DATING METHODS
Some misconceptions about the dating of rocks:
1. Rocks are not dated by their appearance.
2. Rocks are not dated by their petrologic character.
3. Rocks are not dated by their mineralogical contents.
4. Rocks are not dated by their structural features.
5. Rocks are not dated by their adjacent rocks.
6. Rocks are not dated by their vertical superposition.
7. Rocks are not dated radiometrically.
8. Rocks are not dated by any physical characteristics at all.
9. Rocks are not dated by their total fossil contents.
How are rocks dated: INDEX FOSSILS!
“In each sedimentary stratum certain fossils seem to be characteristically abundant: these fossils are known as index fossils. If in a strange formation and index fossil is found, it is easy to date that particular layer of rock and to correlate it with other exposures in distant regions containing the same species.”
Index fossils are remains of organisms (usually marine invertebrates) that are assumed to have been of rather limited duration chronologically, but of essentially worldwide provenance geographically. Thus, their presence in a rock is believed to provide an unambiguous identification of its age.
But just how do geologists know which index fossils date which age? The answer to this question is evolution! That is, since evolution has taken place in the same direction all over the world, the stage of evolution attained by the organisms living in a given age should be an infallible criterion to identify sediments deposited in that age. Thus, rocks are dated by their fossil contents, especially their index fossils.
Paleontologists do not have divine
revelation to justify their evolution model, however,
so exactly what is the evidence that gives them such strong confidence in its
validity? Let [Carl]
“Fossils
provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from
simpler to more and more complex forms.”
Here is obviously a powerful system of circular reasoning. Fossils are used as the only key for placing rocks in chronological order. The criterion for assigning fossils to specific places in that chronology is the assumed evolutionary progression of life; the assumed evolutionary progression is based on the fossil record so constructed. The main evidence for evolution is the assumption of evolution!
David M Raupp, as Curator of
Geology at
“Few paleontologists have, I think, ever supposed that fossils, by themselves, provide grounds for the conclusion that evolution has occurred.”
“The fossil record doesn’t even provide any evidence in support of Darwinian theory except in the weak sense that the fossil record is compatible with it, just as it is compatible with the evolutionary theories, and revolutionary theories, and special creationist theories and even ahistorical theories.”
No wonder that the
“No real evolutionist, whether gradualist of punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution over special creation.”
Therefore, the fossils really do not provide a satisfactory means for dating rocks and we have already seen that this method takes priority over all other methods. Consequently, there is certainly no real proof that the vast evolutionary time scale is valid at all.
That being true, there is no compelling reason why we should not seriously consider once again the possibilities in the relatively short time scale of the creation model.
Scientific Creationism, 12th Ed., 1985.
Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.
Scientific Creationism, Henry M. Morris, Ph.D., 12th
Ed., 1985.
In
attempting to determine the real age of the earth, it should always be
remembered, of course, that recorded history began only several thousand years
ago. Not even uranium dating is capable
of experimental verification, since no one could actually watch uranium decaying
for millions of years to see what happens.
In
order to obtain a prehistoric date, therefore, it is necessary to use some kind
of physical process which operates slowly enough to measure and steadily enough
to produce significant changes. If
certain assumptions are made about it, then it can yield a date which could be
called the apparent age. Whether
or not the apparent age is the true age depends completely on the
validity of the assumptions. Since there
is no way in which the assumptions can be tested, there is no sure way (except
by divine revelation) of knowing the true age of any geologic formation. The processes which are most likely to yield
dates, which approximate the true dates, are those for which the assumptions
are least likely to be in error.
Theoretically,
there should be any number of processes that could be used to measure time,
since all involve changes with time. It
is not surprising that the only processes which are considered acceptable to
evolutionists are those whose assumptions and rates yield great ages.
As far
as the geological formations and of the earth itself are concerned, only
radioactive decay processes are considered useful today by evolutionists. In each of these systems, the parent (e.g.,
uranium) is gradually changed into the daughter (e.g., lead) component of the system, and the relative proportions of the two are
considered to be an index of the time since initial formation of the system.
For
these or other methods of geochronometry, one should note carefully that the
following assumptions must be made:
1. The system must have been a
closed system. That is, it cannot have been altered by
factors extraneous to the dating process; nothing inside the system could have
been removed, and nothing outside the system added to it.
2. The system must initially
have contained none of its daughter component. If
any of the daughter component were present initially,
the initial amount must be corrected in order to get a meaningful calculation.
3. The process rate must always
have been the same. Similarly, if the process rate
has ever changed since the system was established, then this change must be
known and corrected for if the age calculation is to be of any significance.
Other
assumptions may be involved for particular methods, but the three listed above
are always involved and are critically important. In view of this fact, the highly speculative
nature of all methods of geochronometry becomes apparent when one realizes that
not one of the above assumptions is valid!
None are provable, or testable, or even reasonable.
1. There is no such thing in
nature as a closed system. The concept of a closed system
is an ideal concept, convenient for analysis but non-existent in the real
world. The idea of a system remaining
closed for millions of years becomes an absurdity.
2. It is impossible to ever
know the initial components of a system formed in prehistoric times. Obviously no one was present when such a
system was first formed. Since creation
is at least a viable possibility, it is clearly possible that some of the
“daughter” component may have been initially created along with the “parent”
component. Even apart from this
possibility, there are numerous other ways by which daughter products could be
incorporated into the systems when first formed.
3. No process rate is unchanged. Every process in nature operates at a rate
which is influenced by a number of different factors. If any of these factors change, the process
rate changes. Rates are, at best, only
statistical averages, not deterministic constants.
Thus, at best, apparent
ages determined by means of any physical process are educated guesses and may
well be completely unrelated to the true ages.
That is why the “stage-of-evolution,” as discussed in the preceding
section, is preferred over such methods by evolutionists, who consider it much
more reliable than any physical process, even radioactive decay.