One of the major challenges confronting the young earth view has been the supposed ages of millions of years for the earth and dinosaurs—even billions for the age of the earth. One proposal that has been made by creation scientists to account for this seeming discrepancy between secular science view and the creationist view is accelerated nuclear decay (abbreviated herein as ACCND).
For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.
While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
Organic matter in the fossil record generally dates by carbon 14 (C14) dating to about 20,000 to 40,000 years. Other radioactive dating methods such as potassium/argon (K/Ar), rubidium/strontium (Rb/Sr), uranium/lead (U/Pb), thorium/lead (Th/Pb) and others that are based on decay of longer-lived isotopes often give ages in the millions or hundreds of millions of years for these fossils. Why is this? Why are the dates so different?
Many creationists believe that radioactive decay was faster in the past. However, in this talk I want to concentrate on reasons to believe the C14 dates are more accurate and that they give evidence that all life on earth is very young. If decay rates were faster in the past, then even the C14 dates could be too old.
Part I mentioned helium retention in zircons and young carbon 14 dates as evidences for a recent creation and for an acceleration of decay rates in the past. Such an increase in decay rates should have more of an effect on ages computed from isotopes with long half-lives than elements with short half-lives.
Figure 1
If you add millions of years to the Bible, this is what you get.
Recently I was asked to give a talk on resources available on creation. I expanded the topic to include best evidences for creation. This article is based on that talk. For resources, I will discuss some of the major websites and organizations. Many of these will probably be familiar to you if you have been interested in creation science for a while. For best evidences, I will discuss scripture, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of species, empirical detection of intelligent causes, and the age of the earth.
There is an expression about not seeing the forest for the trees. Sometimes it is good to step back, and look at the larger picture. With regard to creation science, there are lots of "trees;" we have articles on geology, genetics, chemistry, paleontology, cosmology, botany, etc. But what is the big picture? Let's start at the beginning: the origin of life.