Protesting About Evolution

This spot in The Believer is intended, over a period of time, to provide a bank of facts and arguments that supports the Biblical concept of Creation as armour against those who would seek to avoid God in advocating Evolution. This is a particular problem in our schools. Give our children the information they need. Keep them up-to-date with this series of articles! We have received the kind permission of Bro. S. P. Clementson to publish the following, which also appeared in "The Testimony".

Millions Of Years

SYNOPSIS: A method of determining great ages for rock deposits has been developed and’ is widely used. The method depends on meas­uring the ratio of pure parent elements and the disintegrated daughter elements in the host rock. The assumption is that it takes millions of years for an appreciable proportion of cer­tain elements to disintegrate. Therefore, any fossils trapped in the rock layer can be dated to this long period of time.

The Big Whammy! It has recently been discovered that, in LAVA FLOWS KNOWN TO BE LESS THAN 10 YEARS OLD, parent and daughter elements were both present in sufficient quantities to indicate an age for the 10-year-old rock bed of 100 to 10,500 MIL­LION years! Now, it appears, the ratios are merely ratios, there from the very beginning, not progressively decaying with time and not a measure of it.

Now read on for Bro. Clementson’s remarks and the devastating effect this must have on the Geological Column!

A problem which frequently arises in a dis­cussion of the truth of the Bible is the claim made by the majority of scientists that the earth and the fossils found therein are of a vast age. What is the truth of this claim? What evidence is there that anything on this earth has existed so long?

At the centre of the issue is the Geological Column. A span of over 600 million years is presented, in most textbooks on the subject of geology, as the very familiar chart of succes­sive geological epochs with their distinctive names Pre-Cambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, etc. It is freely admitted that the complete column does not appear anywhere on the earth, and that in any one place only a few of the strata exist, but it is supposed that in the earth as a whole, the entire column is represented. The Geological Column is therefore, a theoretical concept.

The names of the strata of the Geological Column are firmly based on the fossils which they contain, and once the name of a particu­lar rock has been determined by the fossils it contains, the name of the stratum is referred to as though it were an age. Thus, the fossils are described as though they were dated by the strata, while the strata are referred to as though they were dated by the fossils found in them!

Having compiled the geological chart, the geologists undertook the task of estimating the ages of the various epochs. Comparatively recently they discovered a “tool” for measur­ing these ages, namely, radioactive dating of rocks. After hundreds upon hundreds of com­putations were made from every geological age  and with rocks from all parts of the world, the geologists winnowed out those readings with discordant dates and found that three dates, only three, were acceptable. The pro­cedure adopted has been described by Adolph Knoph:

“The figures have been obtained in various ways. Ultimately, however, they are tied to three dates based on atomic disintegration; 60 million years, the age of the pitchblende at Central City, Colorado; 220 million years, the age of the pitchblende at St. Joachhimstal, Bohemia; and 440 million years, the age of the uranium-bearing shale at Gullhogen, Swe­den. The age of the Swedish shale is the only one of these that is palaeontologically control­led . . . all other absolute ages have been derived by the interpolation based on the thick­nesses of strata or by reasoned guesses.”

No doubt, at first it was intended to treat these figures as provisional, but as time has elapsed, they have come to be regarded as a reliable assessment of the ages. So far the weight of evidence is hardly overwhelming!

However, the reliability of the radioactive methods of dating rocks needs to be examined. It should be mentioned, by way of explanation, that it is accepted by scientists that, originally, radioactive material resided in the mantle of the earth, and that when eruptions occur the radioactive material flows with the molten lava towards the surface of the earth. Rocks that have been overlaid or intruded with material from the mantle are used for dating by radio­active methods, and it is always assumed that the radioactive element started as pure parent element and would begin to disintegrate into its daughter elements when it entered the host rock and that, by measuring the relative weights of the parent and the daughter ele­ments, the age of the host rock can be deter­mined.

This assumption is made because it was thought that the pure parent element was free to flow in the mantle. It is now known that material in the mantle is not fluid and although it has a high temperature, it is also under a high pressure and therefore it is solid. This is borne out by seismic evidence, and conse­quently it is unlikely that when radioactive material flows it has been separated from its previously accumulated daughter elements. If this is so, the age computed will not be the actual age of the host rock, but simply the theoretical age of the material in the mantle.

With a view to verifying this matter, an endeavour was made to obtain information concerning the breakdown of radioactive materials found in rocks of a known age —young rocks from recent volcanic action. It was fortunate that the data was available from two independent sources. Research in the U.S.S.R. had been carried out on 18 samples from 12 recent volcanoes containing radio­active materials in the uranium series, and similar information was available from research in U.S.A. from four different sites.

Details of the data and of calculations of the ages have been published in the “Creation Research Society Quarterly”, December 1970. Suffice it to say here, that using the ratios of parent and daughter elements in the various samples, the calculated ages ranged from 100 million to 10,500 million years for volcanic deposits, which were known to have formed in the last decade.

It is noteworthy that the research workers in U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were merely studying the rocks for their content of uranium and thorium, and they were not concerned with the question of age, but they stated, “Since the age of the rocks is small, the daughter elements uranium 234 and thorium 230 must have entered the mineral bodies at the time of their genesis, instead of being formed on the decay of the parent material”. The obvious conclusion from this investigation is that the ratios of parent and daughter elements are merely ratios, and their use as a basis for calculating “ages” of the rocks, or of the earth itself, is highly questionable and fraught with many assumptions that cannot be checked. This also means that the three tie-points of the Geological Column are suspect, and may equally be “young dates”, and in turn the whole range of dates for the sedimentary rocks with their fossils is called in question.