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The Great Dinosaur Mistake

Carbon 14 Dating

What about carbon 14, you ask; can carbon 14 be used to date fossils? Yes, it can, with one small slight problem. Even if carbon 14 were totally accurate and useable as far back in time as it goes, it only goes back for 40 thousands years. An evolutionist who believes the dinosaur is 70 million years old will not use carbon 14 on it because of this 40,000 year upper limit.

But even carbon 14 has problems. It is based upon the assumption that the rate of the formation of carbon 14 in the upper atmosphere is equal to the rate of decay.

This is not true. Dr. Libbi, who invented the method, says it must be true because it would only take 30,000 years for equilibrium to be established, for the rate of formation to be equal to the rate of decay. He says everyone knows that the earth is over 30,000 years old so carbon 14 must be in equilibrium. Yet the latest studies indicate the rate of formation is not equal to the rate of decay. If allowance is made for Libbi's erroneous assumption, the corrected carbon 14 dates come back to within the last 5000 years.

But even then there are still problems. Carbon 14 analysis, as in the case of other dating methods, does not really determine anything about age; it simply tells you the amount of carbon 14 found in a substance. Carbon 14, formed in the upper atmosphere, filters down into the plants, and one eats either plants or things that have eaten plants. Therefore, a certain amount of carbon 14 is trapped in your body and bones.

Scientists measure how much is present and, based on the half life of carbon 14, they project back in time to see how long you must have been around. Theoretically, that is how ages are determined by carbon 14.

But there are some problems again, because penguins living in the Antarctic today have yielded 3000 year old carbon 14 ages when tested. Seals killed recently gave ages of 1000 years.

There are problems with carbon 14. But even if one were to grant that the method was valid back to 40,000 years, the evolutionist would not use it because he could not date what he believes is a 70 million year old fossil with a method stopping at 40,000 years.

So there is not a single valid scientific method that will determine the age of the rock, nor is there a valid dating method that will determine the age of the fossil. In reality when we find a dinosaur bone, all we really know about the dinosaur is that he lived and died sometime in the past and was buried by some type of water cataclysm.

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