Clearly, such huge time periods cannot be fitted into the Bible without compromising what the Bible says about the goodness of God and the origin of sin, death and suffering—the reason Jesus came into the world (See Six Days? He said, This only makes sense with a time-line beginning with the creation week thousands of years ago.It makes no sense at all if man appeared at the end of billions of years.The level of atmospheric Radiometric dating in general, of course, poses a huge problem for people who believe that the universe is 6000-odd years old.A favorite tactic of Young-Earthers involves citing studies which show trace amounts of Indeed, this results from a unique decay mode known as "cluster decay" where a given isotope emits a particle heavier than an alpha particle (radium-226 is an example.) This fact is extremely inconvenient to them, and creationist literature, accordingly, usually does not mention it.Through the life of the organism, the proportion of C-14 to C-12 reaches the same proportion as in the rest of the environment.

Here are the key assumptions: There is one fact that makes it highly unreasonable to believe that the proportion of C-14 to C-12 was the same in the past as it has been in recent history: It is not in equilibrium.In the case of radiocarbon dating, the half-life of carbon 14 is 5,730 years.This half life is a relatively small number, which means that carbon 14 dating is not particularly helpful for very recent deaths and deaths more than 50,000 years ago.Furthermore, if a sample has been contaminated, scientists will know about it.Ironically, given how supposedly useless carbon dating is claimed to be, Creation Ministries International rests part of their "101 Evidences" on carbon dating being a useful method for within several thousand years.