Some articles I’ve read in academic journals (about carbon dating) have led me to reject the scientific consensus that the earth is billions of years old. Please look at the five articles I have attached.
I examined only the first and last articles (for the sake of time). The first seems to support the consensus—I don’t see any problem. The fifth mentions how older rocks, if analyzed apart from their stratigraphic context (mixed in with younger rocks), can yield an (incorrectly) old date. Yet the “flaw” isn’t in the dating technique. The science is solid. The writer is merely indicating that care must be taken when rocks of different ages have been jumbled, e.g. in flooding or alluvial flow.
The consensus of science fits well with the “two books” approach to Scripture and nature. (Nature is God’s book of works, Scripture his book of words, and they should not be opposed to one another.)
Of course when it comes to geological evolution, 14C isn’t of much use, since it dates only organic material—and only going back a few tens of thousands of years. Yet there are numerous other reliable techniques for dating objects millions and billions of years old. The consensus of cosmologists and astrophysicists is that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. That number may be tweaked again, as it has been in the past, but no one believes they’re off by an order of 7 magnitudes (necessary to support “Young Earth Creationism”).
Unless you’re a scientist, I’m not sure how equipped you are to evaluate scientific conclusions in this field. I too am no scientist, but I’ve read easily 200 scientific works on the topic, and make it a point to keep studying every year—partly for my own interest, partly because these matters do come up in my apologetics ministry.
In short, your suspicion of radiometric dating is unwarranted.
I have a suggestion for you. If you want to keep abreast of scientific developments, I recommend subscribing to Scientific American. And as a thinking Christian, you may also benefit from subscribing to the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. For more on radiometric dating, see Bowman’s excellent (and concise) book, or perhaps Gopalan’s work on the subject.
