Considering Radiocarbon Dating »
The first thing that jumps out at me about any creation account is the sheer size of these numbers. Even if you start with the biblical account, the earth is at least 6000 years old. I don't think anyone will argue that the earth is at least that old. Most will argue that it is much older indeed.
Meanwhile, the science of radiocarbon dating is just 55 years old, being created in 1949 by Willard Libby. Compare that to the age of the planet. If we assume a 6000-year-old earth (remember, the very low end of estimates), you're talking just under 1% of the time elapsed since creation. That's not long. 1% of my life is about 130 days, a period of time which can go by in the blink of an eye.
But also consider in that article that the very process of decay in carbon-14 is not constant. If an element that makes up the very structure of the universe isn't constant, then no measurement based on that element can have much degree of accuracy. In the case of carbon-14, scientists had to use growth rings in trees to match up their dating process, and they say it is accurate to about 11000 BC.
What's more, so far as I know, the oldest "verified" writing goes back perhaps 5500 years, and even that should probably be called into question. What if someone just wrote an older date on their writing tablet? My sons write dates into the future all the time. It doesn't mean that it's actully being written on that future date, and it isn't verifiable proof that can be used for dating anything.
But regardless of all this, let's pretend that the process is spot-on accurate all the way back to 11000 years ago. That's far short of the claimed capability of carbon-14 dating (50000 years), and it could only be achieved with the assistance of dead trees. There's simply no way that anything longer than this period could be deemed accurate. While I personally don't think even dates under 11000 years ago will be accurate, I'll allow that perhaps I may be wrong.
That still results in a bunch of stuff that's less than 11000 years old, and other things that are somewhere between 11001 years old and, well, any date you should like to set. Even with an accurate window of 11000 years, the dates line up much more closely to the 6000-odd years of the bible than they do to the billions of years espoused by many theories. Just makes you wonder.
Disclaimer: This is a blog. These are my thoughts. I am not necessarily aware of any evidence to back up this information other than that linked here. If you have some, please present it, but do it in a conversational - as opposed to confrontational - way, and I'd be happy to discuss it. If you want confrontation, go somewhere else.
