What was unexpectedly found in Dinosaur Bones, Coal and Diamonds_ - Dr. Andrew Snelling

How can we then depend so much upon the radiometric dating? Well, if we're in a court of law, the judge and jury would throw out the evidence, because they couldn't really depend on these methods giving you reliable, accurate results. But we would say that we do have an eyewitness that has given us testimony as to what really happened in that time. Yeah, God has given us an eyewitness testimony in the book of Genesis. And he's laid out the history of the earth, starting with supernatural creation, where trees were already bearing fruit. If we were going back and looking at those trees from our everyday experience, we'd expect those trees have been around for a while to have grown and produced fruit. And we see rocks that, by our normal observation today, we would think have taken a long time to form. But no, God was there and he supernaturally, instantly created. And that's what he says in his eyewitness record in the book of Genesis. And then he goes on to say there was a time when he judged the earth, because of human wickedness, at the time of the flood. And at that time, he caused catastrophic things to happen. Water came from inside of the earth, molten material came from inside the earth, and the earth's surface was totally reshaped. All the high hills and the mountains were covered in water. And Noah came out to a totally different world to the one that he'd experienced before the flood. And so geological processes were speeded up at such magnitudes and rates that we can't even imagine today. We can only get hints at by stepping back and looking at the geological record, and looking at the big picture of the geologic record. I think that's very important. Just like we stepped back before, yes, we can see this cinder cone volcano behind us looks quite large, but it's small by comparison to what we see, even in human history, with Mount St. Helens. But these lava flows are small by comparison to what we see in the geologic record. And so we see evidence that we need to open our eyes to a bigger picture, on a bigger scale, and start to think in terms of what was going on around the world at that time. And the conventional paradigm seems to cut itself off from that picture — from the picture that the present is not really the key to the past, because obviously the past holds some massive, massive catastrophic events that are not going on today. In fact, the Bible would say that the past is the key to the present. If you want to understand why the way the world is today, you've got to understand what happened in the past. And yet the conventional wisdom is that we should look only at the present and extrapolate that back into the past. And Charles Lyell went so far as to say only present-day rates can be used to interpret the past. But fortunately, conventional geologists are now realizing that that doesn't work. That doesn't work. Well, Andrew, when we talk about that accelerated decay — my dad worked in nuclear physics for a long time — that generates heat. Does that raise an issue for us? It does raise an issue, but we can answer the question from almost the negative. If there was a lot of heat, you would melt rocks. So you would expect evidence of melting of rocks. And we don't see that. So that indicates there may not have been excessive heat produced by that accelerated decay. Another indicator — we talked about radio halos. Once you get to a certain temperature, the damage in the crystals gets healed. The atoms vibrate and they snap back into their original positions. And so the halos disappear. So the very fact… the very fact that we can see radio halos in rocks that were formed, you know, in the past indicates that there hasn't been excessive amount of heat. The fact that the radio halos, the polonium ones, require accelerated decay, yet we can still see the end product, the polonium radio halo, indicates that during that accelerated decay, there can't have been a lot of heat produced. Another indication is even with the helium. We talked about the helium leaking out of those crystals. We know that if you heat the crystal up, then you're potentially going to leak that helium out more rapidly. Everyone's familiar with the helium balloons. Yes. You know, you leave them in your living room for a while, they float at the top of the ceiling, but eventually that helium leaks out and they'll start to fall to the ground. Now, if you start to warm that, it's going to… because it's going to expand, it's going to force its way out of those… the membrane holding it in much faster. So there's a number of indicators that give us a clue that the heat may not have been a problem that some people have suggested. I mean, we're still exploring these issues. That's what I enjoy about science. You know, if we had all the answers, there'd be no hard work to do. And that's what makes it exciting. And you can live with the tension of not knowing all the answers. So the fact that I can give you several lines of evidence that indicate that heat might not have been a problem, leads me not to be concerned about that being a problem. Where I've got strong evidence, as well, that the decay rates have been much faster in the past. And as we said before, a rock that's older will have experienced more accelerated decay. So it's not as if that it isn't a tool that we can use, but we have to adjust our thinking about how we use that tool. It cannot give us reliable absolute ages. So we're still left with some mysteries associated with this whole radiometric dating issue. That's right. But after that eight years, did you leave more convinced or less convinced in the record that's in Genesis? Oh, much more convinced. Now we had concrete lines of evidence that we could point to and say, yes, the Bible is giving us an accurate historic record. First of all, was that if we use the different dating methods, the radioactive parent atoms, on the same samples from the same rock units, that we invariably got discordant ages. And you would expect the same? Well, normally the textbook said that you'd have the methods all giving you the same results because they all started at time zero. The clock started at time zero. So what we discovered is that yes, they would have started at time zero, but that the decay rate must have speeded up by different amounts for different parent atoms. And we're talking about very large changes. We also established that the radioactive decay had happened. There was a lot of radioactive decay that happened. We had two lines of evidence of that. That was the radio halos, which is the little bullets fired by the uranium decaying. And also, sometimes a uranium atom splits, as in an atomic bomb. We call that a fission. And so you actually find the particles also damage the crystal. So fission tracks, radio halos, that were evidence of a lot of radioactive decay had occurred, but obviously it had occurred at a very rapid rate. We also saw that in relation to helium leakage. It gave an age of only 6,000 years. So that in real time of 6,000 years, in some time in the past, there'd been a billion and a half years worth of radioactive decay. So these are the pieces of the puzzle that we came to. And this questions the whole conventional way of thinking of Earth history. And yet it strengthens our argument that we need to look back at the book of Genesis, God's eyewitness record, that indicates Earth history was much shorter. And that's what we're seeing from these results, from looking at the radioactive decay in rocks, both the volcanic rocks that we see here, as well as radiocarbon in fossils and fossil vegetation, et cetera. And this fits in with the picture we have here. Remember we said before this lava flow is only small in comparison to the volumes of lavas that were erupted catastrophically in the past. We see lots of indications of catastrophic geological processes in the past. Not just one line of evidence — volcanoes, radioactive decay is another line of evidence, and more that we'll talk about when I show you some of the evidence down there in Sedona. I had no idea how many crystal shops were in Sedona. No, and I'm glad you let me stop by because I wanted to get this pet piece of petrified wood. Arizona is famous for its petrified wood, and it's part of what we need to discuss here. Well, when we were talking about isotopes, one of the things we didn't address was the whole area of carbon-14. I mean, most people are familiar, and yet I'm not sure we know exactly what that is. Can you describe that? Well, first of all, we need to clear up a confusion. Most people think that radiocarbon has been used to date rocks. Whenever they think of radioactive dating, they think of radiocarbon because that's what they're used to hearing. But radiocarbon isn't used to date rocks because most rocks don't have carbon in them. And what we need is organic carbon because it's intrinsic to the methodology or how you understand how radiocarbon works. How does a tree, then, get carbon-14 in it? Well, it's simple because the radiocarbon is produced in the upper atmosphere. Cosmic rays bombarding the Earth's atmosphere turns nitrogen atoms into carbon-14 atoms, which circulates into the carbon dioxide that we breathe. And so it's also taken in by the plants during photosynthesis. So it's in the wood. It's in the leaves. It's in the vegetables we eat. Animals take it into their bodies. So it's in the animals that we eat. So it gets into our bodies. So not only are all these plants around us radioactive with radiocarbon, but we are ourselves. So you have it, I have it. Correct. And as long as we live, we're taking more radiocarbon into our bodies. But when we die, we stop taking radiocarbon into our bodies. And so a dinosaur dies, it stops taking in radiocarbon, and then over the thousands of years, it's getting less and less radiocarbon. And as I said before, you know, after 90,000 years, there should be no radiocarbon left in dinosaur bones. If every atom of the earth was radiocarbon, it all would have decayed away in less than a million years. So if you already believe the fossils, dinosaur fossils, the coal beds, all those things are millions of years old, you wouldn't expect to find any radiocarbon in them. And yet you do. And this is one of the things that we found when we studied petrified wood like this at different levels in the geologic record. I was doing research on this. I was collecting samples in England, in Australia, and I sent them to the radiocarbon laboratories, and sure enough, they had radiocarbon in them. So this is another aspect of this whole time question, because if these things are believed to be millions of years old, like this petrified wood, and yet it has radiocarbon in it that says it's only thousands of years old, then it means that it calls into question the conventional time frame. And so we wanted to test this because we'd seen in the literature — this is in the conventional literature — in the 1980s, they developed a new methodology for measuring radiocarbon. They could count atoms of radiocarbon. That's how good it was. But they wanted to be sure that they weren't getting any contamination in their laboratories. And so they took samples like petrified wood, they took samples of dinosaur bones, and coal, and oil, and natural gas, and limestone even, and they put them in their equipment, and every sample they tested had radiocarbon in it. And this was reported in the literature, and they ignored it. So in our research, we decided, well, we'll test that for ourselves. We wanted to be sure that, you know, this wasn't an artifact of the conventional experimental method. So we selected samples from 10 different coal beds around the United States — some coal beds that were conventionally as young as 40 million years, some coal beds that were conventionally over 300 million years old. And when we tested them for radiocarbon, they had radiocarbon in them, and they all yielded the same radiocarbon age, which meant that these plants must have all lived at the same time and died at the same time. And that fits the flood paradigm, because these would have been pre-flood trees that were all buried together at the same time. But we went further. We thought, okay, let's test out some material that's come from inside the earth that's got carbon in it. So we selected diamonds, because diamonds come from deep inside the earth. Remember the volcano that we were at? Yes. The SP crater? Well, from inside the earth, we have these volcanic eruptions that bring diamonds up. They're made down deep inside the earth, which means the diamonds have never been in contact with the atmosphere until they're brought to the surface. Because carbon-14 is produced in the atmosphere, we wouldn't expect them to have any radiocarbon in them. Because also, they're the hardest substance known so they can't be contaminated. So even when they arrive at the earth's surface, you're not going to exchange carbon-14 in the atmosphere with carbon in the diamond. So whatever the diamond brought up from the depth of the earth has been bottled up and locked in. So we tested the diamonds. We got several diamonds from Africa, and every one of those diamonds yielded radiocarbon at much the same age. It was detectable radiocarbon. Now we presented this research at a conference, the American Geophysical Union, one of the largest bodies of geologists that get together. We had a poster presentation, and unbeknownst to us, one of the scientists that saw our presentation of the diamond evidence was from a radiocarbon laboratory. So he went back to his own university radiocarbon laboratory, got his own diamonds, and reported similar results to what we had found. Here's the sticking point. The diamonds are supposed to be between one and three billion years old. That's the conventional age. For them to be only thousands of years old flies in the face of the conventional wisdom. So when they published their results, what did they say? They tried to put it down to machine error, which of course is ludicrous, because even if you have no sample in your machine, have nothing in the machine, you won't get any radiocarbon. So if it was machine error, you'd expect it to show up radiocarbon when there was nothing in there. When you put the diamond in, it shows detectable radiocarbon, and it's been reproduced. So again, this is an illustration. You know, we did our own sampling, got our own laboratory results, and verified what was already in the open scientific literature for several decades. Whether it's petrified wood, coal, dinosaur bones, the shells of shellfish, they all contain radiocarbon — all through the fossil record. And so that tells us that these layers aren't millions of years old. Well, that brings us back again to the issue of the power of a paradigm. That if evidence doesn't fit in your paradigm, we have a tendency to discard it or ignore it. Exactly. Yeah, it's like having a set of blinkers. I'm only going to believe what I see that fits in with what I already believe. And anything outside that's considered anomalous, I'll just shelve it as a tiny mystery and ignore it. And yet, the more that a paradigm is challenged, the more likelihood that there could be a switch. Unless, of course, there's a spiritual dimension. And because, let's be honest, when we're talking about radiocarbon, these radiocarbon results, we're talking about an earth that's only thousands of years old. We're talking about trees being buried in coal beds all in the one year during the flood. That's why they gave the same age. Then that's radically different from the conventional paradigm. They've excluded God from the picture. As soon as I have to admit that maybe the Bible is correct, that the flood paradigm of earth history, the Genesis paradigm of earth history, is the correct view, then the Genesis paradigm includes a creator, God, to whom man is accountable. And that's why there's a spiritual dimension to it. And that's why they can deliberately choose to ignore the evidence, which is what the Apostle Peter said in 2 Peter chapter 3. They'll be willingly ignorant. It's not that the evidence isn't there, it's that they've chosen to ignore it. And we're faced again with the issue of how closely tied together the issue of time is to both of these paradigms. Because if you have a short period of time, in terms of all that we see around here, then it validates the history that's been recorded for us in Genesis. And just as you said, that brings us face-to-face with God. Time is really the hero of the plot, whichever way you look at it. And this is the battle of these two views of earth history. It's a question of the time scale involved.