This reminds me of the time when I learned about isochron dating.
I had heard all about the Three Basic Assumptions of radiometric dating. Constant radioactive decay rates may have seemed solid enough to me, but not knowing the initial conditions or about contamination or leakage seemed like a doozy. How blind must “evolutionist” worldviews be if they were overlooking problems that obvious? This must be the kind of thing that Romans 1:20-23 talks about, I thought.
So when I found myself in a Bible study group on those very verses in Cambridge, being led by a geology student, I asked him about it.
He looked at me and said, “I’ve read those young earth claims. They are a joke.” I’ll never forget the way he emphasised the word “joke.” He went on: “They take, like, two shells off of a beach somewhere and make extraordinary wide sweeping conclusions based on just that. It’s laughable.” – His emphasis of the word “laughable” was similarly unforgettable.
Then he told me all about isochron dating.
I sat staring at his lecture notes for ten whole minutes in stunned silence. Here he was, telling me all about a radiometric dating technique that does not make the assumptions that young earthists were telling me that radiometric dating makes. By taking multiple samples and plotting a graph, you can determine the age of a rock formation without having to know anything about the original composition. And you can tell whether or not there has been any contamination or leakage because if there has, then the points won’t lie on a straight line.
I learned two things that day. First of all, that young earthists weren’t coming clean. Rather than telling me about how radiometric dating actually worked in practice in the 1990s, they were debunking an over-simplified version of the technique that had been superseded in the 1960s. In other words, they were debunking a straw man. But more importantly, I learned something else.
If you, as a non-expert, think that you know enough about a procedure to be able to tell that it is flawed, you can be absolutely certain that experts who have been studying the technique in detail since before you were born know all about those flaws as well and have either found ways to work round them, or else determined through further rigorous study that they are not serious enough to affect the integrity of the results.