Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Doctor John Ashton. Often when one is talking about the evidence for creation, the evidence that evolution is absolutely impossible because the genetic codes, the DNA codes, are so complex, they couldn't arise by chance, people bring up the topic of, well, what about the billions of years, the radiometric dating, you know, we know the earth and the fossils are hundreds of millions years old according to this, and this is a very valid question to raise, but as I've mentioned many times, what people don't realise is that these methods for calculating these very long ages, these radiometric dating methods, have never actually been validated.
Now, one of the important things is that these methods are determined, determined by chemical analysis of rocks of radio metric, radioactive elements in these rocks and their isotopes and daughter elements and so forth. And scientists do calculations on the basis of measured decay rates at the present time and so forth, and it's based on these chemical reactions. But what these times actually mean in terms of the actual age of the rock doesn't fit with a whole lot of other evidence.
And so, in other words. In other words, if we were validating these methods for prehistorical dates, what we would need to have are rocks that we know by some independent method, say, are 10 million years old, 20 million years old, 100 million years old, 500 million years old, 1000 million years old, and thereby measure these according to the method that we're using, you know, lead, lead or potassium argon or whatever the method is that we're using and calibrate the method. In other words, we would need to analyse, be able to analyse these reference rocks and get the correct result for their ages.
The problem is we don't have these reference rocks. And when we look at other methods of determining ages, we have massive problems. I've mentioned several times on these programmes that when we measure erosion rates of the continents, and a lot of data on this is published in geography journals and so forth, we would calculate that the continents would actually erode away in less than 10 million years on the current sort of rainfall rates.
And yet we know in the past, for example, from the massive rainforests that have been buried and formed coal and so forth, that the earth was much wetter in the past and so hence shorter time again. But there are many other examples that we could use. Another classic example would be the amount of nickel in the oceans.
Nickel is an element. Tiny amounts is important in life, but high amounts, it's quite toxic. And we can measure the rate at which nickel enters the earth's oceans.
And in actual fact, if there's too much nickel in the oceans, it would be toxic to life. In fact, according to the United Kingdom Environmental health guidelines, concentrations higher than 30 parts per billion, which is fairly small, are toxic to marine life. And yet that concentration would have already been reached in just over a million years at the current rates of input.
And so that means, again, that if the oceans were really hundreds of millions of years old or billions of years old, the amount of nickel in those oceans, in the ocean, would have been toxic to life. Nothing would be alive now. So that's very interesting.
Now, it's another interesting thing is that nickel, in other ways, points to a young earth. So when we look at the levels in seawater, which we can measure, range from about, you know, 0.2 to about 0.7
parts per billion, the rate at which nickel is entering the ocean can be determined from fresh water studies. So the nickel in pure water ranges from about one to three parts per billion. It's much higher, of course, in runoff near industrialised areas and heavily developed areas.
But if we take these lower values, then we can calculate that it would only take about 8200 years for all the nickel that we observe in the oceans to form there. Now, this is talking about the soluble nickel in the ocean. At the ocean floor, we find that there are larger amounts, about 500 billion tonnes, I think, from memory of nodules, of what we call these manganese nodules on the ocean floor.
And these are important source of potential mining for minerals. And they contain about 1% nickel, also a bit over 1%, I think one to 2% nickel. If we said, okay, well, some of the nickel has somehow been trapped in these nodules.
When we again look at the rate at which nickel enters and leaves the earth oceans, and assuming that some of the nickel left and formed in these nodules at the bottom, then the maximum age, again, that would take to deposit all the nickel that's in these nodules would be 168,000. So we can see this is very different, much younger than the purported ages that we calculate when we use radiometric dating. And nickel's just one element that we can look at.
If we look at salt. We similarly get much younger ages for our oceans than are calculated by radiometric dating. And this is very important to realise this.
Some of the other things that we get people bandy around these ages based on these sort of different radiometric dating methods. Another one we often hear, for example, is, well, just recently here in Australia, people are talking about the indigenous people have been in Australia for 65,000 years. Matter of fact, had a lecture just the other week from a visiting professor from one of Australia's leading universities talking on a topic related actually to foods and mentioned the fact, well, we know that indigenous people have been here for 65,000 years and have been harvesting particular foods and thought, well, where does this figure come from? And of course, it comes from thermo luminescence dating.
And one of the interesting things is this with radiometric dating, these forms, these methods haven't actually been validated. And a classic case of this was actually reviewed and published fairly recently. Just look up the reference here in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2024.
So that's quite recent. Volume 161, it was titled, it was by H. Tang and Al and others.
Hand and footprints at Osing in tibetan recommendations for dating rock art. Now one of the interesting things is that this rock art had been discussed and reviewed a number of times. And back in 2021, some other researchers reported foot in hand impressions from fossil hot springs in the tibetan plateau.
And they interpreted these as has been artistic art made possibly by children. And so using uranium thorium dating, they said that the deposit there was in the order of 169 to 226,000 years old. So this was using radiometric dating, uranium thorium dating there.
And so consequently, it was claimed that this site was the earliest known example of cave art in the world. Right. So using uranium thorium radiometric dating.
Further analysis, however, by these other researchers published this year in 2024, they say that the uranium thorium dates at this site are inconsistent with thermoluminescent states. So they do thermoeuminescent dating and they get in the order of 20,000 years for the same prints and in a second site nearby. But also they found then further, when there was a little bit more research done, that date seems to be far too old because the second site also contains finger drawn tibetan letters.
And there's evidence that tibetan script was only introduced in the 7th century AD. So it's only 1300 years ago. So it's very interesting when we look now.
Hey, hang on. Here we are. We've got tibetan writing that was first introduced 700 ad, and yet thermal luminescence dating gives us a date of 20,000 years.
Uranium thorium dating gives us a date of 169 to 226,000 years. And so what the latest researchers say, hang on, this area can be no older than 1300 years old. So it's interesting what they talk about these sites and some of these articles are in excellent state of preservation.
And so here we have a clear example reported in a reputable journal there that clearly points out we can date these things with this radiometric dating and get these really long ages, hundreds of thousands of years, and yet we now have prima facie evidence it's only 1300 years old. So we need to remember this, that these radiometric dating methods that are claimed are very inconsistent with other dating methods that we have that and such as erosion rates and also carbon 14 dating. We can often find a rock with some trapped wood in it and we'll date the rock as being tens of millions of years old.
And carbon 14 dating, of course, will give ages tens of thousands of years old. And we know, of course, that again, with carbon 14 dating, we can't actually calibrate because we don't know the level of carbon or the cosmic ray flux in the atmosphere at that time that forms the carbon 14. And when we again, which again depends on the earth's magnetic field and so forth.
And when we correct for these other factors, these dates in carbon 14 dating come back to only around about thousands of years, not tens of thousands of years, when we correct for these dilution factors and so forth. As I've pointed out in the past, I heard a CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific Industrial research organisation scientists talk about that. If, if we actually carbon dated a t shirt that you bought just recently, a cotton t shirt, it would probably date about 1000 years old due to dilution effects, even though the cotton was less than a year old, probably.
So these are important factors to remember. What we need to consider is that the evidence we have from so many areas points to a very young earth. It points to the biblical timeline, in fact.
And this gives us overwhelming evidence that we can really trust the biblical account. And the biblical count is so important because it tells us the purpose of why we're here. It tells us about our creator God, who made us, how he wants a relationship with us and how he has a plan for us to have eternal life with him.
And that is very, very important. And that's why I encourage you to read the Bible. And because it is backed up, it's backed up by archaeological evidence, historical evidence, and now we can see that the science, scientific evidence of dating also points to a young earth.
Remember too, if you want to re listen to these programmes or share them, just google three abnaustralia.org dot au and go to the radio button and click on the listen. And a range of programmes, many topics in the past.
And there are other really good programmes too. There's the Faith and science radio programme, which is there's this programme, there's the science conversation programme, and also in the television section, you can see the television series Evolution Impossible. You've been listening to faith and science.
I'm Doctor John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
