I have heard this many times before, so I went back and looked at the original source of this internet legend. Two notes:
- Potassium-argon dating has known problems that have long been recognized by the scientific community.
excess argon (40ArE) can cause the calculated K/Ar age to be older than the "true" age of the dated material. Excess argon is simply 40Ar that is attributed to radiogenic 40Ar and/or atmospheric 40Ar. Excess argon may be derived from the mantle, as bubbles trapped in a melt, in the case of a magma. Or it could be a xenocryst/xenolith trapped in a magma/lava during emplacement.There is especially a problem dating volcanic rocks.
- No reputable scientist would use only the potassium-argon method to date a rock, especially an igneous rock. They would use other methods to cross-check. From Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective.
Some young-Earth proponents recently reported that rocks were dated by the potassium-argon method to be a several million years old when they are really only a few years old. But the potassium-argon method, with its long half-life, was never intended to date rocks only 25 years old. These people have only succeeded in correctly showing that one can fool a single radiometric dating method when one uses it improperly. The false radiometric ages of several million years are due to parentless argon, as described here, and first reported in the literature some fifty years ago. Note that it would be extremely unlikely for another dating method to agree on these bogus ages. Getting agreement between more than one dating method is a recommended practice.I hate to say it, but it boils down to this: Austin took a sample that he knew would yield an erroneous result with the potassium-argon method and sent it to a laboratory and told them to date it using the potassium argon method. Now Austin and others are wrongly claiming that the entire field of radioisotope dating cannot be trusted.
I'm sure that Austin is a fine Christian and I'm not going to question his motives. However, the fact is that if Austin had really wanted a true answer for the age of the rocks, he would have told the laboratory to use every available method to date them. The other methods would have disagreed with the potassium-argon method and the false outlying data would have been tossed out.
Now that you know the real story, do you still believe that radiometric dating cannot be trusted?
Of course not. Secular dating of rocks can never be trusted. If radiometric dating works for supposed "old" rocks, it should work for new rocks. That's simple logic, the kind that creation scientists have a much better handle on than their evolutionist nemeses.
Dr. David Plaisted demolishes 100+ years of evo fallacies on his simple-to-read but 100% technically accurate treatise of the subject:
http://www.trueorigin.org/dating.asp
Of course, as a creation scientist, Plaisted's great accomplishments and single-handed demolition of thousands of evo science arguments will never be recognized by the evolutionist religion.
The era of evolutionist dominance in science will soon end, though. The vibrant field of creation science and reasonable discussion fora like this will see to that.