The Cure For the Carbon-14 Dating Problem?

  One of the roadblocks to achieving Biblical harmony with so-named science is that our chronological dates do not agree.  And it's no small disagreement, therefore no small roadblock!  Yet it's certainly a problem worth resolving.  Some people otherwise disposed to believe in Jesus are convinced that science has proven that much of the Bible is in error.  Some scientists that feel a tugging on their soul to believe in God and Christ do not feel that they can rationally bridge the gap between what science says is true and what scripture says is true; and so they hold back, and Christians believe that this is a deceit of the Devil that could cost a person their eternal life.  Less gap would mean fewer misled souls.... from a Christian viewpoint.  Christians essentially believe that science, once they were in full possession of the truth, would be in full acknowledgement of God.  As things sit today science is all too often a barrier to faith in our common Maker.  A very powerful barrier.

  I think that science shouldn't care at all what date the testing shows, what age a thing is, but should only care that the age of a thing was correctly determined.  Yet there is a bit of breath holding on both sides.  The Christian, were it definitively proven that the world was millions of years old (or anything much over 6,000 years old) would be in a terrible conundrum.  Why did/does information in Genesis, and information from some other Bible books, collectively tell us that this world is only about 6,000 years old if in truth it is greatly older?  The veracity of the Bible would have sustained a great wound.  It would be a hard blow to scripture's credibility.  A great wound!  After all, Adam's sons were/are named, son to son, until Noah and the flood.  They are 10 people in total, Noah being the 10th.  And the age of each father is given at the time his son was born. Their lives add up to about 1654 years at the time the flood arrived.  That's in Genesis.  Noah's sons are named, son to son, until Abraham, and that's in Genesis.  And two of the Gospels name all or part of the lineage from Adam to Jesus.  Luke lists the entire lineage in Chapter 3.  So, how can you rescue the Bible's chronological credibility if it is proven that the Earth is even 100,000 years old?  Big problem.  Possible collapse of our Christian world view!  And for Christians, unlike scientists, that is a really big deal! 

  Science, by contrast, quite reasonably commits to adjusting its claims about the nature of things it studies as new evidence accumulates.  But the Bible has in essence staked out a position and held it for centuries.  And it can do little else.  It does not have much wiggle room because it claims to be God's word.  (And it is!)  God, all knowing God, does not need to adjust His word as evidence accumulates.  He knew the entire truth when He first spoke to those who directly placed His words into writing under His direction.

  For scientists, if it were irrefutably determined that the world was indeed only 6,000 years old, irrefutably in the eyes of scientists themselves, they would merely need to go about the business of reconciling all of their previous theories and hypothesis to this newly discovered irrefutable truth.  In truth some of them might feel some embarrassment or chagrin, but they are not really supposed to.  For scientists, any certain truth should be a welcome certain truth.  Otherwise they are a corrupted group....not really truth seekers at all, but rather a 'religion' of sorts in their own right.  They are supposed to follow the hard evidence where ever it should lead without reluctance of resistance. 

  But...though Christians believe that scientists merely study what God has done, and therefore have to arrive in agreement with us eventually when they have as much truth through research as we have through scriptural revelation, that time of agreement has not yet come.  And I would speculate that most scientists today will tell you that, based on what they think today, that time never will come.  And so, we stand at odds with each other, we Christians and those scientists.  And the dating process and results for old or extremely ancient objects is one of the huge chasms that stand between us ever agreeing with each other.

  Carbon-14 dating as presently understood says that the Earth is very old.  It dates objects as being up to at least 100,000 years old before this method begins to become un-useful.  Anything much older than 100,000 years old is almost devoid of C-14 because it has mostly all decayed away by then, so there is no longer any C-14 within that object to use for dating it.  But there are people, certainly some Christians, that challenge whether this method is reliable for objects more that even 4,500 years old.  After that point it begins to produce dates that Bible chronology says are impossible.  After all, per the Bible our world is only about 6,000 years old.  And the Bible has actually proven very reliable concerning history since the great flood of Noah.  So, we believe it should be reliable concerning history before the flood also. 

  It's a topic of debate between the two groups, scientists and Christians.  But without going into any pro or anti Carbon-14 dating arguments - why it should be trusted or why it should not - here is a possible solution to this whole issue.  Here is a test that might greatly answer the question:

  We cannot very easily prove that the Earth is as old as Carbon-14 says it is, and the same is true using other types of isotope dating techniques.  The reason is that you have to have a very ancient object of actual known age, and then have Carbon-14 dating, or some other method of radio-isotopic dating independently produce results which also conclude that it is indeed that age.  Once the known age and the measured age showed themselves in agreement, you've largely proved your dating method.  But the problem is - and it is a whopper of a problem - that there isn't any known object of extreme age for which the exact age of that object is truly known.  We can't reach into a bone or fossil storage box and choose the femur of a dinosaur whose age is known with certainty to be 66,384,672 years old, right, and then test it with some isotopic dating method to show that yes, the tester verifies that to be the correct age!  We can't celebrate that our testing produced the exactly correct age result, as if we knew how old that bone was before we started the test.  We have no dinosaur specimen of some exactly known age.  There are none...zero...zilch...not even one!  Recorded human history does not go back all that far.  And forget dinosaurs, we don't even have a far less ancient mammoth bone known with exactitude to be, oh, let's say 5, 672 years old to perform a Carbon-14 test on.  There was no one on Earth keeping track of the exact year that a mammoth died back in time 5, 672 years ago.  So for this reason we just can't prove that the Earth is as old as isometric dating claims it is.  We lack the item that can be used as a standard.  We lack the 'bone of ancient but exactly known age'.  

  But while we can't easily prove any accurate measurement for the ancient Earth idea that science supports, it is theoretically possible, I believe, to prove that the Earth is either about as young as the Bible says that it is, or that it is not.  And we might be able to use Carbon-14 dating to do so.  Here's the notion:

  On Noah's Ark the Bible says there were 8 people, as well as the animals.  We cannot know which animals were the specific animals that made the trip, to date their tissue.  But we might, even today, discover the actual burial place and the body of Noah, his sons Shem, Japheth, and Ham, or one of their 4 Biblically un-named wives.   These are famous persons, and if a very well funded effort were made to trace down their remains, perhaps it could succeed.  If you look it up you'll quickly find that several places in this world claim to be the burial place of Noah.  Obviously, since there are several locations making this claim, they probably cannot all be right!  But that doesn't mean that they are all wrong.  One of them could possibly be the location of Noah's remains.  One internet site lists 6 places claiming to be the site of Noah's remains; there was a location in Turkey, one in Iraq, one in Iran, one in Lebanon, one in Jordan, and one in Azerbaijan.   A rich enough or powerful enough or persuasive enough entity could negotiate with all of these locations for respectful access to the sites to gain possible tissue samples.  It wouldn't be easy, but it might be possible.   

  And we know that the Bible puts the flood at about 2350 years B.C.  So, if we went to these locations and measured the remains with a Carbon-14 tester (assuming they sit upon any actual remains) that might tell us something.  After all, there are these 'alleged' locations for these burials in certain cases.  What if you found the marked burial site of Ham, one of the sons of Noah.  Let's say you excavated and found an actual grave marker.  You managed to translate it somehow, perhaps.  And then you tested those remains genetically and compared them to remains that were believed to be Noah's, and you got a positive match!  The remains thought to be Ham's proved that it was indeed a son of the remains thought to be Noah's!  That would be pretty strong evidence of their respective identities.  So then you performed the C-14 test, and suppose they both showed an age of about 4,000 years.  That is what you would expect based on Bible chronology.  So, then you would have gotten some useful confirmation on the accuracy of C-14 dating on the most ancient of post flood remains, right?  And there is amazing modern technology to use. 

  As I write this in August of 2018 there are not many countries that cannot be entered with permission by either European nations, China, America, or Russia for instance, for the purpose of an archaeological expedition.  In other words yes, there are wars going on, but few places are wholly off limits for cooperating nations that might take part in such a search for the remains of our common ancestors:  Noah and his family.  Or other remains of known, pre-flood Biblically named figures as well.  

  And did you know that an old legend says that the skull of Adam was brought along on the Ark, given to Shem as a memorial type keep-sake and ended up being deposited in a sort of crypt beneath a 'montecito' (small hill) on the Mount of Olives?  According to that legend that hill is still visible today but has a Muslim place of prayer built upon it.  Probably just a legend, obviously, but if it were true and then Adam's skull was located that might provide datable tissue from a man Biblically known to be very close to 5,070 years old, because Adam died about 930 years after creation, he lived his life entirely before the flood, and creation was about 6,000 years ago per the Bible. 

  So, a Carbon-14 test performed on a small respectfully obtained bit of Adam's tissue should read that it is bout 5,070 year old tissue per Bible chronology.  But some Christians believe that Carbon-14 dates aren't correct for samples belonging to the pre-flood times, right?  Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong, all things being equal.  Assuming conditions before the flood were so much different that sun radiation could not form Carbon-14 as readily, we would expect that even though we 'know' that this is Adam's 5,070 year old skull, we Christians might suspect that the Carbon-14 date will read that it is a much older skull than that.  It might read as being a huge amount older.  Many thousands of years older.  So if things turned out that way then we would know...we would have tentatively established...that Carbon-14 dating is very inaccurate for objects obtained from pre-flood times.  As mentioned, many Christians believe this to be the case.  And we could postulate that we would also learn, fairly closely, to what degree it is in error.  And oh, by the way...we would have the exciting ancillary benefit of knowing basically what Adam had looked like.  Skull reconstruction could provide clues.  And we would know if he was our modern size, taller, or shorter, and many other such physical details.  Such information would be tremendously exciting to the world.  And what if some of Adam's DNA was obtained intact?  Now that could be revolutionary within several branches of science and medicine.

  Noah and his sons lived hundreds of years after the flood.  Their bodies presumably had time to replace all of their pre-flood cells with post-flood cells.  The Carbon-14 content of their bodies should have reached equilibrium levels for the new conditions of the post-flood world.  So, if you found tissue from Noah's burial place, from Noah's body, you really should then be able to measure it and get an age of about 4,000 years old, because Noah, for instance, lived 350 years after the flood per the Bible.  So he died about 4,000 years ago.  So, if Carbon-14 dating is reliable, we would get that 4,000 year old age reading using Carbon -14.  That would go far towards proving 2 things:  C-14 is reliable for measuring the age of post-flood organic material.  And, it would show with some reliability that the flood did really take place about 2350 B.C., and that Noah really did die about 350 years later. 

  Finding these specific peoples' remains...verifiably finding them to fairly universal agreement between both theologians and scientists, and then measuring their ages...it would be an accomplishment on par with walking on the moon for the first time or colonizing Mars.  It would certainly exceed the opening of King Tut's tomb in impact.  It would be one of the great accomplishments of our modern times.

  So, I would count such an accomplishment as perhaps the most amazing archaeological work ever performed.  It would be so very useful scientifically and among the religious to learn some truths from such undecomposed remains as might exist.  It might help settle some long standing disputes between the scientific community and the religious community (so long as all testing and handling was above board and certified to be honestly dealt with throughout all discovery and testing.)  And what a window it might open to the pre-flood world.  What diseases did they suffer from?  How much more uncorrupted was their DNA?  What allowed for their reputed very long life spans?  If it was a son of Noah, or one of the wives of the sons, then which people groups in our day sprang from them?  So much might be learned!

  So since we have a few fairly rich governments, or since there are many hundreds of billionaires on Earth, some of them perhaps slightly bored and looking for a challenge of epic proportions, why doesn't someone step up and spend an unprecedented amount of money on this project, and pursue it with multiple discovery teams at multiple sites across the globe and see if perhaps there could be a successful outcome?  Perhaps there can be!  A determined and well funded campaign to answer these questions might meet with success.  And the world has seldom if ever had better political conditions and such effective scientific tools with which to give such an adventure a try.  We have an unprecedented window of opportunity in our times.  But who will rise to the occasion?  It would be tremendous if somebody would.  It is a challenge and a cause aching to find a champion.  Perhaps God would allow them success.

  Or, perhaps God has no interest in this for some reason.   Who can say but God?