
Measuring the Age of the Earth (2014) - acidburnNSA
https://whatisnuclear.com/geology.html
======
cdoxsey
I took a geology class once, which I quite enjoyed, and a certain point we
were discussing radiometric dating. I understood the idea of a half-life and
how you could use a known half-life and the current ratio of isotopes to
measure the age of something, but there was a piece of the equation I didn't
understand, so I asked:

How do we know the starting ratio?

The professor didn't really answer my question, just a sort of "scientists
have measured it" type answer... which didn't make sense to me because
scientists didn't exist 4.5 billion years ago or whatever, so how could they
measure the starting conditions.

I think the poor guy was so accustomed to hostile questions on the topic that
he interpreted it that way. I imagine many of his students came from a young-
earth creationist background and didn't always take that section of the course
well. Or maybe I was just reading into it and the guy was having an off day.
(as an evangelical christian, old-earth vs new-earth was often a topic of
discussion)

But it was actually an honest question. And this article finally gave me the
answer I was looking for. Plotting an isochron of different radioactive
elements solves for both the age and the original composition of the sample.

~~~
nurettin
And you became an old-earth evangelical christian after reading this very
article?

~~~
cdoxsey
I was (and still am) an old-earth evangelical christian.

Many of my friends were young-earth creationists. It's not a topic I hear much
about anymore, but I've had many lively discussions about it.

YEC is interesting because there are different ways people think about it in
relation to science. The most straightforward would be to claim something like
"God created the universe with the appearance of age", so that it would be
actually < 10k years old, but appear billions of years old.

Such a theory is consistent with scientific findings, albeit falling prey to
Ockham's Razor, and violating the principle of Uniformitarianism, both of
which are probably pretty crucial to the Philosophy of science.

Theologically this approach isn't quite as jarring as it may at first appear.
I once heard it put as a question: "Did Adam have a belly button?" If he did,
then that's not really all that different from "the appearance of age" in
general.

For me personally it still didn't sit right with me, and I also disagreed with
the general interpretive approach taken to scripture. Genesis isn't a
scientific textbook and I don't think it should be read that way. I highly
recommend this book for an alternative interpretation:
[https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-
Cosmology/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-
Cosmology/dp/0830837043)

In general I think science is very important and undervalued in the christian
community in general and that's unfortunate. To give just one Biblical
example, King David spent years tending a flock of sheep by night, with
nothing better to do than stare at the stars for hours on end. As
scientifically illiterate as he was, he still knew a lot more about the
constellations than I ever will.

~~~
nurettin
Yes, young creation with old age idea would fall prey to more than just
logical reductionism, such tempering would be deceptive at best. And that is
not a good thing for an anthromorpic deity.

~~~
nurettin
sorry for terrible spelling, I meant anthropomorphic.

------
alejohausner
The OP mentions the work of Claire Patterson [1], who first measured the age
of the Earth using relative abundances of lead isotopes in ancient rock
samples. He found it very hard to do, because the samples he used were getting
contaminated with atmospheric lead, and had to build the first clean room to
measure the samples properly.

Atmospheric lead came from tetraethyl lead in gasoline. He spent decades
campaigning against it, and came close to having his academic career destroyed
by stooges paid the Ethyl Corporation[2]. Through sheer persistence and
strength of character, he managed to get lead additives banned a few years
before his death.

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson)

2\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_Corporation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_Corporation)

~~~
acidburnNSA
There was an excellent COSMOS episode entitled "The Clean Room" that went into
great detail on this topic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room)

