Andy McIntosh - What About the Fossils - Part 11 (Ammonite and Wood)

This is part 11 of a series of commentaries on material presented by Andy McIntosh.  This material was presented at a church that I attend.  It has been presented other places as well.

For reference, related arguments were presented by McIntosh in the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPUU9Wb8yzQ

C-14 Should be Missing

McIntosh presents an argument that C-14 should not be found at all in a sample that is millions of years old, but that we do find that - which is a claimed problem with an old earth.

Why should it be missing?

A single piece of Nitrogen, an atom, has 7 protons, and usually 7 neutrons.  There is this thing that happens to nitrogen where it turns into carbon for a "short" while, then turns back into nitrogen.

It starts when N gets hit with a neutron [N+n].  This causes a proton to get knocked out of the atom.  How an atom acts chemically is kind of based on how many protons it has, so this atom now starts acting like carbon [C(14)]. But this is unstable - atoms like to have the same number of protons and neutrons.  This has 6 protons, but 8 neutrons.  At some point, an electron will get spit out of a neutron, and that neutron will become a proton. When that happens, the atom is now back to a typical nitrogen atom.

No one knows how long this will take for a single C(14) atom.  But if you have a lot of C(14), you can expect about half of it to turn back into Nitrogen in about 5730 years. This is what is meant by "half life".  This block of C(14) will be turning into N over about 60,000 years, at which point, probably, it all will be N.

This process of turning N into C14 happens constantly in the upper atmosphere. The C14 gets distributed through the air. When animals and plants consume the air, this C14 gets made part of their bodies. When it dies, this stops happening. So after about 60,000 years, we'd expect a dead animal to have no more C14 in it.  Note though, that this process doesn't just happen in the upper atmosphere. But because hit happens there, the air we breath has a known amount of C14 in it.

What is it not missing from?

At about 47:10, McIntosh presents a slide showing a sample of ammonite and fossilized wood:

He states:

[...] and this was found, an ammonite which is supposedly in rock which would measure [...] about 120 million years old with a bit of wood that has carbon 14 in it which would date it at less than 100,000 years.  So what's the answer?  Something is wildly wrong with the estimates that people are making [...] concerning the millions of years.

This information seems to come from a paper published by Answers In Genesis:

https://answersingenesis.org/geology/carbon-14/radiocarbon-ages-fossils-cretaceous-strata-redding-california/

This paper contains details, but this chart sums up what they find:

This shows radiocarbon dates from 32,550 to 49,640 years ago.  We should keep in mind that most labs, from my cursory research, will say that when you start getting into the 40,000+ year range, that should be read as "no carbon was in this sample".  So it seems some of these should get thrown out.  But there does seem to be a few samples that fall within the significant range.

Now, there are some long conversations between Snelling, who wrote this paper, and geologists over what this means.  About contamination. About other sources of C14.  About how carbon dating ALWAYS dates something to younger than 60,000 years, even things much older than that, which is why we don't use radiocarbon dating to date rocks. But let us put that aside, and just assume there is something going on here, that these samples are not contaminated, and that the assumption about the source of C14 is correct.

So what next?

We've disproved the age of the universe, what now?

Let's dive into what we're claiming.  There was a study funded by a young-earth advocacy organization.  That organization claims to have evidence that they have 4 rock samples that disprove currently accepted science. 4.

What would you do?  Because at this point, I'm clearly thinking... NOBEL!  Man.  I'm going to be famous, and I get to advance human knowledge!

But, I'm a software developer.  So I asked a geologist friend of mine what he would do:

I don't really do the "science" but I do use a lot of lab generated data, so I'll answer from my perspective. If I received results from a lab indicating that established science was wrong, I would suspect sample contamination, faulty lab equipment, or human error. I would disregard the results as bad and because a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of cores had been wasted someone involved in the process wouldn't be getting paid. However, our samples are difficult to acquire and expensive, if they were easy to acquire, like say from an outcrop I'd have the lab run a new batch on their dime to verify the results. I would also send a second set to a different lab and if both sets of results matched the original results I would write a paper and publish it in a peer reviewed journal. I would then write a book and go on Anderson Cooper and maybe The Daily Show. The author of this paper has had science breaking lab results a few times and its never occurred to him. I hate to go all ad hominem on him, so I'll leave it to this guy here: http://chem.tufts.edu/.../Stear.../no-AiG/realsnelling.htm

Snelling does seem to have responded to that link: https://www.trueorigin.org/ca_as_01.php. These back-and-forth personal attacks should be ignored, we should be focused on the evidence.

What's the path forward?

Sure, we could fund this research.  Instead, let's raise $32 million and build an Ark.

https://answersingenesis.org/ministry-news/ark-encounter/

AIG doesn't seem to me to be doing science, even the biased science of proving creationism.  It more seems like they're just taking things far enough to convince a layperson, and then going on tour.  I get why that is persuasive for the layperson, but these aren't the actions you'd expect from well-trained scientists who think the evidence supports their position.