The Bible and Radiometric dating

(The Problem with Carbon 14 and other dating methods).

Many people are under the false impression that carbon dating proves that dinosaurs and other extinct animals lived millions of years ago. What many do not realize is that carbon dating is not used to date dinosaurs.

The reason? Carbon dating is only accurate back a few thousand years. So if scientists believe that a creature lived millions of years ago, then they would need to date it another way.

But there is the problem. They assume dinosaurs lived millions of years ago (instead of thousands of years ago like the bible says). They ignore evidence that does not fit their preconceived notion.

What would happen if a dinosaur bone were carbon dated? - At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Scientists dated dinosaur bones using the Carbon dating method. The age they came back with was only a few thousand years old.

This date did not fit the preconceived notion that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. So what did they do? They threw the results out. And kept their theory that dinosaurs lived "millions of years ago" instead.

This is common practice.

They then use potassium argon, or other methods, and date the fossils again.

They do this many times, using a different dating method each time. The results can be as much as 150 million years different from each other! - how’s that for an "exact" science?

They then pick the date they like best, based upon their preconceived notion of how old their theory says the fossil should be (based upon the Geologic column) .

So they start with the assumption that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, then manipulate the results until they agree with their conclusion.

Their assumptions dictate their conclusions.

So why is it that if the date doesn't fit the theory, they change the facts?

Unbiased science changes the theory to support the facts. They should not change the facts to fit the theory.

A Dinosaur carbon dated at 9,890 and 16,000 years old NOT millions of years old like evolutionists claim



I have documentation of an Allosaurus bone that was sent to The University of Arizona to be carbon dated. The results were 9,890 +/- 60 years and 16,120 +/- 220 years.

"We didn't tell them that the bones they were dating were dinosaur bones. The result was sample B at 16,120 years. The Allosaurus dinosaur was supposed to be around 140,000,000 years. The samples of bone were blind samples."

This test was done on August 10, 1990

Comment from a reader:

"Of course carbon dating isn't going to work on your Allosaurus bone. That method is only accurate to 40,000 years. So I would expect to get some weird number like 16,000 years if you carbon date a millions of years old fossil. 16.000 years by the way is still 10,000 years before your God supposedly created the Earth."

Amy M 12/11/01

My response:

I explain the limits of Carbon dating below. One thing you might want to ask yourself though, is how do you know it is millions of years old, giving an "incorrect" date (one that you think is too young) or if it actually is only a few thousand years old.

As far as your comments that 16,000 years is older than when God created the earth, we know that there is more carbon in the atmosphere than there was a thousand years ago. So a date of 9,000 or 16,000 years is more likely to be less. Perhaps only 6,000 years old.

30,000 year limit to Carbon dating



Carbon dating is a good dating tool for some things that we know the relative date of. Something that is 300 years old for example. But it is far from an exact Science. It is somewhat accurate back to a few thousand years, but carbon dating is not accurate past this. Thirty thousand years is about the limit. However, this does not mean that the earth is 30 thousand years old. It is much younger than that. (1)

Because of the earth’s declining magnetic field, more radiation (which forms C14) is allowed into the earth’s atmosphere.

Willard Libby (December 17, 1908 – September 8, 1980) and his colleagues discovered the technique of radiocarbon dating in 1949. Libbey knew that atmospheric carbon would reach equilibrium in 30,000 years. Because he assumed that the earth was millions of years old, he believed it was already at equilibrium. However each time they test it, they find more c14 in the atmosphere, and have realized that we are only 1/3 the way to equilibrium. (1)

- What does this mean? It means that based on c14 formation, the earth has to be less than 1/3 of 30,000 years old. This would make the earth less than 10,000 years old! (1)

Carbon dating is based on the assumption that the amount of C14 in the atmosphere has always been the same. But there is more carbon in the atmosphere now than there was 4 thousand years ago. (1)

Since carbon dating measures the amount of carbon still in a fossil, then the date given is not accurate. Carbon dating makes an animal living 4 thousand years ago (when there was less atmospheric carbon) appear to have lived thousands of years before it actually did.

What was the original amount of Carbon in the atmosphere?



A great book on the flaws of dating methods is "Radioisotopes and the age of the earth" (edited by Larry Vardiman, Andrew Snelling, Eugene F. Chaffin. Published by Institute for Creation Research; December 2000)

Dating methods are based on 3 unprovable and questionable assumptions:

1) That the rate of decay has been constant throughout time.

2). That the isotope abundances in the specimen dated have not been altered during its history by addition or removal of either parent or daughter isotopes

3) That when the rock first formed it contained a known amount of daughter material

("Radioisotopes and the age of the earth" pg v)

We must recognize that past processes may not be occurring at all today, and that some may have occurred at rates and intensities far different from similar processes today.

( "Radioisotopes and the age of the earth" pg vii)