Claim CD011:
Carbon-14 dating gives unreliable results.
Source:
Lee, Robert E., 1981. Radiocarbon: Ages in error. Anthropological
Journal of Canada 19(3): 9-29. Reprinted in Creation Research Society
Quarterly 19(2): 117-127 (1982).
Response:
- Any tool will give bad results when misused. Radiocarbon dating has
some known limitations. Any measurement that exceeds these limitations
will probably be invalid. In particular, radiocarbon dating works to
find ages as old as 50,000 years but not much older. Using it to date
older items will give bad results. Samples can be contaminated with
younger or older carbon, again invalidating the results. Because of
excess 12C released into the atmosphere from the Industrial
Revolution and excess 14C produced by atmospheric nuclear
testing during the 1950s, materials less than 150 years old cannot be
dated with radiocarbon (Faure 1998, 294).
In their claims of errors, creationists do not consider misuse of the
technique. It is not uncommon for them to misuse radiocarbon dating by
attempting to date samples that are millions of years old (for example,
Triassic "wood") or that have been treated
with organic
substances. In such cases, the errors belong to the creationists, not
the carbon-14 dating method.
- Radiocarbon dating has been repeatedly tested, demonstrating its
accuracy. It is calibrated by tree-ring data, which gives a nearly
exact calendar for more than 11,000 years back. It has also been
tested on items for which the age is known through historical records,
such as parts of the Dead Sea scrolls and some wood from an Egyptian
tomb (MNSU n.d.; Watson 2001). Multiple samples from a single object
have been dated independently, yielding consistent results.
Radiocarbon dating is also concordant with other dating techniques
(e.g., Bard et al. 1990).
References:
- Bard, Edouard, Bruno Hamelin, Richard G. Fairbanks and Alan Zindler,
1990. Calibration of the 14C timescale over the past 30,000
years using mass spectrometric U-Th ages from Barbados corals.
Nature 345: 405-410.
- Faure, Gunter, 1998. Principles and Applications of Geochemistry,
2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- MNSU, n.d. Radio-carbon dating.
http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/archaeology/dating/radio_carbon.html
- Watson, Kathie, 2001. Radiometric time scale.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/radiometric.html
Further Reading:
Higham, Tom, 1999. Radiocarbon WEB-Info. http://www.c14dating.com/
Thompson, Tim, 2003. A radiometric dating resource list.
http://www.tim-thompson.com/radiometric.html#reliability
created 2003-8-19, modified 2004-9-2