Excerpt from Richard's Milton's book The Facts of Life

The purpose of the article is to show how creationists interpret scientific data. This interpretation is incompatible with the interpretative framework of the theory of evolution. Both creationist and evolutionist theories are examples that illustrates the thesis of the theoretical indeterminancy. The thesis is explained in the article Is the Theory of Evolution a Scientific Theory . I will suggest that you read that article first, before proceeding with this one.

What follows is some parts of the book The Facts of Life , written by Richard Milton. According to Milton, it can be shown that radiocarbon dating is highly unreliable method of dating, since it can give a great variety of results from the same sample. It also contradicts with other kinds of radiometric methods of dating, like Potassium-Argon dating or Rubidium-Strontium Dating. I will not so much dwell on those parts in his book which provides some reasons for their unreliability. I will instead focus on those passages that deals with the evidence of the Earth's young geological age.

Evidence of the Earth's young geological age

There is a known mystery, called "a mystery of the Earth's missing radiogenic Helium." If the Earth were 4,600 millions years old, then there would be roughly 10,000 billion of tons of radiogenic helium 4 in the atmosphere. Actually, there is only around 3.5 billion tons present - several thousand times less than there should be. If we take the measured amount of radiogenic helium at its face value, and make the conservative assumption that the atmosphere, to begin with, contained no radiogenic helium, then the Earth's age comes out at about 175,000 years. The major sources of uncertainty about this dating method are, first, that there may have been some helium 4 present to begin with; second that radiogenic helium may well be entering the atmosphere from the Sun; and third that alpha decay may have been speeded up by outside factors. In each case the figure of 175,000 years is inaccurate in that it would be too great.

Dr Thomas Barnes, Professor of Physics at the University of Texas, has made a special study of the Earth's magnetic field. The strength of the magnetic field has been measured scientifically since the nineteenth century and has shown from statistical studies of these measurements that the field is decaying exponentially with a half-life which is calculated to be around 1,400 years.

This rate of decay is relevant to measurements of the Earth's age, because it is a pointer to a practical upper limit. The half-life value calculated for the magnetic field means that 1,400 years ago the flux density of the field (its "magnetic strength") was twice as strong as today; 2,800 years ago it was four times as strong and so on. Some 7,000 years ago the field would have been 32 times as strong as at present, and 10,000 years ago the field would have been more than a hundred times its present strength.

While this measuring technique does not make possible a direct measurement of the Earth's age, it places a limit on the possible age range which may be considered for life on Earth and limits the range to something in the order of 10,000 years or less. Beyond this the flux density of the Earth's magnetic field would have been impossibly great.

Other evidences for the young Earth is from the observations of meteoric dust. If the earth is 4,500 million years old, then some 63 million tons of dust have settled on its surface. The earth has a surface area in the region of 5.5 * 10^15 square feet, and compacted dust can be assumed to have density in the region of 140 pounds per cubic foot. These figures indicate that enough meteoric dust would have entered the atmosphere to create a layer 180-feet thick. This layer clearly does not exist, nor anything like it.

It has been suggested that all or most of this dust has fallen into the ocean, on to the sea bottom, and any remainder has become mixed with terrestrial dust from the rocks of the Earth's crust. But the suggestion is unconvincing since the mineral composition of meteorites and meteoric dust is chemically distinct from the rocks of the Earth's crust, containing large amounts of nickel content of meteoric dust to be 2.5 per cent, some 300 times greater than in the rocks of the crust. There are no concentrations of nickel such as this either on the earth or on the ocean bottoms. There is a total of around 7,000 billion pounds of nickel dissolved in the oceans. The total amount of nickel carried from the landmass into the seas each year is around 750 million pounds. This means that, on one hand the total nickel dissolved in the seas could have been transported there in as little as 9,000 years, and on the other, there does not appear to be a hidden reservoir of meteoric nickel.

The dust problem applies not only to the earth, but to the Moon as well, which uniformitarians also believe to be billions of years old. Before the first manned landing by Apollo 11 in 1969, it was feared by some lunar geologists that the dust layer on the Moon's surface - undisturbed by atmospheric movement or by oceans - might be so thick that the landing craft would simply disappear into the sea of dust. In the event, of course, Neil Amstrong took his 'giant leap' into merely an inch or two of dust -the sort of amount that would accumulate in thousands, rather than billions of years.

Evidences from astronomical studies also suggest that the earth is very young. Astronomical measurements and observation and the use of computer simulation to study the formation of the solar system have suggested two methods of indicating an upper limit to the Earth's age. First there are the short-period comets - such as Halley's comet, Arund-Rolenson, and the recently discovered Kohoutek. Russian astronomer Professor S. K. Vsekhsviatsky, Director of the Kiev Observatory, has studied periodic comets extensively and written two standard works on the subject. He has come to the conclusion that they are losing their luminosity and the matter which constitutes them at such rapid rate that a comet will disintegrate completely within 50 to 60 revolutions of the solar system. Halley's comet could thus be less than 6,000 years old.

Several short-period comets observed over the last 100 years have failed to return and there are cases where comets appear to have disintegrated while being observed, confirming Vsekhsviatsky's prediction. This has happened very recently, in May 1991, when Halley's comet, after its latest rendezvous with Earth, was seen to break up as it moved away.

In addition there is the Poynting-Robertson effect which predicts that interplanetary dust particles will be pushed out of the solar system and into space by the pressure of radiation from the Sun, while larger particles will be slowed down in their orbits and swept into the Sun. The existence of solar wind capable of causing such effects was predicted in 1951 and confirmed experimentally in 1962 by a US spacecraft sent to Venus. The probe found a steady stream of protons and electrons around the Earth with a density of between one and ten particles per cubic centimetre. Significantly, both of the dust dispersion effects are predicted to take place in less than 100,000 years after planetary formation.

It is interesting that the measured rate of generation of carbon 14 in the atmosphere as exceeding the rate of extinction by as much as 38 per cent, indicating that the 30,000 years or so needed by the terrestrial reservoir to attain equilibrium have not yet elapsed. Using Libby's own equations, the atmosphere can be "dated" by carbon 14 as being roughly 10,000 years old.

It is now accepted that the present continental land masses are fragments of a prehistoric super-continent. Although uniformitarians have attempted to reconcile this break-up with long time scales and slow gradual processes, the only realistic model so far proposed is the ice-cap rupture model of Cook, which entails sudden explosive processes and which involves an ancient Arctic being dissipated as recently as 10,000 years ago. However, this does not rule out an ancient Earth, but it does place severe limitations on the antiquity of origin of many species.

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