The Creation Debate-Part 16

By: Dr. John Ankerberg and Dr. Steve Austin; ©2002

What evidence caused geologist Steve Austin to doubt the generally accepted dates for the age of the earth?

Editor’s note: In June 1990 The John Ankerberg Show taped a series of interviews with men from several branches of the sciences regarding the evidence for creation. For technical reasons we were unable to air these interview. Nevertheless, we have decided to re­lease portions of these interviews in a series of articles so you could read the arguments that were being made at that time—more than a decade ago.

Considerable effort has been made to quote the gentlemen correctly. We have at­tempted to find the correct spelling of the scientific terms used. However, the reader should keep in mind that this is a transcription of oral interviews. Mistakes in spelling and in the technical language should be laid at the feet of the editor.

The Creation Debate – Part 16
Geological Evidence for the Age of the Earth – Part 1

Dr. John Ankerberg: Steve, let me come to you with this question. Are both creationists and evolutionists using geology to support their case and what do you think about that?

Dr. Steve Austin: Yes, both sides are using geology to support their case. You might say geology is the foundation of everything in this debate about evolution of life, because evolution of living things cannot occur unless the earth allows it to happen.

Ankerberg: Okay, tell me the theories on both sides, how geology is being used to support it.

Austin: Evolutionists usually suppose that a geologic process occurs slowly and gradu­ally over countless hundreds of millions, even billions of years. So we’ve had a pretty much evolutionary earth. Creationists, however, many creationists, maybe not all creationists, have supposed that there might be catastrophes in earth history and that things might not operate always slowly and gradually according to the general rates that we see are per­ceived today, but they may occur on occasion rapidly; catastrophic flooding, for example, decimation of dinosaurs, whatever we want to say. And many creationists are suspecting that the geologic ages that are assigned a strata by evolutionists may be in error.

Ankerberg: Tell us a little bit of your own odyssey. I wonder, as a geologist, did you want to be pulled into this fight? How did you get pulled into these questions about origins?

Austin: I’m a Sputnik kid that grew up in that very important science education time. I grew up on the new science and the new math. I was on television when I was age 10, as a science whiz kid. I was there to motivate kids to learn and discover things in science. As I went through my teenage years, I read George Gaylord Simpson’s book The Meaning of Evolution. I was persuaded that evolutionary theory was the correct explanation for the origin of things and that the great ages and a slow and gradual process gave rise to the earth and then in the meantime allowed life to evolve. That was kind of my perspective. As I went to university, I had that particular point of view in mind. And then, over a period of years, you might say, I evolved out of that way of thinking. It was an interesting series of steps that occurred.

Ankerberg: ‘What got your attention first?

Austin: I thought about how the earth works in geologic process. And I thought about geologic time. And all these things dealing with the history of the earth, I tried to investigate critically with the data that I knew best.

Ankerberg: Where did you start?

Austin: I started thinking about the age of the ocean. Edmond Halley, 300 years ago, proposed [the same Edmond Halley that discovered the comet and talked about its periodic cycle], he proposed that we could know the age of things by looking at the salt content of the ocean and in the rivers. And he noticed that salt seemed to be going into the oceans by the rivers, and he speculated that we could come up with the age of the earth, using the salt in the rivers and the salt content of the ocean. It wasn’t until about 90 years ago that John Joly actually put numbers on it, and measuring the salt content, the sodium and the chlorine that are in modern river water, and the content of the ocean, he came up with an age of about 80 to 90 million years for the age of the ocean.

And I’d been working on that particular subject a little bit, and I’ve gone beyond Joly and made the modern quantitative study of some of the sodium inputs to the ocean. And rivers add sodium, all kinds of other processes add sodium, dissolve sodium to the ocean, about 457 billion kilograms per year of sodium is going into the ocean. And yet, as I inventoried the output processes, the sodium that’s going out of the ocean, I could only find an output of about 122 billion kilograms per year of sodium. That means about 335 billion kilograms of sodium is not leaving the ocean, but staying there. And over a period of just hundreds of millions of years, the ocean would be twenty times more salty than it is today. It seems like something’s wrong with the sodium content that Joly came up with for the age of the ocean.

Of course, we have seen radioactive isotopes be proposed as the ultimate indicator of the earth’s age. Perhaps one of the most well-known illustrations of the age of the earth is the so-called meteorite ages. I have studied eleven meteorites. When the lead-lead isotope ratios, the ratio of Lead 207 to 204 is plotted against Lead 206-204, it forms a nice sloping plot. And that line is supposed to be the age of the solar system, of the earth itself: 4.54 plus or minus .02 billion years, the meteorite ages suggest.

Is it that the true age of things? I used to believe very strongly in the meteorite ages, the meteorite lead/lead ages for things, until I discovered in the scientific literature that every­thing is supposed to have evolved from a single common lead/isotope ratio, what’s called the cosmic abundance ratio, and the diagram presupposes it to get the 4.5 billion year age for the earth. But as I looked critically at it, I saw all kinds of evidence in the scientific litera­ture for meteorites suggesting that everything didn’t begin with the same cosmic abun­dance ratio. That caused me to doubt the lead ages of meteorites.

As I looked around in the literature, I even found diamonds from Zaire, diamonds in that African country, which, when plotted, give a sloping line as well, a potassium/argon/isoch­rone age of 6.04, plus or minus .08 billion years. Yet, that’s impossibly old. That can’t be the true age of those diamond deposits out there in Zaire. It’s older than the accepted age of the earth. So geologists have to dismiss this isochrone evidence for age.

And I personally have been involved with dating Grand Canyon rocks and I took someGrand Canyon rocks and I plotted the strontium isotope ratio versus the rubidium strontiumisotope ratio. Rubidium 87 is radioactive and decays to strontium 87. And when you plotsome of these points of the isotope ratios of these Grand Canyon rocks, you get an age ofabout 2.07 billion years. That’s interesting—it would suggest that the Grand Canyon rocks are about 2 billion years old, except this lava flow that the isotope analyses came from is a recent lava flow that is on the rim of the Grand Canyon, spilled over and even blocked the river. It caused me to doubt the ages assigned to rocks.

Here we have some of the best radioactive isotopes methods giving excessively old ages, or just scored in ages. So I find myself over the period of years doubting that radioac­tive isotopes give the correct ages for things.

Ankerberg: So where did you go from there?

Austin: Well, I was thinking about early geology, 1830, when we had Charles Lyell, the founder of modern geology some say. He was talking and looking at sedimentation and erosion. A man, who (I’ll tell you who he was a little bit later) read Charles Lyell’s book, Principles of Geology and he saw this canyon of the Santa Cruz River in southern Argen­tina and he said to himself, it must have taken an immense period of time for that rather sluggish river to slowly carve and cut that canyon. He saw the river and studied it for about a week, about 150 years ago, and he got back into his ship and sailed around to the Galapagos Islands.

Before he did that he wrote in his journal. He interpreted the Santa Cruz River valley there in southern Argentina, and he said, “The river, though it has so little power in trans­porting even inconsiderable fragments, yet in the lapse of ages might produce, by its gradual erosion, an effect of which it is difficult to judge the amount.” And he thought to himself, slow and gradual erosion, and long periods of time.

Then he got in his ship and sailed over to the Galapagos Islands and saw the finches and the reptiles in the Galapagos and he added the next element to this theory, “Not only geological slowness, or gradualism, and geologic time, but biological gradualism and natu­ral selection and survival of the fittest gave rise to the diversity of species you see on the Galapagos Islands. In other words, he went on to propose this theory that we know as organic evolution. His name is Charles Darwin.

Darwin got his ideas of biological evolution from thinking about geological evolution. And he got his ideas of geological evolution from thinking about the Santa Cruz river valley in southern Argentina. Now we know that that whole area has been immensely glaciated. Geologists have studied it and it doesn’t appear that that canyon could be attributed solely to slow and gradual agents of erosion. Darwin was wrong about the canyon, could he also be wrong about his theory? He built his theory on, I think, some incorrect geological gener­alizations.

Dr. Steve Austin, received his B.S. (Geology), University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 1970; M.S. (Geology), San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, 1971; Ph.D. (Geology), Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 1979.

Read Part 17