Mark I. Vuletic

Last updated 21 March 2008

Analysis

This is true, but irrelevant.

(i) As paleontologist Niles Eldredge responds:

A few million years sounds like a huge error, but a couple of million years one way or the other is a small error compared with the huge age calculated. Saying '380 million years plus or minus two million' is like thinking back to April from December and saying you can't remember whether something happened on the 19th, 20th, or 21st. (Eldredge 1982:103)

To help put things in perspective a different way, the error Eldredge describes is only slightly more than half a percent.

(ii) Even with an error factor of a few million years, radioisotope dating consistently shows that the earth is billions of years older than the 6,000-year-old earth the young-earth creationists desire. Not to mention that even the various types of creationists cannot agree whether Genesis allows for billions of years or only a few thousand. Apparently the creationists' preferred method of dating (i.e. pulling a date from their personal interpretation of Scripture) suffers from a significantly higher error factor than radioisopte dating.

There is a nice YouTube video on the size of the young-earth creationists' error factor:

References

Eldredge N. 1982. The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism. New York: Washington Square Press.