Radiometric dating. Radiometric dating (RD) is said to be able to provide absolute dates to fossils, rocks, or buried organic materials. There are many problems with the idea that RD provides absolute dates. There are three main assumptions that plague the trustworthiness of RD.

1. Original quantities of parent and daughter elements. Since RD is a measurement of the ratio of parent to daughter element, it would be important to know how much of each element existed in the sample. But it is impossible to know the original amount, so an assumption of no daughter element is used as the starting point
2. No contamination. It is assumed that there is never any introduction of either parent or daughter elements into the samples over the years.
3. Constant decay rates. It is assumed that the decay rate is constant over the years and that nothing can ever change the decay rate. A team of scientists from ICR have published a serious challenge to this assumption as decay rates have been measured to be wildly erratic in many circumstances.

The idea of RD is that something is millions or billions of years old even though no calibration has been done to confirm this process. Many times, items of known age (rocks from Mt. St. Helens, recently deceased animals…) have been submitted for RD testing and have come back with severely incorrect dates. If we cannot trust the dates provided by RD on items of known date, why should we trust RD when it proposes dates for items where the date is not known?

Carbon 14 is particularly troublesome for evolutionists. The half-life of Carbon-14 is about 5700 years. So after approximately 90,000 years one would not be able to measure any Carbon-14. According to pg 282 of Marvin Lubenow’s Bones of Contention, no fossil has ever been uncovered that did not have some Carbon-14 in it. This includes all of the supposedly 600 million year old samples taken from Pre-Cambrian strata. What this tells us is that no fossils are greater than 90,000 years old.

UPDATE: It has recently been shown that outside forces can change the rate at which radioactive elements decay. So much for absolute dates!

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