Argon, Helium and a Young Earth

There are several method used in attempting to obtain the age of the Earth. The best know is the  radiometric dating of meteorites. Radiometric dating uses a "parent" element that decays into a "daughter" element. When calculating the age of a rock using, say, the Potassium-Argon method (K-Ar), a number of assumptions must be made: The rate of decay has remained constant, the amount of both parent and daughter elements, nothing was added or removed and so on.

When an age of the Earth is produced that do not meet uniformitarian presuppositions, the results of the test are discarded. Instead of "Follow where the evidence leads", this means, "Make the evidence say what you want". Most of the evidence favors a young Earth, and radiometric dating also yields young ages.

Unlike some scientists, creation researchers are willing to examine the evidence and work with serious questions about their results.

In the final report of ICR’s Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) project, Dr. Russell Humphreys reported that helium diffusion from zircons in borehole GT-2 at Fenton Hill, New Mexico, gave an age for the earth of 6,000 ± 2,000 years. This young age agrees with a literal reading of Scripture, but is at variance with the billions of years conventionally held. Gary Loechelt has been a frequent critic of Humphreys’ procedures for calculating the young age by helium diffusion. Humphreys has responded to Loechelt and other critics, demonstrating that their concerns were invalid and successfully defending his findings. 

However, due to Loechelt’s persistent criticisms, Humphreys recently took a deeper look at one of the key papers on which his helium diffusion research was based, and he found some rather odd assumptions about local heating near the borehole. He concluded that some of the assumptions about the heating history of the borehole were made to avoid problems the authors of the paper (Harrison et al) would otherwise have had with the diffusion of argon from the sample. 

You can learn more about the calculations of Dr. Humpreys by reading the rest of "Both Argon and Helium Diffusion Rates Indicate a Young Earth", here.