The driving force for me going to the International Conference on Creationism was the prospect of being able to present my own research. On a personal study, independent of the major YEC organizations, I have been investigating radiometric dating methods, the methods that mainstream scientists tell us how old rocks and bones are. I have been a skeptic of these methods for many years, but ten years ago, I decided I needed to take a deeper study into them.
In 2011, an article came out with new studies showing that DNA had a half-life of 521 years. The article then claimed that DNA would be detectable after 1.5 million years and totally decomposed after 6.8 million years. When I read that article in 2013, I immediately knew that was wrong, so I started crunching numbers. DNA, at that half-life, lasts only 19,000 years until complete disintegration. Their math was not only off, but it was off BADLY. And this passed peer-review. That got me thinking: What about radiometric dating? So that began my study.
I set out to do a mathematical internal integrity study of the whole system, testing to see if the published numbers actually agreed with each other. If that DNA math was off by that much, how much is this “darling” of everyone who believes in “millions of years”? I looked at various angles, but the one that really caught my attention was the measurement of the half-life. I did my studies, but a couple of years ago I hit a dead end because I didn’t have the equipment to do experiments to move forward. I needed help and advice, and this conference was the perfect place to get it. This is what my poster presentation would cover.
As I did my studies, I began learning that individual samples used to measure the decay rates were only being observed for minutes, hours, or maybe days with devices that had 20% efficiency rates, leading to requiring an 80% fudge factor. This led to calculations that these half-lives, that are supposedly billions of years, are being claimed using only 10 to 16 decimal points of a fraction of a sample space of the claim. The sample space was so small that no one could make a meaningful statement out of it without some extremely poor assumptions.
So, what do we do with that? We need to do some experiments. We could measure the physical amount of breakdown of the parent isotopes by calculating how much substance we have, then measuring again after a sufficient time has passed. For example, a 1000 kg sample of Carbon-14 would decay by one gram in three days, validating the half-life measurement of 5730 years. We could also measure how many counts we should be getting on the same sample and watch them get smaller over time to showcase an exponential decay pattern. From that, I suggested where my studied desired to go, such as figuring out if there is a consistent error factor in the calculations by the mainstream scientists determining the +/- factors that are presented, what could cause the decay rates to accelerate, and how water could pull these isotopes in and out of the system.
I proposed doing some experiments that test these measurements that I could not find any information about going into the conference. During the conference, I had a two-hour window to defend my poster and explain it, but I also got to explain it at various other times. Many people were able to follow the poster and when I explained it, they all pretty much agreed that these are things we should do. But then I got to talk to three of the scientists who were part of the RATE Team, who 15 years ago threw a bomb into the whole confidence in radiometric dating methods.
John Baumgardner said I had some good ideas but indicated that when the RATE team was doing their studies, there were many things they looked at which were not published because they did not get anything really conclusive. He did not say specifically, but I wonder if they did look at this aspect. Then Russel Humphreys came by, who is a physicist I highly respect. I really didn’t get a whole of useful information from him because he really wanted me to go look somewhere totally different, but he did make a specific comment about examining how our proximity to the sun during our orbit affects the decay rates.
Then the real help came from Andrew Snelling. He said I was on the right track and that the experiments I suggested needed to be done, but he also indicated that to at least some degree, they had already been done. I had not heard of any, but I got the impression that the direction I wanted to go was either a dead end or at a canyon without a bridge to cross it. He also made comments that when K-Ar dating showed to give wrong results compared to a Uranium date, they tweaked the half-life of K-40 to make it match. I could not get details on this other than a video presentation he had done, which was put on YouTube about five years ago.
However, before this, two of the full paper presentations really caught my attention. One was Snelling’s presentation on radiohalos. His presentation showed strong evidence of both accelerated decay and aquatic leaching because hydrothermal fluids (water and heat fluids) had to pull Polonium away from the Uranium to create the halos that were present in an extremely short time due to Polonium’s extremely short half-life. So, I had some pieces to the puzzle I was working on solving.
But even bigger than this was a presentation given by two college kids at Cedarville University. They did a statistical analysis of the published radiometric dates from the US Geological Databases, analyzing about 29,000 samples. They simply compared the results of the same methods to the same samples and different methods to the same samples to see how much they agreed. Using the bare minimum overlap as a “concurrence” or “agreement” (that is, if one method gave a range of 60-120 million years, and another method gave a range of 30-61 million years, that was a concurrence). Overall, their data showed that only 64% of the dating methods agreed with themselves.
After their presentation, Andrew Snelling gave some detailed feedback along with John Woodmorappe (most famous for his book Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study) on how they need to zoom in on their comparisons to separate the whole rock samples from isochron samples (don’t worry about that difference here) and from isotopes with a solid daughter product from those with a gas as a daughter product. Then I made a comment about those concurrences in how aligned they really were, whether a strong overlap or a just barely overlap. I spoke with both that I would like to take their study and take that step, and I also mentioned it to their mentor, Paul Garner, who initiated the thought for the study and then guided them throughout it. I now had a direction I could go.
What I learned in this process is how even in science, man can make his plans but God directs his steps. I got shut down from going the direction I wanted to go, despite all positive feedback, but I am not to go that direction, at least for now. I instead got a new direction I can look at and when these papers are released. When you take your academic studies and submit them to God’s will and God’s purpose, He will take you directions you could not imagine, and I am by far not done here. I’ll take some time to let things settle, while teaching gets going again for this school year, and once I get some time to review the papers of this conference, I’ll be able to start going down the next step of my journey.
The next International Conference on Creationism is slated to be at Cedarville University again in about four years. A LOT can happen between now and then, but my goal is to publish a full paper with my statistical analysis, and I am also considering doing a theologically based paper as well, possibly showing how a compromise in Genesis leads to compromise everywhere else individually or over generations. But we will see what God does and how He leads me as the dust continues to settle from this conference.
I want to leave this series with this note: science and the Bible are not enemies. They are allies, and as long as you let God direct everything and let Him get the glory, He will show you things beyond your imagination. You can believe the Bible as written and do proper science. You may not make many friends in the academic world, but if you tap into the mind of Christ, you can run circles around their whole departments. Do not fear them nor their mocking. Trust in the Lord and He will bless your studies, including in the sciences. He certainly has blessed mine, and I’m just getting started.
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