The Radioisotope Timescale

But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain.

(Titus 3:9) KJV

Mainstream science (SciPop) has a timescale that’s designed to rationalize biological evolution. Along the way it’s picked up several pieces of supposedly supporting evidence, one of which is radiocarbon and radioisotope dating.

The way that young Earth creation (YEC) folk try to get around this is to take the opposing view, that the decay constant isn’t constant, but it looks like the real problem, the nuance, has been the application of the half-life rate law to nuclear decay. In this scenario nuclear decay has been exponential (initially rapid but slowing down at an ever decreasing rate).

On one hand this matches observations and it’s being reflected in the SciPop press with articles like radioactive decay rates may not be constant after all. In the Biblical narrative nuclear decay began at the fall of man in Genesis 3 with a massive burst of radiation and it’s been cooling down ever since.

In SciPop the premise that the Earth is billions of years old has been used to induce a rationalization of evidence to fit this premise. It’s a giant pile of circular reasoning. The experimental measurement of isotope ratios in rocks gives us a scale of relative dates, so we can arrange samples from oldest to youngest, but not absolute dates so you can’t use it to rationalize a fictional timescale of billions of years. The experimental measurements are what they are, they just don’t prove anything. As such, radiometric dating is pseudoscience.

Up until now the SciPop folks thought that they had a silver bullet which would take out the YEC notion of exponential decay. This is when they like to roll out one of their big guns, math, and induce more rationale along the lines of: if all of the nuclear decay on Earth had taken place within the last 6,000 years, then the heat generated would have been enough to melt the surface of the Earth. You’ll find posts like were Adam and Eve toast?

Fortunately, the theory of Biblical gravitation, and the core accretion model gives us a way to shoot SciPop to pieces so it evens out. The Earth formed around a gravitational singularity which was created on the second day. It caused high atomic weight elements to be concentrated in the core. When nuclear decay began the core melted, not the surface, which is why hell is at the center of the Earth.

1. Periods of geological time were established before radiometric dating was possible,
2. most fossils are found in rocks that can’t be dated using radiometric techniques,
3. it depends on assuming a constant rate of nuclear decay,
4. it’s an inductive rationalization of the premise of an ancient Earth.

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