Recently, while working a flight, two religious loons were seated right next to my jump seat. There they sat, chatting away, and basically comparing notes on their own level of fanaticism, and they got to the subject of science, specifically evolution and the processes by which scientists use to determine the age of artifacts. The first man asked the second how he was able to square his creationist and “young earth” views with what scientists say is fact, supported by so-called “evidence.” “Well,” he said. “Scientists are making conclusions based on assumptions. They only assume the earth is 4.6 billion years old, based on assumptions. The scripture is very clear on this.”
At the time I was hearing this discussion take place I was in uniform, on duty, and actually working the flight; it would have been highly inappropriate of me to take the superstitious whack-a-loon to task, so I held my tongue. But those two guys did get me to thinking: How exactly could one concisely explain a highly complex subject such as radiometric dating to the average American – who is, let’s face it, a fucking idiot – let alone explain it to a superstitious crank that firmly believes – nay! – he knows the world is only about 6,000 years old, and everything we know to be in existence was created in six days by a spooky invisible absentee father figure, in a way that can be easily explained and understood?
This is how scientists measure the rate of radioactive decay:
∫N−1dN=−∫λdt
ln(N(t))−ln(N(0))−λt
ln(N(t)/N(0))
−λt
N(t)/N(0)=e−λt
N(t)=N(0)e−λt
Most people do not understand that. It’s quite literally a foreign language to most of us. So now you see the crux of the problem. How does one explain this?
I think the only way to enlighten creationists is to shoot down their arguments point-by-point. The second man mentioned carbon dating (more accurately known as radiocarbon dating), and he specifically mentioned carbon-14. “How can they say the earth is 4.6 billion years old,” he asks. “They make assumptions based on carbon-14.”
Um, no, sorry. No one that knows what they’re doing is making assumptions based on carbon-14 when regarding anything about a time scale of billions of years. Firstly, after decades of pain-staking research, physicists have been able to quite precisely determine the half-life of radioactive isotopes. Some of these isotopes have half-lives in the billions of years; some have half-lives in the thousands of years; and some even have half-lives that last merely seconds. There are no assumptions being made, based on carbon-14, or anything else. Secondly, carbon-14 has a half-life of only 5,730 years, and is quite useless for measuring something on the evolutionary scale. It is, however, very useful for dating artifacts like the Shroud of Turin and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not quite the right radiometric clock for dating something very old, like the earth or igneous rocks and the objects found near them. Potassium-40 (the potassium-argon clock) is probably better suited for that.
In speaking of assumptions, who, in this case, are the ones jumping to conclusions? The people forming conclusions based on years of careful research, analysis, reason, logic and a certain thing called “evidence,” or the cranks that know the truth because they read it in the Bible? Ah, yes, the Bible. A collection of thousands of years-old allegories and fairy tales, passed on from person to person, tribe to tribe, for hundreds if not thousands of years, before they reached someone literate enough to write them down; translated and transliterated literally hundreds of times, to and from hundreds of languages, many of them long-dead. So, really, who’s making assumptions?