The Notorious Radiocarbon Dating, Part 1

Have you ever heard someone say that Carbon dating proves that the earth is 4.5 billion years old?  Well, if you ever do, realize that they are dead wrong.  Even evolutionists who know what they are talking about would agree that Carbon-14 dating definitely does not prove that the earth is billions of years old.  In fact, radioactive carbon analysis provides important evidence against billions of years, but I will explain that next week.

Carbon-14 (also called radiocarbon, which is short for radioactive carbon) is just a radioactive isotope of Carbon.  Now, this radioisotope (short for radioactive isotope) is different from most others, like Uranium-238, in two main ways, the first of which I will talk about now, and the second next week.  Carbon-14 has a relatively short half-life of 5,730 years.  One half-life is how long it takes half of a sample of a radioisotope to decay at today’s known rates of radioactive decay.  Two half lives does not mean that the entire radioisotope sample has decayed, but simply that half of the existing sample has decayed.  The first half life is half of the original whole sample; the second half life is simply half of the remaining half; the third life would be half of the remaining quarter, and so on until you are left with a sample so small that it can’t be detected with our most advanced instruments.  Carbon-14 dating can’t prove that the earth is billions of years old because it can’t last that long.

Now, before I go any further, I want to clarify that by saying that C-14 has a half life of 5,730 years does not mean that I believe that it really takes that long for radioactive decay to occur.  Always keep in mind that when any scientist says they radioisotope dated an object to be so many years old, they are unquestioningly assuming that the current rates of radioactive decay have always been the same throughout history.  That’s the assumption of uniformitarianism, “the present is key to the past”, right there.  Using radioisotope dating (and therefore, assuming uniformitarianism and assuming that the Bible is wrong) to prove that the earth is billions of years old (and therefore that uniformitarian assumptions are true and that the Bible is wrong), is a form of circular reasoning, which is a logical fallacy.

When thinking about uniformitarian ideas about the present being” key to the past”, stop for a minute and ask yourself one of the most important questions in the world:  WHY?  Why would we expect uniformitarian rates?  The evolutionist relies so much on uniformitarianism, and yet, they have no reason to expect order and uniformity in nature if it was not created.  They have to borrow strictly creationist ideas like order, laws of nature, and laws of logic in order to even attempt to make a case against creation.  That is logically inconsistent.  Now, don’t think for a minute that we believe in uniformitarianism as creationists.  On the contrary, we believe that the Creator not only told us that He did create, but also that there was a global catastrophe after He created.  Next week, I will tell you more about how radiocarbon dating works and about some very exciting discoveries.