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It’s a date

The sciences behind evolution, geology and dating have come a long way since the days when Darwin first put forward the theory of natural selection (in 1859). The science of dating is especially troubling to the religious because it is providing the glue that is cementing all the other sciences as they fill in more and more details of other theories, including the theory of evolution.

It has been very easy for the religious to pretend that the sciences involved are little more than slightly tweaked versions of textbooks from around 1900, but nothing could be further from the truth. The inconvenient truth is that science has moved on a great deal, and this chapter will serve as an introduction to the various dating techniques and how they are doing their part to discredit the claims made by religious sources.

The Earth is basically one big layer cake, with the major layers being (from the centre outwards):

  • The inner core: 800 miles (1,300 km) thick. It is solid.
  • The outer core: 1,400 miles (2,200 km) thick. It is liquid.
  • The mantle: 1,800 miles (2,900 km) thick. Three main parts: lower, soft and rigid layers.
  • The crust: usually 25 to 44 miles (40 to 70 km) thick, however the crust can get as thin as about 3 to 5 miles (5 to 8 km) under the ocean.

(Image from Wikipedia. More information can be found on Wikipedia: Internal structure of Earth.)

It’s the crust that interests scientists the most when it comes to dating because it is only that layer into which we can dig and study. The deepest hole drilled by humans is only 7.5 miles (12 km), which is not even a third of the way to the start of the average mantle depth.

The crust is made of two main layers. The bottom-most layer is made from dense basalt-based rock, and above that sits the oceans and also the continents which are made of less dense granite-based rock. It is accurate to say that the oceans and continents are “floating” on top of the bottom-most basaltic layer. As the continents move around, we experience earthquakes and tsunamis. Sometimes there are weaknesses in the crust which permit the mantle to escape to the surface, and we know those weaknesses as volcanoes.

Do you doubt that the continents are moving? Sorry, you are wrong to hold onto the belief that the continents are as god placed them because it has been measured that they are moving in relation to each other at a rate of about 1 inch (2.5 centimetres) per year.

Almost all of the Earth was laid down over four billion years ago (within the first 500 or so million years of its existence), but the very top of the crust is where all the action and excitement has happened because it has undergone tremendous change in the last four billion years – albeit (usually) very slowly.

Scientists have divided the very top of the crust into (at time of writing) 117 main layers, however there are many major groupings and sub-divisions of those layers. The specification of layers is defined in the Chronostratigraphic Chart which is also called the Geological Column. The chart is an amazing thing because it is based on an enormous amount of excavation and the evidence that such investigations have uncovered.

The Chronostratigraphic Chart (Geological Column). The full-size version of this (in a Google Sheets format can be found here).

You will sometimes hear religious apologists say something like “Oh, that’s just a few layers that were laid down quickly”, e.g. in some sort of flood, however knowing something about the actual scientific geological column shows that dismissive summary to be ridiculous. It’s not just a few layers; it’s well over 100 clearly-defined layers – and layers for which there is repeated and verifiable evidence all over the world.

When scientists dig into the layers they find fossils, and here’s the devastating fact for creationists: the ordering of fossils in those layers is consistent with the model documented in the geological chart. If discrepancies are found, they are minor and simply mean that the model must be (slightly) adjusted to accommodate the discovered evidence. None of that discovered evidence has ever destroyed the model; it has merely refined it.

The layers are not always visually distinct. If you are planning to go into the field with a pickaxe to discover a red layer sitting on top of an orange layer sitting on top of a brown layer, etc., then you will be in for disappointment. The definition of when one layer ends and the next layer starts is often subtle and is usually based on the first appearance of a particular species. To appreciate the subtlety of the definition of the geological column, consider just one of the twelve main Periods: the Triassic, which consists of seven Ages (rows 49 to 55 in the linked spreadsheet). The ages are defined as follows (you don’t have to learn these for an exam):

  • Rhaetian: began 208.5 million years ago and ended 201.3 million years ago. First appearance of the conodont species Misikella sp. and Epigondolella mosheri.
  • Norian: began 227.0 million years ago. First appearance of the conodont species Metapolygnathus communisti and Metapolygnathus primitius.
  • Carnian: began 237.0 million years ago. First appearance of the conodont species Metapolygnathus polygnathiformis.
  • Ladinian: began 242.0 million years ago. First appearance of the conodont species Budurovignathus praehungaricus. The first dinosaurs appeared.
  • Anisian: began 247.2 million years ago. First appearance of the conodont species Chiosella timorensis.
  • Olenekian: began 251.2 million years ago. First appearance of the conodont species Neospathodus waageni.
  • Induan: began 251.902 million years ago. First appearance of the conodont species Hindeodus parvus.

In case it’s bothering you, a conodont is a small eel-like creature. You can find out more about them from the Wikipedia article: Conodont. The following is a depiction of a conodont from that article:

It’s easy to look at a summary in a chart such as the geologic column and be fooled by time scales. Even though the Triassic period looks neatly condensed in the chart, it actually occurred over a 50 million year period (252 to 201 million years ago).

But consider the implications of what has been found in the fossil record by, say, the earliest two markers in the Triassic period (the last two bullet points above): fossils of the conodont species Neospathodus waageni are always found above fossils of the conodont species Hindeodus parvus. Would a young-Earth creationist care to have a go at explaining, if all of the 100+ layers were laid down in a year (or so) by the tumultuous waters of a catastrophic flood, how would one species of a tiny eel-like creature always be found below the species of another tiny eel-like creature? Those creatures are about the same size, so how come the order of deposit is never reversed? That last point is astounding because in itself, it demolishes religion (if the flood story is a fiction, then what else is?).

While they are in an explaining mood, perhaps YEC would also like to explain how it is that footprints have been found between layers of excavated rock? Did the flood waters of “noah” lay down one layer of mud and then wait for an animal – under thousands of feet of water mind you – to walk across that mud before the torrents of flood water laid down another layer of mud on top of the footprints – all of which were subsequently to solidify as rock?

Usually one layer transitions to the next with a whimper (to be honest, the difference between two conodont species isn’t all that exciting to most people), but sometimes it happens with a bang. The start of the Triassic period (from the Permian) was part of an extinction event that devastated life on Earth. To old-Earth creationists (OEC): why would god wait about 4.34 billion years after the Earth formed to wipe out almost all of the species on Earth? That extinction event actually took millions of years to progress – which must have been a miserable time for the species who managed to live through it. Why god, why?

Sometimes the extinction event or layer-definition change is very much quicker. About 66 million years ago it is believed that a meteor strike caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. That’s the one that wiped out the non-flying dinosaurs. The chemical element iridium is found in much higher concentrations in meteors than is found in the Earth’s crust, and a thin layer of iridium is found all over the world in the geological layers at a point corresponding to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Would any OEC care to explain why their god waited 4.534 billion years after creating the Earth to wipe out a large number of species that had spent about 4 billion years evolving? If the plan was to have an uncredited role in the production of the Jurassic Park movies, then fair enough; but it seems like an overly grandiose plan to achieve that.

The entire 117 layers are not neatly laid out in places all over the world for scientists to examine. Geological activity and erosion have meant that the layers have been worn away, or altered due to volcanic activity or local flooding, or folded due to plate tectonics, etc. You can’t go to one particular place on Earth and see the entire geological column, however the mining industry has, in many places, drilled out the entire column. At the Williston Basin in North Dakota USA, the column is visible from the pre-Cambrian period until the Paleocene epoch (approximately rows 25 to 105 in the above spreadsheet). To read more about that, see the Wikipedia article on Williston Basin.

As the religious are keen to point out, the layers do not come with little tags that display the dates that they were laid down. By themselves, what the layers permit is relative dating of fossils. There are many other techniques used to get absolute dates of the various parts of the geological column. The following is a list of some of the absolute dating techniques with a guide to the approximate age of materials that can be tested reliably (links are to Wikipedia articles):

That list is not comprehensive, but it’s likely longer than you imagined? The key thing to remember is that entirely different techniques produce ages that agree with each other when various tests on a specimen are performed. The figure of 4.3 billion years has been used above, but that is simply the age of rocks formed on Earth, and many of the techniques may actually be able to date much older specimens, for example on meteorites arriving from outside our solar system. The oldest known solid material found on Earth that has arrived via a meteorite (the Murchison meteorite which fell in Australia in 1969) is dated to between 5 and 7 billion years old. To the old-Earth creationists, that means that god was doing something else in the universe for (up to) billions of years before he turned his attention to the Earth.

Many of the above tests use a technique of analysing how much of one element has changed into another over time. For example, potassium-argon dating is based on the measurement of the product of the radioactive decay of an isotope of potassium into argon. After a sample of rock has been created (e.g. due to volcanic activity), that decay happens in a known and measurable way. Sorry creationists, it’s like your god built a tiny little clock into each bit of rock, and scientists have found a way to read that clock.

So a fossil itself does not necessarily need to be dated because the fossil’s surroundings can be dated, and therefore must be exactly the same age as the fossil that became trapped in what would become rock. The layers provide the relative ordering of fossil deposits, and the multitude of absolute dating techniques allow scientists to pinpoint the age the deposits happened. Cool.

Carbon-14 dating is the big one when it comes to religious-based controversy. That’s because the technique can accurately date organic specimens up to 20,000 to 50,000 years old (depending on conditions), and that’s at least four to ten times longer than young-Earth creationists claim the Earth has existed – which is a problem – for them.

When a living being dies, the carbon-14 it contains starts to decay into nitrogen-14 (by emitting beta particles). The longer the being has been dead, the less beta particles it emits because its carbon-14 has been dwindling at a predictable rate. That means that the age of the deceased being can be determined by measuring the current rate of beta particles being emitted. If the subject being tested is too old, it has such tiny amounts of carbon-14 to emit beta particles that the emissions get swamped by background radiation – hence the limit on the testing age.

The religious have gone to extraordinary efforts to try to discredit carbon-14 dating, e.g. by “testing” freshwater mussels, or claiming that the amount of atmospheric carbon-14 was much less in the past, or claiming that the Earth’s magnetic field was much stronger in the past which would affect carbon-14 levels, and many more hysterically-desperate attempts. They have been shown to be wrong on every single point that they have raised. These “discreditings” are always made and propagated by non-scientists, however the refutations to the claims – made by actual scientists in the field – are easy to find via basic Internet searches. The problem is that when a claim is made, it is immediately picked up by the religious lay-person and then given an ever-widening audience via a circulating nonsensical video. It is then adopted as a mantra such as “freshwater clams prove carbon-14 dating doesn’t work” – something that is easy for the religious to bleat whenever one of the millions of carbon-14 dating tests reveal something awkward for them.

Carbon-14 testing has confirmed that the last ice-age started to decline about 20,000 years ago, however YEC must stick to the fantasy that the entire ice-age must have happened after the flood attributed to the fictional character of noah – sometime after 4,500 years ago. Madness! There is zero scientific evidence to support a complete ice age in the previous 4,500 years.

The sad thing about carbon dating is that religious people can have no choice but to completely agree with all tests performed on samples less than 3,000 years old. That’s because we have an enormous amount of written evidence that corroborates the test results with known events. Carbon dating has even been used to test the age of a person (via teeth samples), and the results have been within 1.5 years of their known birth year. Why is it that creationists somehow believe that the dating results are reliable up until about 3,000 years ago, but then start to return wildly unreliable results for older samples? Newsflash to creationists: just because you want/need the dating tests to be unreliable, doesn’t make them so.

Here are some things (with approximate dates) that various dating methods have confirmed existed before the Earth was created (according to the timeline proposed by young-Earth creationists):

  • Stone tools: 3 million years ago.
  • Cooking: 2.3 million years ago.
  • Attaching a tool to a shaft (e.g. like an axe): 500,000 years ago.
  • Pigments: 400,000 years ago.
  • Spears: 300,000 to 400,000 years ago.
  • Clothing: 83,000 to 170,000 years ago.
  • Beads: 100,000 to 135,000 years ago.
  • Harpoons: 90,000 years ago.
  • Beds: 77,000 years ago.
  • Cave paintings: 44,000 years ago.
  • Mortar and pestles: 37,000 years ago.
  • Weaving: 36,000 years ago.
  • Flutes: 35,000 years ago. (Yep, people were playing flutes 30,000 years before YEC believe the entire universe was created!)
  • Rope: 28,000 years ago.
  • Ceramics: 26,000 years ago.
  • Pottery: 16,000 years ago.
  • Bread: 14,500 years ago.
  • Dentistry: 14,000 years ago.
  • Agriculture: 11,000 to 12,000 years ago.
  • Constructed stone monuments: 11,000 years ago.
  • Mud bricks: 9,500 years ago.
  • Alcohol fermentation: 9,000 years ago.
  • Tanned leather: 9,000 years ago.
  • Mortar: 8,500 years ago.
  • Kilns: 8,000 years ago.
  • Proto-writing: 8,000 years ago.
  • Copper smelting: 7,000 years ago.
  • Lacquer: 7,000 years ago.
  • Cotton: 7,000 years ago.
  • Fired bricks: 6,400 years ago.
  • Paved roads: 6,000 years ago.
  • Wheels: 5,500 to 6,000 years ago.

And it was at about that point that the YEC would have us believe that god said “let there be light”.

Are you really going to keep believing that all of the above (and they are just the tip of the iceberg) were compressed into a tiny amount of time after 4,000 BCE? If so, and besides “My religious text told me so”, can you produce the tiniest piece of verifiable scientific evidence to support that view?

So to be clear: there is an enormous amount of correlating evidence (based on widely different tests) to prove that they Earth is much older than 6,000 years, and there is zero credible scientific evidence to prove that it is younger than 6,000 years, but because of stories written by superstitious and ignorant iron-age men, you (that’s you, YEC) are going to continue to believe that you exist on a ball that was enchanted into existence about 6,000 years ago?

Why?

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