AGES OF ROCKS AND MUMMIES
As we have seen, evolutionary philosophy attributes widely varying ages to different parts of the creation. The earth with all of its rocks and minerals is supposed to be billions of years old -- the solar system and universe are supposed to be even older -- while most living things have existed for "only" millions of years. Furthermore, human culture and civilization, with all of man's artifacts, have been around for only tens of thousands of years. (Of course, the Biblical record says that all the creation is actually the same age, a few thousand years. The Creator made all things in one week 6000 years ago or so.)
Since evolution believes rocks and minerals have ages up to billions of years, only slowly-decaying elements with long half-lives will do for dating them. Evolution believes it needs radioactive elements with half-lives stretching over billions of years for dating rocks. Three such radioactive elements often used for dating rocks and minerals are uranium, potassium, and strontium.
These elements are favored because they are found in the minerals and compounds of virtually all rocks. (The reason this is so is that these elements form compounds that are quite soluble in water, so they have been dispersed over the earth by water. As we will see, the solubility of these compounds makes them useless for radiometric dating. In other words, the very ubiquity making these elements attractive for dating actually sabotages their validity!) These elements have half-lives that are billions of years long. Only these slowly-decaying elements would leave any remaining radioactivity after the supposed billions of years.
On the other hand, once-living things -- mummies, preserved remains, or anything made from plants and animals -- cloth, paper, tools of wood or bone -- can be dated with radioactive carbon. Radioactive carbon decays much faster than the elements usually used for dating rocks, and it has a half-life of only a few thousand years. All living things past and present contain carbon, a very small percentage of which is radioactive. To evolutionary philosophy, it is useless to date rocks with radioactive carbon, because dating rocks supposedly involves ages of billions of years, and any radioactive carbon originally in them would have disappeared. However, creationists have found radioactive carbon in supposedly very ancient rocks and minerals, showing they must really be quite young (see Note 4).
Likewise, evolutionary philosophy refuses to date coal or fossils (such as dinosaur remains) with radioactive carbon, because these are supposedly millions of years old, again too long for any radioactive carbon to remain. But again, creationists have found radioactive carbon in these, showing they must actually be only thousands of years old (see Note 5). Even more to the point, as we will see, evolution does not date coal or fossil-bearing rock ("sedimentary rocks") even with long-lived radioactive elements like uranium, potassium or strontium. Fossil-bearing, sedimentary rocks are not radiometrically dated at all (see Note 6). (We will see below how evolution really does "date" fossil-bearing, sedimentary rocks.)
We conclude that from the perspective of evolutionary philosophy, there are really three kinds of age determination, each with its own dating method. First, any rock which can be dated radiometrically is supposedly billions of years old (occasionally only millions) and must be dated only by its content of some long-lived element (usually uranium, potassium or strontium). Then there are once-living remains which can be dated by their radioactive carbon content. Finally there are fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks which cannot be dated radiometrically at all. In contrast, creationists have felt free to use radioactive carbon dating on all these and have found them all to be young, precisely as a Biblical chronology indicates.