OkY, FOR EXAMPLE:
No geologists were present when most rocks formed, so they cannot test whether the original rocks already contained daughter isotopes alongside their parent radioisotopes. For example, with regard to the volcanic lavas that erupted, flowed, and cooled to form rocks in the unobserved past, evolutionary geologists simply assume that none of the daughter argon-40 atoms was in the lava rocks.
For the other radioactive “clocks,” it is assumed that by analyzing multiple samples of a rock body, or unit, today it is possible to determine how much of the daughter isotopes (lead, strontium, or neodymium) were present when the rock formed (via the so-called isochron technique, which is still based on unproven assumptions).
Yet lava flows that have occurred in the present have been tested soon after they erupted, and they invariably contained much more argon-40 than expected.1 For example, when a sample of the lava in the Mt. St. Helens crater (that had been observed to form and cool in 1986) was analyzed in 1996, it contained so much argon-40 that it had a calculated “age” of 350,000 years!2 Similarly, lava flows on the sides of Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, known to be less than 50 years old, yielded “ages” of up to 3.5 million years.
The problems with contamination, as with inheritance, are already well-documented in the textbooks on radioactive dating of rocks.* Unlike the hourglass, where its two bowls are sealed, the radioactive “clock” in rocks is open to contamination by gain or loss of parent or daughter isotopes because of waters flowing in the ground from rainfall and from the molten rocks beneath volcanoes. Similarly, as molten lava rises through a conduit from deep inside the earth to be erupted through a volcano, pieces of the conduit wallrocks and their isotopes can mix into the lava and contaminate it.
Because of such contamination, the less than 50-year-old lava flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand (Figure 4), yield a rubidium-strontium “age” of 133 million years, a samarium-neodymium “age” of 197 million years, and a uranium-lead “age” of 3.908 billion years!
REF: .A. A. Snelling, “The Relevance of Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd and Pb-Pb Isotope Systematics to Elucidation of the Genesis and History of Recent Andesite Flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, and the Implications for Radioisotopic Dating,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, ed. R. L. Ivey, Jr. (Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship, 2003), pp. 285–303; Ref. 4, 2005.
G. Faure and T. M. Mensing, Isotopes: Principles and Applications, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, 2005); A. P. Dickin, Radiogenic Isotope Geology, 2nd ed. (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
.A. A. Snelling, “The Cause of Anomalous Potassium-Argon ‘Ages’ for Recent Andesite Flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, and the Implications for Potassium-Argon ‘Dating,’” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, ed. R. E. Walsh (Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship, 1998), pp. 503–525
Oh, nice. Now you are copying and pasting from one of the anti-science creationist sites. Remember, if they are promoting creationism, they are scammers. They may be able to use big words, but that does not make them scientists.
As I said, I cringe whenever I see Christians fall for pseudoscience. At a time when fewer people are going to church than ever, is it really wise to promote this image of Christians as illiterate heathens?