I remember the time when I was introduced to isochron dating.
I’d been introduced to the Three Basic Assumptions of radiometric dating a couple of years earlier when I first came across YECism when I was doing my A levels. I was a bit sceptical about varying nuclear decay rates, but the other two assumptions – knowing the initial conditions and no contamination or leakage – sounded like a pretty obvious and fatal flaw to me.
Fast forward two and a half years, and I was in a Bible study group at university being led by a geology student. The passage in question was Romans 1, and I asked if verses 20-23 could have referred to the “evolutionists” who must be wilfully ignoring such a massive and glaring problem in order to shore up their belief in deep time.
My Bible study group leader responded to me by showing me his lecture notes on isochron dating.
I remember sitting there in stunned silence for a whole ten minutes. What he had just pointed out to me was something that up until that point I simply hadn’t appreciated.
If a scientific technique has fatal flaws that are so glaringly obvious that they can be pointed out to teenagers, you can be absolutely certain that subject matter experts will be aware of the flaws and will either have figured out ways to work around them, or abandoned the techniques concerned altogether.
He also made another point to me at the same time. He described young earth “creation science” as a “joke” and “laughable,” explaining that they routinely draw extraordinary conclusions from tiny, unreliable data sets with huge error bars. I’d seen isolated instances of this myself – Barry Setterfield’s varying speed of light was the one example that came to my mind at the time – but he made the point that the problem is pervasive and ubiquitous throughout YEC literature.
I wondered at the time if the problem there was due to lack of funding, and perhaps if YECism were better funded they would be able to come up with some kind of “smoking gun” that really did conclusively show that the earth is young. But the RATE project has since put paid to that. At a cost of $1.25 million and lasting eight years, it was supposed to be the final, definitive rebuttal to radiometric dating once and for all. What did they come up with? More tiny data sets with huge error bars – and an admission that they needed so much accelerated nuclear decay that it would have vaporised the earth’s crust many times over if it had actually happened.
Since then, Answers in Genesis has spent $100 million building the Ark Encounter. That makes it quite clear that whatever difficulties YECism has in coming up with rock solid evidence for a young earth and against radiometric dating, a lack of funding is not one of them.