Hello and welcome to Science Conversations, a series examining the intersection of science and faith. I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and my guest today is Dr.
John Ashton. This is my 9th conversation with Dr. Ashton based upon his book, Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the origin of life on Earth.
Last time, we noted the historical evidence for a worldwide flood. Today we're examining erosion rates, sedimentation rates, and other evidence in conflict with radiometric dating ages. We'll also begin to discuss problems with radiometric dating.
Dr. Ashton is a chemist with a PhD in epistemology, a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth. Welcome, John.
Hi, Barry. Good to be here. John, we've discussed erosion rates and sedimentation rates and their conflict with radiometric dating before.
Remind us again of the importance of this evidence for your conclusion that evolution is impossible. Yes, sure. Well, I think most people who go to school, high school, university in Australia, and particularly study sciences, are taught that evolution occurred over hundreds of millions of years.
And that's how all the different species of life came to be here. So for this, they require that the continents and so forth are hundreds of millions of years old. Matter of fact, the continents are dated as two and a half billion years and more old.
And the same time. Our public documentaries on nature, they'll talk about some particular creature. Maybe they'll be looking at something, a fossil or something.
Or say this creature lived 130,000,000 years ago. And you'll go to a national park and it'll say that these ranges were pushed up 80 million years ago and so forth. And so everywhere we're being inculcated with these ideas that life on Earth is hundreds of millions of years old.
And of course, we talked earlier that this idea of very long ages was proposed by James Hutton back in the late 17 hundreds, based on his observations of how quickly sediments build up in river deltas and this sort of thing, and the layers are laid down. Now, we now have much more accurate data on that, much, much more accurate data. And the picture is entirely different to that that Hutton originally thought.
And the other thing is too, that James Hutton was not comfortable with the biblical picture of a young Earth. And I think what has happened over the years is that there have been many people that have, for whatever reason, wanted to have an alternative to the biblical picture. They didn't want to accept the biblical account as being a historically accurate account.
And they've worked hard to convince other people that this is so. And it gained a lot of momentum. But now we have really, really good data that shows us that these hundreds of millions of years for the ages of these formations on the surface of the Earth cannot be so.
Now, once something gets into the culture, it's very difficult to move. It isn't it. Once the culture makes a mind flip and goes from the creationist model to the evolutionist model, even though you get better data, it doesn't necessarily mean that the idea disappears, does it? Well, that's right.
In fact, when scientists have spoken out against this, many of these scientists have been marginalized for pointing out the fact, well, hang on, we've got major problems with these dates. We've got major problems with the age of these fossils, with the age of the surface of the Earth and so forth. And this is what's happening.
So these people are just bullied. There isn't actually rational debate. And this has been one of the purposes of my book.
It's been to actually collate this data, to put it out there, to show that this data is already out there in the established scientific literature, but people aren't putting the picture together. And that's also one of the reasons why we're doing this series of conversations. Too yes, and it's great to have this opportunity to talk about these and make people aware that this data is actually published in the scientific literature demonstrating that the Earth cannot be these hundreds of millions of years old.
So what is the observational data telling us? Well, we recall that James Hutton based his long ages on some slow sedimentation rates. Now, when we life on Earth, the plants and animals all rely on water. We rely on rainfall.
Now, as the rain falls on the surface of the Earth and as it runs then down off the surfaces into creeks and rivers and flows into the sea, it carries with it very, very small amounts of matter of the surface of the Earth. And we call this erosion. And also, as this erosion occurs, this material is carried as sediment and as materials within the river systems.
Now, for many years now, we've been monitoring the amount of material being carried by rivers around the world. So we have very accurate data using modern technology. Now, from this data, we can calculate how much material is being carried away and we can calculate how much the surface of the Earth is being eroded and washed into the oceans.
And from these figures, we get figures like, say, for example, around the Grand Canyon area. It's about four inches or 100 years. Now, that doesn't sound like much.
That's only sort of 0.1 of a millimeter per year. So a millimeter is very small, sort of the gap when you hold your fingers very close together.
And so if you take one 10th of that, that's the amount that is eroded. And the general figure for the continent is only 60 years. But the point is this, that after 10,000 years, you have removed a meter off the surface.
So after 10 million years, you've removed a kilometer of surface off the Earth. And so this is why many a number of geographers have observed, well, hang on. We date the continents as two and a half billion years, but they would actually erode away in less than 10 million years.
So, for example, the average thickness of the continent of the United States is about 650 meters. So you could never get sediments then that were hundreds of millions of years old because they would have eroded away in 10 million years. That's right.
So that means that the fossils cannot be that age then. No, exactly. And so we have, say, a situation like the Grand Canyon, where the youngest rocks on the top of the Grand Canyon are said to be 240,000,000 years old.
Now, as I said, we have idea of the rate at which sediments are being carried out of the Colorado River. And from this, we have this erosion rate of about 100 inches per thousand years. So it's quite a long time.
So we think of it, but when we think of the angels that they're claiming hundreds of millions of years, this amounts to quite a bit of thickness. So if we can think if the Grand Canyon was 240,000,000 years old and it's still there, then to be there, we would estimate that you've originally had 24 sediment over the top of it. Sediment would need to be there for the Grand Canyon surface to still be there after 240,000,000 years.
So this is throwing the whole paradigm into confusion, then. Well, exactly. You can't have it both ways.
And these are very, very conservative data. The Grand Canyon air, fairly low rainfall and so forth. In the past, we know that the rainfall was much, much higher.
Now, once you have higher rainfall, you have much higher erosion rates. Also, if you have some sort of major flooding and this sort of thing. So this erosion data that I'm talking about, where we calculate, say, 100 years, that's a conservative estimate then.
Well, it's a conservative estimate, and it does vary. For example, in the Nile, it's only 13 lowering per thousand years. But even so, you're only out there by a factor of five.
So it doesn't really make that much a difference in the big picture because there are other rivers, such as in China, where you have more than a meter, 1.3 meters erosion per thousand years or 1350 years. So the average figure for over the world is considered around 60 years.
So the point is, though, that this data is calculated only on the basis of suspended solid particulates in the river system. It doesn't take into account material that's being rolled along the bottom by the flow of water. It also doesn't take into account the much larger amounts that occur during flooding, because at those times, their stations can't keep up with the data.
So this is more or less the average data. So when we look at the real scenario, as you say, the amount of material is much, much greater in actual fact, which brings the time to a road actually much, much shorter. Again, than the 10 million years.
So there's an absolute major problem there that if the Grand Canyon was still to be there, it must have been covered, as I said, by 15 miles, 24 thereabouts of sediment on the base of calculation at least to have still been there. Could people explain this by saying, well, the Earth has been through a series of uplifts and periods of erosion throughout its history, so this might be just one. The cycle that we're going through at the moment might be.
Just one of many cycles that have taken place in the past where the continents have formed, been eroded, been formed again and been eroded again. Well, we've got to find evidence for that. And we could say, look at if the material is eroded, where does it end up? It ends up in the ocean.
Now, if we look at the thickness of sediments on the ocean, we have again now very accurate extensive data on the thickness of sediments in the ocean. And the thickness of sediments in the ocean is less than half a kilometer on average. It's about 450 meters on average.
Now, again, a number of people have looked at erosion rates and the rate at which these sediments are forming in the ocean. So as well as the data on what is carried by the rivers, we've also got data on these sedimentation rates. We've got data on rate at which sediment is forming into the ocean.
Forming into the ocean. So what's the data on sediments in the ocean telling us then? Well, again, there are a number of studies, one review that looked at twelve studies that have been published in the literature and looked at these and averaged it out, the data out came to the average value of about 15 million years at the current erosion rates to put all the layers in the bottom of the ocean. So there isn't the material there to allow for the erosion of the surface of the Earth in these places like the Grand Canyon to be that old.
But if you have a be those millions of years old, and if you have a major catastrophe, that changes the whole picture, doesn't it? Oh, yes, it makes it heaps shorter. It's going to totally change it again. So this is again using this steady state scenario.
Now, we know that it hasn't been steady state scenario, but the important thing is that the data is consistent. Whether you look at material carried by rivers, whether you look at rates of deposition in the oceans, it's entirely different to the ages calculate by radiometric dating. And so because we don't know the rate at which all these things happened in the past, what we're saying is that we've got massive conflict between these ways of estimating the age of the Earth.
So which one is actually accepted by scientists generally, if there's a conflict between the two? Well, it's generally the ages that are assigned to the fossils, which have been essentially based on Hutton's originally work and Lyle's original work, which was based on estimating the times that it took to lay down these sediments, that sedimentation data is really telling us that the fossils are really not possible. And it's also telling us that the continent shouldn't be here either. That's right.
So when we date them as hundreds of millions of years old, and this dinosaur lived 130,000,000 years old, and that one lived 70 million years old, and that particular fossil little creature over there was 230,000,000 years old, and those coal seams are 300 million years old, it just doesn't make sense. They can't be there. They would have eroded away.
So what would be the final consequence of the erosion of the continents? You're basically filling up the ocean basins, so you're going to flood whatever land is left. So we should really see just a water covered Earth, shouldn't we? Well, I'm not sure what we would see, but we would certainly see massive amounts of sediment. Of course, as the mountains eroded away, it's going to perhaps change rainfall.
And how that would model up, I'm not sure. But it's quite clear that we would require massive amounts of erosion, and we would require the corresponding massive amounts of sediment on the ocean floor. But the main thing is it's the rate at which these things happen.
They happen much, much faster than the geological record based on the fossils would suggest. And what scientists have actually agreed over the years has been the ages of these particular time periods in the geologic column. They run back.
So we run back the Cabrium 500 and 4550 million years, the precamium even older. And so what is very, very clear is that these ages that are assigned to all these different periods down cannot be correct on the basis of the erosion rates. They can't be correct, but the erosion rates are observable.
We can see that. And that's the other important thing, too. These dates have been and that's a really good point that you've raised, Barry.
These dates are all based on hypotheses assumptions. And as we saw discussed previously on this uniformitarianism, UNModel for the period of time preceding in the Earth, that things have continued much the same as they are now. Well, okay.
Even if you assume that once you look at erosion rate data, it doesn't work, what that means is there's just no time for evolution to have occurred. That time period is no, no way, long enough. Now, the volcanoes also make a jarring note here for this paradigm, because we can also measure the amount of material that's going into the atmosphere and falling on the Earth each year.
Well, that's true. Or into the oceans. Well, that's right.
It's very interesting. Now, when you look around, there are a lot of extinct volcanoes. No matter what continent you go to, and I've been to several, there are a lot of extinct volcanoes.
And we know just around where we live here there aren't any active volcanoes around here, but there are plenty of extinct volcanoes. But even if we look at the rate at which volcanoes are emitting volcanic material, lava and so forth today and we have accurate measurements, say from the 1940s onwards then we know that they release on average about four cubic kilometers or about a cubic mile of material onto the Earth's surface each year. Now, we also know that in the past there were many more volcanoes that were active that were putting out a lot of material and there were some whopper volcanic eruptions like Lake Taupo in New Zealand released about more than 1000 cubic kilometers of material when that huge volcano erupted.
But assuming just this modest value of one cubic mole, four cubic kilometers per year then if the continents are really two and a half thousand million years old then during that time two and a half thousand cubic miles or 10,000 cubic kilometers of volcanic material should have accumulated. Now, that is actually enough to cover the entire surface of the Earth, oceans included, to the depth of nearly 20. So again, you can see if we have this uniformitarian easter and we know the volcanic activity was much, much more in the past you go for walks around here, there are dikes here, there are lava intrusions there.
And thankfully, that sort of thing isn't happening now. But even if we just assume this very, very slow, steady rate that we observe now assuming over the period of time we would expect that there'd be the evidence of 20 volcanic material on the surface of the Earth, but it isn't there. So that means the age has to be again, the ages have to be much shorter because what we do is we have estimated that there's only 33 cubic miles or 133,000,000 cubic kilometers of sediments of volcanic origin.
So that's a big difference. So if we have the steady rate system we expect 10,000 million cubic kilometers but we only have 135,000,000 cubic kilometers. So that's a huge difference.
And that means that for that amount at the current rate to form that would form in less than 34 million years. So again, this brings us back to the surface of the Earth being only tens of millions of years old. And this is a very conservative that's an outer limit, isn't it, really? That's right.
It's a very conservative calculation based on the very relatively low rates that we have now compared to what we know in the past. If we look at the catastrophic evidence or the evidence for catastrophic conditions in the past that can drop that 34 million years down just to tens of thousands of years for the volcanic deposits to form. The point is this that when we look at this data we can go out and measure the rates of this volcanic material coming out from eruptions, et cetera.
We can go out now and observe. We've got a lot of satellite imagery data. We have a lot of geological surveys that have been done.
There's a lot of data published in literature. We can calculate very accurately these geological deposits, whether they're sedimentary, whether they're volcanic. When we look at all this data and put it together, what does it point to? Even at the most conservative, assuming the steady state condition, it's only 1020 million years at most for the surface of the Earth.
But yet what the radiometric dating method says, oh, no, these are hundreds of millions of years old, and what the old geologists thought, based on their estimates, that it again was 100 millions of years old. So the bottom line is this. When we look at the good data, when we look at the data that we can measure now, when we look at the data that's published in the peer reviewed scientific literature, we're talking about top journals, geophysical journals, these sort of things.
We now have the evidence that the surface of the Earth must be very young if we take into account the catastrophic picture. And we also now have evidence of that, and we've talked about that, the fact that you've got vertical trees growing through some sediments, there's no erosion rates between layers. They must have been laid down very quickly.
We've had massive, huge amounts of material transport over large distances. It all just shrinks it all back down and makes the biblical picture of only thousands of years and the global flood very, very realistic and a very, very accurate scenario describing the situation that we can actually go out and observe today. So let me just sum up what I think you're saying.
These Outer Limits don't give us reliable dates, they just give us Outer limits. Exactly, yes. They're just outer limits based on the available data.
They don't account for unusual events like major catastrophes or the fact that the volcanoes are more active in the past, and they don't provide anywhere near the time that evolution needs. And that's the important point, isn't it? That's the important point. And the other important point is that they are clearly at loggerheads with the radiometric dating assigned to these particular structures.
There's a huge discord between dating, as I said, the top layers of the Grand Canyons, 240,000,000 years old, dating. The bottom layers, sedimentary layers, at around about 500 million years old. And then the very lower layers, I think, date down to about 1300 million years old, over a billion years old.
Those dates that are measured by the radiometric dating are in total conflict with what we observe in terms of erosion rates, sedimentation rates, and the deposition of volcanic deposits. And they are also inconsistent, as we said the other week, with the fact that you've got all these parallel layers on top of one another without signs of erosion. And yet, as I said, when we measure erosion rates, they can be extremely high, particularly in high rainfall areas.
And we know that there was high rainfall in the past because we find evidence in many of these places now of lush forests, the massive coal deposits that are formed from massive vegetation. They will require very high level of rainfall, sort of like you'd find in New Guinea and the Amazon now. And in these areas, we find very high erosion rates.
So, again, this shrinks the time right back down. Well, we're going to talk about the radiometric dating after a break, but there are some other types of evidence that give us clues to a younger Earth, and that assigned by radiometric dating. Let's have a look at some of those.
Let's have a look firstly at the soft tissue and dinosaurs and the intact protein sequences. This, again, is really, really exciting finds that we have consistently now, a number of studies, dozens of studies have now been published in the literature where the scientists have dug up, recovered the remains of giant reptiles in the past and other creatures that lived in the past. And they've cut open the bones.
And in the bones, we're still finding soft tissue that is preserved. Now, this is very, very important. Matter of fact, some DNA sequences have been recovered, blood tissue collagen have been discovered.
And the importance of this is that these particular molamus molecules are biopolymers. They are very long polymers. And we know that over time, they break down.
Matter of fact, we've done experiments, we can do experiments in the lab and say, how long does it take for these polymers to break down? And when we break them down, we get only thousands of years for them to break down. Yet those dinosaurs are typically dated 70 million years or more older. So when this first came out, the first scientists that began reporting this said, well, no, you can't analyze.
There must be something wrong. But they were persistent. And of course, many more scientists now have collaborated and corroborated these results.
So we now have really good data. And again, this is pointing very clearly. They can't be millions of years old.
I think millions of years is a long, long time. A lot of things happen in that. And we know that natural molecules, they vibrate, they move.
They're not just sitting there dormant. They might be at zero degrees Kelvin, but they're not at zero degrees Kelvin. That's minus 273 centigrade.
So at the temperatures on the surface of the Earth, these molecules are moving. And after a while, they break down. They're not stable.
And you're saying they cannot possibly last 65 to 70. No, they can't be anywhere near that. They can only be tens of thousands at most.
And there's other examples. For example, they've recovered DNA from fossilized leaf tissue and these sort of things that have been found, they've been able to extract these biopolymers. And again, so what we're finding is, in the lab, we see, we preserve these, we can put them under control conditions.
We can measure the rate at which these polymers break down. We can do that. We observe that in the lab today when we extrapolate it.
They can't be mean to yourself. They break down much, much faster than that. But the evolutionary paradigm is very powerful.
I went online to check out some of this data, and I discovered that some scientists are now acknowledging, yes, it's clear that this is soft tissue. But they're saying, well, this is really exciting because this helps us to understand how soft tissue can survive for 65 million years. Yes.
They're just so reluctant to sort of recognize the evidence that it's just staring them in the face. It's sort of like the old picture. There's an elephant in the room.
They can't see it. Now, there was another area that you mentioned in your book, and that's viable bacteria in salt crystals in permian strata claimed to be 250,000,000 years old. Yeah.
So again, this, again, just fits this whole scenario of trying to somehow the scientists want to believe that the Earth is very old. See, the National Academies of scientists around the world have essentially now committed themselves to evolution. They've published statements along the line that evolution is a fact.
But when they make these statements, they're just assertions, and they're not actually backed by references to peer reviewed, substantial literature. And I mentioned this before. When they make these statements, they're just assertions and saying, the academy we the Academy of scientists say this, that the evidence is there, but they don't say what the evidence is.
And the fact is that there isn't evidence. They've just made that assertion. And it's sort of like a political decision that they've made.
And to me, it actually blows my mind that we can have these top science academies making statements like this. And I think what it is is that it's sort of like you're in a group, and, you know, all the other people are thinking along the same lines as you, and they're all in agreement with you. So you feel very powerful and very confident to make this statement because nobody's going to challenge you.
But the basis of that statement isn't there. It's just, okay, you've got all these other people that are agreeing, but they haven't, in my view, actually got down and looked at the big picture and really challenged the evidence and looked at the basis of how they believe they know. And that's the area that I come from.
That's the area of my expertise. That's the area that I trained in. That's the area that I'm interested in.
What are the assumptions underpinning the conclusions that we draw? How can we know what is the basis on what we know, what we claim that we know? And when we look at the claims that are made to support evolution, we find that they are not based on strongly substantiated evidence. The evidence is very weak and is vastly disappearing. When we look at the creation scenario, the evidence is mounting and it's very good evidence.
So when we get back, for example, to this bacteria that their coma is now 250,000,000 years old, one of the PhD students that I was co supervisor for some years ago was looking at cryopotectants for bacteria that we want to preserve, say, for food use. And so we want to actually preserve the bacteria in frozen material. And we were looking at ways that we could actually keep the bacteria alive over long periods of time and particularly if they're frozen.
And so one of these things is cryoprotectants. Now, the thing is that when you're doing these experiments, gradually over time, bacteria die. And so the idea was that we might start with 10 billion bacteria.
And could we say that after a period of a year we still had 1 billion left and gradually they die off? Now, we know from the studies again, all the components in the bacteria are full of these large biopolymers. They are vibrating. So even if we have these bacteria preserved in salt, after time, those biopolymers are going to break down.
We're only going to have to have a very, very small percentage of those biopolymers break down or parts of the DNA break down when its DNA won't function anymore and it won't be viable. The bacteria that they removed from those salt crystals were viable. And so on the basis of the studies that we know now on the viability of bacteria, it's absolutely impossible that they would be 240,000,000 years old.
They would be at most 1000 years old or thereabouts one would think that's on the base of what we can know today. So this is why it's very important that we look at what can we know today when we look at the data, we can actually go and measure in the laboratory today that we can go and validate today. It all points, in my view, to a young earth.
So you're saying that it's impossible for these bacteria to be 250,000,000 years old, essentially on the basis of our knowledge of chemistry at the moment, yes. And what you were saying before about these science academies making these statements about evolution without the evidence, that's a form of groupthink, isn't it? That's a way in which people are just thinking the same things without allowing any alternative perspective to come into it. That really is against science, isn't it? Because science has seemingly, to me progressed as people have rebelled against the previous understanding and pushed forward, sometimes against great opposition.
So how can we progress in science if there's groupthink around a particular paradigm? Well, that's exactly the situation. They've made these statements. And yet, as I mentioned before, you go on to the University of California Berkeley Evolution Museum website and they say one.
Of the important things that biologists are trying to work out now is how evolution happens. They don't have a mechanism, and yet they're asserting that it did happen. I mean, it just blows one's mind.
The top scientists recognize that we don't have a mechanism. They recognize that the neo Darwinian paradigm is impossible. We got top philosophers saying that.
But the fact that the science academies have come out with these statements now, it means it's virtually impossible for any respected journal to publish anything counter to evolution. And it also means it'd be very difficult for any openly creationist scientist to get a research grant in that area. It just wouldn't happen.
So it's very effective censorship. Let's continue on now with our mutation rates, our DNA mutation rates, because this is another form of evidence that we have discussed previously. Well, yes, that's exactly it.
And this is data that, again, is published in journals like Nature and so forth. If we take the mitochondrial DNA, it's accumulating mutations all the time. And so from next generation of offspring to the next generation is slowly accumulating mutations.
Now, after a while, if you have sufficient mutations, you're going to close down the operation of an organism. So say a mutation occurs say mutation occurs in the code for DNA to produce the beta cells in the pancreas. We're going to die from diabetes, one of the codes from the proteins.
If we get a mutation in one of the DNA for one of the proteins in the blood coding mechanism, then that blood coding mechanism is going to fail and we're going to bleed to death. There are thousands of biochemical mechanisms in our body that we require to live. They are all programmed via the DNA.
If we get a mutation that damages one of those processes, we disrupt the whole system. Like, you might just be damaging your blood coding system, but you die. You might just be damaging your beta cells, but you eventually die from diabetes.
So sooner or later, we will die. What this means is that there's only a certain percentage of mutations that we can accumulate to before we actually die. A matter of fact, that's why we do die of old age, but we're talking about accumulations that are passed on in our Gamut cells.
Now, when we work back from these accumulation rates, we can work out that human mitochondrial DNA cannot be more than 100,000 years old. If it was, there'd be so many mutations that wouldn't work anymore. As a matter of fact, we're not quite sure as exactly how many levels it needs to be before it doesn't function, maybe within an order of magnitude.
And so that's why, for example, when the Cornell University geneticist John Sanford, who's an expert in this area of genetic mutations and mutation rates, matter of fact, he was one of the co inventors of the gene gun that's responsible for genetic engineering. He was an expert witness in the area of DNA mutation case in the Kansas State Board of Education science hearing. And at that court case and the transcripts are available online, his best estimate for the age of life on Earth was less than 100,000 years.
So here we have an expert witness and that's a calculation. And there's a lot of data now published in the science literature on these mutation rates. And essentially what's pointing out, and I've done some calculations myself, and quite easily it would bring the age of life on Earth down to around 10,000 years, possibly for the maximum age of life on Earth.
So if he's correct, you would have the extinction of virtually all the species before 100,000 years? Yes, definitely. So this whole point, look, the whole picture of evolution is that mutations create new codes and evolve into something else. What we observe is the very opposite.
Mutations generally either don't do anything or they damage the code. And as this damage the code accumulates, we get disease. And we know from studies now in medicine that these disease rates are increasing.
On the John Hopkins database for genetic diseases, there's over 10,000 diseases now they're related to mutations. And so what we actually observe is the very opposite. We observe the opposite to evolution.
We observe the decay of life on Earth. I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you're listening to science conversations.
My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. John has been examining erosion rates, sedimentation rates, and other evidence in conflict with radiometric dating ages.
When we come back, John will begin our discussion of the problems with radiometric dating. If you have any questions or comments in relation to today's program, you can call Three ABM, Australia radio within Australia on 024-97-3456, or from outside of Australia on country code 6124-973-3456. Our email address is
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Barry Harker and you're listening to science conversations. My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth.
John has been examining erosion rates, sedimentation rates, and other evidence in conflict with radiometric dating ages. In our remaining time, John will begin our discussion of the problems with radiometric dating. John, how reliable is radiometric dating for rocks of a known age? Wow.
Well, that's a real question. That is an eye opener to many people. We think of radiometric dating as a method that uses physics and chemistry.
These are the real hard sciences. They're very rigidly controlled with standards and this sort of thing. And therefore radiometric dating is seen to be this is the clincher.
This sets the age of the rocks. But what people, I think need to understand is that these methods have actually never been validated. Now, when, I mean, validation is they've never actually been proved to actually work in terms of very old dates.
Now, I worked as the chief chemist in a food research laboratory that was accredited by the National Association of Testing Authorities and I was a signatory for that. So when the results went out from our laboratory I signed that they were accurate results, true results. Now, the reason for that was that our methods were validated.
So we had samples sent to us that were known samples. They had been made up. They were of a known composition.
And we analyzed those and that validated the method. The method gave the same answer as was known to be in the particular food or the sample that we're analyzing. Now, that's called the validation the method and their standard methods that are produced.
Now, when they do radiometric dating we have measured in the laboratories rates at which elements decay. So that is one element, it's radioactive and it slowly changes into another element or another isotope of that element that's sort of a different atomic weight of the same element. And we also have measured the concentrations very accurately.
Now, using mass spectrometers again that are calibrated very accurately. And so we have these two sets of measurements that we can do and they are very accurate. And because they're very accurate, it's believed that radiometric dating is very accurate.
What we don't know is what do these concentrations actually mean? And so how the radiometric dating works is it says that originally you had this amount of element A present and over time it changed into element B. And we measure the concentration of A and the concentration of B and from the difference we can calculate the age. But the problem is we don't know what the concentrations of things were means years ago.
We don't know what the concentrations of these elements were in these particular rocks means a years ago. Also, we don't know what changes have taken place. We don't know whether some of the material is leached away.
We don't know whether some material has been added. The other thing is we don't even know whether the rates of decay have been constant over all that time. Now, it was widely assumed that they were.
Radioactivity was discovered round about the 19 hundreds and radiometric dating was developed in principle about 1910. But it really wasn't set up till just after the war, about 1947. The first proper dating scheme was set up and it was calibrated.
Now, that dating scheme was actually based on dating five rocks. I think they were in the Appalachian Mountains in different areas of the strata. And the ages in between were actually estimated on the basis of the thickness of the sediments between those layers.
Assuming the universe because you can't date the sediments, can you? You can't date the sediments. And so that's the other important thing. We only date volcanic rocks.
So if a volcanic rock spews out over the top of a sediment, and that sediment has been laid down on top of another volcanic rock, we can date the volcanic rocks above and those underneath. And then we assume, depending on the thickness of the sediment and the two dates, any ages of the fossils in between. So that's how it's worked out.
So as you can see, there's a lot of guesses, there a lot of hypothesis there. One of the important things is, as I said, we don't, since that time, since the 1940s, when the dating methods were first set up, sure, they've got more accurate equipment in terms of mass spectrometers, and we now have accumulated more accurate data. But that's now we're measuring the decay rates.
Now, what were the decay rates in the past? Now, we know that decay rates change under pressure. We know that decay rates change under extreme temperatures. Matter of fact, experiments have been done at extremely high plasma temperatures where you can increase the decay rates, I think it might be a million fold.
The other thing is, we know that decay rates vary slightly with sunspot sort of cycles in the sun. So we don't know particularly if there were catastrophic conditions in the past, how that changed the rate of decay. And there are some evidence, that appears to be a growing evidence, that at certain times in the past, radioactive decay rates were much faster.
But it hasn't still answered your question of what about rocks of known age. Now, this is very, very interesting. When we do radiometric dating, we have to assume that we know the original concentration of the daughter element, that is, the element that the first element is decaying to, or there was none present.
A lot of assumptions there. We have to assume that the parent or daughter element, as I said earlier, hasn't been moved in some way. Now, we can get round those assumptions by using what we call isochron dating methods, where we actually measure the isotope concentration in a number of different minerals in the same rock.
From that average, we can get a much more accurate result. And so that's called isochron dating, which is used today. When we apply isochron dating to rocks of known age, we get ridiculous answers.
So, for example, if we date historic lava flows in Hawaii that we know may be 300 years old, 200 years old, we get that they're millions of years old. And a very interesting study was done at the University of on the Australian National University. Now, what they did here was samples were obtained from a number of different lava flows from Mount Noahoe in the North Island of New Zealand.
Now, it erupted on the 11 February 1949, the 4 June 1954, the 30 June 1954, and the 14 July 1954. And also February 19, 1975. Now, geologists took large samples from these independent lava flows and they were then subsampled and they were analyzed at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University.
And they used a number of different dating methods and they use isocron dating methods. And so a number of different samples were taken. I think there were two or three multi kilogram size rock samples taken from each of these overflows.
Now, they're all about the same time. We know this work was done in between 1999 and 2002. So most of the samples were about 50 years old.
Some of them were only one of them was only 25 years old when they were dated. The Rubidian Strondium isochron gave an apparent age of 133,000,000 years. The Sumerium neodynium isochron gave an apparent age of 197,000,000 years.
And the lead lead Isocon gave an apparent age of 3000, 908,000,000 years. And yet we know those rocks were only 50 million years. 50 years old.
They were only 50 years old. We actually observed when they happen. Now, if you're out in the field somewhere and you come across some volcanic extrusion that's come up, or you uncover a rock that's been buried, it's a volcanic rock.
And you send it into the dating lab and you get it dated, and it comes back as millions of years, how do you know that it wasn't 50 or 100 years old? Because that's the point. When we date rocks that are this recent, we still get these very, very long ages. And that's done at one of our best laboratories in Australia.
But the same thing has been happened in many other places. A lot of work has been done in this area just in recent times. So, for example, the Somerset Dam in Queensland, we got data on that.
There's a Jurassic Triassic intrusion that's supposed to be, according to the fossil dating, somewhere around 220,000,000 years old when it was dated by potassium argon dating. And there were a number of samples here. Isochron age gave 174,000,000 years old.
The Rubidium strontium age, isochron age was 393,000,000 years. Sumerium neodynium Isochrome method gave 259 million years. The lead lead method gave 1420 5 million years or 1.4
billion years. So you got a massive range of those. So if you were analyzing if you were a scientist analyzing this, and you know that the fossil age is around 220,000,000 years, and you send these samples into the lab, and they come back with these three ages ranging from 174,000,000 years to 1.4
billion years. But you happen to have one result that comes back at 259,000,000 years. Then you'd probably report that one, because that's close to the model age, to the fossil age.
You see what I mean? But you've got a big spread there to pick from these sort of situations. I know a study, big study has been done on rocks in the Grand Canyon, for example. And so the cardenas basalt, which is on the eastern side, the Grand Canyon in Arizona has a conventional age of about 1.1
billion years, or 1000, 100 million years from earlier radiometric dating when it was redone. Using at the Geotron laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they got potassium argon ages ranging from 577,000,000 years to 1000 million years. And their Isocon age, one of their Isocon ages was 516,000,000 years.
So you got a huge rager there. The same rocks were analyzed by another laboratory at the University of Colorado in Boulder. They used Rubidium Strontia method.
They got 1.1 billion years on average for 19 samples. They got 900 million years on average for another 22 samples.
When they used the Sumerium neodynium system, they got one and a half billion years. So there's a huge range there. The lead lead ages were 1.3
billion years. So they essentially got ages from 500 million years to 1000 500 million years. So we could go on.
I think another important point to realize is that they're trying to measure these ages with these. If you're using, say, the Ribidium strontium system, the half life is 49 billion years. If you're using the Neodynium system, the Sumerian neodynium system, the half life is 106,000,000,000 years.
So again, if you're using systems that have half life up in the billions of years, is it just an artifact of that system that you're going to get millions of years, ages anyway? Because it's interesting. One of the guys that helped set up the original radiometric dating system, in his textbook, as I recall, he says when you are measuring the age of a rock, you should choose a radiometric dating system that has a half life within an order of magnitude of the age of the rock that you're measuring. Now, I mean, that begs the question, you're assuming the rock is billions of years old.
So when we look at it, as I said, if we measure any rock, we get a huge variation. Same rock, different radioisotape system, vastly different ages. When we have young rocks, rocks that we know the historic ages of, we measure them in the best laboratories, we know they're only 100 years old or 50 years old.
We still get their millions of years old. So to me, radiometric dating by that method is meaningless. And it just shows us the method hasn't been validated.
So what you're saying to me, and I've been trying to analyze what you're saying and come up with some conclusions about it, is that radiometric dating is not a direct dating method. It relies on a set of assumptions which if they are correct, it would be reliable. But because we can't validate the assumptions, we can never rely on the method.
And what you're saying with the rocks of a known age indicates that you get wildly different figures with different methods. Therefore this is a bit hit and miss, isn't it, really? Well, I think you've summed it up very well in principle, it's a very accurate method. But because there are so many unknowns, we can't really apply it with any certainty.
And that's the difference. And as we can see, these dates that we get are in huge conflict with either observations the rocks are only 100 years old or they're only 50 years old or on the age where we obviously didn't see the rocks formed. They are huge conflict with erosion rates, deposition rates, with the molecular breakdown of fossils, all these sort of things all pointing to much younger ages.
So if we look at the big picture, then with the information that we got about sedimentation rates and erosion rates and the decay rates with DNA, the finding of soft tissues, long protein chains in animals that are supposed to be millions of years old, then we get the same picture that there's a problem with the dating through radiometric ages, which is quite different from the times that we're getting or the outer limits that we're actually getting with these other methods. So when we look at this big picture it means that the whole dating paradigm is in a bit of a mess. That's what it looks like to me.
And I think what has happened is our education system and our media system has saturated us with statements that these creatures, these rock formations, are millions of years old. We just hear it all the time. This evolved over so many millions of years.
That change occurred so many million years ago and we just hear it. It's continuously. It's almost if it's fat.
When we drill down, when we analyze the data, it's totally unfounded, it's inconsistent. And we have good results now from top laboratories in the world using the best data available. It's totally inconsistent and it points to a young age.
So I think now we can have great confidence in the biblical account. What this is showing us is that the attempt to bring in long ages and refute the Bible is not founded on good science. The good science points to young ages and the biblical picture as outlined in Genesis.
We're on really, really strong ground with the creation model and the Genesis account. Thanks, John, for the conversation today. Next week, we're going to finish off this issue about radiometric dating and go on to some other issues as well.
But that's been a very helpful conversation today. I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you've been listening to science conversations.
My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. Next week, our conversation will conclude the discussion of radiometric dating.
Don't miss it. Bye for now and God bless.
