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Perspectives on the Age of the Earth and Why They Matter Perspectives on the Age of the Earth and Why They Matter Perspectives on the Age of the Earth and Why They Matter By Francis Ö. Dudás Perspectives on the Age of the Earth and Why They Matter By Francis Ö. Dudás This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Francis Ö. Dudás All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-4385-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4385-0 Table of Contents Table of Contents ........................................................................................v Preface ..................................................................................................... vii Section I: We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea ...................................................1 Chapter 1: Jennifer’s Story .........................................................................3 Chapter 2: Fast Forward ...........................................................................14 Chapter 3: Fast Forward Redux ................................................................20 Section II: The Symphony .......................................................................23 Chapter 4: Symphony Hall .......................................................................25 Chapter 5: Basics: What I Believe ............................................................34 Chapter 6: Approaching God Through Creation ......................................46 Section III: The Aweful Rowing Toward God ........................................51 Chapter 7: The Rowboat ...........................................................................53 Chapter 8: Tradition as a Way of Knowing ..............................................57 Chapter 9: Inspiration as a Way of Knowing ..........................................63 Chapter 10: Reason as a Way of Knowing ..............................................66 Chapter 11: More Limits ...........................................................................70 Chapter 12: The Problem of Scale ............................................................72 Chapter 13: More Limitations of Knowledge ...........................................78 Chpater 14: Some Caveats ........................................................................85 Chapter 15: A History of Interpretations ..................................................89 Chapter 16: Christian Creationist Perspectives ........................................95 Chapter 17: How Science Views the Age of the Earth ........................... 113 Section IV: Looking for Real Estate in Whitefish Falls ........................129 Chapter 18: A Fragment of a Memoir .................................................... 131 Chapter 19: Fresh Air .............................................................................134 Chapter 20: The Grenville Onion ........................................................... 142 Chapter 21: Thawing Out........................................................................144 Chapter 22: How Long in the Freezer? ...................................................153 Chapter 23: Vacation in the Bahamas ....................................................159 Chapter 24: Before the Oceans Came..................................................... 162 Chapter 25: The Grenville Mountain High ........................................... 165 Chapter 26: The Sudbury Dikes ............................................................. 172 vi Table of Contents Chapter 27: A Surprise ........................................................................... 175 Chapter 28: What the Huronian Has to Say ........................................... 177 Chapter 29: Before the Huronian ............................................................ 181 Chapter 30: The Core of the Onion: It’s About Time! ...........................183 Section V: The Science: A Vision Through the Keyhole ......................187 Chapter 31: Playing Musical Chairs .......................................................189 Chapter 32: Isotopic Reality ...................................................................193 Chapter 33: Developing Dating Methods ...............................................205 Chapter 34: Systematics of Radioactive Decay ......................................208 Chapter 35: Principles of Dating Analyses............................................. 218 Chapter 36: Let the Counting Begin .......................................................226 Chapter 37: We Want to Count Closed Systems ....................................241 Chapter 38: From Isotopic Ratio to Age .................................................245 Chapter 39: Specific Isotopic Systems ...................................................259 Chapter 40: Do These Systems Work in Real Life? ...............................284 Chapter 41: What About Whitefish Falls? ..............................................295 Section VI: Unloading the Camel .........................................................301 Chapter 42: Jelly Beans ..........................................................................303 Chapter 43: Frame of Reference: Uniformitarianism .............................307 Chapter 44: Robert Gentry and Radiohalos ...........................................324 Chapter 45: Non-Uniformitarian Creation Days ....................................330 Chapter 46: Challenges to Uniformitarianism .......................................337 Chapter 47: Creationist Criticism of Isotopic Dating .............................343 Chapter 48: The RATE Study ................................................................362 Chapter 49: RATE Proposal of Large-Scale Mixing .............................371 Chapter 50: RATE Evidence of Accelerated Decay ..............................376 Chapter 51: The Character of “Proof” ....................................................389 Chapter 52: What Happened to the Jelly Beans? ...................................405 Section VII: The View from 4.03 Hill ..................................................409 Chapter 53: The Search Party ................................................................. 411 Chapter 54: Time: A Many-Splendored Thing ....................................... 416 Chapter 55: The View from 4.03 Hill .....................................................436 Chapter 56: Go Tell It on the Mountain ..................................................446 Notes ....................................................................................................... 451 Glossary ..................................................................................................533 Bibliography ...........................................................................................547 Index .......................................................................................................557 Preface This book is about the gap in perception and attitude between the 44% of the US population that believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and those who accept the scientific determination that the earth is 4.56 billion years old. It is about investigating the age of the earth, and how that seemingly innocuous investigation links to what we think we know of science, to what we believe, and to how that knowledge and belief locate us in the context of a broader universe. It weaves together three points of view—personal anecdote, scientific and philosophical observation, and polemic. There are therefore distinct changes in tone–some sections are light reading, others are pretty dense, and yet others are, I hope, challeng- ing to our comfortably accepted views of the world. What I hope I have done in this book is to provide an entry, for a moderately literate audience, to worlds of science and philosophy that we normally do not ponder. In terms of science, this book discusses things that are more detailed than a typical high-school, or even introductory college chemistry class might discuss, but it stops well short of where research into fundamental chemical and physical principles has taken us. It is not difficult science, but it pokes its nose into an area of science that is not routinely treated in introductory textbooks. It discusses something of the philosophy of time, or perhaps more accurately, the history of the philosophy of time, to construct links between the issue of “the age of the earth” and the larger questions of philosophy, particularly the question of “how do we know?” For me, the bottom line has been the daily wonder that what we define as the laws of chemistry and physics work, reproducibly and predictably. And they work not only in the laboratory that was my home for more than a decade, but in the laboratory next door, and in the laboratory in Paris, and in the one in Beijing. There is a fundamental reality that our separate experiments describe and verify. This leads me to believe–and I use that term intentionally–that what we have measured is correct, and accurate, within the uncertainties that attend our methods. But we must be aware at all times that what we consider “natural laws” are our own descriptions–they do not, in any way, “govern”
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