Radiometric Dating and Reason — Part 5

This is the fifth in a series of articles on radiometric dating. You can find links to previous articles in the series here. Really, radiometric dating has some things in common with rolling the dice, as readers of this series have seen. Evolution requires an ancient earth, so quite a bit of finagling and selective citing is involved in order to keep the belief in "deep time" alive.

Previous articles gave a general explanation of radiometric dating, then went into more detail on various methods. Those included the isochron method, noble elements, and alkali metal dating. This latest installment on rare earth elements could be considered Part 5A, since the article said that it's continued next month. Like the previous articles, there is material that should appeal to people who want to consider the mathematics involved.

Past articles in this series have attempted to establish a foundation for understanding the radioisotope dating models or hypotheses, their assumptions, and how those assumptions lead to a “deep time” picture of our universe. Secularists would have us accept their convoluted, circular arguments as scientific fact simply because the majority of people in the academic community embrace them. Hopefully our readers now understand that using the various types of radioisotope decay as clocks does not consistently produce concordant results, nor is it verified by observational evidence. If these radioisotope decay methods do not properly date rocks of known ages, how can we trust them to date rocks of unknown ages? Trusting these methods to give factual dates would then be a matter of faith, not science. What secularists are trying to instill in us is a strange amalgam of science and their biased philosophy known as secular humanism.

Dating methods using the rare-earth elements are not used as frequently as the potassium-argon (K-Ar), argon-argon (Ar-Ar), rubidium-strontium (Rb-Sr), uranium-lead (U-Pb), and lead-lead (Pb-Pb) methods and are somewhat hidden from general knowledge. The rare-earth elements (REEs) are a group of seventeen metallic elements—i.e., the lanthanides plus scandium (Sc) and yttrium (Y)—that tend to exhibit similar chemical properties and tend to appear in the same ore deposits. They are relatively plentiful in the earth’s crust but are so dispersed they are not often found in concentrations that make the ore deposits economically extractable. Thus, the term “rare earths” is archaic and dates back to the discovery of the black mineral ytterbite (later renamed gadolinite) in 1787 at a quarry in Sweden.

To finish reading this article, roll on over to "Rare-Earth Clocks, Sm-Nd and Lu-Hf Dating Models: Radioactive Dating, Part 5".