Del: How can we then depend so
much upon the radiometric dating? Andrew: Well, if we're
in a court of law the judge and jury would throw out
the evidence because I couldn't really depend on these methods
giving you reliable, accurate results. Del: But we would say that we do
have an eyewitness that has given us testimony as
to what really happened… Andrew: that's right.
Del: …in that time in the past. Andrew: Yeah, God has given us
an eyewitness testimony in the book of Genesis.
And he's laid out the history of the earth,
starting with supernatural creation,
where trees were already bearing fruit.
If we were going back and looking at those trees
from our everyday experience, we'd expect those trees have
been around for a while to have grown and produce fruit.
And we see rocks that by our normal observation today we
would think it's taken a long time to form; but no,
God was there and he supernaturally,
instantly created and that's what he says in his eyewitness
record in the book of Genesis. And then he goes on to say there
was a time when he judged the earth because
of human wickedness — at the time of the flood —
and at that time he caused catastrophic things to happen.
Water came from inside of the earth, molten material
came from inside the earth, and the earth's surface
was totally reshaped. All the high hills
and the mountains were covered in water,
and Noah came out to a totally different world to the one that
he had experienced before the flood.
And so geological processes were sped up to such magnitudes
and rates that we can't even imagine today.
We can only get hints at by stepping back and looking at
the geologic record — looking at the big picture of
the geologic record. I think that's very important,
just like we stepped back before.
Yes we see say this cinder cone volcano behind us; this looks
quite large but it's small by comparison to what we see,
even in human history with Mount St. Helens.
But these lava flows are small by comparison to what we see in
the geologic record. And so we see evidence that…
that we need to open our eyes to a bigger picture
on a bigger scale, and… and… and start to think in terms of
what was going on around the world at that time. Del: And the conventional
paradigm seems to cut itself off from that picture,
from the picture that the present is not really
the key to the past because, obviously, the past holds
some massive, massive catastrophic events
that are not going on today? Andrew: In fact, the Bible
would say that the past is the key to the present.
If you under… want to understand why the way
the world is today, you've got to understand what happened in
the past. And yet the conventional wisdom
is that we should look only at the present and extrapolate
that back into the past. And Charles Lyell went so far as
to say only present day rates can be used to interpret
the past. But fortunately, conventional geologists are now
realizing that that doesn't work.
Del: Yeah, yeah. Andrew: That doesn't work. Del: Well, Andrew, when we talk
about that accelerated decay — my dad worked in nuclear physics
for a long time — that generates heat.
Does that raise an issue for you? Andrew: It does raise an issue,
but we can answer the question from almost the negative. If…
if… if there was a lot of heat you would melt rocks.
So you would expect evidence of melting of rocks.
And we don't see that. So that indicates there may not
have been excessive heat produced
by that accelerated decay. Another indicator we
talked about, radiohalos — once you get
to a certain temperature, the damage in the crystals
gets healed: the atoms vibrate and they snap back
into the original positions. And so the halos disappear.
So the very fact… the very fact that we can see radiohalos
in rocks that were formed, you know, in the past indicates
that there hasn't been an excessive amount of heat.
The fact that the radiohalos — the polonium ones —
require accelerated decay, yet we can still see
the end product — the polonium radiohalo —
indicates that during that accelerated decay there
can't have been a lot of heat produced.
Another indication is that even with the helium… we talked about
the helium leaking out of those crystals.
We know that if you… if you heat the crystal up then…
then you're potentially going to leak that helium out
more rapidly. Everyone is familiar
with a helium balloon. Del: Yes. Mmm hmm. Andrew: You know, you leave them
in your living room for a while, they'll start… they float at
the top of the ceiling. But eventually that helium leaks
out and they'll start to fall to the ground. Now if you start
to warm that, it's going to… because it's going to expand,
it's going to force its way out of those… the membrane
holding it in much faster. So there's a number
of indicators that give us a clue that the heat may not
have been a problem that some people have suggested.
We're still exploring these issues.
That's what I enjoy about science. You know if we had all
the answers they'd be no hard work to do. And that's
what makes… makes it exciting. And you can live
with the tension of not knowing all the answers. So fact
that I can give you several lines of evidence that indicate
that heat might not have been a problem, leads me not
to be concerned about that being a problem.
Well I've got strong evidence as well that that decay rates
have been much faster in the past. As we said before,
a rock that's older will have experienced more
accelerated decay. So it's not
as if it isn't a tool that we can use, but we have
to adjust our thinking about how we use that tool. It doesn't…
it cannot give us reliable, absolute ages. Del: So we're still left
with some mysteries associated with this whole
radiometric dating issue. Andrew: That's right. Del: But after that eight years,
did you leave more convinced or less convinced in the…
in the record that's in Genesis. Andrew: Oh, much more convinced!
Now we had concrete lines of evidence that we could point
to and say yes, the Bible is giving us an accurate
historic record. First of all, was that if we used
the different dating methods — the radioactive parent atoms —
on the same samples from the same rock units,
that we invariably got discordant ages. Del: And you would expect
the same? Andrew: Well,
normally the textbooks said that you'd have the methods all
giving you the same results because they all started at
time zero — the clocks started at time zero.
So what we discovered is that, yes, they would have to start
it at time zero, but that… that the decay rate must have
speeded up by different amounts for different parent atoms.
And we're talking about very large changes.
We also established that the radioactive decay
had happened — there was a lot of radioactive decay
that had happened. We had two lines of evidence
of that, that was the radiohalos which was the little bullets
fired by the uranium decaying, and also, sometimes,
the uranium atom splits as in an atomic bomb.
We call that a fission. And so you actually find
the particles also damage the crystal.
So fission tracks, radiohalos, the evidence of a lot
of radioactive decay had occurred.
But obviously that occurred at a very rapid rate. We also saw
that in relation to helium leakage —
gave an age of only 6,000 years, so that in real time
of 6,000 years — in some time in the past —
there'd been a billion and a half years' worth
of radioactive decay. So these are the pieces
of the puzzle that we came to and this questions the whole
conventional way of thinking of earth history. And yet
it strengthens our argument that we need to look back at
the book of Genesis, God's eyewitness record,
that indicates earth history was much shorter.
And that's what we're seeing from these…
these results, from looking at the radioactive decay in rocks —
both the volcanic rocks that we see here, as well
as radiocarbon in fossils and fossil vegetation et cetera.
And this fits in with the picture we
have here. Remember we said before
this lava flow is only small in comparison to the volumes
of lavas that were… erupted catastrophically
in the past. We see lots of indications
of catastrophic, geological processes
in the past: not just one line of evidence — volcanoes —
radioactive decay is another line of evidence, and more
that we'll talk about when I show you some
of the evidence down there in Sedona. Del: I had no idea how many
crystal shops were in Sedona. Andrew: No, and I'm glad you let
me stop by because I wanted to get this pet…
piece of petrified wood. Arizona is famous for its
petrified wood and that's part of what we need to discuss here. Del: Well when we were talking
about isotopes, one of the things we didn't
address was the whole area of carbon-14. I mean most
people are familiar, and yet I'm not sure we know exactly what
that is. Can you describe that? Andrew: Well, first of all we
need to clear up a confusion. Most people think
that radiocarbon has been used to date rocks.
Whenever they think of radioactive dating they think
of radiocarbon because that's what they're used to hearing.
But radiocarbon isn't used to date rocks, because most
rocks don't have carbon in them. And what we need is organic
carbon because it's intrinsic to the methodology, or how
you understand how radiocarbon works. Del: How does a tree, then,
get carbon-14 in it? Andrew: Well, it's simple
because the radiocarbon is produced
in the upper atmosphere. Cosmic rays bombarding
the earth — atmosphere — turns nitrogen atoms
into carbon-14 atoms, which circulates into the carbon
dioxide that we breathe. And so it's also taken
in by the plants
during photosynthesis. So it's in the wood,
it's in the leaves, it's in the vegetables we eat;
animals take it into their bodies,
so it's the animals that we eat. So it gets into our bodies.
So not only are all these plants around us radioactive
with radiocarbon, but we are ourselves.
Del: So you have it, I have it. Andrew: Correct. And as long
as we live, we're taking more radiocarbon into our bodies.
But when we die, we stop taking radiocarbon into our bodies.
And so a dinosaur dies — it stops taking in radiocarbon —
and then over the thousands of years it's getting less
and less radiocarbon. And as I said before, you know,
after 90,000 years, there should be no radiocarbon
left in dinosaur bones. If every atom of the earth
was radiocarbon, it all would have decayed away in less
than a million years. So if you already believe
the fossils — dinosaur fossils, the coal beds, all those things
are millions of years old — you wouldn't expect to find any
radiocarbon in them; and yet you do. And this is one
of the things that we found when we studied petrified wood
like this at different levels in the geologic record.
I was doing research on this. I was collecting samples — in…
in England, in Australia — and I sent them to radiocarbon
laboratories and, sure enough, they had radiocarbon in them.
So this is another aspect of this whole time question because
if these things are believed to be millions of years old —
like this petrified wood — and yet it has radiocarbon in it
that says it's only thousands of years old — then it means
that it calls into question the conventional timeframe.
And so we wanted to test this, because we'd… we'd seen
in the literature — this is in the conventional literature —
in the 1980s they developed a new methodology for measuring
radiocarbon and they could count atoms of radiocarbon.
That's how… how good it was. But they wanted to be sure that
they weren't getting any contamination
in their laboratories. And so they took samples
like petrified wood. They took samples
of dinosaur bones, and coal, and oil, and natural gas,
and limestone even, and they put them
in their equipment; and every sample they tested
had radiocarbon in it. And this was reported
in the literature and they ignored it. So in our
research we decided well, we'll test that for ourselves.
We wanted to be sure that, you know, this
wasn't an artifact of conventional
experimental method. So we selected samples from ten
different coal beds around the United States: some coal
beds that were conventionally as young as 40 million years,
some call beds that were conventionally over
300 million years old. And when we tested them
for radiocarbon, they had radiocarbon in them and
they all yielded the same radiocarbon age,
which meant that these plants must have all lived at the same
time and died at the same time. And that fits
the flood paradigm, because these would have
been pre… pre-flood trees that were all buried together at
the same time. But we went further. We thought,
okay, let's test out some material that's come from inside
the earth that's got carbon in it. So we
selected diamonds, because diamonds come from deep
inside the earth. Remember the volcano that we
were at? Del: Yes.
Andrew: The SP Crater. Well, from inside the earth we have these volcanic eruptions
that bring diamonds up. They're made down deep inside
the earth which means the diamonds have never been
in contact with the atmosphere until they're brought
to the surface. Because carbon-14 is produced
in the atmosphere, we wouldn't expect them to have any
radiocarbon in them. Because… also they're the hottest
substance known, so that can't be contaminated.
so even when they arrive at the earth's surface,
you're not going to exchange carbon 14 in the atmosphere
with carbon in the diamond. So whatever the diamond brought
up from the depth has been bottled up and locked in.
So we tested the diamonds. We got several diamonds
from Africa, and every one of those diamonds yielded
radiocarbon much the same age. It was detectable radiocarbon.
Now we presented this… this research at a conference:
the American Geophysical Union — one of the largest bodies
of geologists that get together. We had a poster
presentation and, unbeknownst to us, one
of the scientists that saw our presentation of the diamond
evidence was
from a radiocarbon laboratory. So he went back to his own
university radiocarbon laboratory,
got his own diamonds and reported similar results to
what we had found. Here's the sticking point.
The diamonds are supposed to be between one and three billion
years old. That's the conventional age.
For them to be only thousands of years old flies in the face
of the conventional wisdom. So when they publish
their results, what did they say?
They tried to put it down to machine error,
which of course is ludicrous because even if you have no
sample in your machine — have nothing in the machine —
you won't get any radiocarbon. So if it was machine error you'd
expect it to show up radiocarbon when there was nothing in there.
Del: Huh. Andrew: When you put
the diamond in, it shows detectable radiocarbon,
and it's been reproduced. So again
this is an illustration; you know we did our
own sampling, got our own laboratory results,
and verified what was already in the open scientific literature
for several decades — whether it's petrified wood,
coal, dinosaur bones, the shells of shellfish —
they all contain radiocarbon all through the fossil record.
And so that tells us that these layers aren't millions
of years old. Del: Well, that brings us back
again to the issue of the power of a paradigm.
That if evidence doesn't fit in your paradigm we have
a tendency to discard it…. Andrew: Exclude it.
Del: …or ignore it. Andrew: Exactly, yeah.
It's like having a set of blinkers: I'm only
gonna believe what I see that fits in with what
I already believe. And anything outside,
that's considered anomalous — I'll just shelve it as a tiny
mystery and ignore it. And yet the more the paradigm
is challenged, the more likelihood that there could be
a switch. Unless of course there's
a spiritual dimension. Del: Mmm hmm. Andrew: And because, let's
be honest, when we're talking about radiocarbon,
these radiocarbon results… we're talking about an earth
that's only thousands of years old, we're talking
about trees being buried in coal beds all in the one year during
the flood; that's why they gave the same age — then that's
radically different from the conventional paradigm.
They've excluded God from the picture. As soon
as I have to admit that maybe the Bible is correct,
that the flood paradigm of earth history — the Genesis
paradigm of earth history — is the correct view,
then the Genesis paradigm includes a creator God…
Del: right. Andrew: …to whom man
is accountable. And that's why there's
a spiritual dimension to it. And that's why they can
deliberately choose to ignore the evidence,
which is what the Apostle Peter said in II Peter chapter 3:
they'll be willingly ignorant — it's not that the evidence
isn't there, it's that they've choose…
chosen to ignore it. Del: Choose to ignore it. Yeah.
and we're faced again with the issue of how closely
tied together the issue of time is to both of these paradigms.
Andrew: Exactly. Del: Because if you have a short
period of time, in terms of all that we see around here,
then it validates the history that's been recorded for us
in Genesis and, just as you said, that brings us
face to face with God. Time is really the hero
of the plot, whichever way you look at it.
And this is the battle of these two views of earth history.
It's a question of the timescale involved.
He talks about radioactive decay and radiohalos here too
11:45 good example of evolution holding back science
ye
More updates on diamonds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Creation/comments/fp37x3/diamonds_and_c14_breaking_long_ages/ftdxmy2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf