Intelligent Design

The beginning of my argument is that our dating methods are faulty. Radiometric dating is the most commonly used dating method on igneous rocks, not sedimentary which is the rock type that commonly contains fossils. Radiometric dating measures the decay of unstable parent atoms into stable daughter atoms. To measure age they have to make 3 assumptions. First the initial conditions of the substance is known. In radiometric dating this means that we know how many parent atoms (unstable ions) were present and it is assumed that no daughter ions were present. The second assumption is that the sample hasn't been altered by any other forces. The third assumption is that the decay rate of atoms is constant. Although these assumptions have to be made we can't be sure about any of them. A simple example of radiometric dating is an hourglass. Normally when an hour glass has half the sand in the top and half in the bottom it would be assumed that 30 minutes have passed. However this makes the assumptions that no sand was in the bottom when the hourglass was started (daughter atom already being present), that no sand was added or taken out (altered by other processes), and that the size of the neck never changed (decay rate). Now in an hourglass some of these things are impossible because it's a closed system, but in nature anything can happen. Radiometric dating will only accurately age igneous rocks from perfect conditions. There is even practical proof that radiometric dating gives inflated ages. A group of scientists used radiometric dating to age rocks created in the Mt. St. Helen's eruption and these rocks gave ages that were much higher than 30 years. Carbon-14 dating has similar problems. Carbon 14 is the dating method used on once living organisms. Carbon dating measures the transformation of C-14 into Nitrogen, this transformation takes place because C-14 is unstable. While an organism is alive it takes C-14 though eating. Although C-14 is being changed into N while the organism is living it is being replaced with more C-14. When it dies C-14 intake stops but C-14 continues to transform into Nitrogen. Carbon dating requires 3 pieces of knowledge to figure out an age. The first is is how much C-14 the organism started with. To figure this out scientists use a modern similar organism and compare the level of C-12 to C-14 they then assume this is how much C-14 the dead organism had. The second part is to figure out how much C-14 is left. Finally in order to compute an age scientists have to know the half-life of C-14, or the amount of time it would take half of the C-14 to become Nitrogen. The problem with dating is we don't know if conditions on the earth were the same billions of years ago to figure out if we can use modern organisms to find out how much C-14 dead organisms should have started with. Because of all this Carbon dating is accurate only to about 1,000 years and only when the sample comes from perfect conditions. Even in ideal conditions carbon dating has another problem that makes it hypocritical. The two isotopes of carbon used to figure out how much C-14 an organism started with, C-14 and C-12, aren't in equilibrium, something that only should have taken about 30,000 years.