ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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I've heard from some people that the method scientists use to date dinosaurs is flawed and that dinosaurs are actually only thousands of years old. Another theory is that God created the world with the dinosaurs already dead and fossilized.
The methodologies we use to date things involve a number of methods which all corroborate with one another. Radiometric dating, specifically carbon dating, is the method most people are aware of; but carbon dating works upward to several thousand years ago. That's because what is being measured is the rate of decay from carbon14 to carbon12, carbon14 is an unstable isotrope of the carbon atom and so slowly decays into carbon12, a stable isotrope of the carbon atom. A lot of the carbon in living things is carbon14, and so after something dies the carbon is no longer being replenished, and so begins to decay. We know the rate of that decay, that is, the time it takes for that decay to happen--so we can measure the time by measuring the ratio of carbon14 to carbon12. The same basic thing is done with other forms of radiometric dating, for example potassium over very long periods of time decays into argon. And for very, very long time frames, we can measure the rate of decay of uranium into lead.
But other forms of dating include dendrochronology, that is, measuring the age of trees by the number of growth rings they have. Also ice core dating, antarctic ice builds up layer upon layer every year and so the layers of ice from an ice core sample can be counted.
So there's no single method, but a lot of different methods, and which are corroborating with one another. So when there is a lot of data and evidence that is consistently pointing toward the same thing, that is when we can start to be reasonably confident about what the evidence is showing us.
-CryptoLutheran
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