This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition (2008), by Dr. Walt Brown. It is designed to be read online.
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64. Radiometric Dating: Contradictions and Key Assumption
The public has been greatly misled concerning the consistency and trustworthiness of radiometric dating techniques (such as the potassium-argon method, the rubidium-strontium method, and the uranium-thorium-lead method). For example, geologists hardly ever subject their radiometric age measurements to “blind tests.”a In science, such tests are a standard procedure for overcoming experimenter bias. Many published radiometric dates can be checked by comparisons with the evolution-based ages for fossils that sometimes lie above or below radiometrically dated rock. In more than 400 of these published checks (about half of those sampled), the radiometrically determined ages were at least one geologic age in error—indicating major errors in methodologyb and understanding.c One wonders how many other dating checks were not even published because they, too, were in error.
A major assumption underlying all radioactive dating techniques is that decay rates, which have been essentially constant over the past 100 years, have also been constant over the past 4,600,000,000 years. This is a huge and critical assumption that few have questioned. Several lines of evidence show that radioactive decay rates were once much faster than they are today.d A case can be made that earth’s radioisotopes quickly formed and that most decayed at the beginning of a global flood. [See “Energy in the Subterranean Water” on page 438.]