April 2020 Newsletter

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In accordance with the CDC all April events have been cancelled.
 

Articles

The Age of the Earth

By Dr. Joseph Kezele

The age of the earth is an absolutely crucial topic in the controversy between evolutionists and Bible believing creationists, but it is not the real issue.

In general evolutionists understand better than many Christians that the repeated assertion of long ages for the universe and earth itself casts doubt upon the veracity of Scripture. When that assertion is accomplished in the mind of an individual, then it naturally follows to have doubts about the veracity of the rest of the Bible, and the authority of Scripture is overturned.
So how can the Earth be dated? Rocks cannot be dated by appearance, chemical content, the order of the rock layers or by index fossils. Index fossils are said to be specific fossils that are characteristic of specific rock layers. The problem for the evolutionary model is that the order of the rock layers and of fossils in the rock record is not consistent from place to place.
Indeed in many locations layers according the secular geologists representing tens or hundreds of millions of years are missing in various places. The Grand Canyon has great examples of this, one of which is where the Coconino Sandstone directly rests upon the Hermit Shale. When you look at the contact between these two layers, it is level and so tight not even a razor blade can be inserted between them. There are no signs of unevenness, no erosion, for hundreds of miles. It is impossible for millions of years to pass with no unevenness developing. The simple explanation is that the supposed missing time simply never existed.

The attempted scientific fallback position lies in radiometric dating, using pairs of elements, a mother element, which is unstable and is therefore radioactive, and a daughter element, produced by decay of the nucleus of the mother element. A common example is the decay of uranium to lead. This method is unreliable because it depends upon three assumptions which cannot be observed, but which can be disproven.

The first assumption is that there was no daughter element in the sample when it came into existence. There is no way to know this, except for one special situation. The second assumption is that the rate of decay of the mother element has always proceeded at the very same rate at which it is measured to occur today. This has been disproven by elegant experiments. Go to https://www.icr.org/rate/ for details. The third assumption is that nothing ever entered or left the specimen to alter the ratio of mother element to daughter element. This also is unknowable, and in the case of Carbon-14/Carbon-12 this assumption has been disproven more than once.

When samples of known age have been dated using radiometric methods, the results are seriously in error. New rock formed after the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens measured 30 years later should have shown it to be around 30 years old, but standard radiometric dating gave the significantly incorrect date of 350,000 years. This is just one of many examples of wild disagreement between known dates with calculated dates using radiometric methods. Since this is the case with samples of known ages, how can we have confidence in dating of samples of an unknown age?
So how do secular geologists date rocks? You ask’ “How old is this particular rock?” The answer is, “300 million years because of the fossils we find in it.” You then ask, “How do you know the age of that fossil?” The answer is, “300 million years because of the rock it is found in.” Do you see how this works? Circular reasoning. The dates of the rock layers are arbitrarily assumed, in order to create a record of deep time, which is necessary to provide for long, long ages, to give evolution enough time to happen, since it is so improbable. Attempts are made to find dates by radiometric methods that are consistent with the assumed dates. Different pairs of mother-daughter elements give widely different dates from the very same sample, so the number most consistent with the desired date is cherry picked, to “prove” its age.

However, there are many methods that provide ages consistent with the biblical time frame of less than ten thousand years, even close to the six thousand year age of the universe and Earth given by the chronologies in Chapters 5 and 11 in Genesis. Some examples are the strength of Earth’s magnetic field, the decay of comets, the erosion of Niagara Falls, coral reef growth, sodium, potassium and uranium in the ocean, and spiral galaxies.

Scientific data from observations confirm what Scripture gives us about the age of Earth without relying upon assumptions. After all, the author of the world is the author of the Word. He does not contradict himself.