The method of Carbon-14—which is continuously generated in the atmosphere by cosmic radiation—has long been used by all kinds of scientists as the method of dating discoveries of the past. No greater use has been found for radiocarbon dating than that of archaeology. Every find, every discovery, every artifact is tested for the amount of carbon left within a specimen to determine when it existed. That it has been used against the dating of the geologic scale has only added to its validity to most of these scientists. In fact, dating is often determined just by comparing it to the level of the scale an artifact has been found. But what if the scale itself is wrong?
Of course this is a question most of these scientists never ask. After all, the field of dating ancient events has provided evolutionists a harbor of security for their beliefs in the geological time scale based on Carbon-14/Carbon-12 dating methods. They have long promoted evolution as the only basis of development while at the same time, discounting any other argument—especially that of creationism.
The rock levels of the Geologic Time Scale
Their belief in the time scale, though they cannot provide a naturalistic mechanism, is their interpretation of earth history that has been developed with a succession of various types of plants and animals in a series of finds covering hundreds of millions of years that they claim is unchallengeable. However, many scientists today that believe in the creation by design of the earth, hold that the interpretation of history is based on the Biblical outline of an historic time line, which included catastrophic events, such as the sudden destruction caused by Noah’s Flood, which destroyed the earth and essentially all its life.
The only consistent way to interpret the geological record in light of this event is to understand that fossil-bearing rocks are the result of a massive global Flood that occurred only a few thousand years ago and lasted but a year. In fact, flood myths are common across a wide range of cultures, extending back into Bronze Age and Neolithic prehistory, which depict a flood, sometimes global in scale, usually sent by a deity to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution.
This Biblical interpretation of the rock record implies that the animals and plants preserved as fossils were all contemporaries. This means trilobites (one of the earliest-known groups of arthropods—the latter being an invertebrate animal having an exoskeleton), all of the now extinct animals and all the mammals dwelled on the planet simultaneously, and they perished together in this world-destroying cataclysm.
Although creationists have long pointed out the rock formations themselves testify unmistakably to water catastrophism on a global scale, evolutionists generally have ignored this fact—which is partly due to the legacy of the doctrine of Uniformitarianism passed down from one generation of geologists to the next since the time of Charles Lyell in the early nineteenth century.
Lyell’s view of Uniformitarianism assumed that the vast amount of geological change recorded in the rocks was the product of slow and uniform processes operating over an immense span of time, as opposed to a global cataclysm of the type described in the Bible and other ancient texts. When the knowledge of radioactivity was discovered about a hundred years ago, evolutionists deeply committed to the uniformitarian outlook believed they finally had proof of the immense antiquity of the earth even though this decay process from a measurement method was subject to considerable "noise" from cosmic rays, which interfered with the measurement.
According to the Time Clock advocates, the specimen should start out with 100% (pure) and deteriorates from there; however, there are almost always reasons why the specimen is not “pure”
In particular, they discovered the very slow nuclear decay rates of elements like Uranium while observing considerable amounts increasing of the daughter products from such decay. They interpreted these discoveries as vindicating both uniformitarianism and evolution, which led to the domination of these beliefs around the world in academic circles throughout the twentieth century.
However, it appears now that even stronger methods of measuring this radioactive decay are possible—which shows a different picture. Thus, modern technology has produced a major fly in that uniformitarian ointment. A key technical advance, which occurred about 25 years ago, involved the ability to measure the ratio of Carbon-14 atoms to Carbon-12 atoms with extreme precision in very small samples of carbon, using an ion beam accelerator and a mass spectrometer.
Prior to the advent of this accelerator mass spectrometer method, the Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio was measured by counting the number of Carbon-14 decays—that is, Carbon-14 is an unstable isotope of carbon with 8 neutrons (instead of the typical 6) and six protons. When this Carbon-14 decays, it does so by beta decay, releasing a beta particle as one neutron becomes a proton. That is, because Carbon-14 is radioactive, it decays over time, which means that older artifacts have less Carbon-14 than younger ones. Thus, product of the decay of Carbon-14 (called a “parent” isotope) is Nitrogen-14; forming the stable atom at the end called the “daughter” product.
The time it takes for Carbon-14 to radioactively decay is described by its half-life. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, which means that after 5,730 years, only half of the original amount of 1 Carbon-14 remains in a sample of organic material. After an additional 5,730 years—or 11,460 years total—only a quarter of the Carbon-14 remains. Thus the amount of Carbon-14 remaining can be used to determine the age of organic materials. After 10 half-lives, or 57,300 years, the amount of Carbon-14 remaining (0.1%) becomes very difficult to detect. Thus, fossil fuels—coal and oil claimed to be millions of years old and therefore would have no carbon-14, actually were measured with carbon-14, giving dates around 50,000 years old. If they really were millions of years old, they would not contain any detectable amount of Carbon-14.
Thus, the uniformitarian approach for interpreting the Carbon-14 data assumes a constant Carbon-14 production rate and a constant biospheric carbon inventory extrapolated into the indefinite past. It does not account for the possibility of a recent global event or any condition of the past other than the one they proclaim, such as global catastrophes that removed a large quantity of carbon from the biospheric inventory.
However, conditions of contamination in the artifact and the measurement process has been improved and is far more accurate, actually increasing the sensitivity of the raw measurement from approximately 1% of the modern value to about 0.001%, extending the theoretical range of sensitivity from about 40,000 years to about 90,000 years.
Accelerator mass spectrometer
The expectation was that this improvement in precision would make it possible to use this technique to date dramatically older fossil material. The big surprise, however, was that no fossil material could be found anywhere that had as little as 0.001% of the modern value! Since most of the scientists involved assumed the standard geological time scale was correct, the obvious explanation for the Carbon-14 they were detecting in their samples was contamination from some source of modern carbon with its high level of Carbon-14 (Fred H. Schmidt et al., "Early expectations of AMS: Greater ages and tiny fractions. One failure?—one success," Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B, vol.29 Iss.1-2, Elsevier Publishing, 1987, pp97-99).
Therefore, they mounted a major campaign to discover and eliminate the sources of such contamination. Although they identified and corrected a few relatively minor sources of Carbon-14 contamination, there still remained a significant level of Carbon-14—typically about 100 times the ultimate sensitivity of the instrument—in samples that should have been utterly “Carbon-14-dead,” including many from the deeper levels of the fossil-bearing part of the geological record.
(John R. Baumgardner et al., "Measurable C-14 in fossilized organic materials: Confirming the young earth creation/Flood model," in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, R. E. Walsh, Ed, Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, PA, 2003, pp127-142).
Given the short Carbon-14 half-life of 5730 years, organic materials purportedly older than 250,000 years, corresponding to 43.6 half-lives, should contain absolutely no detectable Carbon-14. (One gram of modern carbon contains about 6 × 10 to the 10th Carbon-14 atoms, and 43.6 half-lives should reduce that number by a factor of 7.3 × 10 to the 14th). An astonishing discovery made over the past 20 years is that, almost without exception, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer methods, organic samples from every portion of the Phanerozoic record show detectable amounts of Carbon-14! These Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratios were so ordered other than the youngest sample.
Phanerozoic samples appear to be clustered in in a very close range, regardless of geological “age.” A straightforward conclusion that can be drawn from these observations is that all but the very youngest of the organic material relating to the current geologic period was buried contemporaneously—much less than that claimed by the Uniformitarianists. This is consistent with the biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the air-breathing life on the planet in a single brief cataclysm only a few thousand years ago (Russell Humphreys, et al., “Measurable Carbon-14 in Fossilized Organic Materials: Confirming the Young Earth Creation-Flood Model,” Science, 2011).
In the case of one species, Spisula subtruncata (a medium-sized marine clam, or bivalve mollusc, found in the Eastern Atlantic from Iceland to Morocco and into the Mediterranean Sea), measurements were made on both the outside and inside of the shell of a single individual specimen. The average Carbon-14 value for the outside of the shell was 0.3, while for the inside it was 0.67, which suggests the Carbon-14/ Carbon-12 ratio, instead of decreasing under the measurement of evolutionists within the assumed geologic cycle, more than doubled during the lifetime of this organism instead of decreasing.
Let us consider what the AMS measurements imply from a quantitative standpoint. The ratio of Carbon-14 atoms to Carbon-12 atoms decreases by a factor of 2 every 5730 years. After 20 half-lives or 114,700 years (assuming hypothetically that earth history goes back that far), the Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio is decreased by a factor of 2 to the 20th, or about 1,000,000. After 1.5 million years, the ratio is diminished by a factor of about 10 to the 79th. This means that if one started with an amount of pure Carbon-14 equal to the mass of the entire observable universe, after 1.5 million years there should not be a single atom of Carbon-14 remaining! This, then, shows that any single or group of measurements dating artifacts or physical specimens beyond 50,000 years is simply inaccurate.
Thus, we use the Biblical dating of the Earth in our articles, though showing a comparison with the evolou0tionist’s geological scale. In so doing, events, such as those listed recently about the raising of ancient South America, show dates far more recent than that of the geologic scale.
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