Man has been observing and recording time since God created
humans with our special intelligence. The devices for doing this have changed
over the years, but their accuracy from the beginning is very impressive.
Days are easy to understand – sunup and sundown mark them.
Months are determined in part by the moon phases. Years also can be established
by the sun’s position in the sky. And seasons are indicated by natural changes
in animals and plants and the weather.
Weeks however, were given to us directly from God. He
created the earth and life in six days and rested the seventh day – the Sabbath.
He knew that we would weaken and run out of energy without a day of rest.
The time frame that causes confusion is the EON. This is
primarily a geological term for a long range of time divided into eras and
periods. Sometimes the fossil record gives a clue to the period in question,
such as the Jurassic made famous by movies with that name in their titles.
However, this is a completely hypothetical, man-made-up time with no natural or
observable frame.
The attempt to date fossils and rocks with Radiometric Decay
methods is not without error and assumptions. The range of the assumed ages of
these items is sometimes a factor of millions or hundreds of millions of years.
Fifty year old lava has been dated from 133 million to 3.9 billion years old.
The science seems pretty straightforward. Simply put, over
time Potassium becomes Argon. If you measure the amount of Argon in a rock you
can tell how much Potassium was there to begin with, since all natural rocks
contain Potassium. By measuring the Argon you should be able to tell how long
it took to produce that amount.
But here are the assumptions and unknowns. What was the
condition of the rock forming? How many Potassium atoms were there originally?
Was there any outside contamination of the Argon from water or other chemicals?
Has the decay rate been constant? These all point to unprovable theories
regarding Radiometric Decay dating. After all, the only one around more than
6.000 years ago was God Himself.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BY CARL E GUSTAFSON
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