Claims by early Victorian geologists such as James Hutton that some of the Earth’s rock strata were formed millions of years ago have been supported in recent times by the use of radio-isotope dating methods, the results of which can, in most cases, be accommodated by G-Theory.

Geological Clocks
Radioactive materials found in the earth act as natural geological clocks that were somehow “wound up” when the nuclei of their atoms were created, possibly multiple millions of years ago—clocks that are slowly running down as those nuclei disintegrate and emit radiation, such as alpha particles that can be detected with Geiger counters.

The half-lives of radioactive elements, the time required for half the nuclei existing at any given time to emit radiation and transmute themselves in different isotopes, which may also be radioactive, can vary from multiple millions of years, in the case of Uranium, for example, down to a few minutes, or even a fraction of a second for the highly unstable man-made isotopes created by neutron bombardment inside a nuclear reactor.

A useful metaphor here would be to compare the decay of a radioactive substance to water running out of the plug hole of a bath, with the water’s half-life being the time for half the water to escape, and then for half of that remaining water to escape, and so on. Since the pressure pushing water out of the plug gets less as the bath level falls, the escape rate is proportional to the amount remaining. A graph of water level against time, at least for a bath with vertical sides, would therefore be like that showing how the amount of un-decayed material remaining in a radioactive sample varies with time. In this simple model, different radioactive isotopes could be represented by different liquids that would flow out with different rates depending on their viscosity and density.

At the present time, orthodox physics teaching is that half-lives are invariant, totally unaffected by physical conditions such as extremes of temperature or even the most corrosive chemical attack, which only affect the electron shells in the outer part of atoms, and not their nuclei.

The fact that elements with half-lives measuring millions of years still exist in the ground, strongly suggest that the Earth is at least several times older than that – unless, as Young Earth creationists contend, God actually created the Earth in an “already old” state, with its radio-active uranium already partially decayed into stable Lead – by analogy, they would argue, with the fact that Adam and Eve were also created “old”, as adults rather than babies.

Another fact that Young Earth creationists have to explain away is that the light currently arriving from distant stars has taken multiple millions of years to make its journey in some cases and so set out before Adam was even created, unless of course the speed of light has changed dramatically or that God created not only the stars but also, at the same time, streams of light waves already extending from them to the earth’s surface.

The Age of the Earth
One early non-radiometric attempt to estimate the age of the Earth was to compare the amounts of minerals being transported by rivers into the oceans each year with the total amount already in there. The age came out in the hundreds of millions of years, but young-earth creationists were quick to point out that God may have made the seas salty to begin with

Radiometric methods are susceptible to fundamental problems, assumptions and simplifications that are metaphorically similar to this, but harder for the non-scientist to understand.

As already mentioned, G-Theory has no argument with the vast ages that radiometric methods attribute to Palaeozoic and Mesozoic strata, which it assigns to a pre-Adamic age. If there is disagreement, it will concern dates assigned to some Cenozoic strata. Incidentally, it is important to understand that the radiometric technique do not date the cenozoic rock strata themselves, which consist of sediments, but igneous intrusions made into them since their formation -- lava flows that accompany them in various locations.

Clearly, an intrusion of volcanic magma into already existing sedimentary strata should be younger than those strata. Conversely, the sedimentary formations must be older than the dates assigned to the solidified magma by the Potassium-Argon technique.

Potassium-Argon Dating
The well-established but unreliable potassium-argon technique depends on the radio-active decay of the isotope Possium-40 (symbol, K-40) with a half-life of 1.3 billion years – the time required for half of the original K-39 atoms in a sample to have turned into Calcium-40 and Argon-40 atoms, the latter existing as a chemically un-reactive gas which remains trapped in the rock but can be boiled off from a test sample in the lab by intense heat then measured using a mass spectrometer.

The key to dating igneous rocks by this process is the simplifying assumptions that when lava erupts from the ground, all the gaseous Argon that had previously accumulated over millions of years and had been trapped under ground, supposedly boils off into the atmosphere – thereby resetting the radioactive clock to zero. The gradual build-up of Argon then starts over again from that moment in time, so that when a geologist later appears on the scene many years later and chips off a lump of the solidified lava for dating purposes, his careful measurements of the relative amounts of Potassium and Argon should enable him to work out the time elapsed since the eruption.

Naturally, any old Argon that failed to boil off during the eruption, or any that diffused in from concentrations in magma deeper down, or later from the air, could make the sample appear very much older than it really was

Incidentally, it has been said that using a radio-isotope with such a long half-life for dating strata as young as 6,000 years is a bit like using a clock with only an hour hand to time a 100 metre sprint. Nevertheless, the technique usually generates dates of millions of years for Cenozoic samples, which is what most scientists want to see and so find “acceptable”.

Argon-Argon Dating – the Holy Grail
To overcome the problems of Potassium-Argon dating, the Argon40-Argon39 method has been devised – and has been used to date the historically verified destruction of Pompei by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD with an error of only seven years. The method is now called the “holy grail” of radiometric dating, being applicable to igneous rocks from a few thousand up to millions of years old. Up-to-date information on such techniques, and hopefully some discussion of assumptions and possible sources of error, is available on-line at the University of Berkeley Geochronology Center.

Although this sophisticated technique is still reliant on various assumptions, Doctor Roger Wiens, a committed Christian and a professional scientist working at Los Alamos, confirms the validity of the physics involved. Extensive information on dozens of dating techniques is provided on his website which is easily found through Google.

The expert opinion of Dr. Wiens not withstanding, the absolute assertions of Science have so often later proved to be wrong – and mistakes can of course occur in the application of an accurate technique in an inappropriate manner to complex, confusing and poorly understood geological situation. Consequently, when Science does conflict with an accurate reading of the Bible, we may well be justified in adopting the attitude of the great Albert Einstein, who, when once informed that an experimental result disagreed with his beautiful theory of relativity, famously retorted “Well, then, the experiment is wrong!” -- as later proved to be the case! However, the fundamental assumption of radiometric dating, i.e. the assertion that the half-lives of radioactive materials are invariable, is now being seriously questioned.

The Elementary Dawkins Defence
Incidentally, since radioactive decay involves probability, some might be tempted to resolve this problem by adopting what might be termed the “Elementary Dawkins Defence”. Since radio-active decay is a random process, like that involved in repeatedly tossing a coin and counting the heads and tails— to arrive at an accurate half-life value for a given isotope, scientists have to take the average of repeated measurements over periods of time.

It is, in fact, physically and mathematically possible for a given sample of Potassium-40 to decay into Argon very much faster than expected – with the result that the rock stratum containing it will appear far, far older than it really is. We might ask if the same thing could then happen in two rock strata . . . or 10, or 1000 . . . or, purely by chance of course, in all the igneous rock strata that have ever been tested?

Clearly, no reasonable person would accept such an absurd possibility, yet that is precisely the calibre of arguments Richard Dawkins offers in support of evolution – namely, that every single plant and animal in the world resulted from the accumulation of billions and billions of fortuitous mutations and random re-arrangements of atoms and molecules! No wonder many mathematicians are outraged by the infantile assumptions of Darwinism.

Carbon-14 Dating
Although the Argon-Argon technique is suitable for dating igneous rocks and, by implication, sedimentary strata into which they have intruded, it would be nice to have a method for dating organic remains directly.

Just such a technique was invented in the 1940’s by Willard F. Libby, making use of the relatively short-lived radio-active isotope Carbon-14 which is being continuously generated in the atmosphere by the action of cosmic radiation from space. The technique is useful to palaeontologists for two reasons – first because it has a half-life of only 5570 years, and second because it is absorbed in the process of photosynthesis and becomes part of the tissues of all plants and then the animals that consume them as food. When the plant, such as a tree, or an animal dies, no more C-14 is absorbed, and that already present starts to decay – thereby providing a measurable time-dependent variable.

Dating Organic Remains
Scientists using the technique assume that a piece of wood, for example, found by careful measurement to contain half as much C-14 as one presently living must have died approximately 5570 years ago – and one with a quarter as much, over 11,000 years ago. Such C-14 measurements have been used to date artefacts and plant, animal and human remains from Cenozoic strata as being many thousands of years old – far, far beyond the mere 6000 years indicated by Bible chronology. How might that conflict be explained?

Although C-14 dating has been calibrated against artefacts of known age, the method makes the simplifying assumption that the intensity of cosmic radiation and also the structure of the Earth’s atmosphere have always been the same as now. However, if the cosmic intensity were lower before Noah’s Flood, for example, artefacts from that age would appear to be vastly older than they really were because they would have contained much less C-14 to begin with.

Meaningless Results
Attempts to calibrate Carbon-14 dating based on counting tree rings in cores bored from California’s ancient Bristle-cone Pines, such as the famous Methuselah tree, which may well have survived Noah’s Flood, are also unreliable because a tree can form more than one growth ring in a year, depending on the seasonal conditions—thereby making it look much older than it really is. Several other calibration methods involve similar assumptions. It would seem, therefore, that the results obtained by carbon dating for materials from before the Flood are quite unreliable.

Half-life Heresy
By one of those odd coincidences, just today, as I edit this material, my attention has been drawn to an article in the “New Scientist” magazine entitled “Half-life Heresy” which discusses recent findings by Claus Rolfs at the Ruhr University in Germany that challenges the fundamental assumption that the half-lives of radioactive materials are invariable—and suggesting that, given the right conditions, they may be dramatically reduced, possibly from thousands of years to mere hundreds.