You Need to Understand Radio-carbon Dating

Last week I read this in an Israeli newspaper:

“A massive tower that defended [Jerusalem’s] main water source – which was thought to have been built in the Middle Bronze Age, nearly 4,000 years ago – [Carbon dating results] have shown the structure likely dates back only to the ninth century B.C.E.”

Like it or not, you need to understand radio-carbon dating. Nearly every field of science relies on it. Archaeologists in particular count on carbon dating to help them determine the age of many of the artifacts they dig up. 

What is it? How does it work?

At this moment, powerful cosmic particles from somewhere out in the Milky Way are striking Earth’s upper atmosphere. They combine with nitrogen atoms to form unstable Carbon 14 atoms – unstable in the sense that the C-14 atoms slowly decay back to nitrogen.

The C-14 and more stable C-12 carbon atoms combine with oxygen atoms to form carbon dioxide. The ratio between the two types of carbon dioxide is - currently - one trillion to 1.

Both types of carbon dioxide are breathed in by living plants. Animals, of course, breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. However, animals do collect C-12 and C-14 from the plants they eat. So animals and humans, like plants, are assumed to have the same one trillion to 1 ratio of C-12 to C-14. Obviously, rocks cannot be measured by a carbon clock since they don't breathe.

(The archaeologists in Jerusalem had to have dated some piece of wood they found, not the stones the tower is built from. It was the piece of wood, or technically, the death of the tree the wood came from, that dated to David’s day, not the stone tower.)

When a plant or animal dies, it stops taking in carbon dioxide. It is assumed that the C-12 remains stable for the rest of eternity, but the no-longer-breathing plant's C-14 begins to decay.

It is assumed that all plants take in C-12 and C-14 in the same amounts and with the same ratio. It is further assumed that the ratio has remained constant; that is, that a plant living, say, 6000 years ago took up one C-14 atom to every one trillion C-12 atoms, just as plants do today.

The rate of decay – that is, the rate at which C-14 leeches away – is currently measured at one half gone every 5,700 years. And it is assumed that it has always been the same. So if you were to analyze a sample of 100 trillion carbon atoms from a modern plant, 100 of them would be C-14 atoms. If you looked at 100 trillion atoms of a 5,700 year-old plant you would only count fifty C-14 atoms – half the original amount. 100 trillion atoms from a plant 11,400 years old would have only twenty-five C-14 atoms, and so on.

Simple, right? The lower the amount of C-14, the older the sample. Given all that, any sample more than a few thousand years old will have a microscopically small amount of C-14... one might even say an "immeasurably small amount." And, of course, when you are measuring things in atoms, the samples (and the machinery) are subject to contamination.

According to radiocarbon.com, scientists use oxalic acid made from sugar beets known to have been harvested in 1955 to calibrate their tests. They also use wood from a tree known to have been cut in 1890, “unaffected by fossil fuel effects.”

Wait: What?

Yup. Turns out that changes to the atmosphere mess with the carbon levels. Scientists assume that, prior to the fossil fuel age there were no significant changes to the atmosphere. That explains that reference to the ‘1955 sugar beet oxalic acid,’ as well: atmospheric testing of hydrogen bombs in the nineteen fifties significantly altered the levels of C-12 and C-14 in the atmosphere.

Notice all the assumptions involved: For the carbon clock to be reliable, the amount of the mysterious cosmic rays striking the atmosphere from the unknown space source would have to remain constant over tens of thousands of years. Have they? Who knows? The scientists admit they know little about them.

In addition, cosmic rays are greatly affected by magnetic fields – both that of the earth and that of the sun. The magnetic fields, in fact, are the reason scientists can only say the cosmic rays come from 'somewhere in the galaxy' – because each magnetic field they pass on their way to Earth changes their direction and their intensity. 
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Earth's magnetic field fluctuates dramatically. The sun’s does as well.

Let’s take it a step further. For much of Earth's geologic history a dense shroud of water, dust or other debris covered the planet. Would this have affected cosmic rays striking the atmosphere? Absolutely. Would that have altered the relative amounts of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Again, yes.

Atmospheric oxygen is believed to have been as low as 15%, and as high as 35%, at various points in geologic history. The nitrogen level went down when oxygen went up, and vice versa. Carbon dioxide levels changed nearly every time a volcano erupted. When humans began cooking and heating with fire (6,000 years ago according to the Bible or 350,000 years ago according to science) carbon dioxide climbed. When we began using fossil fuels, CO2 really jumped. And atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s hugely affected levels of C-14 in the atmosphere.

So how can anyone say that the ratio of C-14 to ordinary carbon in a plant living today is the same as the ratio in a plant that lived thousands of years ago?

The scientists themselves, who lean so heavily on the radiocarbon clock, need to read the work of other scientists:

• “A large and sudden increase in radiocarbon around AD 773 is documented in coral skeletons from the South China Sea…forming a spike of 45% in late spring, followed by two smaller spikes. The carbon anomalies coincide with an historic comet collision with the Earth's atmosphere on 17 January AD 773.” – Nature.com
• “We find [in annual rings of Japanese cedar trees] a rapid increase of about 12% in the C-14 content from a.d. 774 to 775, which is about 20 times larger than the change attributed to ordinary solar modulation.” – Nature, June 2012
• “The rate of carbon 14 radioactive decay may have been different in the past. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have been different in the past. The assumption of a constant ratio of C-14 to C-12 is invalid; equilibrium would require about 30,000 years, (or 50,000 years according to this mathematician) and the C-14/C-12 ratio appears to be increasing still.” – Tufts.edu

That last part there, about “equilibrium,” is important. If all the assumptions were true, 30,000-50,000 years after the C-14 process began, whenever that was, the atmosphere should have reached equilibrium… it should have reached a point where the C-14 decayed away at the same rate at which it is being generated. Otherwise, by now we’d be swimming in C-14.

But it is still increasing. Which can ONLY mean:

1. The C-14 process – cosmic rays reaching the atmosphere, the atmosphere containing the present-day levels of nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2, the C-14 being absorbed by plants then decaying out, etc. – that process began less than 30,000 years ago… or
2. The theory on which Carbon 14 dating is based, is just wrong…

Please leave a respectful comment. (Comments are moderated, so if you're a troll or a salesman, don't bother.) To read another of my columns about science versus the Bible, click here.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this page by purchasing a book.

Archaeological proof Hezekiah really did turn a pagan shrine into a toilet

“And they demolished the pillar of Baal, and demolished the house of Baal, and made it a latrine to this day.” (2Kings 10:27, RSV)

Israeli archeologists have discovered a stone toilet while excavating an ancient city gate at Lachish. The latrine is evidence a biblical king tried to stamp out idol worship there.

The scriptural reference above is to Jehu defiling a Baal temple, not Hezekiah making a latrine in the gate of Lachish. But finding this toilet at Lachish suggests that King Hezekiah seems to have followed the practice of Jehu, deliberately defiling the eighth century B.C.E. shrine at the gate to the ancient city, just as Jehu did to the north.

“A toilet was installed in the [pagan] holy of holies [“. . .the high places of the gates. . .” 2 Kings 23:8] as the ultimate desecration of that place,” the IAA said in a statement. “A stone fashioned in the shape of a chair with a hole in its center was found in the corner of the room.” The authority said it was the first time an archeological find confirmed the practice of installing a toilet to desecrate a pagan worship site. 

 

Laboratory tests suggest the stone toilet at the Lachish gate was never used, the IAA said, making its placement “symbolic, after which the holy of holies was sealed." It remained sealed until the city was destroyed.

Lachish, about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem, was conquered by the invading Assyrians under King Sennacherib in the eighth century B.C.E. The city gate was first located “decades ago,” the IAA said, but was only fully exposed in early 2016. “The excavation revealed destruction layers in the wake of the defeat, including arrowheads and sling stones, indicative of the hand-to-hand combat that occurred in the city’s gatehouse."

The discovery is just one more in a long list proving that the Bible is trustworthy. To read another of my columns on the reliability of the Bible, click here.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing a book.

Is this the floor Jesus walked on?

Archaeologists have completed the restoration of ornate floor tiles which experts believe likely decorated the courtyard of the Second Jewish Temple.

In total, archaeological teams have uncovered approximately 600 colored stone floor tile segments, with more than 100 of them positively dated to the Herodian Second Temple period. The restored tiles came from the Temple Mount Sifting Project, salvaging artifacts from a Muslim construction site at the Temple complex.

The project provides visible and incontrovertible proof, backed up by ancient texts and historical context, of a Jewish Temple on the Mount.

Why would proof be needed?

Denial of a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount began at the 2000 Camp David Summit, when the Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat insisted - with no proof - that “the Temple” existed near Shechem (Nablus), and not on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The claim has since been taken up in the international narrative as UNESCO passed an initiative claiming the Temple Mount as an exclusively Muslim holy site. This claim went mainstream last October when the New York Times published an article questioning whether the two Jewish Temples ever existed at all.

The restoration is proof of a theory that large expanses of the Temple Mount during the Second Temple were covered with a special type of ornate flooring called opus sectile, Latin for “cut work.” The idea was first put forward in 2007 by archaeologist Assaf Avraham, director of the Jerusalem Walls National Park. The new discovery confirms it.

“So far, we have succeeded in restoring seven potential designs of the majestic flooring that decorated the buildings of the Temple Mount,” said Frankie Snyder, a member of the Temple Mount Sifting Project and an expert in the study of ancient Herodian style flooring, explaining that there were no opus sectile floors in Israel prior to the time of King Herod. “The tile segments were perfectly inlaid such that one could not even insert a sharp blade between them.” 

The tile design is consistent with floors found in contemporary works built by Herod. Similar flooring has been found at Herod’s palaces in Masada, Herodium, and Jericho, among others. A key characteristic of the Herodian tiles is their size, which corresponds to the Roman foot (11.6 inches).

The find also agrees with Talmudic literature about the construction of the Temple Mount which describes rows of green, blue and white marble. The tile segments, mostly imported from Rome, Asia Minor, Tunisia and Egypt, were made from polished multicolored stones cut in a variety of geometric shapes. [Read more here…]

Since the modern archaeological age began, the Temple Mount has been off-limits, as it has been the site of the Muslim Dome of the Rock for over a thousand years. However, Muslim construction projects occurred during the years 1999-2000 that involved large scale earthworks using heavy machinery; the purpose being to create an entrance to an area Jews refer to as Solomon’s Stables (an ancient subterranean structure) which they were converting into a new mosque. In addition, in an open area on the eastern side of the Temple Mount, ground level was lowered with bulldozers in order to lay new pavement slabs. About 400 truckloads of rubble were removed and dumped in various locations, mainly in the nearby Kidron Valley.

The earth-moving was done without building permits, and without archaeological supervision. While mainstream archaeologists were enraged at the destruction, Zachi Dvira, an archaeology student, came up with the idea of collecting and sifting through all the rubble to see what was there. Despite the lack of “context,” (being able to assign a time period to an artifact based on the strata in which it was found) his thinking was that ‘something is better than nothing.’ The Sifting Project began in the Tzurim Valley National Park in 2004.  

Since then, it has been responsible for some of the most outstanding finds in Jerusalem archaeology, including:

• A bulla (a lump of clay impressed with a seal) reading “…son of Immer.” (See Jeremiah 20:1)
• Over 5,000 coins, including coins minted by the Jews during the revolt against Rome in 66 C.E..
• Terracotta figurines that appear to have been smashed on purpose. (2 Kings 23:24)
• Babylonian arrowheads.
•  A small bronze harp that looks so much like the City of David logo that Israel now uses it in place of their own logo in some of their publicity.
• An amulet bearing the name of Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III

[Read more about the Temple Mount Sifting Project here…]

 Bill K. Underwood is a freelance columnist and author of several books, available in e-book or paperback at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing a book.