I have a minority opinion about the age of the Earth. I believe it’s roughly 7,500 years old, not billions of years. To many, at first glance at least, this may seem contrary to science. But bear with me, and let me show you the connection between the element helium, the Bible, and God.
The connection is radiometric dating. That’s the technical term for measuring how old an object is by the elements within it. The general idea is that there is a radioactive “parent” element or isotope that degenerates over time into a “daughter” element or isotope. You may have heard of “carbon dating.” Carbon dating measures how much carbon-14 (carbon with two extra neutrons) remains in items that were once living. Carbon dating works well for things less than 5,000 years old. For details of how scientists date objects, and the hidden assumptions they use to get the answers they want, please see my blog post The Dating Game.
Back to helium. Helium is produced when uranium decays into lead. Supposedly, this has been going on for billions of years, and some scientists use the uranium/lead link to claim a rock is billions of years old. At eight stages in this uranium-to-lead decay process, the nucleus of the atom ejects an alpha particle, which has two protons and two neutrons. The alpha particle quickly acquires two electrons and becomes the gas helium.
Helium is the gas in party balloons. It’s light and “slippery,” and doesn’t stay long in the rocks. In the year 2000, three noted scientists published charts predicting how much helium should be left using two models – a “Creation” model and a “billions of years” model. After the charts were published, they sent rock samples to one of the world’s top laboratories for extensive testing.
The lab compared the relative amounts of uranium and lead, and, based just on that ratio, estimated the rocks were 1.44 to 1.5 billion years old. However, and now I’m finally getting to the point, when they measured how fast helium leaks out of rocks (the helium diffusion rate if you want a technical term), the measurements almost exactly matched the Creation model. Using the measurements of this world-class lab, the earth is between 4,000 to 8,000 years old. Not billions. It wasn’t a small difference, the precisely measured amount of helium still in the rocks was 100,000 times larger than the billions of years model predicated. That’s a huge difference, five orders of magnitude and 25 standard deviations for nerds like me. The inescapable conclusion is that radioactive decay rates were hugely accelerated in the past – probably during the Flood of Noah. Perhaps God weakened the strong nuclear force.
The gold standard for testing a scientific theory is when it can predict in advance what a measurement will be. The Creation model is golden. A 100,000 times difference is beyond stunning. It is one of the strongest pieces of scientific evidence confirming recent Creation. There are many others, such as the discovery of soft tissue (blood, cartilage, DNA, etc.) in dinosaur and other fossils claimed to be millions of years old, the discovery of detectable amounts of carbon-14 in fossils and diamonds (anything older than 60,000 years should not have measurable carbon-14), the pristine rings of Saturn, and on and on.
Helium shows us the Bible – the Word of God – is true. Remember that when you see a party balloon. Helium rises to God and reveals the glory and wonder of Creation.
Thanks for reading,
Doug Ell