Moon Rock Age Contradiction

Can a rock be both 1.6 and 3.9 billion years old? Charlie Duke walked on the moon at age 36 on the Apollo 16 mission.  Before this he studied geology for 6 years.  On the moon he picked up a rock about the size of his hand, and brought it back.  Radiometric dating is supposed to tell when the liquid lava or magma solidified into the rock.  Multiple samples were taken from the rock.  On one end they said it was 1.6 billion years old, but on the other end it tested as 3.9 billion years old.  NASA claims the 3.9 billion year old date is correct.  Most people never hear an alternative view, so they believe that date.  However, if you would like to hear the other side of the story, so you can make an informed decision for yourself, read on.  (Or if you would just like to watch Charlie Duke tell his story, skip to the end.)

Since NASA wanted a date around 3.9 billion years old, they claimed that was the right date, and ignored the younger date.  (If these dates were both right, it would mean the lava started to form into a rock, and it did not completely harden or re-melt for 2.3 billion years!)  Obviously there is a major problem with the dating methods.  How reliable are the dating methods for rocks?

In 1990, scientists took multiple samples from an earth rock and used the 5 dating methods considered to be the best.  Here are the dates those tests returned:

340,000 years

350,000 years

900,000 years

1,700,000 years

2,800,000 years

If the tests were accurate and reliable, they should have given approximately the same ages.  But they didn’t.  If the scientists were to assign an age to this rock, it would not be based on the radiometric dating, rather, it would be based on something else.  Usually the rock is associated with a rock layer that the geologists have associated a time to, so they pick the date closest to their story.  In this case, if they thought the rock layer was a million years old, they would say that it is around 900,000 years old, and the other dates were contaminated or erroneous.  But in reality, they picked the date they wanted.  This is not scientific.  If you look at the back of any scientific paper that includes the dating of rocks, you will see that they get lots of different dates that they throw out because they don’t agree with the story they are trying to tell.

But it gets worse.  The rock that was dated in 1990 was actually formed in the dome of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.  It was actually 10 years old, and we know that because we saw it form.  How can these scientific tests be so wrong?  The answer is that they are based on a lot of assumptions.  Here’s a simplified illustration: it is known that A atoms slowly turn into B atoms.  We measure the rate of this change today.  Scientists are certain that there were no B atoms in the rock when it formed, and they believe they know how much A was in it at “birth”, so they do the math and determine that the rock was X number of years old.  It turns out that, they don’t know how, but there were a lot of B atoms in the rock when it formed.  They also can’t be sure how many A atoms were there in the first place, nor can they be sure that the rate of change has never changed.  They weren’t there.  All the assumptions could be, and probably are, wrong.

If you think about it, how do we know how old anything really is?  If someone recorded it, or told us, then we know.  If someone found an adult cat, a vet can guess at its age, but it’s only a guess.  If someone says, “I saw that cat’s mother give birth to it 4 years ago in May,” now we know how old it is.  Doesn’t it make sense that if you invented an age test for rocks, you would first check it against rocks you know the ages of?  Here are some rocks of known ages that have been tested.

Place	Known date	Radiometric date
Hualalai, Hawaii	1800	1,500,000 years old
Mt. Etna, Sicily	122 BC	250,000 years old
Mt. Etna, Sicily	1792	350,000 years old
Mt. Lassen, CA	1915	110,000 years old
Sunset Crater, AZ	1064	260,000 years old
Mt. Ngauruhoe, NZ	1977	270,000 - 3,500,000 years old

I am not aware of any radiometric testing of rocks of known ages that have even been close to accurate.  (If you do, PLEASE show me.)  Some scientists will tell you that the problem is that rocks that are less than 10,000 years old can't be dated accurately.  If this was the case, the rocks would have close to zero B atoms, and the test would say they are 0 years old, not that they have way too many B atoms and are hundreds of thousands and even millions of years old.

So why do scientists trust radiometric dating?  Most people haven’t heard about its flaws, because people who support evolution don’t talk about evidence that destroys their story of history.  Almost all the peer pressure is to support evolution.  Scientists who don’t support evolution are black listed, they don’t get grants, and they lose their secular university jobs.  (See the 2008 documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” by Ben Stein for evidence of this.)  So all you ever hear is articles and videos of people talking confidently about how many millions of years old things are.  But there really isn’t any proof for those ages.  Actually, there is a lot of good proof that the earth is young.  More on that later.

I wrote this article because I recently watched a video of Charlie Duke and his wife, Dotti, talking about their experiences, including Charlie’s walking on the moon.  At that time, they were struggling in their marriage, but now, in their 80’s, they are such a great couple.  So loving.  They claim that Jesus made the difference.  The video is on the Institute for Creation Research’s YouTube channel, and it’s called Moonwalker: The Incredible True Story of General Charlie Duke.  He talks about the rock at 48:30.  I highly recommend it.  ICR’s YouTube video department is really good.  They put out a lot of good stuff.  They have a great scientific model in Continuous Environmental Tracking and have some great experiments going on with Mexican Tetras (blind cave fish).  The fish respond to changes in dark to light environments in just days…