RADIODATING CONFUSION

Here are 16 basic reasons why radioactive dating methods are notoriously unreliable. This is science vs. evolution—a Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, brought to you by Creation Science Facts.

This material is excerpted from the book, DATING OF TIME IN EVOLUTION. An asterisk ( * ) by a name indicates that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations in the books this Encyclopedia is based on, only 164 statements are by creationists.
You will have a better understanding of the following statements by scientists if you will also read the web page, Dating of Time in Evolution.

Not dating methods, but a study in confusion:

1: No rock in the world is a closed system. They all can be, and probably have been, contaminated

2: Decay rates could have been different in the past. Under varying conditions, we have already found evidence of change in the present—and Joly found changes in the past

3: Daughter products could easily have been present in the beginning. An original intermingling of such products would nullify present attempts to date by daughter products

4: Unknown changes in our past environment could ruin the narrowly drawn assumptions. There is no way of knowing exactly what each local past environment was like

5: High energy particles, nearby radioactive minerals or contact with certain chemicals could earlier have significantly altered decay rates

6: Earlier changes in the atmosphere would have greatly affected decay rates. No one knows whether the earlier atmosphere was identically like our present one

7: The decay clocks did not have to start at the beginning of their chains. Daughter products could have been present in the beginning

8: Lead could originally have been mixed in with the uranium or thorium. It is only an assumption that all the lead could only be an end-product

9: Common Lead 9 (PB-209) could have been mixed in. This would also seriously affect the dating

10: Leaching could easily have occurred in past time. Passing solutions could have carried away portions of daughter products

11: Comparisons of lead ratios could be inaccurately made. This could damage test results in five ways

12: Any earlier change in the Van Allen belt would have decidedly affected decay rates. —And we have only known of this high-atmospheric belt since 1959

13: Free neutrons could be captured from neighboring lead 206. Most radiogenic lead on earth could have been produced by neutron capture

14: If the earth had originally been molten, this would have resulted in wide variations of rock settings. Intense heat damages radiodating clock settings

15: Uranium dates, thorium dates, and all the other dating methods always disagree with one another. This itself is strong evidence of the unreliability of the various methods

16: Some of the daughter products (such as argon) are gases which easily migrate out of the rocks. Why then are these daughter products relied on for dating purposes?

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