New Light on Radiometric Dating

2 Peter 3:5
“For this they are willingly ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:”

Most people find the subject of radiometric dating too technical to understand. Until recent years, scientists who believe in creation haven’t had the necessary resources to explore radiometric dating in detail.

Now that has changed, and some important discoveries are being made. When granite rock hardens, it freezes radioactive elements in place. The most common radioactive element in granite is Uranium-238. This element is locked in tiny zircons within the granite. As part of the decay process, helium is produced. While it stays within the zircon for a period of time, being a very small atom, helium escapes the zircon within a few thousand years.

When creation scientists studied granite samples, they made interesting discoveries. The samples were from a mile below the earth, which, according to inflated evolutionary years, were 1.5 billion years old. The helium still locked in the samples was studied as well as the rate at which the helium diffused from the rock. They concluded that the helium in the rock was 100,000 times more plentiful than it should have been if the rocks were really 1.5 billion years old. They concluded that their findings are consistent with an Earth that is about 6,000 years old.

As our knowledge continues to grow, what we know continues to be in agreement with Scripture.

Prayer:
I thank You, Father, for those things in the creation that bear witness to You. Help me to be a faithful witness, too. Amen.

Notes:
Answers, 7-9/06, pp. 22-24, Don DeYoung, “Raising the Bar on Creation Research.” Photo: A 10 gram sample of U-238. Courtesy of Forwardbias. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.