Yesterday I posted a simple story about the Glen Rose dinosaur site now having a Creationism Museum near it and about the amount of attention these anti-intellectuals are getting from the press. (It started as a tongue-in-cheek apology to my Kentucky-bred wife, saying that now Texas was a backward as her home state.) What I never expected was a landslide volley of people on both sides wading in on the science at hand of dating fossils.
The science is called Carbon Dating. And this is going to take some math skills but I found an article at Google from “How things Work” (I give them the credit here) to explain in simple terms carbon dating. Here goes.
As soon as a living organism dies, it stops taking in new carbon. The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 at the moment of death is the same as every other living thing, but the carbon-14 decays and is not replaced. The carbon-14 decays with its half-life of 5,700 years, while the amount of carbon-12 remains constant in the sample. By looking at the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in the sample and comparing it to the ratio in a living organism, it is possible to determine the age of a formerly living thing fairly precisely.
A formula to calculate how old a sample is by carbon-14 dating is:
t = [ ln (Nf/No) / (-0.693) ] x t1/2
t = [ ln (Nf/No) / (-0.693) ] x t1/2
where ln is the natural logarithm, Nf/No is the percent of carbon-14 in the sample compared to the amount in living tissue, and t1/2 is the half-life of carbon-14 (5,700 years).
So, if you had a fossil that had 10 percent carbon-14 compared to a living sample, then that fossil would be:
t = [ ln (0.10) / (-0.693) ] x 5,700 years
t = [ (-2.303) / (-0.693) ] x 5,700 years
t = [ 3.323 ] x 5,700 years
t = 18,940 years old
Because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years, it is only reliable for dating objects up to about 60,000 years old. However, the principle of carbon-14 dating applies to other isotopes as well. Potassium-40 is another radioactive element naturally found in your body and has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Other useful radioisotopes for radioactive dating include Uranium -235 (half-life = 704 million years), Uranium -238 (half-life = 4.5 billion years), Thorium-232 (half-life = 14 billion years) and Rubidium-87 (half-life = 49 billion years).
The use of various radioisotopes allows the dating of biological and geological samples with a high degree of accuracy. However, radioisotope dating may not work so well in the future. Anything that dies after the 1940s, when Nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors and open-air nuclear tests started changing things, will be harder to date precisely.
Okay, if you made it through that you have a pretty good idea of the science involved in carbon dating. Well, not so fast. The other day two scientists were discussing carbon-14 on the radio and the problem they were having matching some of their dating scenarios up with Radio and Light echo measurements from space. This gets really deep, but here is the lay version: We can measure the expansion of the universe by measuring light as it moves away from us. (Remember the observations in 6th grade science of a train whistle moving toward you or away from you. The Doppler Affect, it is called, makes the sound go up or down depending on weather the source is coming at you or moving away from you. Light and radio waves do exactly the same thing.) So scientist can measure time backward and forward to very precise intervals – say 1,000 years. Precise? You scoff. Yes. Because what they will tell you is that a thousand years, when you are searching in billions of years, is nothing. Dust in the ether. A blink of the cosmos eye.
And the problem they were having is that certain formations that were supposed to be a certain age were actually coming in much older and they could not understand why. So, a physicist from England came up with the idea that carbon-14 might not decay in a linear or straight-line progression. It might, for example decay faster at the first half of its half-life or (as the other side thinks) the latter half of its half-life would see the decomposition of radioactive ingredients faster. They both describe the decomposition as a Bell curve with a growth in the decay and then a settling back to a measured linear line.
Ah-ha, you say. Got you. The world could be only 6,000 years old. Not so fast there Theology Breath. It seems as if the averaged time, even with this Bell curve bump would only move carbon dating 100,000 years or so. Enough to screw up some computations on Earth, but again a drop in the bucket in the great cosmos. And this, they reasoned is why Carbon 14 dating has had some miscalculations. Oh!
So it could be that the world is actually 100,000 years older than we even thought. Or, 100,000 years younger. Either way, it is still in the billions (that is with a B) and not 6,000 years.
And we’ve got the math to prove it. As they say (except on Wall Street) numbers don’t lie.
Shew!
All that to simply say this. Science has a place in our society. It has found cures to diseases. It has helped place men on the Moon and in orbit around the earth and made satellite communication possible giving us things like cell phones and GPS. Science helps us frack thick gummy oil into high-performance gasoline and it has turned salty seawater into fresh, drinkable water. It has made plastics, tanned leather, yielded more cotton production and even made it possible for tiny electrons to flow from the keys of my typewriter-like keyboard here, to this screen, on to you in milliseconds– some of you thousands of miles away.
Yes, Science has done that and thousands of more things that affect our lives each and every day. Not religion. Not evangelical shouting and ranting and raving. But science. Based on one plus one equals two. Two plus two equals four…and so on very logical. And yes, there are theories within science that have not been proven out completely yet. Gravity is a theory. And let me tell you, it works. Might not be able to explain it quite yet. But it is a theory that truly works.
Darwin also comes to mind, but his observations and subsequent observations are so much further down the road in terms of understanding biological development than anything that has ever come out of Dallas Theological Seminary (or any other such school) it is preposterous for us to even consider teaching creationism in school in place of, or even next to, science.
Case in point of science and religion not being on the same page. I wore a linen suit the other evening with a light wool sweater shirt. Very attractive and I didn’t get struck by lightening nor have the horn of a ram gore me to death. Deut.22:11. (Okay I made the part about the ram up.) But the point is that is religion. Not science. It has no logic to it. None.
So here’s the deal. Let the science classes teach science. Theories and all. And if you want to teach hocus pocus theology. Have at it.
But call it theology. Not science.
And please, don’t tell the geeks in fashion class that wool and linen are no-no’s; or all hells going to break loose.
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