Hi guys. I'm new to the forum but spent some time lurking the "Why SteveBee is wrong thread." So forgive me for not knowing how quote functions and the like work. Anyways, onto my question here.

I've been doing a little research on radiometric dating these past few days, and ended up looking up stuff on the age of the Moon. Well, this was on the first page of Google...

http://www.creationinthecrossfire.org/A ... ating.html

Now, I know from experience not to trust creationists very much, especially after reading that SteveBee thread. So I'm not too concerned with their accusations of geologists just throwing out dates older than the "Evolutionist presupposed age." The only question I really have pertains to their section of the moon:

"Rock samples brought back from the moon were tested and dated. Some were only millions of years old, while others were 28 billion years old. The moon is assumed to be 4-4.5 billion years old by evolutionists. The following table shows the wide age spread scientists measured in moon rocks brought back during the Apollo program. [Whitcomb]"

You can see the chart for yourself. I tried to copy it but it came out weird.

So my question is how are these dates upwards of 11, 16, even 28 billion years accounted for? They obviously can't be correct. Could cosmic radiation have anything to do with the skewed dates? Were these tests for certain geological events or impurities that the creationist website is misrepresenting? I know next to nothing about how it all works and would like insight from someone who does.

Thanks.

Don't trust them at all, it is all bollocks.

When they have a paragraph heading: "Origin of Radioactive isotopes—divine or natural?" And the second sentence under that heading is: "According to evolutionists, about 8-16 billion years ago the Big Bang exploded, creating the universe.

You can pretty much ignore the rest.

'Evolutionists' don't determine the age of the universe, cosmologists do, and none of them say: "8-16 billion years ago the Big Bang exploded, creating the universe."

Ignore them and go learn some real science is my advice. Science is interesting.

No need to even look that far, just read the first line:

"Most people, including scientists, assume that radioactive dating methods, such as Carbon-14 or Uranium, are very reliable. Because of this, they view young earth creationists as foolish—akin to those who believe in a flat earth."

No that isn't why we find it foolish. That only adds further confirmation of just how foolish it is.


Don't bother with that nonsense. Why not start with the source:
NASA Lunar sample compendium.

Itsdemtitans wrote:
Now, I know from experience not to trust creationists very much...

You shouldn't trust them at all, not ever.

4 1/2 billion year old Moon-cheese? Not half as rancid as creationist claims.

I notice the "reference" cited is listed as being from someone called "Whitcomb".

Would this be the same Whitcomb that co-authored a number of well-known creationist screeds, alongside professional liar for doctrine Henry Morris?

Jack Chick's nom de plume, perhaps?

Itsdemtitans wrote:Hi guys. I'm new to the forum but spent some time lurking the "Why SteveBee is wrong thread." So forgive me for not knowing how quote functions and the like work. Anyways, onto my question here.

I've been doing a little research on radiometric dating these past few days, and ended up looking up stuff on the age of the Moon. Well, this was on the first page of Google...

http://www.creationinthecrossfire.org/A ... ating.html

Now, I know from experience not to trust creationists very much, especially after reading that SteveBee thread. So I'm not too concerned with their accusations of geologists just throwing out dates older than the "Evolutionist presupposed age." The only question I really have pertains to their section of the moon:

"Rock samples brought back from the moon were tested and dated. Some were only millions of years old, while others were 28 billion years old. The moon is assumed to be 4-4.5 billion years old by evolutionists. The following table shows the wide age spread scientists measured in moon rocks brought back during the Apollo program. [Whitcomb]"

You can see the chart for yourself. I tried to copy it but it came out weird.

So my question is how are these dates upwards of 11, 16, even 28 billion years accounted for? They obviously can't be correct. Could cosmic radiation have anything to do with the skewed dates? Were these tests for certain geological events or impurities that the creationist website is misrepresenting? I know next to nothing about how it all works and would like insight from someone who does.

Thanks.

I don't know about this particular case with moonrocks being "28 billion years old", so I can't speak to it directly. But what I can show is that it is entirely possible in general to get a radiometric date that is actually much older than the real age of the sample, but that we need to look at how the rock formed or what happened to it during it's lifetime for this to happen.

Scientists (geologists) know how most rocks form, what kinds of alterations they go through and how this affects their chemistry. So when a rock has been subjected to a process that significantly alters it's use for radiometric dating (because the original isotopic fractions have been altered, producing a wrong radiometric age), scientists can actually see this when examining the rock.

What can some times happen is that he rock, when it forms, is first in a melted state. It then slowly crystallizes over time, but during the process of crystallization(or perhaps it has been re-melted over it's lifetime), it will lose a lot of gas building up inside it. One of the gases it loses might be one used in radiometric dating, so when measuring the fraction there is a lack of a daughter isotope, so such a case the rock might look "young" when measured with radiometric dating. Scientists can usually see that a rock has been re-melted.

Or some times the opposite result can happen. Rocks are altered over their lifetime so they lose a larger fraction of the parent isotope, or come to contain too much of the daughter isotope (which can be because they have been melted and now contain small crystals from other rocks with a higher fraction of the daughter isotope, these inclusions are usually called xenoliths and scientists know how to look for them). In both cases such rocks are obviously not suited for radimetric dating. But some times dishonest creationists will still send them to dating laboratories for dating.

Anyway, a good page on this subject is: http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/evolution/reliability.php

Reliability of radiometric dating

So, are radiometric methods foolproof? Just how reliable are these dates?

As with any experimental procedure in any field of science, these measurements are subject to certain "glitches" and "anomalies," as noted in the literature. Skeptics of old-earth geology make great hay of these examples. For example, creationist writer Henry Morris [Morris2000, pg. 147] has highlighted the fact that measurements of specimens from a 1801 lava flow near a volcano in Hualalai, Hawaii gave apparent ages (using the Potassium-Argon method) ranging from 160 million to 2.96 billion years, citing a 1968 study [Funkhouser1968]. In the particular case that Morris highlighted, the lava flow was unusual because it included numerous xenoliths (typically consisting of olivine, an iron-magnesium silicate material) that are foreign to the lava, having been carried from deep within the earth but not completely melted in the lava. Also, as the authors of the 1968 article were careful to explain, xenoliths cannot be dated by the K-Ar method because of excess argon in bubbles trapped inside [Dalrymple2006]. Thus in this case, as in many others that have been raised by skeptics of old-earth geology, the "anomaly" is more imaginary than real. Other objections raised by creationists are addressed in [Dalrymple2006a].

Well, now, Itsdemtitans. First of all welcome to the forum. Have fun.

Anything Creationists write or say must be viewed from their perspective that a Christian God exists and that their thought processes revolve around the book of Genesis in the Bible. Without that book (Genesis), Creationists as a group, organisation or even singly, would not exist.
Every discovery by science is compared by Creationists with 'the Bible' and if such discoveries contradict their interpretation of 'the Bible', then the science is wrong.
I would recommend that you avoid like the plague any sciencey sounding article that has a Creationist influence. It will be biased and will contain lies to justify their distorted view of the natural world.

28 billion years old??

Teague wrote:28 billion years old??

Yeah.

Since then I've done a lot more looking into radiometric dates. When the moon rocks were first dated, radiometric dating was still in its infancy. Scientists did not know of every single to look for when choosing a sample. Likely they got these wild dates by dating rocks that had lost a lot of their parent element, thus making them seem older than they were. This is sometimes caused by reheating or melting the rock and causing the isotopes trapped inside to be released.

If you look at modern journals you see they give consistent dates and outliers are always reported if the cause is unknown. Even contamination is usually reported.

First of all, I'd like to know how the authors of that tripe came up with the figure of 28 billion years, because I've never seen anything like it in any actual scientific literature.

Let's take an example of an isotope with a suitably long half-life - Thorium 232. This has a half-life of 14 billion years. Its decay products are well known - this diagram from Kaye & Laby illustrates the decay sequence nicely. Ultimately, 232Th decays, via a chain of short-lived intermediates, to 208Pb, which is stable. Consequently, measuring the ratio of 232Th to 208Pb in a rock sample gives you a reasonable indication of its age. Indeed, from the decay equation, you can work out how much of an initial sample of 232Th would be converted to 208Pb, after a given amount of elapsed time. We start with:

N = N0e-kt

Noting that the half-life is 14 billion years, we therefore have:

½N0 = N0e-kT

where T is the half-life. Cancelling out the N0 on both sides and rearranging gives us:

k = ln(2)/T

where ln(x) is the natural logarithm function. So, knowing the half-life, we calculate the decay constant k, which for 232Th becomes:

k = ln(2) ÷ (441,882,000,000,000,000) = 1.568 × 10-18

In case you're wondering where I got that huge number on the left hand side from, it's the number of seconds in 1.4×1010 years.

Right, so armed with this information, we can now work out how much 232Th would be converted to 208Pb in 4.4 billion years. Starting with a 100 Kg sample of 232Th, we would have, after this amount of time, the following amount:

N = 100×e-(kt) = 100×e-0.217 = 80.4 Kg

So, a little under 20% of the sample would have been converted in that time.

As a check to see if the numbers are indeed correct, we should, after a 28 billion year period (which is two half-lives of 232Th, which is why I chose this isotope), have just 25% of our original 232Th left. Let's run the numbers:

N = 100×e-(kt) = 100×e-1.385 = 25 Kg

Bingo.

Now, we'll move on to molar ratios, because these are independent of the masses of the atoms in question. One mole of 232Th is 232 grams, and 1 mole of 208Pb is 208 grams. The calculations still give us the same relationships for the 232Th atoms that have disappeared, and the same equation can still be used, but the advantage of moving to molar ratios, is that the amount of 208Pb produced, when couched in molar ratios, doesn't involve tedious mass conversions. Consequently, for a sample that's 4.4 billion years old, one mole of 232Th will be converted to 0.804 moles of 232Th, and 0.196 moles of 208Pb. Since chemists routinely work with molar ratios, this makes everything more convenient from the calculation side, but still allows us to analyse actual raw data. Consequently, if we alight upon a sample in which the molar ratios of 232Th and 208Pb are 0.804 and 0.196 respectively, then we know we're dealing with a likely primordial sample. Molar ratios biased toward the 232Th side will indicate a sample that solidified at some younger age than 4.4 billion years, again calculable in the above manner.

Now comes the fun part. Scientists don't just happily assume that their samples will always yield nice data like this, regardless of lies peddled to the contrary by creationists. Instead, they perform other tests in order to ensure that they have as much information about the provenance of the sample as possible. So, for example, with a terrestrial sample here on Earth, scientists would check other isotopes and their parent/daughter nuclide ratios, to provide cross-checking, and would also perform tests to determine if the sample had been subject to other phenomena affecting molar ratios of substances of interest. Earth provides a number of these, one important one being groundwater movement dissolving out soluble minerals, and transporting them to lower strata. Geologists could probably cite several other processes that could exert similar effects upon molar ratios, but since I'm not a geologist, I'll leave it to them to come here and discuss this.

As a consequence, if one set of parent/daughter nuclides occurs in molar ratios that are consonant with a given age, but one outlier exists yielding a different age, then this is a clue to the scientists, that something of interest happened to that sample. Either it began with an anomalous composition of elements, or it acquired one via other processes before being collected. Which is usually what tends to be reported in the literature, specifically to alert other future scientists to the possibility of anomalous compositions and their effect upon the data. This is reported perfectly honestly in the literature, specifically to warn other researchers to check their samples for such anomalous compositions before performing any actual calculations, and quite often, examples of anomalous results arising from calculations not taking account of said checks, are provided to illustrate the errors that can arise if one does not apply due diligence and rigour.

It would not surprise me in the least, if [1] this is precisely what happened with the lunar rock samples, and [2] the resulting reporting had been duplicitous quote mined by creationists, leaving out all the important caveats that would inevitably appear in any genuine scientific reportage. Indeed, I can imagine one entirely plausible scenario that would result in an anomaly of this very sort with 232Th, namely, the rock sample was formed with additional 208Pb in its matrix. Now here on Earth, this would become apparent early on in the testing, because here on Earth, that initial additional 208Pb would form easily recognisable crystalline minerals, and the presence of those would be an immediate pointer to the fact that this sample began with additional lead.

Lunar rocks, on the other hand, are subject to somewhat different weathering processes to those on Earth. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, together attenuate cosmic rays and charged particles from the solar wind, more or less eliminating weathering processes arising from those sources, whilst the atmosphere provides a different set of weathering phenomena of its own. On the surface of the Moon, however, the rocks are exposed to the vacuum of space, and to direct weathering by the solar wind. NASA has already alighted upon the results of this, in the form of nanophase iron, which occurs in measurable quantities in lunar rock samples, but which is only seen on Earth in artificially irradiated mineral samples. Now, of course, it's not just iron that's subject to cosmic ray and charged particle spallation of this sort - other elements will also be subject thereto. Consequently, I would expect any primordial lunar samples containing enhanced initial 208Pb to contain that lead in a nanophase form, which, lo and behold, would be distributed in the rock sample in a manner difficult to distinguish from the distribution arising from 232Th decay. Of course, I'll await some suitably informed words from actual analysts of the samples in question before suggesting that this is what happened, but the fact that I can alight, with relatively little effort, upon a plausible natural mechanism for the appearance of skewed molar ratios in a lunar rock sample, should be telling you that the actual scientists can think of a lot more, and go looking for them.

I think this covers the bases fairly neatly.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:4 1/2 billion year old Moon-cheese? Not half as rancid as creationist claims.

In their case it'd be moon cheesy sticks?