1 2 3 4 5 6

Age of Meteorites

Most of the other measurements for the age of the earth rest upon calculating an age for the solar system by dating objects which are expected to have formed with the planets but are not geologically active (and therefore cannot erase evidence of their formation), such as meteorites. The following is a table of dates of meteorite groups (from Chris Stassen, see also his detailed Isochron Dating FAQ).

 

Learn about the types of meteorites here (82% are stony Chondrites, about 8% are Achondrites such as Eucrites, 5% are Iron, etc).

Whole-Rock Isochron Ages of Different Meteorite Groups

[ From G. Brent Dalrymple (page 291), some omitted for brevity ]

Meteorite class or group Number

Dated Method Age (billions

of years)

Chondrites (CM, CV, H, L, LL, E) 13 Sm-Nd 4.21 +/- 0.76

Carbonaceous chondrites 4 Rb-Sr 4.37 +/- 0.34

Chondrites (undisturbed H, LL, E) 38 Rb-Sr 4.50 +/- 0.02

Chondrites (H, L, LL, E) 50 Rb-Sr 4.43 +/- 0.04

H Chondrites (undisturbed) 17 Rb-Sr 4.52 +/- 0.04

H Chondrites 15 Rb-Sr 4.59 +/- 0.06

L Chondrites (relatively undisturbed) 6 Rb-Sr 4.44 +/- 0.12

L Chondrites 5 Rb-Sr 4.38 +/- 0.12

LL Chondrites (undisturbed) 13 Rb-Sr 4.49 +/- 0.02

LL Chondrites 10 Rb-Sr 4.46 +/- 0.06

E Chondrites (undisturbed) 8 Rb-Sr 4.51 +/- 0.04

E Chondrites 8 Rb-Sr 4.44 +/- 0.13

Eucrites (polymict) 23 Rb-Sr 4.53 +/- 0.19

Eucrites 11 Rb-Sr 4.44 +/- 0.30

Eucrites 13 Lu-Hf 4.57 +/- 0.19

Diogenites 5 Rb-Sr 4.45 +/- 0.18

Iron (plus iron from St. Severin) 8 Re-Os 4.57 +/- 0.21

As shown in the table, there is excellent agreement on about 4.5 billion years, between several meteorites and by several different dating methods. The accusation cannot be made that this represents selective use of data -- the table includes a significant fraction of all meteorites on which isotope dating has been attempted. According to Dalrymple (page 286), less than 100 meteorites have been subjected to isotope dating, and of those about 70 yield ages with low analytical error. Further, the oldest age determinations of individual meteorites generally give concordant ages by multiple radiometric means, or multiple tests across different samples (from Chris Stassen).

Meteorites Whose Radiometric Ages Exceed 4.4 Billion Years

[ From G. Brent Dalrymple (page 287-9), some omitted for brevity ]

Meteorite Name Material Dated Method Age (billions

of years)

Allende whole rock Ar-Ar 4.52 +/- 0.02

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.53 +/- 0.02

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.48 +/- 0.02

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.55 +/- 0.03

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.55 +/- 0.03

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.57 +/- 0.03

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.50 +/- 0.02

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.56 +/- 0.05

Guarena whole rock Ar-Ar 4.44 +/- 0.06

13 isochron Rb-Sr 4.46 +/- 0.08

Shaw whole rock Ar-Ar 4.43 +/- 0.06

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.40 +/- 0.06

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.29 +/- 0.06

Olivenza 18 isochron Rb-Sr 4.53 +/- 0.16

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.49 +/- 0.06

St. Severin 4 isochron Sm-Nd 4.55 +/- 0.33

10 isochron Rb-Sr 4.51 +/- 0.15

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.43 +/- 0.04

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.38 +/- 0.04

whole rock Ar-Ar 4.42 +/- 0.04

Indarch 9 isochron Rb-Sr 4.46 +/- 0.08

12 isochron Rb-Sr 4.39 +/- 0.04

Juvinas 5 isochron Sm-Nd 4.56 +/- 0.08

5 isochron Rb-Sr 4.50 +/- 0.07

Moama 3 isochron Sm-Nd 4.46 +/- 0.03

4 isochron Sm-Nd 4.52 +/- 0.05

Y-75011 9 isochron Rb-Sr 4.50 +/- 0.05

7 isochron Sm-Nd 4.52 +/- 0.16

5 isochron Rb-Sr 4.46 +/- 0.06

4 isochron Sm-Nd 4.52 +/- 0.33

Angra dos Reis 7 isochron Sm-Nd 4.55 +/- 0.04

3 isochron Sm-Nd 4.56 +/- 0.04

Mundrabrilla silicates Ar-Ar 4.57 +/- 0.06

olivine Ar-Ar 4.54 +/- 0.04

plagioclase Ar-Ar 4.50 +/- 0.04

Weekeroo Station 4 isochron Rb-Sr 4.39 +/- 0.07

silicates Ar-Ar 4.54 +/- 0.03

R. Sungenis: This data doesn’t prove anything for the evolutionist. As I stated at the beginning of this critique, the only thing it shows is that these elements presently have the half-lives listed above, but whether this is proof that they existed billions of years ago is simply conjecture. The Creationist simply insists that, as God created DNA, cellular mechanisms, nucleons, and many other processes whole and functional, they would each carry with them the characteristics with which they were created. With radioactive elements, their half-lives were instilled in them at their ex nihilo creation. God chose these extended half-lives at that time because He wanted these radioactive elements to remain in mostly in their original state with little decay.

Porvaznik: Summary of the Evidence for the Age of the Earth

The development and refinement of modern instrumentation and radiometric dating methods based on the decays of isotopes of uranium, potassium, rubidium, samarium, rhenium, and lutetium to their respective daughter products lead, argon, strontium, neodymium, osmium, and hafnium beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing to the present finally produced the answer to the question of the antiquity of the earth.

We can be confident that the minimum age for the earth exceeds 4 billion years -- the evidence is abundant and compelling. Rocks exceeding 3.5 billion years in age are found on all the continents, but four especially well-studied areas: the Superior region of North America, the Isua-Godthaab area of western Greenland, the Pilbara block in the northern part of Western Australia, and Swaziland in southern Africa, where rocks 3.5 billion years or more in age have been found, carefully mapped, thoroughly studied, and dated by more than one radiometric method.

Meteorites are the oldest and most primitive rocks available for earthbound scientists to study. The majority of the 70 or so well-dated meteorites have individual Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, Pb-Pb and 40Ar / 39Ar ages of 4.4 to 4.6 billion years. Internal and whole-rock isochron ages determined by Rb-Sr, Lu-Hf, Sm-Nd, Pb-Pb, and Re-Os methods, as well as other isotopic evidence, shows the major meteorite types were formed within a few tens of millions of years between 4.5 and 4.6 billion years ago.

All hypotheses for formation of our solar system call for the planets, including earth and the asteroids, to be formed within a very short interval of time. Thus, the ages of meteorites are relevant to the age of the earth and suggest that the earth and the other solid bodies of the solar system formed about 4.5 to 4.6 billion years ago (Dalrymple, pages 398-401).

"We now know, to within 1% or better and from a variety of evidence, that the age of the Earth-Moon-meteorite system is about 4.51 - 4.55 Ga [billions of years old]." (G. Brent Dalrymple, from "The Age of the Earth in the Twentieth Century: A Problem (Mostly) Solved" in The Age of the Earth From 4004 BC to AD 2002 edited by C.L.E. Lewis and S.J. Knell [Geological Society, 2001], page 219)

See also Part 2: The Scientific Evidence for Evolution

BOOKS CONSULTED

On the Age of the Earth and the Universe

The Age of the Earth from 4004 BC to AD 2002 edited by C.L.E. Lewis and S.J. Knell (Geological Society Special Publication No 190, 2001)

The Age of the Earth by G. Brent Dalrymple (Stanford University Press, 1991)

God and the New Physics by Paul Davies (Touchstone, 1983)

Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe by Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, Stephen C. Meyer (Ignatius Press, 2000), proceedings of the 1999 Wethersfield Institute

On Creation/Evolution

Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson (Intervarsity Press, 1991, 1993)

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution by Michael Behe (Touchstone, 1996)

Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution by Kenneth R. Miller (Cliff Street Books, 1999)

Young Earth Creationist Texts

The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1961)

It's A Young World After All: Exciting Evidences for Recent Creation by Paul D. Ackerman (Baker Book House, 1986)

Creation's Tiny Mystery by Robert V. Gentry (Earth Science Associates, 1986)

See also Part 2: The Scientific Evidence for Evolution

The Talk Origins Age of the Earth FAQs

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-youngearth.html

The Talk Origins Evolution FAQs

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html

R. Sungenis: As we have seen, radiometric evidence is not only an uncertain science, but for years evolutionists have been presupposing that a half-life of billions of years means that the element existed billions of years ago. At best this interpretation is unprovable, at worst, it is a fallacious and underhanded interpretation of the scientific data. The same goes for the geologic column. For years we have been told that the geologic column is a multi-million year chronology of Earth’s history, since it has been assumed that strata were formed horizontally over extended periods of time. This simply is not provable, and there are not only viable alternatives that state that the geologic column formed vertically, but this hypothesis is also testable in the laboratory.

In addition to evolutionists biased interpretation of the field evidence, we also have an inordinate amount of dishonesty taking place in the science community in order to fabricate evidence for evolutionary theory. Just one example will suffice. Allow me to quote from the book Betrayers of the Truth by William Broad and Nicholas Wade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) a book that will enlighten the reader to the inordinate amount of fraud and deception taking place in our esteemed world of “science.” The authors write:

“The discovery of the Piltdown man was made by Charles Dawson, a lawyer who maintained a quiet practice in the south of England and dabbled in geology. A tireless amateur collector of fossils, Dawson noticed a promising-looking gravel pit on Piltdown Common, near Lewes in Sussex. He asked a laborer digging there to bring him and flints he might find. Several years later, in 1908, the laborer brought him a fragment of bone that Dawson recognized as part of a thick human skull. Over the next three years further bits of the skull appeared.

“In 1912 Dawson wrote to his old friend Arthur Smith Woodward, a world authority on fossil fishes at the geology department of the British Museum of Natural History, saying he had something that would top the German fossil found at Heidelberg. Woodward made several visits with Dawson to the Piltdown gravel pit. On one of these expeditions, Dawson’s digging tool struck at the bottom of the pit and out flew part of a lower jaw. Close examination led Woodward and Dawson to believe that it belonged to the skull they had already reconstructed.

“In great excitement, Smith Woodward took everything back to the British Museum, where he put the jaw and cranium together, filling in missing parts with modeling clay and his imagination. The result was truly remarkable. The assembled skull became the “dawn man” of Piltdown. Kept secret until December 1912, it was unveiled before a full house at the Geological Society in London, where it created a sensation. Some skeptics suggested that the human skull and apelike jaw did not belong together; others pointed out that two characteristically abraded molar teeth were not enough to prove the jaw was human. But these objections were ignored, and the find was accepted as a great and genuine discovery.

“The talk in clubs and pubs could note with satisfaction the new proof that the earliest man was indeed British. The Piltdown skull was also of scientific interest because it seemed to be the “missing link,” the transitional form between ape and man that was postulated by Darwin’s still controversial theory of evolution. Subsequent excavations at the gravel pit were not disappointing. A whole series of new fossils emerged. The clinching evidence came from a pit a few miles away – the discovery a few years later of a second Piltdown man.

“Yet some were troubled by the Piltdown finds, among them young zoologist at the British Museum, Martin A. C. Hinton. After a visit to the site in 1913, Hinton concluded that the whole thing was a hoax. He decided to smoke out th tricksters by planting clearly fraudulent fossils and watching the reactions. He took an ape tooth from the collection at the museum and filed it down to match the model canine tooth that Smith Woodward had fashioned out of clay. Hinton had the obvious forgery placed in the pit by an accomplice and sat back to wait for it to be discovered and the entire Piltdown collection to be exposed.

“The tooth was discovered, but nothing else went right with Hinton’s plan. All involved with the “discovery” seemed delighted and soon notified the nation about the new find. Hinton was astonished that his scientific colleagues could be taken in by so transparent a fake, and he suffered the additional mortification of seeing Charles Dawson , whom he suspected to be the culprit, acquiring kudos for his handiwork. He decided to try again, only this time with something so outrageous that the whole country would laugh the discoverers to scorn.

“In a box in the British Museum he found a leg bone from an extinct species of elephant. He proceeded to carve it into an extremely appropriate tool for the earliest Englishman – a Pleistocene cricket bat. He took the bat to Piltdown, buried it, and waited for the laughter.

“It was a long wait. When the bat was unearthed, Smith Woodward was delighted. He pronounced it a supremely important example of the work of Paleolithic man, for nothing like it had ever been found before. Smith Woodward and Dawson published a detailed, serious description of the artifact in a professional journal but stopped short of calling it an actual cricket bat. Hinton was astonished that none of the scientists thought of trying to whittle a bit of bone, fossil or fresh, with a flint edge. If they had, they would have discovered it was impossible to imitate the cuts on the cricket bat. “The acceptance of this rubbish completely defeated the hoaxsters,” notes a historian of the Piltdown episode. “They just gave up, and abandoned all attempts to expose the whole business and get it demolished in laughter and ridicule.” Perhaps Hinton and friends should have considered planting a bone on which the name Smith Woodward had been carved.

“Piltdown man retained its scientific luster until the mid-1920s and the discovery of humanlike fossils in Africa. These indicated a very different pattern of human evolution to that suggested by the Piltdown skull. Instead of a human cranium with an apelike jaw, the African fossils were just the reverse – they had humanlike jaws with apelike skulls. Piltdown became first an anomaly, then an embarrassment. It slipped from sight until modern techniques of dating showed in the early 1950s that the skull and its famous jaw were fakes: an ape jaw, with filed-down molars, and a human skull had each been suitably stained to give the appearance of great age.

“Circumstantial evidence pointed to the skull’s discoverer, Dawson, as the culprit. But many have doubted that he could have been the instigator; although he was best placed to salt the gravel pit, he probably lacked access to the necessary fossil collections as well as the scientific expertise to assemble fossils of the right age for the Piltdown gravel. Indeed, the real mystery is not who did it but how a whole generation of scientists could have been taken in by so transparent a prank. The fakery was not expert. The tools were poorly carved and the teeth crudely filed. “The evidence of artificial abrasion immediately sprang to the eye. Indeed so obvious did they seem it may well be asked – how was it that they had escaped notice before,” remarked anthropologist Le Gros Clark.” (Pages 119-122).

There are many more such cases in anthropology, archeology, radiometrics and geology, but this one example will suffice for the present. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that the evolutionists have admitted their presuppositions and that they will not change their tactics or their minds when confronted with contrary evidence to their theory of evolution. Here are a few example of their hubris:

In 1929, evolutionist D. M. S. Watson, stated: “The theory of evolution is universally accepted not because it can be proven true, but because the only alternative is special creation by God, which is clearly incredible” (Nature, Vol. 123, 1929).

Similarly, geneticist Richard Lewontin stated:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concept that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door (“Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, pp. 28, 31).

The only absolute certainty we have in this world is what comes from the mouth of God. In His word it states that He created the universe in six days, not six billion years or sixteen billion years. As for science, the facts are plain: we have found no irrefutable scientific evidence to deny this divine revelation, including that from Brent Dalrymple.

Robert A. Sungenis, M.A.

Catholic Apologetics International

1 2 3 4 5 6