Defender's Guide to Science and Creationism

Assertion: ¹⁴C dating is unreliable because it once showed a living mollusk to have been dead for 3,000 years.

Mark I. Vuletic

Last updated 3 December 2008

Analysis

(i) As pointed out by zoologist Tim Berra (1990:38), many of the "obviously wrong dates" creationists point to come from misapplication of carbon dating to samples for which it was never supposed to work in the first place. The short half-life (5,730 years) of ¹⁴C makes carbon dating accurate only up to 50,000 years, so in some cases creationists derive incorrect results by applying the test to samples older than 50,000 years. In other cases, such as that of the "3,000 year-old" mollusk, the error arises because of well-understood peculiarities in the environment from which the sample was derived. The mollusk incident is explained in full detail by Keith and Anderson (1963), and has no impact on the general reliability of carbon dating.

(ii) The maximum error in proper ¹⁴C dating is only a few thousand years. This means that even with the worst kind of error on samples in the older range, the results of ¹⁴C dating leave no room for the 6,000 to 10,000 year-old earth desired by young-earth creationists.

References

Berra TM. 1990. Evolution and the Myth of Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keith MS and Anderson GM. 1963. Radiocarbon dating: fictitious results with mollusk shells. Science 141:634.

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