C14 Dating?

Question

i recently read that radioactive carbon dating is inaccurate or is somehow not correct... please read this and respond as to if it is correct and why creationists are saying the earth is only a few thousand years old yet evolutionists are saying hundreds of millions of years old. here is the link to where i read it: http://www.creationism.org/topbar/faq.htm

Answer 1

No form of dating is 100% accurate. C14 comes close though. It can accurately tell you an period of time something exsisted, but it won't tell you the exact date and year. C14 is carbon, with a half life of just under 6000 years. This means, that after 6000 years, half of the carbon would have transformed into it's daughter isotope. Because of it's fairly low half life (other elements can extend millions of years) we can really only accurately test up to 50,000 years. This is only because after about 9 half lifes, the amount of C14 left is so small it is nearly impossible to detect (although it is possible).

Testing fossils uses other practices, such as using the rock layer in which it was found in. Rocks have other elements with these long half lifes in them, such at millions of years. So if a fossil is found in a rock that is 65 million years old, how else could it've gotten there except 65 million years ago?

C14 needs to be found in once living organisms, such as tissues, plants, animals. That's why we can't use it to date things such as lava domes that the creationalist website states. If we did use C14, we would look for plants that were trapped in the lava flow and see how old they are, but that would not tell us how old the lava flow was. We'd need to use other elements to date.

Answer 2

Carbon 14 dating is inaccurate. A study of tree rings compared with C-14 dating showed about a 3% shorter age using C-14 dating. C-14 dating cannot be used for ages greater than several tens of thousands of years, and certainly not millions of years. Also, anything stated on a creationsim website can be discarded since it is biased. Finally, no credible geoscientist claims the Earth is "hundreds of millions of years old". The Earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago along with the rest of the solar system.

Answer 3

C-14 dating has a relatively high margin of error, due to the extremely long half-life of Carbon 14 atoms. But it remains in use because of the same reason: the long half-life of Carbon-14 atoms.
That doesn't mean that creationists are right, however. It just means that we can't be certain if the earth is 5.12 billion years old or just 4.87 billion years old, for example.

Answer 4

So, in spite of in case you comprehend the 0.5 existence of Potassium, how do you comprehend that in the time of the a million.28 billion years of its existence no longer something has handed off to regulate the potential, concentration, and existence of the substance being examined? no longer each and every little bit of of Potassium in the international is on the comparable potential. in any different case none might exist anymore if the international is 4.5 billion years old. So how do you comprehend the preliminary potential of the Potassium you're sorting out? you comprehend what that's now, even nevertheless it no longer a hazard as much as now its foundation from its modern potential. Sorry, yet there are merely too many variables to be able to %. up a chew of rock, examine its radioactivity, and then declare as a scientific certainty that the rock is XX form of years old.

Answer 5

First of all, you're trying to take information about science from a creationist website. That's like taking your facts on politics from NBC and not expecting a liberal bias!