08/12/2023
Don DeYoung
Ph.D. in physics
Dr. DeYoung is a member of ICR’s RATE team of scientists (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth).
In the book Thousands... Not Billions, DeYoung argues for a young earth. He shows, for example, that carbon-14 actually supports a young earth rather than an ancient one.
“Rocks and fossils containing carbon occur in abundance throughout the earth’s strata. Once living organisms now buried in these strata incorporated some carbon-14 within themselves while they were alive. For earth materials classified as ancient, all of this original C-14 content should be completely decayed away. ... any carbon-containing materials that are truly older than 100,000 years should be ‘carbon-14 dead’ with C-14 levels below detection limits. This fact gives rise to a major challenge to the long age assumption for rocks and fossils. In recent years, readily detectable amounts of carbon-14 have been the rule rather than the exception. This is true for samples from throughout the fossil-bearing parts of the geologic record with presumed ages extending to hundreds of millions of years. The unexpected carbon-14 was initially assumed to be a result of contamination, most likely from the experimental counting procedures, but as this problem was aggressively explored, it was realized that most of the carbon-14 was inherent to the samples being measured” (Thousands ... Not Billions, pp. 48, 49).
David W. Cloud, Testimonies of Scientists Who Believe the Bible