Here's something i'd like to share which I found on the internet. It's quite long but it's some useful information -
Radiometric dating was the culminating factor that led to the belief in billions of years for earth history. However, radiometric dating methods are not the only uniformitarian methods. Any radiometric dating model or other uniformitarian dating method can and does have problems, as referenced before. All uniformitarian dating methods require assumptions for extrapolating present-day processes back into the past. The assumptions related to radiometric dating can be seen in these questions:
Initial amounts?
Was any parent amount added?
Was any daughter amount added?
Was any parent amount removed?
Was any daughter amount removed?
Has the rate of decay changed?
If the assumptions are truly accurate, then uniformitarian dates should agree with radiometric dating across the board for the same event. However, radiometric dates often disagree with one another and with dates obtained from other uniformitarian dating methods for the age of the earth, such as the influx of salts into the ocean, the rate of decay of the earth’s magnetic field, and the growth rate of human population.16
The late Dr. Henry Morris compiled a list of 68 uniformitarian estimates for the age of the earth by Christian and secular sources.17 The current accepted age of the earth is about 4.54 billion years based on radiometric dating of a group of meteorites,18 so keep this in mind when viewing table 6.
Table 6. Uniformitarian Estimates Other than Radiometric Dating Estimates for Earth’s Age Compiled by Morris
0 – 10,000 years >10,000 – 100,000 years >100,000 – 1 million years >1 million – 500 million years >500 million – 4 billion years >4 billion – 5 billion years
Number of uniformitarian methods* 23 10 11 23 0 0 (respectively to each year range)
* When a range of ages is given, the maximum age was used to be generous to the evolutionists. In one case, the date was uncertain so it was not used in this tally, so the total estimates used were 67. A few on the list had reference to Saturn, the sun, etc., but since biblically the earth is older than these, dates related to them were used.
As you can see from table 6, uniformitarian maximum ages for the earth obtained from other methods are nowhere near the 4.5 billion years estimated by radiometric dating; of the other methods, only two calculated dates were as much as 500 million years.
The results from some radiometric dating methods completely undermine those from the other radiometric methods. One such example is carbon-14 (14C) dating. As long as an organism is alive, it takes in 14C and 12C from the atmosphere; however, when it dies, the carbon intake stops. Since 14C is radioactive (decays into 14N), the amount of 14C in a dead organism gets less and less over time. Carbon-14 dates are determined from the measured ratio of radioactive carbon-14 to normal carbon-12 (14C/12C). Used on samples that were once alive, such as wood or bone, the measured 14C/12C ratio is compared with the ratio in living things today.
Now, 14C has a derived half-life of 5,730 years, so the 14C in organic material supposedly 100,000 years old should all essentially have decayed into nitrogen.19 Some things, such as wood trapped in lava flows, said to be millions of years old by other radiometric dating methods, still have 14C in them.20 If the items were really millions of years old, then they shouldn’t have any traces of 14C. Coal and diamonds, which are found in or sandwiched between rock layers allegedly millions of years old, have been shown to have 14C ages of only tens of thousands of years.21 So which date, if any, is correct? The diamonds or coal can’t be millions of years old if they have any traces of 14C still in them. This shows that these dating methods are completely unreliable and indicates that the presumed assumptions in the methods are erroneous.
Similar kinds of problems are seen in the case of potassium-argon dating, which has been considered one of the most reliable methods. Dr. Andrew Snelling, a geologist, points out several of these problems with potassium-argon, as seen in table 7.22
These and other examples raise a critical question. If radiometric dating fails to give an accurate date on something of which we do know the true age, then how can it be trusted to give us the correct age for rocks that had no human observers to record when they formed? If the methods don’t work on rocks of known age, it is most unreasonable to trust that they work on rocks of unknown age. It is far more rational to trust the Word of the God who created the world, knows its history perfectly, and has revealed sufficient information in the Bible for us to understand that history and the age of the creation.
its a good debate reconciling science, space and god...but I think we will - I think the only reason it all hasn't come together yet is because as much as we think we are very clever people spiritually and scientifically, we actually no very little at all.
