Can you picture in your mind a huge, heavy elephant limping around with the aid of a wooden crutch comparable to what you or I might use if we had injured a foot or a leg? No, I don’t mean a cartoon elephant, but I am referring to a real elephant. Completely unworkable, isn’t it? Well, radiocarbon dating is to evolutionary theory what a wooden crutch would be to our wounded elephant – completely unworkable or useless.
Yet, radiocarbon dating has been a popular method with which evolutionists have attempted to affix dates to formerly living things. This dating method is troubled with numerous assumptions, voluntary or involuntary subjectivity and application to inappropriate subject matter. Hence, the results of radiocarbon dating provide contradictory results even on the same material tested, and overall, it is unreliable. For instance, two parts of the same musk ox found in Fairbanks, AK were subjected to radiocarbon dating, which rendered conflicting dates of 7,200 and 24,000 years old.
Assumptions include theorizing that the half-life of carbon 14 is about 5,730 years, supposing that the rate of decay of carbon 14 has always remained the same (even through the projected millions of years evolutionists tout), that samples being analyzed have not been contaminated by additional carbon 14 from water or soil, that forest fires and volcanic activity have not altered the carbon 14 in a specimen, and that nitrogen in the atmosphere that is radiated by cosmic rays to produce carbon 14 initially has not varied over time. The very nature of this dating methodology does not lend itself for use beyond 50,000 years (or plus/minus 10,000 years per various guess-estimates) because any remaining carbon 14 is too little to analyze with this method. In addition, radiocarbon dating relies for its calibration on other types of dating – unannounced methodologies that also ought to be independently validated before they could verify carbon 14 dating.
Do you see a problem relying on a dating system that depends on such an unsure foundation of assumptions and subjectivity? Is it any wonder that radiocarbon dating interpretation can yield widely contradictory results? Radiocarbon dating has netted ridiculous ages for still living creatures like a shell of a mollusk (23,000 years old) and a shell of a snail (27,000 years old)! Further, recently killed seals through carbon 14 dating appeared to be 1,300 years old! On the other hand, unaware that bone samples were from dinosaurs, carbon 14 analysis in 1990 by the Department of Geosciences at the University in Tucson, AZ came up with 10,000 to 16,000 years old rather than 60 million years old. In addition, diamonds and coal samples submitted elsewhere on other occasions for radiocarbon dating evidenced the presence of carbon 14, which theoretically should not have been discoverable given the hypothesis that coal and diamonds require millions of years to form (carbon 14 should not be discernible somewhere after 70,000 to 100,000 years).
One must know the amount of carbon 14 in a living thing before being able to analyze the amount of carbon 14 in a formerly living thing to ascertain its age. However, no exemplars of living dinosaurs are available to plug into the carbon 14 dating process. Incredibly, though, evolutionists have purported to be able to use carbon 14 dating relative to dinosaurs, which they also claim lived millions of years ago. Do you see a problem here respecting the application of radiocarbon dating to dinosaurs without having a reference sample for them from which to extrapolate?
At best, radiocarbon dating may prove useful regarding wood, bone, shells, etc. that are already known to be not more than thousands of years old. Radiocarbon dating is incapable of determining the age of something that evolutionists may claim is older than the historical record, and it is incapable of determining the age of anything claimed to be millions of years old. Carbon 14 dating is not a threat to the Scriptures – including and especially the biblical account of the creation of all things.
