Some questions on carbon dating (radiometric carbon dating)?

Question

Ok, If carbon 14 has a half life of less than 6,000 years how can you determine the age of an organism that has been dead for 60,000 years? Is there still enough carbon 14 available to give an accurate reading? If not, how do you determine the age?

And also, why do so many fundamentalist christian groups like creationists pour scorn on search research?
Do they have any viable arguments to contradict evidence which, to my knowledge at least, is considered acceptable in the general scientific community?
Who is right, creationists, scientists or somewhere in between?
Thanks

Thanks for the humour on a serious subject Herman!
It sometimes helps!

Hi Clevergirl. I've heard more than enough from creationists thanks. I intentionally posed this question to a more secular audience. I want to hear their side of things

Answer 1

I posted this in answer to your question in biology, you're right that it belongs better here so I'll repost it:

A half-life means that over that period, half of the element will have decayed. So for C-14, half will have decayed into C-12 after 5568 years. But there'll still be half left. After another 5568 years, half of what was left will have decayed, but there'll still be a quarter of the original amount. And so on.

After about 50,000 years, the amount left is negligible so it is not possible to measure things older than that using this method, contrary to many creationists' claims. Luckily there are plenty of other methods which are able to date much longer periods.

As to why a small minority of Christians reject science, it is because they are unable to imagine a concept of God greater than their small minds can hold, so they limit him to their own limitations. In several years of observing creationist arguments, I have never seen one that is valid.

As Richard Dawkins says: "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."


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Just to add: it's amazing how ignorant some of the creationists are. Chas, of course coal is going to contain carbon - that's its major component. No "evolutionist" (of course dating techniques have nothing to do with biological evolution, but you can't expect a creationist to understand simple things like that) would ever claim that coal should contain no carbon.

Answer 2

Carbon dating can only date things to a max of around 50000 years.
According to evolutionists coal should not contain any carbon any more. Yet no coal has been found which does not contain carbon!

Other radiometric methods are used to date longer ages. However there are many assumptions involved. The fact that rock from a recent volcano was dated as millions of years old should be enough to make people treat radiometric dates with a good deal of scepticism.

Most dating methods indicate that the earth is young. See link 1 below.
There are many 'viable arguments' which indicate that the evolutionary hypothesis is not a good explanation of the evidence that we see around us. see link 2

rhsaunders above is gravely mistaken if he thinks evolution is proven. I suspect he does not udnerstand what science actually is.
The fact is that one cannot prove what happened in the past using the scientific method of observation, test, repeat, and so on.
Evolution and Creation are philosphical ideas or worldviews, within which people interpret the actual evidence very differently. We all have the same evidecne with which to do science in the present.
It's a bit rich for an evolutionist to claim that creationists ignore evidence - in my experience it is evolutionists that ignore the awkward evidence.
Creationists are in favour of all evidence being shown and all points of view being given an airing. rhsaunders is a typical evolutionist - trying to rubbish creationists without engaging in debate on the evidence.

Daniel (below), you demonstrate just how little some evolutionists actually use your brain to think about the issues!

Answer 3

By knowing the half life of an isotope you can determine how old a material is by looking at the ratio of the parent isotope and it's daughter isotope. Carbon-14's daughter isotope is Nitrogen. The half life of C-14 is 5730 years, so we can effectively date materials up to 100,000 years before there is no longer enough tracable carbon to measure.

The problem in the case of carbon dating is in how carbon is absorbed into organic material, and how it is created. The earth is shielded from solar radiation by it's magnetosphere. C-14 forms when radiation penetrates the magnetosphere and knocks neutrons out of nuclei in the upper atmosphere. These neutrons then bump into ordinary Nitrogen atoms this creates Carbon-14. Radioactive C-14 combines with Oxygen just like regular Carbon-12 to form Carbon Dioxide which is then taken into plants and animals like you and me when we breathe. When an organism dies, it no longer takes in C-14 and so the Carbon clock starts ticking.

The problem is, that different plants will absorb C-14 differently then they absorb regular C-14. In addition, fluxuations in the magnetosphere will cause more or less C-14 to be produced, affecting the overall Carbon Nitrogen and Oxygen ratios.

It addition, other isotopes used to date, such as Potassium (K) can also affect parent-daughter ratios when they are created. The isotope of K-40's daughter isotope is Argon-40. It has been observed that Argon may also be present when K-40 is formed. This has actually been observed in Volcanic eruptions in New Zealand in the mid-1900's. The presence of Argon affects the parent:daughter ratio making materials appear much older or younger than they really are.

Another problem is the presence of C-14 in fossils older than 100,000 years old. As mentioned earlier, Carbon-14 is only effective in dating up to 100,000 years old. Normally to date these fossils we evaluate the strata in which we find them... if we find a fossil in layers that we date by other methods to be several million years old, then we can presume the fossil lived about the time that layer was made. However some of these fossils have been shown to have very high amounts of Carbon-14 in them. This would indicate that either the Carbon was somehow absorbed afterwards, or that it is not as old as the strata it was found.

As to the implications of these findings, time will tell as we come to a better understanding of our dating methods, and the universe in which we exist.

Answer 4

There are many techniques used for dating artifacts; carbon-14 decay is just one. It would be difficult to use C-14 to date something as old as 60,000 years, but the scientists have a huge bag of tricks for doing this sort of thing and keep inventing more all the time. One such that has become popular of late is to compare C-12 with C-13. Life prefers C-12, so differentiation occurs. Some of the Ice Age glaciers have recently been dated using this stunt.
Creationists are extremely good at ignoring evidence that they don't like. But that's their problem; evolution is now a proven fact, and having further debate about it is a waste of time. That would be true even if evolution were not proven, because it can be proven that believing in any supernatural intervention leads to no useful conclusions.

Answer 5

Oi I'm a christian! You should ask that on a christian site where they can stick up for themselves. I'm a christian studying ecology... doesn't really match I guess. And I say that yes there is science but God created it, you can't create the whole universe in six days, but to God, who lives forever and ever and ever, maybe six days is more like six millenniums? And do you disagree that humans were made from the earth? When science says that they were created by these funny little organisms that were from the earth and that could survive without oxygen and evolved into fish and then in land fish and then into mammals and then into apes and then into you (over a long period of course).
Anyway, in answer to your original question I think you can.

Answer 6

All that may be true, but you should never kiss on a first carbon-date. The creationists think it's immoral (plus some of those Carbons are right slappers)

Answer 7

Scientific method is a testable way of investigating reality. We set up a theory and test it by hypothesis. It is an incredibly powerful tool and the method that has given us everything around you - from early empirical scientific methods (If I beat the grain I can separate wheat from chaff) to more recent quantum physics. Evolution is a proven scientific theory. Creationism is a belief, in the same way that one might choose to believe in Bertrand Russell's teapot orbiting the earth. Creationists believe to the letter a collection of millenary texts and essentially ask that you do not question them - you either believe, or you don't. Creationism has nothing to do with religious faith, and a lot to do with being a muppet.