Young earth creationism radiometric dating

To that end, he quoted some authorities, including Richard Lingenfelter. Having accomplished that, Morris concluded that the barrel was still in the process of being filled up and that, given the present rate of water coming in and leaking out, the filling process began only 10, years ago. It's a great argument except for one, little thing. The water is not coming out of the hose at a steady rate as our model assumed! Sometimes it slows down to a trickle so that much more water is leaking out the barrel than is coming in; sometimes it goes full blast so that a lot more water is coming into the barrel than is leaking out.

Thus, the mere fact that the present rate of water coming in exceeds that of the water leaking out cannot be extrapolated back to a starting time. And, that destroys the entire argument. Lingenfelter's paper was written in , before the cycles of C variation we described had been fully documented. The point is that fluctuations in the rate of C production mean that at times the production rate will exceed the decay rate, while at other times the decay rate will be the larger. Lingenfelter actually attributed the discrepancy between the production and decay rates to possible variations in the earth's magnetic field, a conclusion which would have ruined Morris's argument.

Henry Morris chose not to mention that portion of the paper! Creationists don't want their readers to be distracted with problems like that -- unless the cat is already out of the bag and something has to be said. Tree-ring dating see Topic 27 gives us a wonderful check on the radiocarbon dating method for the last years.

That is, we can use carbon dating on a given tree-ring the year sequence having been assembled from the overlapping tree-ring patterns of living and dead trees and compare the resulting age with the tree-ring date. A study of the deviations from the accurate tree-ring dating sequence shows that the earth's magnetic field has an important effect on carbon production. When the dipole moment is strong, carbon production is suppressed below normal; when it is weak, carbon production is boosted above normal.

What the magnetic field does is to partially shield the earth from cosmic rays which produce carbon high in the atmosphere. Contrary to creationist Barnes' totally discredited claims, which I've covered in Topic 11 , the earth's magnetic field dipole moment has, indeed, increased and decreased over time. Strahler presents a graph of the earth's dipole moment going back years. The curve is roughly fitted to mean values determined about every to 1, years The curve is roughly degrees out of phase with the C curve.

The idea [that the fluctuating magnetic field affects influx of cosmic rays, which in turn affects C formation rates] has been taken up by the Czech geophysicist, V. Bucha, who has been able to determine, using samples of baked clay from archeological sites, what the intensity of the earth's magnetic field was at the time in question.

Even before the tree-ring calibration data were available to them, he and the archeologist, Evzen Neustupny, were able to suggest how much this would affect the radiocarbon dates. Thus, at least within the last years, the earth's magnetic field has fluctuated and those fluctuations have induced fluctuations in the production of carbon to a noticeable extent.

Therefore, as already noted, Dr. Hovind's claim that carbon has been slowly building up towards a 30, year equilibrium is worthless. You now have the technical reason for the failure of Morris' model. It may interest the reader to know that within this year period, where the radiocarbon method can be checked by tree-ring data, objects older than BC receive a carbon date which makes them appear younger than they really are!

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An uncorrected carbon date of years for an object would actually mean that the object was years old. Seven hundred years or so is about as far as the carbon method strays from tree-ring dating on the average. Individual dates given on a correlation chart Bailey, , p. As it turns out, we have a check on the carbon production which goes back even further than years:. Evidence of past history of C concentration in the atmosphere is now available through the past 22, years, using ages of lake sediments in which organic carbon compounds are preserved.

Reporting before a conference on past climates, Professor Minze Stuiver of the University of Washington found that magnetic ages of the lake sediments remained within years of the radiocarbon ages throughout the entire period. He reported that the concentration of C in the atmosphere during that long interval did not vary by more than 10 percent Stuiver, , p. Thus, the available evidence is sufficient to validate the radiocarbon method of age determination with an error of about 10 percent for twice as long a period as the creation scenario calls for.

Yes, the atmospheric content of carbon can vary somewhat. The dipole moment of the earth's magnetic field, sunspot activity, the Suess effect, possible nearby supernova explosions, and even ocean absorption can have some effect on the carbon concentration. However, these factors don't affect the radiocarbon dates by more than about percent, judging from the above studies.

Of course, when we reach the upper limit of the method, around 40, years for the standard techniques, we should allow for much greater uncertainty as the small amounts of C remaining are much harder to measure. Tree-ring data gives us a precise correction table for carbon dates as far back as 8,, years. The above study by Stuiver shows that the C fluctuations in the atmosphere were quite reasonable as far back as 22, years ago.

The earth's magnetic field seems to have the greatest effect on C production, and there is no reason to believe that its strength was greatly different even 40, years ago. For a refutation of Barnes' argument see Topic Therefore, atmospheric variation in C production is not a serious problem for the carbon method. The evidence refutes Dr.

A Close Look at Dr. Hovind's List of Young-Earth Arguments and Other Claims

Hovind's claim that the C content of our atmosphere is in the middle of a 30,year buildup. Thus, we can dismiss this young-earth argument. It is painfully obvious that Dr.

Hovind knows next to nothing about carbon dating! Changes in the sunspot cycle do have a noticeable, short-term effect on the rate of C production inasmuch as sunspots are associated with solar flares, which produce magnetic storms on Earth, and the condition of the earth's magnetic field does affect the number of cosmic rays reaching the earth's upper atmosphere.

Carbon is produced by energetic collisions between cosmic rays and molecules of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. Sunspots have absolutely nothing to do with the rate of C decay , which defines the half-life of that radioactive element. Hovind has confused two completely different concepts. Quantum mechanics, that stout pillar of modern physics, which has been verified in so many different ways that I couldn't begin to list them all even if I had them at hand, gives us no theoretical reason for believing that the C rate of decay has changed or can be significantly affected by any reasonable process.

We also have direct observation:. That radiocarbon ages agree so closely with tree-ring counts over at least years, when the observed magnetic effect upon the production rate of C is taken into account, suggests that the decay constant itself can be assumed to be reliable.

Since years is almost two half-lives for carbon, it's half-life being years plus or minus 40 years , we have excellent observational evidence that the decay rate is constant. We also have laboratory studies which support the constancy of all the decay rates used in radiometric dating. A great many experiments have been done in attempts to change radioactive decay rates, but these experiments have invariably failed to produce any significant changes. It has been found, for example, that decay constants are the same at a temperature of degrees C or at a temperature of degrees C and are the same in a vacuum or under a pressure of several thousand atmospheres.

Measurements of decay rates under differing gravitational and magnetic fields also have yielded negative results. Although changes in alpha and beta decay rates are theoretically possible, theory also predicts that such changes would be very small [ Emery, ] and thus would not affect dating methods. There is a fourth type of decay that can be affected by physical and chemical conditions, though only very slightly. This type of decay is electron capture e.

Because this type of decay involves a particle outside the nucleus, the decay rate may be affected by variations in the electron density near the nucleus of the atom. For example, the decay constant of Be-7 in different beryllium chemical compounds varies by as much as 0.

The only isotope of geologic interest that undergoes e. Measurements of the decay rate of K in different substances under various conditions indicate that variations in the chemical and physical environment have no detectable effect on its e. Believe it or not, a number of creationist attacks against radiometric decay rates are aimed at a kind of "decay" called internal conversion IC , which has absolutely nothing to do with the radiometric dating methods Dalrymple, , p.

Harold Slusher, a prominent member of the Institute for Creation Research, claimed that "Experiments have shown that the decay rates of cesium and iron 57 vary, hence there may be similar variations in other radioactive decay rates. These are both stable isotopes so there is no decay rate to be changed. This statement merely reveals Slusher's ignorance of nuclear physics.