Evolution or Creation?
Eight-year
Research Project Supports Young Earth
(Published
in Impact, December 2005, Coral ridge Ministries, PO Box 555, Fort Lauderdale,
FL 33302)
Findings from an eight-year scientific research project seriously challenge the conventional view that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. Creation scientists from the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) project unveiled research results in November at a long-anticipated conference sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research.
The scientific data presented support an earth age close to 6,000 years. "Why are we not surprised" said Tom DeRosa, executive director of Creation Studies Institute, who attended the conference. "Because that's exactly what the Bible says!"
Over 2,200 people attended this conference at Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, California, to witness the culmination of eight years of extensive research by eight scientists with earned doctorates in the fields of geophysics, geology, physics, and meteorology. In 1997 these scientists set out to take a closer look at radioisotope dating, which is the basis for the argument that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. An ancient earth is a necessary ingredient for evolution to be true, since billions of years are needed in the evolutionary model for the universe to mystically assemble itself into its present extraordinarily complex state.
Dr. Russell Humphreys, the RATE team's theoretical physicist, demonstrated that helium, a product of radioisotope decay, was found in the Zircon crystals of granite rock. If the earth was 4.6 billions years old, there would be no leftover helium; it would all have escaped. When measuring how fast helium leaked from the Zircon crystals, Humphreys came to the conclusion that the earth is 6,000 years old.
Dr. Andrew Snelling, an Australian geologist on the team, performed a detailed study of radiohalos (microscopic circular marks left on mica crystals from radioactive decay). He studied over 3,485 slides made from seventy rock samples from Australia, England, Norway, and the United States. The radiohalos caused by the decay of uranium and polonium strongly suggests rapid decay, not a gradual decay process over billions of years. This evidence of rapid nuclear decay, creation scientists believe, is due to catastrophic conditions produced by a worldwide flood.
Dr. John Baumgardner, the geophysicist on the team, studied the age of coal and diamonds, conventionally dated as millions or billions of years old. Because of the rapid rate at which carbon-14 decays, it should not be present in samples older than thousands of years, but the coal and diamonds studied still had carbon-14 in them!
"These results showed the coal and diamonds to be thousands of years old, not millions or billions," said DeRosa. "Evolutionists would have a difficult time supporting long ages with this thorough research."
Dr. Larry Vardiman closed the conference by summarizing the RATE team's findings and affirming that the biblical earth age of thousands, not millions, of years stands the test of science. "Why shouldn't it?" DeRosa said. "After all, it is what Genesis has proclaimed all along."