CARBON-14 DATING POINTS TO THE FLOOD

As we approach the end of our survey of radiometric dating, we focus again on how to date the remains of once-living things with the radioactive carbon method. This is probably the one radiometric technique with the potential for really accurate results -- though it is often abused, as with evolutionary attempts at rock dating. Radioactive carbon (carbon-14) is a form of the element carbon. Of course, carbon is part of all living things. All living tissues have carbon.

Carbon enters into living things by way of what is called the carbon cycle. In the carbon cycle plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air. It is one of the raw materials plants must have to live. The leaves absorb carbon dioxide from the air, then people eat the plants, and the carbon in the plants goes into the bodies of the animals or people. A very small percentage of all carbon in the environment is radioactive carbon-14. Carbon-14 forms naturally, and it enters the carbon cycle along with ordinary carbon (carbon-12).

But when carbon-14 is incorporated into the body of an organism, it decays because it is radioactive. After the organism, plant, animal or person, dies, the carbon-14 continues to decay. But after death, carbon-14 in the remains of the organism is no longer replenished by the intake of raw materials (food and air). Other things being equal, the older the specimen, the lower the carbon-14 content. Carbon dating can work for any specimen containing carbon. Sometimes rocks and fossils have traces of organic, carbonaceous materials, and creationists have successfully carbon-dated some of these -- as mentioned above -- and shown them to be quite young.

As with rock dating, however, evolution usually has a very high preconceived age for once-living remains. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of original carbon-14 content, and then the resulting carbon-14 age is also exaggerated. But when real historical information is used to estimate the primordial carbon-14 content, the carbon-14 method can often give quite useful results. In contrast to evolutionary attempts to date rocks, the carbon-14 method for once-living material can have legitimate applications.

For example, some of the oldest living things are the bristlecone pines of California. Tree ring studies (counting tree rings) show that bristlecone pines are at most 5000 years old, and probably somewhat less -- 4500 years or so. Carbon-14 dates which are not based on evolutionary preconceptions, but on historical data, also indicate the same age limit for living things. The carbon-14 method, then, with corrected assumptions, does indicate an age for living things that is pretty much in line with Biblical chronology. In fact Dr. Robert Whitelaw, a creationist, has shown that corrected carbon-14 dates indicate a world-wide Flood around 3000 B.C., close to the timing of the Flood in Biblical chronology (see Note 13).

How does one obtain these "corrected" carbon-14 dates? The key is relying on actual measurements of carbon-14 in the environment spanning the last several decades. These measurements can be used mathematically to estimate carbon-14 levels in the environment in the distant past. These levels were low. This is different from the evolutionary approach which sets past carbon-14 levels artificially high, making it appear that today's lower carbon-14 levels represent a large drop due to supposedly great age. For many allegedly very old artifacts, evolutionary philosophy refuses to use historical indications of primordial carbon-14 content, because these are relatively low and yield radiometric ages less than the evolutionary consensus.

In closing we emphasize again that evolutionary philosophy believed the earth to be extremely old decades before the discovery of radioactivity, let alone its use in radiometric dating. We have also seen that the methods used to date igneous rocks are really worthless -- methods involving the decay of elements like uranium, potassium, or strontium -- because the assumptions on which these methods are based are scientifically invalid. And evolution does not even try to radiometrically date sedimentary rocks, the rocks supposedly revealing the evolutionary "book of life" itself. On the other hand, carbon-14 for dating once-living remains has real applications if historical data are used to estimate primordial carbon-14 content. When properly computed, the carbon-14 chronology turns out to be consistent with Biblical chronology.