Age of the earth and carbon dating?

Question

i am a Christian and therefore belive in the creation of earth. i think that the earth is 5000-15000 years old.

i wanted to hear other peoples thoughts whether from creation or evolution standpoint. but im mostly interested in evoltuion. i dont just want this to be a philosophical argument based only on what people think. i want to hear the "facts" about evolution. how old does it deem the earth to be, and how can it prove this?

i also want to hear a little more about carbon 14 dating. from what ive read it is only accurate to about 6000 years or so because that is the lifespan of carbon 14. after that there is no way to tell.

so how do evolutionists get the billions of years in certain rocks and stuff?

i just want to hear scientific "facts" about this. please dont just give your opinion.

thanks

Answer 1

To estimate the age of the earth, you apply the principle of carbon dating, but use other isotopes than those of carbon, e.g. the breakdown of uranium into lead. Under this measurement, the earth has an estimated age of around 4.54 billion years. This figure is consistent with dating of other solar material, such as moon rocks. These oldest ages are from the analysis of meteorites, but aging the oldest minerals in the earth's crust gives a date of around 4.404 billion years.

On these measures, life began on earth around 3 billion years ago, i.e. for almost one third of its existence, earth had no life at all. Earth rocks are in a constant state of cycling and recycling. If rocks are up to 3 billion of years old, then the images of creatures which appear in those rocks are also that old. It is not surprising that over 1.4 billion years organic compounds can gather together and form self-replicating molecules, such as the primitive equivalents of DNA. After another 2.5 billion years, vertebrates, animals with backbones evolved.

If you believe in creation, the only scientifically sensible position to take is that the earth was created to seem as if it evolved over a long period of time. However, to do this is an act of faith, not of scientifically demonstrable fact.

Answer 2

Bear with me, this is a long explanation.

The earth is roughly 4.6 billion years old. We know this by a process known as radiometric dating. Radiometric dating works by measuring the amount of a radioactive isotope in a certain mineral.

An isotope is a variation of the number of nuetrons, for each atom of an element. For example Hydrogen has 3 isotopes: H1, H2 and H3. The number is from the estimated atomic mass of each isotope. Nuetrons and Protons have roughly the same mass. Electrons have a much tinier mass, and have a negligible effect on the the atomic mass of each isotope.  H1 has 1 proton and 1 electron, atomic mass=1, H2 1 proton, 1electron and 1 nuetron, atomic mass=2 and so on.

Many elements have more than one isotope, also, most elements have only one stable isotope, meaning, they break down. The others have no stable isotopes.

They break down by emitting particles and energy, this is called radiation. and when they break down, they do so at a known rate called a half-life. Radioactive isotopes always lose one half of thier radioactivity in each half -life. Each half-life is the same for each particular isotope, so H-2 and C-14 have different half-lives. Like I mentioned earlier, when an isotope breaks down, it does so by emitting off some of its subatomic particles to become a more stable isotope. When it does this, it actually becomes another element. For example, Uranium-238 will break down several times until it becomes a stable isotope of lead.

There is also a known percentage of each isotope in nature when these atoms reach a certain state in nature. For example when a mineral freezes or melts or vaporizes, the change in state does something to the subatomic particles in that sample which some of them move from stable to unstable isotopes. Remember earlier, when I said they break down at known rates and when they form there is always a known ratio. All they do now is find the ratio of unstable isotopes to more stable ones in the sample, and that is how they find the age of the sample.

Now to C-14, C-14 has a half-live of 5668 years, and is accurate for dating anything containing C-14 from 30 years old to 60,000 years old. All living things produce C-14, until they die, so C-14 cannot be used on anything living as new C-14 would skew the results. But if it has been dead ffrom anywhere between 30 and 60,000 years you could get a pretty good read on to within a few years.

Now C-14 is useless for dating the earth, as we know that it is 4.6  billion years old. They use other radioactive isotopes, some have half-lives millions of years , and a few have them of over a billion years.

Radiometric dating goes into way more detail than this, this is just the basic, intro stuff. I hope this helps.