Featured as a back-of-page article in the CSABC Quarterly Letter of December 2018

by David Kadylak

Many critics of biblical creation science say that the scientists do not make scientific predictions, but instead give ad hoc explanations from the Bible. The following is a great example where Christian scientists set out to make a prediction that risked being wrong. A great evidence to share with those who are skeptical of the biblical creation view, with compelling results. Hopefully more samples can be taken and analyzed from different locations to bolster the findings.

Helium is a small molecule, and the second-lightest element after hydrogen. Helium (without electrons) is emitted when certain radioactive elements decay, such as uranium. Being a small element, it is able to easily escape (leak) from minerals, making it very “slippery”.

A number of years ago, the amount of helium left in the zircons (tiny crystals found in granite rock) was analyzed from the hot “basement” (very deep) Precambrian rock from New Mexico. Based on uniformitarian assumptions, the uranium-lead ratio gave a radioisotope date of “1.5 billion years”. However, it was discovered that up to 58% of the helium that would have been produced from the nuclear decay of the uranium was still in the zircons, which would be quite a surprise to find that much remaining after 1.5 billion years when much more should have made its way out.

Some calculations were done for how fast the helium would have leaked out of the crystals based on the hypothesis that the rock was 1.5 billion years old or the hypothesis that the earth was created by God about 6,000 years ago as recorded in the Bible. The graph below shows the scientific predictions of the diffusivity (leak rate) if the biblical account is correct (~6,000 years) in red and if the naturalistic assumptions are correct in pink, based on the temperature of the rock.

Model-predicted and measured helium leak rates fit a 6,000-year prediction very well

Then a mining company was commissioned to drill in the same rock location, and pass along rock sample to an outside experimenter—an expert in the field and who believes in long ages—to measure the diffusivity of helium in same-size zircons, and who had no idea of the predictions. The experimental results collected are shown in the graph in blue, and you can see the amazing agreement and overlap of the data based on the assumption that the rock is about 6,000 years old. Furthermore, to try to even get close to the age of 1.5 billion years would mean having the data change by 100,000 times (or 5 orders of magnitude). Error bars are shown, indicating that the data are not expected to deviate from within the range within the error bars (95% of the time) if very many samples were collected and the experiment repeated many times over, and it is extremely unlikely that the data would line up by accident.

This is probably one of the greatest scientific evidence that the Word of God can be used as a reliable source to start developing scientific models about the past, while the humanistic models can be rejected. The Bible can then also be trusted with the other things it talks about all the way to what will come at the end.

Ref: Helium evidence for a young world continues to confound critics by Russ Humphreys