Del: How can we then depend so much upon
the radiometric dating?
Andrew: Well, if we're in a court of law the judge
and jury would throw out the evidence because I couldn't
really depend on these methods giving you reliable,
accurate results.
Del: But we would say that we do have an eyewitness
that has given us testimony as to what really happened…
Andrew: that's right. Del: …in that time in the past.
Andrew: Yeah, God has given us an eyewitness testimony
in the book of Genesis. And he's laid out the history
of the earth, starting
with supernatural creation, where trees
were already bearing fruit. If we were going back
and looking at those trees from our everyday experience,
we'd expect those trees have been around for a while to have
grown and produce fruit. And we see rocks that by our
normal observation today we would think it's taken a long
time to form; but no, God was there
and he supernaturally, instantly created and that's
what he says in his eyewitness record in the book of Genesis.
And then he goes on to say there was a time when he judged
the earth because of human wickedness —
at the time of the flood — and at that time he caused
catastrophic things to happen. Water came from inside
of the earth, molten material came from inside the earth,
and the earth's surface was totally reshaped.
All the high hills and the mountains
were covered in water, and Noah came out to a totally
different world to the one that he had experienced
before the flood. And so geological processes
were sped up to such magnitudes and rates that we can't
even imagine today. We can only get hints at
by stepping back and looking at the geologic record —
looking at the big picture of the geologic record.
I think that's very important, just like we
stepped back before. Yes we see say this cinder cone
volcano behind us; this looks quite large but it's small
by comparison to what we see, even in human history
with Mount St. Helens. But these lava flows are small
by comparison to what we see in the geologic record.
And so we see evidence that… that we need to open our eyes to
a bigger picture on a bigger scale, and… and…
and start to think in terms of what was going on around
the world at that time.
Del: And the conventional paradigm seems to cut itself off
from that picture, from the picture
that the present is not really the key to the past because,
obviously, the past holds some massive,
massive catastrophic events that are not going on today?
Andrew: In fact, the Bible would say that the past
is the key to the present. If you under…
want to understand why the way the world is today, you've got
to understand what happened in the past.
And yet the conventional wisdom is that we should look only at
the present and extrapolate that back into the past.
And Charles Lyell went so far as to say only present day rates
can be used to interpret the past. But fortunately,
conventional geologists are now realizing
that that doesn't work. Del: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: That doesn't work.
Del: Well, Andrew, when we talk about that accelerated decay —
my dad worked in nuclear physics for a long time —
that generates heat. Does that raise
an issue for you?
Andrew: It does raise an issue, but we can answer the question
from almost the negative. If… if… if there was a lot of heat
you would melt rocks. So you would expect evidence
of melting of rocks. And we don't see that.
So that indicates there may not have been excessive heat
produced by that accelerated decay.
Another indicator we talked about, radiohalos —
once you get to a certain temperature,
the damage in the crystals gets healed: the atoms vibrate
and they snap back into the original positions.
And so the halos disappear. So the very fact… the very fact
that we can see radiohalos in rocks that were formed,
you know, in the past indicates that there hasn't been
an excessive amount of heat. The fact that the radiohalos —
the polonium ones — require accelerated decay,
yet we can still see the end product — the
polonium radiohalo — indicates that during
that accelerated decay there can't have been a lot
of heat produced. Another indication is that even
with the helium… we talked about the helium leaking out
of those crystals. We know that if you…
if you heat the crystal up then… then you're potentially going
to leak that helium out more rapidly.
Everyone is familiar with a helium balloon.
Del: Yes. Mmm hmm.
Andrew: You know, you leave them in your living room for a while,
they'll start… they float at the top of the ceiling.
But eventually that helium leaks out and they'll start to fall
to the ground. Now if you start to warm that, it's going to…
because it's going to expand, it's going to force its way
out of those… the membrane holding it in much faster.
So there's a number of indicators that give us
a clue that the heat may not have been a problem that some
people have suggested. We're still
exploring these issues. That's
what I enjoy about science.
You know if we had all the answers they'd be no hard
work to do. And that's what makes… makes it exciting.
And you can live with the tension of not knowing
all the answers. So fact that I can give you several
lines of evidence that indicate that heat might not have
been a problem, leads me not to be concerned about
that being a problem. Well I've got strong evidence
as well that that decay rates have been much faster
in the past. As we said before, a rock that's older will have
experienced more accelerated decay.
So it's not as if it isn't a tool
that we can use, but we have to adjust our thinking about how
we use that tool. It doesn't… it cannot give us reliable,
absolute ages.
Del: So we're still left with some mysteries
associated with this whole radiometric dating issue.
Andrew: That's right.
Del: But after that eight years, did you leave more convinced or
less convinced in the… in the record that's in Genesis.
Andrew: Oh, much more convinced! Now we had concrete lines
of evidence that we could point to and say yes, the Bible
is giving us an accurate historic record. First of all,
was that if we used the different dating methods —
the radioactive parent atoms — on the same samples
from the same rock units, that we invariably
got discordant ages.
Del: And you would expect the same?
Andrew: Well, normally the textbooks said
that you'd have the methods all giving you the same results
because they all started at time zero —
the clocks started at time zero. So what we discovered is that,
yes, they would have to start it at time zero, but that…
that the decay rate must have speeded up by different amounts
for different parent atoms. And we're talking about
very large changes. We also established
that the radioactive decay had happened — there was a lot
of radioactive decay that had happened.
We had two lines of evidence of that, that was the radiohalos
which was the little bullets fired by the uranium decaying,
and also, sometimes, the uranium atom splits
as in an atomic bomb. We call that a fission.
And so you actually find the particles also
damage the crystal. So fission tracks, radiohalos,
the evidence of a lot of radioactive
decay had occurred. But obviously that occurred at
a very rapid rate. We also saw that in relation
to helium leakage — gave an age of only 6,000 years,
so that in real time of 6,000 years —
in some time in the past — there'd been a billion
and a half years' worth of radioactive decay.
So these are the pieces of the puzzle that we came to
and this questions the whole conventional way of thinking
of earth history. And yet it strengthens our argument
that we need to look back at the book of Genesis,
God's eyewitness record, that indicates earth history
was much shorter. And that's what we're
seeing from these… these results, from looking at
the radioactive decay in rocks — both the volcanic rocks
that we see here, as well as radiocarbon in fossils
and fossil vegetation et cetera. And this fits
in with the picture we have here.
Remember we said before this lava flow is only small
in comparison to the volumes of lavas that were…
erupted catastrophically in the past.
We see lots of indications of catastrophic,
geological processes in the past: not just one
line of evidence — volcanoes — radioactive decay is another
line of evidence, and more that we'll talk about
when I show you some of the evidence down
there in Sedona.
Del: I had no idea how many crystal shops were in Sedona.
Andrew: No, and I'm glad you let me stop by because I wanted
to get this pet… piece of petrified wood.
Arizona is famous for its petrified wood and that's part
of what we need to discuss here.
Del: Well when we were talking about isotopes,
one of the things we didn't address was the whole area
of carbon-14. I mean most people are familiar, and yet I'm
not sure we know exactly what that is. Can you describe that?
Andrew: Well, first of all we need to clear up a confusion.
Most people think that radiocarbon has been used
to date rocks. Whenever they think
of radioactive dating they think of radiocarbon because that's
what they're used to hearing. But radiocarbon isn't used
to date rocks, because most rocks don't have carbon in them.
And what we need is organic carbon because it's intrinsic
to the methodology, or how you understand
how radiocarbon works.
Del: How does a tree, then, get carbon-14 in it?
Andrew: Well, it's simple because the radiocarbon
is produced in the upper atmosphere.
Cosmic rays bombarding the earth — atmosphere —
turns nitrogen atoms into carbon-14 atoms,
which circulates into the carbon dioxide that we breathe.
And so it's also taken in
by the plants during photosynthesis.
So it's in the wood, it's in the leaves,
it's in the vegetables we eat; animals take
it into their bodies, so it's the animals that we eat.
So it gets into our bodies. So not only are all these plants
around us radioactive with radiocarbon,
but we are ourselves. Del: So you have it, I have it.
Andrew: Correct. And as long as we live, we're taking more
radiocarbon into our bodies. But when we die, we stop taking
radiocarbon into our bodies. And so a dinosaur dies —
it stops taking in radiocarbon — and then over the thousands
of years it's getting less and less radiocarbon.
And as I said before, you know, after 90,000 years,
there should be no radiocarbon left in dinosaur bones.
If every atom of the earth was radiocarbon, it all
would have decayed away in less than a million years.
So if you already believe the fossils — dinosaur fossils,
the coal beds, all those things are millions of years old —
you wouldn't expect to find any radiocarbon in them;
and yet you do. And this is one of the things that we found
when we studied petrified wood like this at different levels in
the geologic record. I was doing research on this.
I was collecting samples — in… in England, in Australia —
and I sent them to radiocarbon laboratories and, sure enough,
they had radiocarbon in them. So this is another aspect of
this whole time question because if these things are believed
to be millions of years old — like this petrified wood —
and yet it has radiocarbon in it that says it's only thousands
of years old — then it means that it calls into question
the conventional timeframe. And so we wanted to test this,
because we'd… we'd seen in the literature — this is in
the conventional literature — in the 1980s they developed
a new methodology for measuring radiocarbon and they could count
atoms of radiocarbon. That's how… how good it was.
But they wanted to be sure that they weren't getting any
contamination in their laboratories.
And so they took samples like petrified wood.
They took samples of dinosaur bones, and coal,
and oil, and natural gas, and limestone even,
and they put them in their equipment; and every
sample they tested had radiocarbon in it.
And this was reported in the literature
and they ignored it. So in our research we decided well,
we'll test that for ourselves. We wanted to be sure that,
you know, this wasn't an artifact
of conventional experimental method.
So we selected samples from ten different coal beds around
the United States: some coal beds that were conventionally
as young as 40 million years, some call beds
that were conventionally over 300 million years old.
And when we tested them for radiocarbon,
they had radiocarbon in them and they all yielded
the same radiocarbon age, which meant that these plants
must have all lived at the same time and died at the same time.
And that fits the flood paradigm,
because these would have been pre… pre-flood trees that
were all buried together at the same time.
But we went further. We thought, okay, let's test out some
material that's come from inside the earth that's got
carbon in it. So we selected diamonds,
because diamonds come from deep inside the earth.
Remember the volcano that we were at?
Del: Yes. Andrew: The SP Crater. Well,
from inside the earth we have
these volcanic eruptions that bring diamonds up.
They're made down deep inside the earth which means
the diamonds have never been in contact with the atmosphere
until they're brought to the surface.
Because carbon-14 is produced in the atmosphere, we wouldn't
expect them to have any radiocarbon in them. Because…
also they're the hottest substance known,
so that can't be contaminated. so even when they arrive at
the earth's surface, you're not going to exchange
carbon 14 in the atmosphere with carbon in the diamond.
So whatever the diamond brought up from the depth has been
bottled up and locked in. So we tested the diamonds.
We got several diamonds from Africa, and every one
of those diamonds yielded radiocarbon much the same age.
It was detectable radiocarbon. Now we presented this…
this research at a conference: the American Geophysical Union —
one of the largest bodies of geologists that get together.
We had a poster presentation and,
unbeknownst to us, one of the scientists that saw our
presentation of the diamond evidence
was from a radiocarbon laboratory.
So he went back to his own university
radiocarbon laboratory, got his own diamonds
and reported similar results to what we had found.
Here's the sticking point. The diamonds are supposed to be
between one and three billion years old.
That's the conventional age. For them to be only thousands
of years old flies in the face of the conventional wisdom.
So when they publish their results,
what did they say? They tried to put it down
to machine error, which of course is ludicrous
because even if you have no sample in your machine —
have nothing in the machine — you won't get any radiocarbon.
So if it was machine error you'd expect it to show up radiocarbon
when there was nothing in there. Del: Huh.
Andrew: When you put the diamond in,
it shows detectable radiocarbon, and it's been reproduced.
So again this is an illustration;
you know we did our own sampling,
got our own laboratory results, and verified what was already in
the open scientific literature for several decades —
whether it's petrified wood, coal, dinosaur bones,
the shells of shellfish — they all contain radiocarbon all
through the fossil record. And so that tells us that these
layers aren't millions of years old.
Del: Well, that brings us back again to the issue of the power
of a paradigm. That if evidence doesn't fit
in your paradigm we have a tendency to discard it….
Andrew: Exclude it. Del: …or ignore it.
Andrew: Exactly, yeah. It's like having
a set of blinkers: I'm only gonna believe what I see
that fits in with what I already believe.
And anything outside, that's considered anomalous —
I'll just shelve it as a tiny mystery and ignore it.
And yet the more the paradigm is challenged, the more
likelihood that there could be a switch.
Unless of course there's a spiritual dimension.
Del: Mmm hmm.
Andrew: And because, let's be honest, when we're
talking about radiocarbon, these radiocarbon results…
we're talking about an earth that's only thousands
of years old, we're talking about trees being buried in coal
beds all in the one year during the flood; that's why they gave
the same age — then that's radically different
from the conventional paradigm. They've excluded God
from the picture. As soon as I have to admit that maybe
the Bible is correct, that the flood paradigm
of earth history — the Genesis paradigm of earth history —
is the correct view, then the Genesis paradigm
includes a creator God… Del: right.
Andrew: …to whom man is accountable.
And that's why there's a spiritual dimension to it.
And that's why they can deliberately choose
to ignore the evidence, which is what the Apostle Peter
said in II Peter chapter 3: they'll be willingly ignorant —
it's not that the evidence isn't there,
it's that they've choose… chosen to ignore it.
Del: Choose to ignore it. Yeah. and we're faced again
with the issue of how closely tied together the issue of time
is to both of these paradigms. Andrew: Exactly.
Del: Because if you have a short period of time, in terms of all
that we see around here, then it validates the history
that's been recorded for us in Genesis and,
just as you said, that brings us face to face with God.
Time is really the hero of the plot,
whichever way you look at it. And this is the battle of these
two views of earth history. It's a question
of the timescale involved.