Recently, I asked a question about the existence of meotorite. I wasn't satisfying with the answer, because of the following two: creation science said that the earth had been existed for less than 10,000 years and naturalistic evolution said that the origin of the universe happened 10 to 20 billion years ago. If creation science is right about the earth existence, which means that the existence of the meorite could not have been accurate, according to the creation science. my question is how accurate those two dates are: creation science and naturalistic evolution. And at last, if naturalistic is right about the earth existence. Could they have known that billion years ago, time was the same, as it is today.

note: IF anyone want to know where I got my info. Please go to www.religioustolerance.org/evolution.html

-- Jean E. Theagene (jtheagene@yahoo.com), February 01, 2001

Answers

Here is an article about the oldest meteorite in case anybody wants to know what we're discussing:

4. 5 billion year old meteorite

-- Sharon Gabel (gabel@oswego.edu), February 05, 2001.

There is no concrete answer to your question. If you believe in Creation then you would doubt the accuracy of any scientific findings that dispute Creationism. If I believe in pure science-which I do personally-then I would doubt the accuracy of anything put forth by the Creationism community. It's a question of faith, and beliefs. Personally, because of my beliefs, the idea of the Earth being only 10,000 years old is ludicrous. But, somebody who believes in Creation would think the Earth being over 4 billion years old is just as unbelievable. So, like I said before, there's no right answer to this question of accuracy. It all comes down to what you believe in.

-- Michael Carpenter (mcarpent@oswego.edu), February 04, 2001.

If you recall in the Old Testament, it says that a thousand years is as a day to God. In light of this, the Earth's creation didn't happen in a matter of days, but in a matter of "days." Time has not always been as concrete as it is today. Just think: we didn't have an accurate length of a year until one of the South American civilizations figured it out to be 365 1/4 days. If geologists can conctretely prove the age of a rock sample, what proof do we have in saying that they are wrong?

-- Johanna Besaw (jbesaw1@oswego.edu), February 12, 2001.

Radiometric dating is used to date rocks. And that is as accurate as we know the half life of the decaying radioactive isotope.

Potassium-40 is used in astronomy to date meteorites. Potassium-40 has a tremendous halflife that is 1.25x10^9 years, or 1,250,000,000 years. Granted there is probably a great deal of error in this number, but when you are dealing in billions usually small errors get ignored.

This is the same exact process as carbon dating. Except Carbon-14 only has a half life of like ~ 5000 years. We could not date rocks with C-14.

the 4.5 billion year figure is not just a number someone made up, it is the number that commonly occurs when doing radiometric dating on the Earth, AND of meteorites.

The fact that rocks on the Earth and from space both show the same age in laboratory tests does place some credibility on that number.

However, the 10,000 year date supplied by the bible has no scientific basis whatsoever.

Info taken from "Facts on file dictionary of Astronomy" edited by Valerie Illingworth

-- Rob McRae (rmcrae1@oswego.edu), February 13, 2001.

In nearly every textbook describing the radiometric techniques used to date the age of rocks, there are qualifiers outlined in the first chapter that define the assumptions that one makes with all isotopic date determinations. Radiometric dating is a statistical science that assumes in every measurement that no physical process has distributed the individual atomic nuclei in some "non-random" manner.

The potassium-40 technique ( http://www.britannica.com/seo/p/potassium-argon-dating/ )measures the ratio of radioactive K-40 to radioactive argon-40. To determine the date of a sample it is vaporized and the ionized atoms so formed are passed through a powerful magnetic field using a mass spectrometer to separate the individual atomic nuclei from one another.

The reality that every parent-daughter radiogenic dating technique neglects/ignors, is the history of the individual atoms before they congealed to form solid rocks. All of the physical processes that give rise to elements generate them at temperatures that exceed their ionization temperatures by many magnitudes. Before any of the elements beame bound up in rocks, they existed as plasmas in interstellar space or plasma within the interior of stars. In both circumstances, their physical motions within the plasma are primarily dominated by electromagnetic forces.

When polyatomic plasmas are injected into powerful magnetic fields in tokomak reactors they immediately form laminations of self-similar nuclei. This same type of physical layering/segregation should be anticipated in the motions of plasmas that accompany the formation of nebulae and preceed the creation of star and the objects that orbit stars in the solid state. These electromagnetic processes generate effects that influence the "local" abundance of every element and isotope and all parent-daughter radiogenic specie.

To know the true age of the solar system relative to the Big Bang, we would have to know the electromagnetic trajectory/history of the atoms that form the solar system. We lack this information in every instance of rock dating via radiometric techniques.

-- R D Brown (rbrown@ec.rr.com), June 16, 2001.