How accurate are the billions-of-years-ago time scales that are offered with such authority in science textbooks to date life on earth? Perhaps they are not as solidly founded as the public has been led to believe. “Popular Science,” in its November 1979 issue, reports that physicist Robert Gentry of Columbia Union College in Maryland “believes that all of the dates determined by radioactive decay may be off—not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude.” In fact, Gentry asserts that “presently accepted ages may be too high by a factor of thousands.” The physicist bases his conclusions on the evidence of radioactive decay in wood that has almost turned to coal. In deposits “supposedly at least tens of millions of years old,” he says, “the ratio between uranium-238 and lead-206 should be low.” But it is not. Of the implications of his research, he observes: “I realize it’s difficult to believe. It would invalidate the whole underlying principle of radioactive dating: that the rates of decay are forever unvarying—an untestable assumption.” The obvious import for the age of man was noted by “Popular Science”: “Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand.” This agrees with the chronology of the Bible, which puts the age of man at about 6,000 years.
