Carbon dating proved wrong

ERRORS ARE FEARED IN CARBON DATING

At least to the uninitiated, carbon dating is generally assumed to be a sure-fire way to predict the age of any organism that once lived on our planet. Without understanding the mechanics of it, we put our blind faith in the words of scientists, who assure us that carbon dating is a reliable method of determining the ages of almost everything around us. However, a little more knowledge about the exact ins and outs of carbon dating reveals that perhaps it is not quite as fool-proof a process as we may have been led to believe. At its most basic level, carbon dating is the method of determining the age of organic material by measuring the levels of carbon found in it. Specifically, there are two types of carbon found in organic materials: carbon 12 C and carbon 14 C It is imperative to remember that the material must have been alive at one point to absorb the carbon, meaning that carbon dating of rocks or other inorganic objects is nothing more than inaccurate guesswork. All living things absorb both types of carbon; but once it dies, it will stop absorbing.

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Dating is everything in archaeology. Exciting discoveries of ancient burial sites or jewelry might make headlines, but for scientists, this kind of discovery is only meaningful if we can tell how old the artifacts are. So when chemist Willard Libby developed radiocarbon dating in , it was a breakthrough for archaeology and he was awarded a Nobel prize for his achievement. Nowadays people take radiocarbon technology for granted and many people think you can use radiocarbon on any human remains. Many exciting finds have been inaccurately dated or not dated at all, meaning the skeletons' clues from the past are still locked away. But my team may have found the key: DNA dating. To understand why we need DNA dating, you need to know what radiocarbon dating is.

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Radiocarbon dating can easily establish that humans have been on the earth for over twenty thousand years, at least twice as long as creationists are willing to allow. Therefore it should come as no surprise that creationists at the Institute for Creation Research ICR have been trying desperately to discredit this method for years. They have their work cut out for them, however, because radiocarbon C dating is one of the most reliable of all the radiometric dating methods. This article will answer several of the most common creationist attacks on carbon dating, using the question-answer format that has proved so useful to lecturers and debaters.

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Radiometric Dating: Problems with the Assumptions

The field of radiocarbon dating has become a technical one far removed from the naive simplicity which characterized its initial introduction by Libby in the late 's. It is, therefore, not surprising that many misconceptions about what radiocarbon can or cannot do and what it has or has not shown are prevalent among creationists and evolutionists - lay people as well as scientists not directly involved in this field. In the following article, some of the most common misunderstandings regarding radiocarbon dating are addressed, and corrective, up-to-date scientific creationist thought is provided where appropriate. MYTH 1. Radiocarbon is used to date the age of rocks, which enables scientists to date the age of the earth.

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