Radiocarbon Dating

Vic Biorseth, http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com

Radiocarbon dating is the most reliable and widely used process of absolute dating of Earthly organic material - from things that once lived - but it has some severe limitations. As the decay rate for each radioactive isotope is known, it is possible to calculate how long the process has been taking place for a given specimen under examination.

Nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere are bombarded by neutrons produced by cosmic radiation resulting in radioactive carbon (C14) that becomes incorporated into atmospheric carbon dioxide. While animals inhale and utilize oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, plants inhale and utilize carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. So, the now C14-incorporated carbon dioxide is breathed and absorbed into all carbon dioxide breathing plants, and then the plants are eaten by animals, and the C14 passes into animal tissues. Even carnivores that eat only animal tissue absorb C14 from that animal tissue.

When the plant or animal dies no further isotope is absorbed and the beta radiation emission begins to gradually reduce to half strength, after the “half-life” of the isotope; 5,730 years in the case of C14.

Fortunately organic carbon is a constituent of all living material, and wood, bone, charcoal, peat, horn, and vegetable remains in soil can all be examined with sensitive Geiger counters, allowing for calculation of absolute age. This makes radiocarbon dating quite useful, up to a point. Error factors, plus or minus, involve hundreds of years.

But the diminution of the radioactivity limits the method to about 40,000 years without the use of "special techniques,” which radically increase the potential error factor, and above 70,000 years the amount of radioactivity is too small to register, let alone measure.

Very old carbon such as found in coal deposits is radioactively dead and useless for carbon dating. Coal is long past its own half-life. So very old things may not be measured at all, and younger things may not be measured with precision. Aging anything on Earth in the hundreds of thousands of years, or in the millions or beyond, involves little more than educated conjecture.

Another word for conjecture is a guess. A Guess never rises above the level of being a guess, no matter how scientific, no matter how educated, no matter how much consensus it enjoys, no matter how well it "fits" any popular hypothesis. Even with full, 100% consensus in the scientific community, in the absence of any empirical evidence, conjecture still remains conjecture. We cannot know with any certainty the age of most of the geological strata that is available to man for viewing.

I would still, however tentatively, tend to agree with a given, millions-of-years-old, Earth strata-age that enjoys near unanimous scientific support. Why? Because I can't come up with a better scientific guess than they can, and it's their field, not mine. The real problem in this situation lies in trying to determine if the proponents of the given strata-age are real scientists, or merely disciples of the faith of Scientism, play-acting at being real scientists. The only way to do that is to listen very carefully to their words, and how they state their case.

When you hear a TV scientist on PBS, or on the History Channel, or on the Discovery Channel, or a teacher in a classroom, saying things like, today, we can accurately measure the age of earthly strata, you should know that what you are listening to is clear falsehood. It might have started out as more of a little fib than a flagrant lie, but over time it has taken on the respectable aura of clear and overwhelming consensus among the educated elite, world wide. It has the near unanimous support of all of the fellows of TTRSTF, who will harrumph about it and support what, when pressed, they will refer to as conjecture, because the term conjecture sounds so much more scientific than the term very popular wild assed guess. In general, if a proposed conjecture regarding the age of a rock or a radioactively-dead fossil or a strata layer supports a given scientistic dogma, then that conjecture will enjoy immediate, unchallenged, and near unanimous support from the recognized scientific community.

This, alone, should tell us something very important about today’s recognized scientific community.

Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a real scientist, and real science is still being done. It is most usually done very quietly.

Note well that, when modern scientists speak of cosmic distances between celestial objects, and the velocities at which such objects are moving toward or away from us, they stand on much firmer empirical evidences for their statements than when they are speaking of the age of an ancient bone fragment or fossilized leaf. But such things as the physical optics, color-phase or wave-length of light waves emitted by the observed objects, while they may be quite accurate, have nothing to do with aging earthly material.

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