To date a rock by radiometric means, one must first assume:
What the initial amount of the parent atoms was at the time that the rock formed.
That the original composition of the rock contained no daughter atoms.[76]
That neither parent nor daughter atoms have ever been added or removed from the rock.
That the decay rate of parent atom to daughter atom has always remained constant.
If these assumptions are correct, then the radiometric dates are correct. However, there is no way to independently test these assumptions. If they are wrong, the method could yield faulty dates that might be far too old.
When dating a rock, the geochronologist (scientist who performs the dating procedure) must first assume the rocks age before it is dated. For example, if a scientist believes a piece of rock is 4.5 billion years old, he or she may then use the uranium-lead dating method because it has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. This involves circular reasoning, as is clearly evident in the article on dating in the Encyclopedia Britannica: Most geologists must rely on geochronologists for their results. In turn, the geochronologist relies on the geologist for relative ages.[77] The geochronologist must also be sure that the rate of decay, from uranium to lead for example, has remained constant in the rock over the past 4.5 billion years. Furthermore, the amount of uranium in the rock that was present to begin with must also be assumed. And neither uranium nor lead can have ever been added or removed from the specimen by any natural circumstances, catastrophic or otherwise. If all of these assumptions are correct, then the resulting dates are correct. However if even one of these assumptions is wrong, then the resulting dates are erroneous.
Why does radiometric dating repeatedly result in very old dates (such as billions of years)? While one explanation is that these dates show the specimens true age, another is that one or more of these large assumptions associated with this method of dating is wrong.
Scientists have dated lava rock samples from various active volcanoes with the radiometric method. Because the formation of these rocks has recently been observed, radiometric dating should not give them an age of millions of years.[78] Yet there are many such examples. Consider the following:
Rock which was formed in 1986 from a lava dome at Mount St. Helens volcano was dated by the Potassium-Argon method as 0.35 ± 0.05 million years old.[79]
Rocks from five recent lava flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe in New Zealand were dated using the Potassium-Argon method, and resulted in dates ranging from <0.27 to 3.5 million years but one lava flow occurred in 1949, three in 1954, and one in 1975.[80]
Salt Lake Crater on Oahu was determined to be 92-147 million years, 140-680 million years, 930-1580 million years, 1230-1960 million years, 1290-2050 million years, and 1360-1900 years old, using different radiometric dating methods.[81]
How did 1000 year old carbon-dated trees in the Auckland volcanic field of New Zealand get buried under 145,000-465,000 year old Potassium-Argon-dated lava rock?[82]
One explanation given by scientists for some of these incorrect dates is that excess argon was retained in the rocks when they solidified from a molten state. According to the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, It is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale
The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily attributed to excess or loss of argon.[83]
If excess argon can cause exaggerated dates for rocks of known age, then why should this dating method be trusted for rocks of unknown age?
No one knows for sure if any of the assumptions of radiometric dating are correct, however this is the only method of dating that is considered absolute.[84] Physics professor and researcher Dr. Saami Shaibani, a leading consultant for Americas Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who has one hundred scholarly articles to his credit and has been designated International Expert in his field by the US Departments of Labor and Justice, realizes, In man-made dating methods, there is assumption upon assumption, plus a couple of more assumptions sprinkled in, plus some blind guesswork. And this masquerades as wonderful, legitimate methodology, but its not.[85]
