minute per gram because there was very little C14 in the atmosphere for them to breathe that would have been mixed in with the CO2. We cannot assume that C14 has always been consistent in the atmosphere. We know that it is constantly increasing. Willard Libby knew that it was increasing, and he chose to disregard the evidence. C14 is increasing more and more in our atmosphere, proving that the atmosphere is not more than 10,000 years old. Uranium lead and potassium argon dating methods work on basically the same principle. They all make some faulty assumptions.
If I found a dinosaur fossil and took it to a museum for carbon dating, they would say, Oh, Mr. Hovind, we cannot possibly carbon date this because it is too old. I would say, You cant date it because it is too old? They would say, Oh yes, this is a dinosaur bone, and dinosaurs lived about seventy million years ago. Carbon dating is only good for about 30,000 or 40,000 years. I would ask, Well, how would you date it if you cannot carbon date it? They would say, We simply use another method. Each of the radioactive elements have a different half life. We know that this bone is about 70 million years old (U235 has a half life of 700 million.) We would use the U235
so that gives us a pretty accurate way of measuring objects between 50 million and 800 million years old. That bone fits in that range, so we will check for U235 instead of C14.
They brake off a piece and test it. They find the uranium-to-lead composition, and they say, Oh! This bone is ten million years old. Something went wrong. Lets try it again. They get another sample, break it off, check for uranium-to-lead composition, and this time it shows to be only two million years old. They will say, Something went wrong. The sample must have been contaminated. Lets try it again. They brake off another sample. They will continually test until they get an answer that is in the range that they are looking for which is 70 million years.
You see; everything must fit within the geologic column. The geologic column is the bible to the evolutionist. Any radiometric dating that is given that is outside the realm of the geologic
column is rejected. They will say, We know that cant be right. We already know how old it is,
approximately, based on the geologic column. That is where the fraud comes in. The geologic
column is a hoax. If a bone did contain some carbon, uranium, and potassium, and they checked
it three different ways, they would get three wildly different numbers. Let me cite from an article that I read:
Some Cat! The family cat died and was buried by the children. A few years later the young people wondered what was left of their cat, and dug it up. They were amazed to find that some of the bones appeared to be petrified. In order to find out, they sent it to the university lab without telling the nature of their discovery. As a result of the lab testing, they were informed that the bones were those of a cat that lived several million years ago and was an evolutionary ancestor of the modern cat.
You can take a clam that is still alive, break off a piece of the shell, and send it to a university for carbon dating, and it will come back to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old. I dont want you to think that all dating methods are useless. They are not useless, but they are very much over blown in
their importance. They are all based on very faulty assumptions. Dont fall for the statement, They proved it is so many millions of years old based on carbon dating.