How Old Is the Earth? - Dr. Andrew Snelling (Conf Lecture)

well welcome to this afternoon's plenary session here at the conference i'm dr andrew snelling i'm a geologist who works for dances in genesis and uh this afternoon we're going to do a broad overview of this question dating the earth young or old this is perhaps the central issue or question that people get heated over in this origins debate you know because once you start talking about the earth being young then you're talking about what the bible's saying about the age of the earth and uh you're also not allowing enough time for evolution to have occurred and so this is the most hotly baited uh topic i don't have time this afternoon to delve into every aspect a lot of it will be skimming the surface but i want to show you some of the array of information that is available to you and how we reason through the information that's available so with that i want to launch into it and first of all i want to emphasize no matter how we answer this question from a scientific perspective that all scientific or scientific evidence for the age of the earth is based on unprovable assumptions that's so important why because we weren't there in the past we only have the present to study and we're looking at the details in the present and extrapolating them back in the past so what we do whether we're trying to prove a young or an old earth we start with a process that we know it's rate in the present we can measure that process so we can measure how much sediment is going down into the oceans every year down the rivers we can we can measure the earth's magnetic field and what's happening to it today we can look at comets and we're going to come to some of those issues and then we have some suitable and reasonable starting conditions but we have to assume those because we weren't there when the process started and we so we're stuck with with just the measurements in the present but we we have to assume some reason now if you if you're starting from a a naturalistic assumption then you're going to have the processes starting in a different way some other starting conditions but of course when we come as creationists we have a different set of starting conditions and you'll see that more as we delve into it but we have to assume or we can assume that the process rate has remained constant since the since the process started at the rate we measured today that's that's the assumption that most seculars will would would assume that is that present day processes and their rates are all that are necessary to explain what happened in the past it's the view that's often called uniformitarianism it doesn't rule out occasional catastrophes modern seculars uh posit things like uh meteorite impacts that wiped out the dinosaurs well we don't experience the meteor meteorite impact of that scale today so that is allowing for some catastrophic processes in the past but generally they'll assume that rates have been constant through the past but that will only ever give us a maximum qualitative age for the earth we have to always recognize that man what process we choose whether we're trying to demonstrate a young or an old earth we're always making assumptions that's for every one of us in this room and it's very important to recognize your assumptions because and their limitations because that means you're more tentative about your statements from your scientific results with that said this these are some of them examples of some of the processes that are being used to date the earth and the solar system and the universe that are being used and we're going to look at some of these this afternoon and it's true that about 90 of them yield a young age for the earth and only about 10 percent yield an old age some are more reliable than others and we want to delve into those this afternoon so let's look at some of these processes for example short period comets and danny faulkner i i owe him credit for some of this information but you're familiar with comments comets consist of ice and dust and so they're essentially dirty snowballs and the salt as they come through the so here we can see the the head and here's the tails you see there's two tails there's a gas tail and a dust tail as a as a comet comes close to the sun in its elliptical orbit through the solar system you have the solar wind which is particles that are streaming out from the sun they interact with the head of the comet and you get the gas and the dust blown off and stream back and so you that's the tail which is illuminated by the the the um the sunlight as it gets closer to the sun and so what's happening is the the comet is actually disintegrating because it's losing some of those ice and and dust particles in its nucleus and unlike planets they go through elliptical orbits the short period comets are defined as comets with an elliptical orbit period of less than 200 years and so one of the familiar ones is halley's comet which returns every 70 to 80 years and of course we all know from historical records that it was a more spectacular display in the past simply because it was larger and had more material streaming off and so it was brighter as it's come on later passes by the earth it's less spectacular and that's because it's disintegrating it's slowly wearing out and so uh as i said as it goes past the sun it's losing some of its dust and and ice and so over time these comets are eventually destroyed or completely disintegrate sometimes of course we've seen with the levee shoemaker comet some years ago it got too close to jupiter and it actually broke apart and slammed into into jupiter so these comets the the main message is these short period comets are disintegrating they're destroyed so the question is where did the comets come from if they only last for if they have a period of only 200 years and they're disintegrating then in time they're going to disappear but we've still got comments in the solar system today then where are they coming from and there's been two suggestions that there's been the short period comets have come from the kuiper belt uh and then there's the longer period comets that have come from the oort cloud and here we can see uh here's the inner part of the solar system uh you can see that the out the the kuiper belt is supposed to be in the uh outer parts of the solar system and then this ought cloud is way out there beyond the solar system now the question is does the ought cloud exist and this is a quote from carl sagan no less that many scientific papers are written each year about the ought cloud its properties its origin its evolution yet there is not a shred of direct evidence for existence it's basically a hypothetical construct out there it may well be out there but it's not been observed we don't have the evidence for it but it certainly helps the the long age people to explain the origin of these comets these long period comets which are greater than 200 year periods because we've got a source out there they believe that they might have a source of the short period comets like halley's comet from the kuiper belt uh we certainly have observed transnewtonian objects now depending on whether you like it or not you know pluto was actually downgraded to a trans-newtonian object and so it it in a sense populates part of this this kuiper belt which was discovered in 1930 the trans-newtonian objects and has been re-emphasized with more and more discoveries in the past 20 years you know as we've been able to put up satellites with telescopes on them uh that get out of the earth's atmosphere you can see things more more in in sharper view out there in space because you're not looking through the earth's atmosphere so more and more of these have been discovered some of these have been called kuiper belt objects but the problem is that they are too large in size to be the source of the short period comets and the composition isn't right so in other words the kuiper belt doesn't help the help the uh astronomers explain the short period comments so we're they're left with a dilemma where do these short periods comets come from everyone agrees that they're supposed to have been there since the origin of the solar system uh so that's that's not a issue but the the evolutionists claim the solar system has been here for four and a half billion years so the comments comet should also be of similar age yet uh we can determine how quickly these comets disintegrate uh assuming they've always disintegrated at the same rate that we observed today then the short period comets may likely only last less than 10 000 years so if they date back to the origin of the solar system then the short period comets are not four and a half billion years old or so they're probably less than 10 000 years which dates the solar system which dates the earth and so you can see the line of argument and so this is a reasonable indication that the solar system and the earth may be young less than 10 000 years old so as i said evolution argue that new short period comets come from the kuiper belt to replace those that disintegrate but we have not seen any so without a source of new short period comets the fact is we still see them in the solar system that means the solar system is less than 10 000 years old and the earth as well now the earth has a magnetic field and uh by the way i've chosen examples that are very important you notice these are examples of large-scale processes the first example was a solar system-wide process now we're dealing with a process that earth earth wide later on we'll talk about we'll have a whole session on radiometric dating of rocks well that's just a local rock sample in one little part of the earth it's not not a big picture evidence and we need to keep that in mind now the earth magnetic field which uh appears to be generated in the earth's core as a result of movement motion in the earth's core it's generated by electrical currents uh this goes back to the work from by thomas barnes that was built on by russ humphries but in the outer core the inner core is solid the outer core is is fluid and so you get movement of material you've got electrical currents there electrical currents as you know from your physics will generate electric uh magnetic fields and if you change the direction of the electric current it will change the direction of the mult of the resultant magnetic field what we've discovered from real-time measurements that the energy of the earth's magnetic field loses half as long as half its energy in approximately every 1400 years we know that from historic measurements as as long as as early as the 18 early 1800s there were measurements that have been made and we can see on this graph that the energy of the magnetic field we it indicates that it has been decreasing at a steady rate now this is the strength of the the energy of the field not just the simply the strength the energy of the field now during the flood here again now see we've we've introduced another component we're assuming that that during the flood things might have been happening at a more catastrophic rate and certainly during the flood because of the catastrophic activity the earth's magnetic field would have lost its energy much faster during the flood because uh as you as the geologists know from this morning session there were things happening on a catastrophic rate inside the earth that resulted in catastrophic processes on the earth's surface with plates moving around and colliding sediments moving around and you'll hear more about that in the in the geology sessions to come so if we if we go back in time we know that there were reversals of the earth's magnetic field during and after the flood we can actually see uh find evidence of the strength of the earth's magnetic field even in his prehistoric sorry in pottery and archaeological sites where the clay is baked some sometimes you get the magnetic minerals in the clay that gets baked and when it gets baked if it's hot enough it will lock in the direction of the earth's magnetic field and virtually fossilized measurements of the earth's magnetic field at the time and so we can get some feel for the intensity and the magnetic directions in the past even going back into earlier periods we can uh also uh see evidence of the magnetic reversals recorded in the ocean floor basalts that erupted during the flood uh kurt dr kurt wise and dr steve austin talked about that in the geology session this morning some of you may be familiar with that that information evidence of the magnetism was locked into the basalts when they cooled and in fact we've seen evidence of these reversals having been rapid why lava flows on stings mountain in oregon southern oregon we know from we can actually work out how long it takes a lava flow to cool and if you get one that's thin enough it will cool within to down to the temperature at which the magnetic field direction will get locked in it will cool to that in a matter of a week or two and so we actually in the 1990s geophysicists working on those basalt flows in in oregon actually found the evidence where parts of a reversal were recorded in these lava flows that cooled in less than two weeks indicating that it was very rapid the geophysicist conventional geophysicist who had a different model for the earth's magnetic field were scratching their heads because according to their model their dynamo model it would take hundreds of thousands of years for these reversals to occur but in the context of a creationist flood model uh where the uh it's electrical currents and you're getting the movement of fluids inside the inner core during the flood uh electrical currents change direction change the magnetic field very quickly it can cope with this happening in in just a short period of time in in days to weeks interestingly some of you may not be aware but this has also been confirmed from lake sediments in the apennines of italy there's a paper just about two or three years ago uh in in one of the journals geophysical research letters where they reported on these lake sediments not far north east of rome where they also found evidence of a a part of a reversal recorded in the sediments that had been deposited very rapidly so we have confirmation that these changes of magnetic field direction contain very rapidly and as i said we can see it from recorded ancient pottery so if we extrapolate that rapid field energy loss back into the earth's history uh taking into account the fact the flood will cause some major disruptions then you can see you get the further back you go you get a stronger and stronger magnetic field it gets so strong that it becomes intolerable for life on the earth and so that puts an upper limit and that upper limit then comes down to about a maximum age of 10 000 years again this is a whole earth process now we're making a lot of assumptions and and i i emphasize that because no matter how we how we do our science when we're dealing with the past we're making assumptions what about the erosion of continents uh you know every year some so many sediments get washed by rivers down to the oceans and then up and down on the ocean floor we can measure the rate of erosion of the continents today and assuming the past erosion has always been at today's rate then all the continents would have been eroded to sea level in no more than 14 years 40 million years 14 million years now of course people argue well as you erode material off the continents get lighter and so they'll rise and so you'll keep keep elevating your your land surface yeah there's a lot of caveats for sure but here's the problem if if if 40 million years if if you did that erosion why do we still have mountains today why the appalachians still there if they've been eroding as they have been for you know 300 million years but you see we have to ask the question you know go back and ask question our assumptions the conventional wisdom is the rate has been more or less the same through all the millions of years but has passed erosion been always at the same rate today no because erosion rates were extremely catastrophic at the end of and soon after the flood with the waters retreating off the off the land surface as dr austin a rapid rise of vertical rises at the end of the flood we see lots of evidence for that then then the erosion is going to be extreme so most of the erosion of the continents would have occurred in only a few thousand years and so that means that we have to we have to drastically reduce that 40 million year estimate so in other words we can take that and by plugging in our assumptions based on the flood producing most of those sediments then that number 40 million years comes right down and gives you much much younger rain the same with the sediments on the seafloor you know we can measure the average thickness of the loose sediments on the on the sea floor we can figure out how much mud is entering every year how much mud is coming out because some leaves as it goes down into these ocean trenches and gets gets down and pushed down into the mantle but you can do the math and figure out the the mass balance between different materials and so uh if if the past accumulation accumulation rate is similar today then all the sediments on the sea floor would have probably got there in about only 12 million years but that's a vastly shorter than the secular conventional time frame and now let's plug in our own assumptions has the past accumulated accumulation rate always been the same as today no as we said during the flood particularly at the end of the flood and soon after we had catastrophic erosion as the land surface was rising the flood waters retreating carving out canyons most of those sediments on the ocean floor would have been put there in just a few years at the very most and so that drastically reduces that estimate for the accumulation of the seafloor sediments from only from 12 million years down to you know just a few thousand years since the flood what about the saltiness of it and again these are full these are total earth processes okay we're talking about global scale processes the saltiness of seawater we can do the math and the mass balance and uh dr steve austin did this work years ago with russ humphries they teamed up and so this is available as a as a scientific paper if you want to go into the more details a lot of this material is available in detail in the creationist technical literature and so we can quantify all these different uh c parts of this sequence and just taking sodium as one of the components of materials that get washed into the ocean sodium of course is the component of common salt sodium chloride and we can figure on something like 450 million tons per year going in and 120 million years a million tons per year going out this is a result of our sea spray coming up on the land etc etc and so we can measure today's rate of the salt entering the oceans we know how salty the the ocean water is today if we start with fresh water oceans that's our study assumed us starting conditions then if the present level of sea saltiness of sea water would have been reached in only just about 62 million years as dr steve austin uh indicated and russ humphries that's being very generous to the conventional paradigm 62 million years yet everyone agrees in the conventional community the oceans have been around for at least three to four billion years i say four billion years now because in the literature there's more and more evidence that the oceans were formed very early in in the earth's history uh according to the conventional paradigm so here's a disjointed figures aren't they they get the saltiness starting with a freshwater ocean at the present rate of adding salt to the oceans in only 62 million years but the oceans have been around for three to four billion years well they have to try and reconcile that but there's been no way that they can do that we have to ask ourselves from our paradigm from a biblical uh worldview did would god have started with freshwater oceans well maybe not he certainly created fish that could tolerate a salty ocean so maybe he started with fish in a in a in a salty ocean maybe not as salty as today we don't know because we weren't back there but we do know the oceans got saltier in the past and uh has the salt had always entered at the rate we measured today no humongous amounts of salt were added to the oceans catastrophically during the flood from all that volcanic water that was released from those all that explosive volcanic action i mean up 70 of what comes out of a volcano is water and it's got all chemicals in it it's hot and of course so the eroding sediments just like erosion today releases chemicals into river waters well so during the erosion during the flood so so that means that was a massive amount of addition of salt to the oceans during the flood so if we don't start with salty ocean if we start with salty oceans rather than a fresh water ocean and we add most that we add all the salt during the flood then the present level of saltiness would have got there very very rapidly and so it would have been achieved in only thousands of years so you can see what i mean when you look at the the assumptions the assumptions of the starting conditions the assumptions of the rate depending on your on your paradigm whether your old earth or young earth you're going to plug in different different assumptions and different starting and conditions and you'll get different results and we can definitely show from a biblical perspective that the oceans are therefore very young and if the oceans are very young and go back to the early history of the earth and in fact the bible says god created the earth that was already covered in water right from the beginning then it indicates a young earth helium in the atmosphere is another indicator helium is a byproduct of radioactive decay and we'll come back to that later in the conference it leaks out of rocks and minerals and eventually finds its way into the atmosphere we can actually measure the rate of helium addition to the atmospheres into the atmosphere every year but we we do know that some of that helium leaks out into space there's no question about that there's increasing evidence that that's the case it's not fully qualified but it's certainly not a as massive amount as what's coming out of the rocks out of the ground and so if we measure the rate at which it leaks into the atmosphere today we do the math on also on how much leaks out of the atmosphere into space and if we assume a helium-free atmosphere initially and the leakage of helium at today's rate then all the helium into in the atmosphere would have got there in less than two million years so that kind of dates the atmosphere which is a global scale thing therefore it's an indicator of the age of the earth but the atmosphere has been claimed to by uh the conventional paradigm to be have been there for at least three to four billion years so without an extra source of helium or and or a greater past leakage in the outer space the atmosphere is less than 2 million years old but again if the earth's atmosphere had some healing to begin with and if radioactive decay was much faster during the flood which i'll illustrate when we talk about radiometric dating tomorrow uh then additional healing would have leaked in the atmosphere and only the the all the healing would have leaked in only a few thousand years and so the the atmosphere is only as old as all that so again that's a global scale process that limits the age of the the system another uh indicator what about the stone age graves here's the argument according to the conventional paradigm the man was in the stone age for 195 000 years and during that time it's estimated the population would have averaged around a million people throughout that 195 million a thousand years well that means during that time period about 8 billion people will have lived and died so where are all their graves how can we find so few of these human remains in post-flood sediments people that lived after the flood people have said that have lived in the stone age if if the stone age was 195 000 years long there would have been about 8 billion people lived in that time but we find so few graves so maybe the stone age wasn't 195 000 years long maybe it was just a brief technological transition from the people who left the tower of babel only about four four thousand two three hundred years ago after all when they left the tower of babel a lot of them had to leave the technology behind so as they moved out they just grabbed what they could to start start clearing forests and lighting fires and starting to re-establish technology in their lifestyle again only a brief period what about the advent of agriculture we know when that happened it's only only not that long ago less than 10 000 years ago as i said evolutionists the conventional paradigm claims that men have been hunter gatherers for you know those 195 000 years through the stone age and they only discovered agriculture less than 10 000 years ago but it begs the question if there were 8 billion people that lived during that time as hunter-gatherers how come one of them wasn't smart enough to figure out if you put a seed in the ground you could grow crops come on i mean that's that was an obvious observation and so why did it take them so long to discover agriculture well probably because it wasn't that long time of a period in fact the bible tells us that no when he got off the ark planet a vineyard they knew about agriculture because they had agriculture in the pre-flood world so agriculture was immediately re-established after the flood and the stone age has said was only a mere brief technological transition it wasn't that people were less intelligent it was just their technology because they had to re-establish it after they were dispersed dramatically and catastrophically at the tower of babel and so if the advent of agriculture is less than 10 000 years old that dates back to the time of noah and again it's a it's a limitation on on human history and therefore the earth's history what about the length of written history man has always kept documents written on written on um on on on monuments cave paintings all the rest of it and it's only been around for about five thousand years he's always been intelligent beautiful cave paintings even records of lunar phases the more we investigate some of these uh sites like stonehenge and and some of these other sites they were actually astronomical observatories you know you go to machu picchu and you know they had the sun dial set up they were wanting to know when to plant crops and everything these were not unintelligent people and they kept records of these phases so they couldn't know when to plant their crops and so again why did man supposedly wait 195 000 years to suddenly invent writing skills no it doesn't make any sense at all adam communicated with god in the garden of eden the art was built under under god's direction and written written records go back 5 000 years therefore human history back to the flood goes back about that time human population growth is another indicator if we assume about four and a half years from noah to the present and conservatively assume a generation span of 40 years and two and a half children per family we'd get the result in seven billion people today on the planet uh in that time period with a growth rate of only about half a percent whereas the current average is about three and a half children per family a growth rate of about two percent and so and this would have been greater in the past because they had larger families okay mortality was higher life spans were slightly shorter but if we if we plug in those figures in four and a half thousand years we get many more than the seven billion people that we have on the planet today that allows for those who died early from disease or wars and so the the evolutionists claim that you know man has been around for at least half a billion half a thousand million years but you know if that were true there ought to be so many people now on the earth's surface you know we wouldn't be able to fit them in and so again the human population growth puts limits on the age of the human population how long we've been here on the earth since the time of noah so all of these methods some of these that i've highlighted here we can show yield a young age for the for the uh for the earth and the solar system and but what about some of these 10 you know the the one that the conventional paradigm always focuses on is radiometric dating and is it a reasonable approach to look at the ten percent and leave and not not focus on the nine percent a ninety percent well let's have a look at uh how the evolutionists conventional claimed that the earth is for just over four and a half billion years old they used radioactive dating of rocks no they didn't do you realize that the age of the earth was not determined on earth rocks was determined by using a group of meteorites back in 1956 claire patterson at caltech used meteorites to date the age of the earth the assumption was that the meteorites came from asteroids that formed at the same time as the earth from the solar nebula the meteorites thus represent the earth when it's formed and it's assumes that radioactive dating actually works and so they're the assumptions that were made in acquiring the age of the earth well how does radioactive dating work i'm going to come back to this tomorrow in more detail but let's do a quick thumbnail sketch the process is similar to what we see with an hourglass clock we have parent atoms here that fall and become daughter atoms we know the rate of falling which is like radioactive decay so if you've got an hourglass clock that's rated at one hour all the sand grains fall from top to bottom in one hour if you walk into a room and you see half the sand grains up the top and half the sand grains that down the down the bottom how long has the clock been ticking half an hour oh no that's assuming that you started with all the sand grains up there which is a point to come to but how does it work well a rock is chemically tested for these parent and daughter atoms and if you know the rate of decay and you assume that it remains constant at today's measured rate then you can calculate backwards by measuring how many green atoms you've got here if they all came from red atoms you can calculate if you know the rate of falling you can calculate how long ago all the green atoms were red atoms up there and you just did that when i said if half were down here and half were up there you immediately knew that if half would come down from there at the rate of falling one hour half half an hour it's the same in the rocks by measuring the daughter atoms assuming they all came from red atoms you know the rate of falling or radioactive decay can back calculate and that's the age of the rock assuming what well you have to assume that all the sand grains in the top bowl the red atoms fell down they didn't start with any red atoms to begin with i saw any green atoms to begin with okay if the rate of radar decay has remained constant the falling rate then you can calculate how long the hourglass has been operating so as i said there's there's three major assumptions so the the use of the hourglass requires three crucial assumptions the starting conditions a closed system and a constant falling array falling right so these three assumptions are even more crucial to radioactive dating methods but here's the difference when you play with an hourglass you're there to see the starting conditions with the geologists there to see the rocks when they form assumption number one you have to know the initial conditions you have to know that the amounts the amounts of the parent daughter are atoms at the beginning when the rock formed okay and the geologists believe that they can make reasonable assumptions the assumption is that when the rock forms that's when the clock starts ticking but were there any red atoms in the rock were there green atoms as well they don't know they have to look from the present measurements of the these quantities in the rocks and try and infer what it was back in the past and that runs into problems as i'll show you in a moment you have to assume that all the daughter atoms the green atoms have come from radioactive decay of the red atoms that there's been no red atoms added or green atoms taken away what if there's been the system hasn't been closed in your hourglass clock everything's sealed nicely so that there's been no contamination or interference from the outside but of rocks being closed for the millions of years that they've been sitting there in the ground no you've got ground waters that flow through the rocks ground waters leech uranium they can add lead to the system they can do all sorts of things and so you can't be sure that your rock hasn't been contaminated through all the time it's been sitting there in the ground and what about the radioactive decay rate can we be sure that the rate we measure today has been constant through time actually we've only been measuring the rates for the last 80 years in the lab and even then if you do the investigations we've discovered that there's inconsistencies that some of the measurements by whatever techniques they've used haven't always replicated results that other lab laboratories have produced and the interesting thing is a side note the way the geochronology community gets around that is they calibrate all the radiometric clocks against uranium lead so the decay rate of the decay rate of potassium is actually calibrated to the decay rate of uranium so the methods are not independent of one another their decay rates have been calibrated against one another which is an issue that i've been looking into recently and i've also been looking into how well we really do know the uranium decay rate and also is the method as good as it's claimed to be but that's another story so that's that's our third assumption now none of these assumptions are provable why because the past cannot be observed and measured we can't test the past we're going to test the present yes things did exist in the past and what happened in the past has produced what we see today but our assumptions about how today was produced will determine how good we are at figuring out what happened in the past so and i would add that these assumptions are not even reasonable simply because we know that contamination is common we we know the possibility that the system may not have started with zero daughter pro daughters in the in the rock in fact we can show that uh all of these assumptions have been violated we have evidence and come back for our extended talk on radiometric dating and i'll show you the evidence that these assumptions have been violated and if the assumptions have been violated then the clocks don't give reliable agents absolute agents that is so we know that daughter atoms are regularly inherited when a rock forms so the initial conditions are not known subsequent contamination is common so it hasn't been a closed system and decay rates were likely very much faster in the past so if we don't have a constant decay rate we don't have a closed system and we don't know the initial conditions then these clocks aren't really good timepieces at all but as i'll show you tomorrow we can still use them in a relative sense if if if we know some something about these various assumptions and we'll come back to that i just want to give you one example before we close off in this session and we go to the grand canyon you'll you'll notice that we geologists talk a lot about the grand canyon not because we necessarily americo centric but simply because this is one of the best places on earth where much of the geological record is exposed to view you can actually walk from the bottom of the grand canyon to the top and beyond and you're climbing your way through the record of earth history and that's what makes the grand canyon such a unique place and an important place to test the creation flood model and so uh in the grand canyon and this is work that uh dr austin has been involved in heavily uh there's lava flows that are so recent we can still see some of the volcanoes on the north rim of the canyon and the lava flows spilled down on the walls of the canyon and they blocked the colorado river so it was after the canyon formed so this is post flood after the flood then we also have here they are here's one of these volcanoes that's vulcan's throne and here you can see the lava flow spilled over the walls of the canyon we also have lava flows down the bottom of the canyon these are the cardenas basalts these are the inner gorge and i'll say something more about these rocks on thursday these are pre-flood rocks these are ancient rocks in anyone's terminology and so there's two these two uh basalts that we can contrast what do the radiometric methods show about the ages of these rocks what sort of results we get oh here's the cardenas basalts looking down over the rim of the canyon and here they are up close and personal when dr oster went in and sampled some of these for for dating work well the eureka plateau basalts these ones that are so recent they give you a variety of ages from potassium argon which are young ages all the way up to older ages with the rubidium strontium lead-lead dating and i'm assuming you understand the chemical symbols there potassium argon rubidium strontium lead lead that's the two end members of the two uranium parents uranium-238 and uranium-235 notice that this is disparity in the ages which one of these is the correct age for the rock well if you weren't there to see the eruptions you couldn't be sure but you'd probably posit that this is a relia a reasonable estimate because we know it's so recent that it came down the walls of the canyon what about the cardenas basalts the same samples with all three all of these methods notice the potassium argon rubidium strontium sumeridium the sumeridim is three times the size of the potassium argon age that's not very accurate is it that's incredibly different what can we say well look at these two lava flows see how similar their rubidium strontium ages are and by the way this is using the superior isochron technique which involves multiple samples to obtain the age not single sample ages these are multiple samples so these are very good with very good statistics notice that the rubidium strontium isochron ages are very similar within the error margins why do you think that these two lavas would give you a similar rubidium strontium age well it would be if they have a similar rubidium strontium chemistry which could would go back to their source the salts come from the upper mantle the upper mantle below the grand canyon would have been the source for both the ancient and the recent lava flows so if they came from the same mammal mantle source they would have the same mantle rubidium strontium chemistry which would give you the same age so in other words these ages really aren't true ages there are there are a result of the chemistry of the source look at the differences in these ages notice that there's a pattern you can see the recent lava flows here and the cardenas the ancient ones notice that the potassium is always the youngest the rubidium is in is is next and these ones are older in both of these situations in other words there's a systematic pattern which indicates that there's a systematic process going on and it's best explained by rapid acceleration of decay rates in some catastrophic event in the past and so those will be pains to point out tomorrow in the case of the cardenas basalt what we're saying is during a past catastrophic event no let me just back up here and preface this by reminding you if you go to the literature each one of these methods would be like having several hourglass clocks lined up on the on the bench here and each would have different size sand grains different size nuclei of the parent atoms and therefore they will produce different daughters green atoms but all clocks should tick through one hour through the same one hour pit real time period they should give you the same age that's why we argued that each of these clocks if we applied all the methods to each of these rocks we should get the same results through the same real-time period from the formation of the rock to the day so in the real time period from when the cardenas basalt formed to the day which is the time period since the rock formed what's happened is on the assumption of present day decay rates the rubidium strontium clock has ticked through 516 million years while they're a bit sorry the potassium argon well the iridium stony must tick through one thousand one and eleven million years while the samaritan is ticked through fifteen hundred and eighty eight million years in other words the decay rates the only way you can reconcile that disparity is if the decay rates were happening more rapidly in the past compared to the rates that we measure today so i don't have time to go into that in more detail because i want to wrap this up but let's give the lessons here in summary the recent erupted basalts inherited their ages from their source so we can be sure that the ancient basil also inherited the same isotope chemistry chemistry the initial conditions were not known we cannot be sure a contamination has not occurred it has not been a closed system and the decay rates were not constant in the past so in closing on the scientific side of the equation let me remind you again all scientific evidence involves and requires unprovable assumptions we choose a rate that we measure in the present we start with suitable and reasonable starting conditions that we assume but we can't prove them because we weren't there to see those initial conditions at the start if we assume the rate has been constant in the time although that no scientists were there to check that the rates have been constant through time then these processes even radiometric dating can only give us a maximum qualitative qualitative maximum age for the earth so the question is how then can we be sure of the earth's age its true age well the answer is only if we have an eyewitness who is present who's given us a reliable eyewitness record of what happened in the past and as christians we say yes we do have that in the scriptures we have the creator's record of what happened he's told us when the earth was formed how it was formed and what's happened since at the time of the flood and so we know about the earth sage and its history from an eye witness who was reliable because god cannot lie and jesus the creator said and i like to remind christians who struggle with this issue if you say you're a christ follower then what did jesus say i am the way the truth and the life no one comes to the father except through me that means that jesus never told us a lie otherwise he is not the way and he's not the truth and he's not the life and jesus said if you believe not moses you would have believed if you had believed moses you would have believed me for he wrote of me but if you believe not his writings how you will you believe my words moses wrote about creation and the flood in genesis so jesus is saying if we don't believe what moses told us then how are we going to believe what he's telling us and jesus himself taught he said from the beginning of the creation which god created in other words jesus believed and taught that there was a beginning and that god created all things and furthermore he said from the beginning of the creation god made them male and female so jesus was teaching the god-made man at the beginning of time as recorded in genesis not after billions of years of cosmic geologic and biological man was made at the beginning of time that's the secular conventional paradigm man is not at the beginning his way here at the training edge of the present trailing edge of time the beginning of creation was back here 13.8 billion years ago at the big bang whereas jesus's timeline is no from the beginning of the creation god made the male and female looking back from today man created on day six is way back there at the beginning of the creation that's that's consistently what what jesus is teaching just as we read in genesis so here's the question when it comes to the earth's age why does this matter well it matters because as christians why should we give precedence to the conventional paradigm over the clear god-breathed statements of scripture when that conventional paradigm has been framed by scientists interpreting what they see without reference to in fact they reject god's word and these are finite fallable scientists who reject god's word why should we why should we try and tack on their interpretations to what god has clearly told us in his words yes human reasoning alone insists that today's natural processes are the only scientific means for calculating the age of the earth dr tackett referred to that in the opening session you know only thinking inside the box we as as christians we look outside the box to the creator who exists outside the box and and so we have a different way of looking at things remember therefore all human activities including science should humbly submit to the word of god yes science does provide answers confirming the earth's real age and we went through some of those evidences earlier in the session but we can only find the earthreal age plainly evident in the light of the authorities of god's word beginning in genesis so the literal historic record and the chronology in the scriptures matter why because they are the chronology of god's plan of redemption and the genealogy of jesus christ our redeemer the scriptures are his story they revolve around jesus the creator who came as a man to be our kinsmen redeemer and will eventually sum everything up when he comes again and ushers in a new heaven and a new earth so it matters that that chronology matters because the chronology of adam to the present to up to christ is his family history and if he isn't our kinsmen redeemer then he's not truly man who who died on our behalf by his shed blood so this is why this question ultimately matters it's not just a scientific question it's really a question about our eternal destiny the truth of the the central uh central uh event of human history the cross of christ well thank you very much for attention

Channel: Is Genesis History?

Views: 36,705

Rating: 4.7638097 out of 5

Keywords: andrew snelling, geology, creationism, creation science, young earth creationism, flood geology, young earth, apologetics, science

Id: IWc_z_qQfQg

Length: 54min 26sec (3266 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020