Documentaries, like PBS’s long-running NOVA series, often show new discoveries of dinosaur fossils that, to the average viewer, may evoke mixed feelings of excitement and confusion. Secular researchers are almost always claiming that any and all findings back up the evolutionary model. Even that of dinosaur soft tissues.
But the Biblical global flood, as described in Genesis, is the most reasonable explanation for how dinosaurs and other creatures could still have soft tissue in them. This is what we would expect if these remains are within the Biblical timeframe of about 4.5 thousand years and not millions of years old.
So why the discrepancy?
Geologists are trained that the Earth is old, 4.5 billion years old. Fossils are dated by the rock layer in which they are found. But the dates of the Earth and these rock layers are determined by radioisotope dating methods. I am sure you are familiar with C-14 dating, but you may not be familiar with other dating methods, such as potassium/argon (K/Ar) or uranium/lead (U/Pb).
Because of the short half-life of C-14, it is only "valid" for dating specimens less than 50,000 years old. Potassium/argon is used to date from 20,000 to billions of years, and uranium/lead is used to date from 1,000 to 500,000 years. But these dating methods, which rely on radioactive decay of the radioisotopes like K-40, assume that there is no decay product (in this example, Ar) when the rock hardened, that there was no exchange of elements with the surrounding environment, and a constant decay rate throughout Earth’s history. Each assumption has been proven to be wrong, so how can one trust these dating methods?
Let me give you a recent example.
Mount St Helens erupted on May 18th, 1980. This year is the 45th anniversary of the eruption. In 1994, after the lava dome in its crater cooled, Steve Austin, a creation geologist, took samples of the basalt (hardened lava) from the dome. He sent several samples to a radiometric dating lab for testing and dating. The samples tested were dated between 250,000 and 1.5 million years old, but we know they were only 14 years old at the time of sampling.
The main reason there is such a stark difference between the actual date and the radioisotope dates is that there was plenty of argon (the decay product of K-40) in the samples. The dating method assumes that there is no decay product (in this case, argon) when the rocks solidify. This was clearly not the case, and disproves one of the main assumptions of the dating method. It’s like having an hourglass that had sand at the bottom of the glass before it was turned over (the sand representing the argon). You would assume that some time had passed since the hourglass was turned over, but in fact, it didn’t. You would have no way of knowing when the hourglass was turned over.
This shows that these radiometric dating methods are highly unreliable at best and useless for accurately measuring the dates of the Earth, rocks, and fossils.
The moral of the story is that we can trust the historical record recorded in the Bible over man’s attempt to rewrite history by ignoring what has clearly taken place globally on this Earth, i.e., the global flood. Geologists have been taught that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon over eons of time, but this is intuitively unsettling. It makes much more sense that the massive receding waters from the flood carved the canyon in a short period of time as the mountains rose and the valleys of the deep were formed, as described in Genesis.
- Dr. Don Clark, PhD, Vice Chairman of Creation Moments
Image: Filming at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, BLMUtah, PD, Wikimedia Commons.
