- How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?
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- How Good are those Young-Earth Arguments: Radiocarbon Dating
In another creationist, Robert L. Whitelaw, using a greater ratio of carbon production to decay, concluded that only years passed since carbon started forming in the atmosphere!
How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?
The argument may be compared to filling a barrel which has numerous small holes in its sides. We stick the garden hose in and turn it on full blast. The water coming out of the hose is analogous to the continuous production of carbon atoms in the upper atmosphere. The barrel represents the earth's atmosphere in which the carbon accumulates. The water leaking out the sides of the barrel represents the loss mainly by radioactive decay of the atmosphere's supply of carbon Now, the fuller that barrel gets the more water is going to leak out the thoroughly perforated sides, just as more carbon will decay if you have more of it around.
Finally, when the water reaches a certain level in the barrel, the amount of water going into the barrel is equal to the amount leaking out the perforated sides. We say that the input and output of water is in equilibrium. The water level just sits there even though the hose is going full blast. The barrel is made deep enough so that we don't have to worry about water overflowing the rim.
Henry Morris argued that if we started filling up our empty barrel it would take 30, years to reach the equilibrium point. Thus, he concluded, if our Earth were older than 30, years the.
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That is, the equilibrium point should have long since been reached given the present rate of carbon production and the old age of the earth. The next step in Henry Morris' argument was to show that the water level in our barrel analogy was not in equilibrium, that considerably more water was coming in than leaking out.
To that end, he quoted some authorities, including Richard Lingenfelter. Having accomplished that, Morris concluded that the barrel was still in the process of being filled up and that, given the present rate of water coming in and leaking out, the filling process began only 10, years ago. It's a great argument except for one, little thing. The water is not coming out of the hose at a steady rate as our model assumed! Sometimes it slows down to a trickle so that much more water is leaking out the barrel than is coming in; sometimes it goes full blast so that a lot more water is coming into the barrel than is leaking out.
Thus, the mere fact that the present rate of water coming in exceeds that of the water leaking out cannot be extrapolated back to a starting time. And, that destroys the entire argument.
Lingenfelter's paper was written in , before the cycles of C variation we described had been fully documented. The point is that fluctuations in the rate of C production mean that at times the production rate will exceed the decay rate, while at other times the decay rate will be the larger.
Lingenfelter actually attributed the discrepancy between the production and decay rates to possible variations in the earth's magnetic field, a conclusion which would have ruined Morris's argument. Henry Morris chose not to mention that portion of the paper! Creationists don't want their readers to be distracted with problems like that -- unless the cat is already out of the bag and something has to be said.
Tree-ring dating see Topic 27 gives us a wonderful check on the radiocarbon dating method for the last years. That is, we can use carbon dating on a given tree-ring the year sequence having been assembled from the overlapping tree-ring patterns of living and dead trees and compare the resulting age with the tree-ring date. A study of the deviations from the accurate tree-ring dating sequence shows that the earth's magnetic field has an important effect on carbon production.
When the dipole moment is strong, carbon production is suppressed below normal; when it is weak, carbon production is boosted above normal.
How Good are those Young-Earth Arguments: Radiocarbon Dating
What the magnetic field does is to partially shield the earth from cosmic rays which produce carbon high in the atmosphere. Contrary to creationist Barnes' totally discredited claims, which I've covered in Topic 11 , the earth's magnetic field dipole moment has, indeed, increased and decreased over time. Strahler presents a graph of the earth's dipole moment going back years. The curve is roughly fitted to mean values determined about every to 1, years The curve is roughly degrees out of phase with the C curve.
The idea [that the fluctuating magnetic field affects influx of cosmic rays, which in turn affects C formation rates] has been taken up by the Czech geophysicist, V. Bucha, who has been able to determine, using samples of baked clay from archeological sites, what the intensity of the earth's magnetic field was at the time in question. Even before the tree-ring calibration data were available to them, he and the archeologist, Evzen Neustupny, were able to suggest how much this would affect the radiocarbon dates.
Thus, at least within the last years, the earth's magnetic field has fluctuated and those fluctuations have induced fluctuations in the production of carbon to a noticeable extent.
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Therefore, as already noted, Dr. Hovind's claim that carbon has been slowly building up towards a 30, year equilibrium is worthless. You now have the technical reason for the failure of Morris' model. It may interest the reader to know that within this year period, where the radiocarbon method can be checked by tree-ring data, objects older than BC receive a carbon date which makes them appear younger than they really are! An uncorrected carbon date of years for an object would actually mean that the object was years old. Seven hundred years or so is about as far as the carbon method strays from tree-ring dating on the average.
Individual dates given on a correlation chart Bailey, , p. As it turns out, we have a check on the carbon production which goes back even further than years:. Evidence of past history of C concentration in the atmosphere is now available through the past 22, years, using ages of lake sediments in which organic carbon compounds are preserved. Reporting before a conference on past climates, Professor Minze Stuiver of the University of Washington found that magnetic ages of the lake sediments remained within years of the radiocarbon ages throughout the entire period.
He reported that the concentration of C in the atmosphere during that long interval did not vary by more than 10 percent Stuiver, , p. Thus, the available evidence is sufficient to validate the radiocarbon method of age determination with an error of about 10 percent for twice as long a period as the creation scenario calls for. Yes, the atmospheric content of carbon can vary somewhat.
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The dipole moment of the earth's magnetic field, sunspot activity, the Suess effect, possible nearby supernova explosions, and even ocean absorption can have some effect on the carbon concentration. However, these factors don't affect the radiocarbon dates by more than about percent, judging from the above studies. Of course, when we reach the upper limit of the method, around 40, years for the standard techniques, we should allow for much greater uncertainty as the small amounts of C remaining are much harder to measure. Tree-ring data gives us a precise correction table for carbon dates as far back as 8,, years.
The above study by Stuiver shows that the C fluctuations in the atmosphere were quite reasonable as far back as 22, years ago.
The earth's magnetic field seems to have the greatest effect on C production, and there is no reason to believe that its strength was greatly different even 40, years ago. For a refutation of Barnes' argument see Topic Therefore, atmospheric variation in C production is not a serious problem for the carbon method. The evidence refutes Dr. Hovind's claim that the C content of our atmosphere is in the middle of a 30,year buildup. Thus, we can dismiss this young-earth argument. It is painfully obvious that Dr.
Hovind knows next to nothing about carbon dating! Changes in the sunspot cycle do have a noticeable, short-term effect on the rate of C production inasmuch as sunspots are associated with solar flares, which produce magnetic storms on Earth, and the condition of the earth's magnetic field does affect the number of cosmic rays reaching the earth's upper atmosphere. Carbon is produced by energetic collisions between cosmic rays and molecules of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere.
Sunspots have absolutely nothing to do with the rate of C decay , which defines the half-life of that radioactive element. Hovind has confused two completely different concepts. Quantum mechanics, that stout pillar of modern physics, which has been verified in so many different ways that I couldn't begin to list them all even if I had them at hand, gives us no theoretical reason for believing that the C rate of decay has changed or can be significantly affected by any reasonable process. We also have direct observation:.