C-14 Decay: Support for Evolution?


Dear hijas,

Take C-14 for example. C-14 or radiocarbon is a perfect example of a physical aspect of our universe that is scientifically determined and analyzed. From your chemistry classes you remember that the element carbon comes in three isotopes: C-12, C-13, and C-14. The carbon atom has 6 protons, but it is the number of neutrons that determine the isotope. C-12 then has 6 protons and 6 neutrons, C-13 has 6 protons and 7 neutrons, C-14 has 6 protons and 8 neutrons.  During life both plants and animals, including you and I, are gaining and losing C-14; plants chiefly through CO2 in the air, animals chiefly through eating the plants. When an organism dies, it no longer gains C-14, but only loses it.

The production of C-14 in the universe follows an ordered principle or law whereby cosmic rays trigger a process in the atmosphere that changes atmospheric nitrogen into C-14. This carbon in the atmosphere mostly becomes attached to oxygen formed carbon dioxide (CO2) . The CO2 includes the stable, common isotope C-12 and a very tiny amount of the unstable C-14; only about 1 in a trillion carbon atoms is a C-14 atom. Carbon dioxide is then ingested by plants and animals and is incorporated into their biological structures, and it stops at the time of death of the organism. It can be seen in the chart below:

C-14 production

Unlike C-12 and C-13, C-14 is unstable and eventually decays back into nitrogen. Once a plant or organism dies it no longer takes in new carbon, and the amount of C-14 in the tissue of the plant or animal begins to decrease. This decay rate can be measured as the ratio of the isotopes C14/C12. It is expressed in terms of a half-life, which is the amount of time for half of any given sample of C-14 to decay back into nitrogen. Thus, after one half-life, 50% of the original C-14 atoms will remain in the sample. After two half-lives, 25% of the original C-14 atoms will remain, three half-lives 12.5%, 4 half-lives 6.25%, and so on. The scientifically measured half-life today of C-14 is 5730 years.


So how does this support evolution and its millions and millions of years? It doesn’t; C-14 decay actually supports just the opposite. It supports a relatively young (thousands, not billions and millions) age for the dead organisms found in the rock layers of the earth, thus eliminating the vast long ages required for evolution to even happen. We can see this in a number of examples.

We must remember the half-life, right? C-14 half-life = 5730 years. After 18 half-lives, or a little more than 100,000 years, the percentage of C14/C12 in any given sample is undetectable by our most sensitive scientific instruments. The implications here are huge! Since each half-life is 5730 years, this means that no C-14 at all would be detectable in a specimen that is older than 18 X 5730 = 103,140 years. But what if we did find C-14 in, let’s say, a dinosaur bone, or coal, or seashells? These are formerly living organisms. Dinosaurs supposedly went extinct 65 millions years ago. Coal is thought to be hundreds of millions of years old. Some seashells supposedly date back even further. Wouldn’t detectable C-14 in these specimens tell us these things couldn’t possibly be older than 100,000 years? It certainly suggests it, doesn’t it?

But, not only that, what if we found detectable C-14 in something supposedly billions of years old? How could something supposedly billions of years old have any C-14 left? It shouldn’t, except that we do find detectable C-14 even in diamonds supposedly billions of years old. These examples throw the whole dating system upon which evolution is based into a futile exercise of whack-a-mole. The actual, detectable C-14 in specimens supposedly millions and billions of years old keeps popping up to disprove the old dates they’ve been given by the evolutionists. C-14 decay is a valuable tool in our arsenal, mis hijas, and is just one of many proofs to disembowel long evolutionary ages.

For further study I encourage you to visit: http://www.icr.org/article/117/, http://creation.com/carbon-14-dating-explained-in-everyday-terms, http://creation.com/diamonds-a-creationists-best-friend, http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad


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