CPT Q. 075: Are not labels such as ‘Mesozoic’ and ‘Cretaceous’ not circular and tautological?

Q. 75. You continue to employ what seems to me a confusing ‘mix’ of deep time terms and concepts in your geology and radiometric age explanations with short time language in connection with Biblical history and the Flood. For example, you date the Sierra batholith pluton emplacements during “the Mesozoic, mostly during the Cretaceous.” Your use of geologic eras, periods, etc., postulated by their 19^th century authors in deep time stretching over tens of millions of years (and defined by fossil content) to date the events of a one year Flood to me seems to be circular, tautological, and also still non-definitive regarding the actual timing of pluton emplacement.

Historical Background

Response: If there were no reliable chronometer available, capable of providing reasonably accurate time correlations for geological formations across the face of the earth, then I would tend to agree with your assessment. In the 19^th century when the labels for the geological eras, periods, etc. were coined and assigned, it was indeed the fossil content that guided the correlations. Whether or not these correlations were done correctly and whether or not they were applicable all over the earth are without doubt important issues. However, in the 19^th century the absolute amount of time represented by this fossil record was impossible to determine. It was ultimately nothing more than a matter of speculation and guesswork. Certainly, belief in Darwin’s ideas of common ancestry and the efficacy of natural selection drove the guesswork about the time scale into the range of hundreds of millions of years.

The discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and the realization that radioactivity offered a means for dating rocks within the decade following radically changed that state of affairs. Suddenly, methods appeared that seemingly provided a means to obtain absolute dates for geological formations, independent of their fossil content. Although these methods were restricted to igneous rocks, igneous intrusions and beds of volcanic tuff were/are common enough in sedimentary environments to provide relatively tight age constraints on sedimentary formations. With this development, the chronological correlations based on fossil content could now be cross-checked using radioisotope methods that had no logical connection with fossils. What was found was that the correlations obtained by radioisotope methods matched with a high degree of fidelity the correlations based solely on fossil content. What in general did not match were the actual ages involved. Those based on 19^th century guesswork did not agree that well with those derived from radioisotope methods.

Therefore, if one surveys the various versions of the idealized geological column decade by decade through the 20^th century, one finds significant changes in the dates assigned to the various eras, periods, and epochs during the early decades, with the size of the changes becoming relatively small by the end of the century. This trend is mainly the result of the accumulating numbers of radioisotope determinations of igneous intrusive rocks and tuff layers that provided tighter and tighter constraints on the fossil-bearing sedimentary formations. The name designations for the geological eras, periods, and epochs continued to be correlated with their fossil content, but the time scale was now controlled, not by fossil content, but by radioisotope age determinations, whose number has now become quite large.

So is it proper for someone like myself to use the standard designations for the different stages in the geological record, designations originally coined and established in the literature by 19^th century geologists who were mostly uniformitarians and Darwinists? Do these designations inherently imply tens and hundreds of millions of years? Are they inherently circular and tautological? Are they therefore worthless in any valid description of what occurred in the year-long Genesis Flood? Let me address these issues in light of the historical background I presented above after I provide some relevant highlights of the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) project.

Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE)

The firm conviction on the part of uniformitarians that the earth is some 4.5 billion years old and that multi-celled life forms have existed on our planet for close to 600 million years is based first and foremost on their confidence in radioisotope dating results. This confidence relies, firstly, on many strong lines of evidence that an undeniable record of billions of years’ worth of nuclear decay (at presently observed decay rates), is present in the earth’s rocks, and, secondly, on the assumption that nuclear decay rates have never changed in any significant way since the earth originally formed.

The RATE program was undertaken by scientists like myself who are persuaded from Scripture that God, who cannot lie, has clearly revealed that He created the earth and cosmos from scratch only a few thousands of years ago. The goal of RATE was to uncover the logical flaw in the way in which radioisotope data is commonly interpreted that leads most people to conclude the earth has a multi-billion year long history. Our primary conclusion was that the primary flaw is the assumption that either God does not exist at all or if He exists, He has never intervened in any major way in the physical operation of His creation. We noted that the latter error was prophesied by the apostle Peter as one of the (if not the major) deceptions of the last days. Specifically, we concluded that the uniformitarian assumption that nuclear decay rates had been constant since creation was false. The fundamental error is just that simple.

Even more specifically, we concluded that roughly four billion years’ worth of nuclear transmutation (at presently measured rates) occurred when God fashioned the physical earth on Days 1 and 2 of Creation Week and possibly also on the early part of Day 3, before He had created any life. We also concluded that roughly 600 million years’ worth of nuclear decay took place during the Genesis Flood. We believe it was God who graciously provided us with clear-cut experimental evidence to support these conclusions, which to many continue to be astonishing. For anyone who is not conversant with our research results, I encourage such a person to download the individual chapters of our book, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative, L. Vardiman, A. A. Snelling, and E. F. Chaffin, eds., ICR/CRS, 2005, from http://icr.org/rate2/.

A major secondary conclusion, highly relevant to this discussion, is that radioisotope methods do, on the whole, give reliable relative ages for most igneous rocks. This conclusion was based in part on more than a thousand radioisotope analyses the RATE team carefully performed on a large and diverse suite of rock samples utilizing some of the best laboratories in the world. Although we did discover and document some discordance among the various radioisotope methods, most of this discordance was in crystalline rocks stratigraphically below fossil-bearing sediment layers, rocks presumably formed as part the creation of the earth itself during the early portion of Creation Week. For igneous rocks we infer to have crystallized during the Flood, we found much less discordance.

At a very basic level, the RATE program showed that the amount of nuclear decay, as implied by various physical indicators such as fission tracks and radiohalos, which occurred during the interval of time in which the fossiliferous sediment layers were deposited, i.e., during the Flood, equals several hundred million years’ worth of decay at presently measured decay rates, with little room for uncertainty. There is tangible, visible, physical evidence for this very important conclusion. This evidence is not from just one locality or region, but from many locations around the world. Moreover, we found that the cumulative amount of nuclear decay decreases in a smooth monotonic way from the bottom of the rock record as one goes upward toward the top.

The inescapable conclusion is that nuclear decay processes operated at highly accelerated rates during the Flood cataclysm. Radioactive species in igneous rocks that crystallized early in the cataclysm logically experienced larger cumulative amounts of decay than those in rocks which crystallized later. Hence, evidences recorded in rocks that reliably indicate the cumulative amount of nuclear decay which has occurred since each of the rocks crystallized provides a means for reliably determining the order in which the rocks formed. Of course, without a detailed knowledge of the actual time history of the changing decay rates, actual ages for the rocks simply cannot be determined. But relative ages are provided. In other words, the RATE research shows that, with only a few relatively minor caveats, radioisotope dating does provide reliable relative dates in many if not most cases. Hence, radioisotope methods can, with logical consistency, be usefully applied to unraveling what occurred during the Genesis Flood.

Conclusions on the use of standard geologic designations

Let me now return to the basic issues at hand, namely, is it proper for someone like myself to use the standard designations for the different stages in the geological record, designations originally coined and established in the literature by 19^th century geologists who were mostly uniformitarians and Darwinists? Do these designations inherently imply tens and hundreds of millions of years? Are they inherently circular and tautological? Are they therefore worthless in any valid description of what occurred in the year-long Genesis Flood?

First, if there is an independent means for testing the reality of the correlations in the geological record provided by fossil content, then the charge that these correlations are circular and tautological cannot be logically sustained. Radioisotope methods do provide such an independent test, and these methods overwhelmingly confirm the correlations based on fossil content are genuine. Rocks with Cambrian fossil assemblages consistently display the same radioisotope values all over the globe. Similarly, Triassic fossil assemblages consistently display the same radioisotope values on a worldwide scale. So the overall vertical sequence constructed to some degree by piecing the fossil data from different regions together can be and has been confirmed using techniques, namely, radioisotope methods, which are have no logical connections with fossils. So this claim of tautology and circularity is without basis today.

Next, do the designations for geological eras, periods, etc. inherently imply tens and hundreds of millions of years? Certainly, the period designations, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic are tinged with Darwinist connotations if one is disposed to thinking of them with a uniformitarian mindset. On the other hand, if one has a Biblical mindset, the term, ‘ancient world’, which the apostle Peter uses in 2 Peter 2:5 to refer to the world before the Flood may come to mind. The majority of the life forms one finds as fossils in the Paleozoic rocks are from that ‘ancient world’ which perished. By contrast, significant numbers of life forms found as fossils in Cenozoic rocks are present in our world today, that is, the ‘present earth’ Peter mentions in 2 Peter 3:7. Mesozoic rocks contain representatives from both worlds.

More to the point, I would contend that nothing in these designations logically requires them to mean tens or millions of years. While they generally bear such connotations to a uniformitarian, it is his/her uniformitarian mindset that lends such time associations to those terms. Recognizing that radioisotope methods independently verify that vertical fossil successions which correlate laterally in a global manner are real, many creationists like myself apply these terms to the specific well-defined portions of the geological record with which they have long been associated. However, accepting the Biblical revelation concerning the earth’s physical history as reliable, we deliberately reject the logically unnecessary overlay of the uniformitarian time scale. Use of these well-established terms allows us to communicate effectively with one another and also to secular earth scientists who may be doing work which is proving useful to defend the Biblical perspective. Hence, we find it extremely advantageous to use the existing designations instead of seeking to create a parallel but essentially equivalent set of terms.