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I was reading the February ‘Here and There’ comments in the War Cry when I noticed the words "a log that’s been scientifically dated as 45,000 years old!" And a little further on the words "logs found mainly around Northland and dated 40,000, 36,000, 16,000 . . ." and I wondered if you understood the terrible implication of these statements?

The first implication is that you are denying the Bible’s chronology. According to the Bible, our planet is very young, around about 6 thousand years. There are many clear evidences for a young earth, based on very accessible data, which I will not list here, but you may follow this line by reading the books listed at the end of the letter.

I know it is easy to accept what seems to be ‘scientific’ statements about an ancient earth, but this is a common failing of the fallen nature - to accept human reasoning rather than stand on the Word of God. I have done it myself several times, unfortunately.

But I presume that the dating, which you mentioned, is based on some sort of radiometric system, i.e. Carbon dating.

Carbon14, or radiocarbon as it is often called, is manufactured in the upper atmosphere by the action of cosmic rays. Ordinary nitrogen (N14) is converted into C14.

Ordinary carbon (C12) is found in the air we breathe, which, of course, is cycled by plants and animals through nature, so that all living things contain carbon.

When C14 has been formed, it behaves just like C12, but the difference is that once formed it begins to decay back to C12. (This is because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which shows that all complex things decay downwards to become less complex).

But there are many great difficulties involved in measuring the amount of C14 in things, and many presumptions are involved.

1. First of all we don’t know how much C14 was in a substance when it died. We have to assume a certain amount, so when we measure the C14 we can make a calculated guess.

2. We have no real idea how much carbon has intruded into the substance, for example, during the Industrial Revolution the whole carbon cycle was upset. Tree-ring studies show fluctuations in carbon, so there might have been fluctuations in the past which we don’t know about. We have to assume that the carbon cycle has been steady for thousands of years, otherwise the system of dating things by Carbon14 cannot be accurate.

The discoverer of C14 dating, W.F.Libby, had great problems with it. In his day he already knew that C14 was entering the system about 12% faster than it was leaving. So Libby built this imbalance into his system.

Modern analysis of the method which Libby started now has a built in error rate of about 35%. Which means that the assumptions have to increase in order to get the results the scientists want.

Coal from Russia, which modern geologists dated as being about 300 million years old yielded a C14 date of only 1680 years.

Natural gas from Alabama and Mississippi, dated by modern geologists as being 50 to 135 million years old had a C14 date of a mere 30,000 to 34,000 years respectively.

Bones of a sabre-tooth tiger from the LaBrea tar pits (near Los Angeles), which were dated by evolutionists as about 100,000 to 1 million years old, had a C14 date of only 28,000 years.

These (above) dates were obtained by modern C14 methods, and the results surprised and puzzled the scientists, because despite all their assumptions, and despite drastic modification of the C14 parameters, they obtained results which totally defied their expectations.

The work of Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell have combined to strike tremendously destructive blows at the Church, and, sadly, there are many ‘men of the cloth’ who actually preach the atheistic dogma of these two godless men. Gradually the poison of Darwin and Lyell has filtered down into the church, until today, where we find born-again Christians who hold the view that the Genesis account and the long-age view of the earth can be somehow combined. Some Christians hold that the "days" of Creation were not really 24 hours, despite the huge problems. Some other Christians say that God ‘used’ evolution, despite the fact that Jesus and other NT writers totally denied this. It is a sad state of affairs when the Church actually helps the enemy to chip away at its own foundation!

Once the earth is assumed to be ancient, i.e. tens of thousands of years old, the concept of gradual change over millennia is easier to accommodate. Once vast ages are assumed, the possibility of evolution may even be entertained. The supernatural can then be pushed further away. The tremendous world-wide Flood, which implies divine intervention, may be relegated to the back of the mind, or banished completely. Once the view is assumed that the earth is more than 35,000 years old, all sorts of errors can creep in, and Scripture will be further eroded.

Let us, as Christians, take our stand by faith on the Word of God, and not give ANY ground to the unbelievers!

Before I close, here is a quote from a firm evolutionist, William D. Stansfield, Ph.D. (Animal Breeding, Instructor of Biology, California State University. From his book ‘The Science of Evolution’, Macmillan, New York, 1977 page 82 and 84 :

"All the above methods for dating the age of the earth, its various strata, and its fossils are questionable, because the rates are likely to have fluctuated wildly over earth history. A method that appears to have much greater reliability for determining absolute ages of rocks is that of the radiometric dating . . ."

"It is obvious that that radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be. Age estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often quite different (sometimes by hundreds of millions of years). There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological "clock". The uncertainties inherent in radiometric dating are disturbing to geologists and evolutionists . . ."

At least this man was willing to admit the failings of radiometric dating, but what a pity that the general public, including many Christians, have carried on assuming that ‘science’ is up-to-date and accurate, when in fact it is in tatters. Far better that Christians hold on to the plain statements of Scripture, which never changes.