1 Timothy 6:20
“O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:”
The majority of people do not understand how scientific dating methods work. It is common for populist evolutionists to refer to the carbon dating of fossils, for example, while serious evolutionists would never make that mistake. As creationists, we need to do better than this. I frequently hear creationists rightly questioning scientific dating methods, yet doing so for the wrong reasons. They assume that carbon dating has indeed been carried out on fossils and that it has proven inaccurate. This is not the case.
Carbon dating, by its very nature, has not been carried out on fossils or on any rock. Carbon-dating is not a catch-all term that refers to all kinds of dating methods. It specifically refers to that type of dating that is applied to materials which contain carbon. These would specifically be organic compounds, contained in materials which have come from a previously living source. But fossils usually do not contain the original organic material. They are actually impressions, or casts, of the material made in sedimentary rock in a manner similar to a hardened imprint of a footprint, having been preserved in the hardening of wet cement.
Given that, for example, fossilized dinosaur bones do not contain the original material, they are not dated by carbon dating. Serious evolutionists, to be fair, have not claimed that they have. As we explain why evolution could never have happened, it is important to do so with arguments that are both biblically and scientifically correct.
Prayer: Father, help us to be good witnesses to the truth that You have given us, that we may honor You in all we say. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: Encyclopaedia Britannica, < https://www.britannica.com/science/carbon-14-dating >, accessed 1/24/2019. Image: created by author, CC BY-SA 4.0 International.
