Carbon dating measures one thing: how much carbon-14 remains in a sample from something that was once alive. That narrow scope is why it cannot disprove the Bible, and why the viral arguments on both sides miss. Biochemist Dr. Fazale Rana of Reasons to Believe places carbon dating inside a larger family of radiometric methods. The ages that seem to clash with Genesis come from that family as a whole, and whether they clash at all depends on how one reads the word day in Genesis 1.
The popular argument usually arrives in two opposite forms. One says carbon dating has proven the earth ancient and Genesis false. The other says carbon dating is guesswork invented to embarrass believers. Both treat the method as a verdict machine. Neither stops to ask what the tool actually measures, what assumptions it rests on or what part of Scripture it could even touch.
What Would It Take to Disprove the Bible?
Start with the claim itself. For carbon dating to disprove the Bible, two things would both have to be true. The method would have to establish ages that genuinely contradict something Scripture teaches. And the reading of Scripture it contradicts would have to be the only faithful reading available. If either link fails, the argument fails.
That gives the investigation an order. First, what does the method measure? Second, what do the broader dating results say, and on what assumptions? Third, what does Genesis 1 claim, and how do careful Christian readers understand it? Each step narrows what the headline can honestly mean.
One Isotope, One Kind of Sample
Rana’s explanation begins with atoms. Certain versions of atoms, called isotopes, are unstable and decay over time into other atoms. Carbon exists in nature as carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14. Carbon-14 is the unstable one, and it decays into nitrogen-14. Rana says that decay happens in a mathematically describable, predictable manner, which is what makes it useful as a clock.
Then he states the scope of the tool: “Carbon-14 is great for something that was once alive.” And he describes the method: “And so by measuring how much carbon-14 was in that sample, you’re actually able to determine how old that sample is, knowing that decay rate.”
That is a limited instrument. It works on remains of living things, and it works by comparing one isotope against a known rate of decay. It is not a general instrument for dating the earth. Rana describes it as part of a “collection of techniques” known as radiometric dating, and that distinction carries more weight than anything else in this debate.
Where the Large Numbers Come From
When Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, asked how dating methods seem to put Christians at odds with the creation story, Rana did not answer by talking about carbon-14 alone. He spoke of the whole family of methods: “What these techniques indicate is that the earth is about four and a half billion years old.” He added, in his own summary, that the solar system is the same age, that life has been present on earth for 3.8 billion years, and that modern humans have been around for roughly a hundred thousand years.
Those figures are Rana’s report of what radiometric dating indicates. The conversation does not walk through which isotopes or measurements produce each one, and a reader should register that gap rather than fill it with confidence. What it does establish is narrower and still useful: the ages that seem to clash with a young earth are attributed to radiometric dating as a group, not to carbon dating by itself.
Both popular camps stumble here. Whoever claims carbon dating has proven the earth to be billions of years old has pinned the whole result on the one method Rana describes as suited to once-living things. Whoever tries to defeat the age of the earth by attacking carbon dating is aiming at the same wrong target. Each side has built its case on a tool it has not examined.
What the Strongest Young-Earth Case Actually Disputes
The most serious young-earth work, as Rana describes it, does not claim the readings are fake. That finding alone undercuts half of the online argument.
Rana, who is not a young-earth creationist, said so plainly: “Even though I’m not a young-earth creationist, I very much respect the methodology of young-earth creationism because they’re starting with Scripture.” He explained the logic. If you are convinced Genesis 1 teaches a young earth and the evidence seems to say otherwise, that conviction pushes you to ask, “[Is] the scientific data that’s coming in actually reliable?” It also pushes you to ask, “Are there assumptions that are being employed that maybe are not valid assumptions?” that lead people to read the data a certain way.
He identifies the Institute for Creation Research as the group that has done, in his opinion, the most and best work on the question, and he describes their study on radioactive decay and the age of the earth. His summary of their position is striking. They “basically argued that at face value, it really does look like from radiometric dating techniques that the earth really is several billions of years old.”
So the serious young-earth case grants the readings and questions an assumption underneath them. Rana states it this way: “The assumption going into this is that the decay rate for radiometric decay is constant.” The proposal, as he relays it, is that decay rates may have sped up at some point: during the creation week, at the fall or at the time of the flood. If so, samples would show a high level of decay that looks old even though the earth is young.
One limit belongs in plain view. This account of the Institute’s work is Rana’s characterization, offered by an old-earth scientist describing a rival position. It is a generous characterization, but it is secondhand, and anyone weighing the young-earth case should read its proponents directly. Even so, the argument he describes is a real one. It agrees with the old-earth side about what the instruments read and disagrees about what the readings mean. Calling carbon dating junk science does not represent the best young-earth thinking. It represents something weaker.
The Limit of the Evidence on Accelerated Decay
This is the most important qualification in the whole question. Rana’s response to the accelerated-decay proposal is brief: “Old-earth creationists generally don’t find them compelling.” He accepts that the scientific dates are reliably determined.
The conversation does not lay out the physical reasons for rejecting accelerated decay. A reader who wants to settle that dispute will need more than this source provides. What can responsibly be said is this: one camp argues that decay rates changed, the other judges that argument unpersuasive, and the outcome turns on evidence about the physics of decay itself.
That reframes the whole controversy. Even on the young-earth side, nobody serious is asking whether radiometric dating is a hoax. The live question is whether one of its assumptions held across all of history, and that is a narrower and more answerable question than the viral claim admits.
Does an Old Earth Contradict Genesis 1?
Suppose the radiometric ages are correct. The argument against the Bible still needs its second link: that Genesis 1 requires a young earth. Here the dispute moves from the lab to the text, and the weight of the testimony shifts with it. Rana speaks on dating as a trained biochemist. On Genesis he speaks as an informed non-specialist, and he says so himself: “I’m not a biblical scholar, I’m a biochemist.” His textual arguments deserve a hearing, but they carry less authority than his account of the science.
Rana argues that the Hebrew word translated day can carry several meanings, much as the English word does: the time from sunup to sundown, a 24-hour period or a longer span. He insists that old-earth creationists still read Genesis 1 as literal history. To the charge that they do not, he answers, “Well, I would actually argue we are reading it literally.” For him, a literal reading means attending to the original language and to how the account fits with the other creation accounts in Scripture.
He credits the scholar Walt Kaiser with one argument. On the first creation day, God names light and darkness:
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Genesis 1:5).
If the ordinary day is itself being established on the first creation day, the reasoning goes, the creation day may be something longer. Rana also points to the seventh day:
“And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made” (Genesis 2:2).
That day has no closing reference to evening and morning, which Rana takes to suggest it is still in play.
The argument he finds most compelling comes from reading Genesis 2 as an expansion of the sixth day. Adam is formed from the dust. Only then does God plant a garden and cause it to grow. “Adam is not created in the Garden of Eden,” Rana notes. Adam works the garden and names the animals before the woman is made, and Rana judges that this much activity could not fit into 24 hours. Read as ordinary days, he says, “If not, you actually create a conflict between Genesis one and Genesis two.”
He also draws on the idea that a day can be as a thousand years to God:
“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4).
Rana points out that the psalm is attributed to Moses, whom he regards as the author of Genesis 1. Second Peter makes a similar statement:
“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).
These verses need careful handling. Psalm 90 contrasts human frailty with God’s eternity. Second Peter 3 addresses why the Lord’s promised coming has not yet arrived. Neither passage is defining the days of Genesis 1. They show that God does not experience time as people do, which makes a flexible reading of day possible. They do not prove it.
The Strongest Reply From the Text
The fair challenge to the old-earth reading comes from Genesis 1 itself. The chapter numbers its days and closes each of the first six with evening and morning. Many careful readers take that pattern as ordinary days, and young-earth creationists build their position on exactly that kind of attention to the chapter. A reader can also ask whether Genesis 2 is meant to be read as a strict sequence nested inside the sixth day, which is the premise Rana’s strongest argument depends on.
A skeptic might raise a different suspicion: that old-earth Christians adopted long days only to rescue the Bible from science. Rana’s history bears on that without settling it. He accepted an old earth as an agnostic, argued for long days before he was a Christian and kept that reading after he came to faith. That shows his reading did not begin as a rescue operation. Whether it is correct still has to be argued from the text, and faithful readers of the same verses come down in different places.
What the Evidence Leaves Standing
The chain of reasoning behind the viral claim breaks at both links. Carbon dating is too narrow a tool to carry the age of the earth. The broader radiometric results, which the most serious young-earth research grants at face value, are contested only at one assumption about decay rates. And whether any of it contradicts Genesis depends on a question of interpretation that evangelicals answer in more than one way. Rana sees three main options: young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism and evolutionary creation. His verdict on them is measured: “Every position has strengths and weaknesses. No position is perfect, but at least there’s a landing point.”
What all three share is what Rana calls the overarching message of Genesis 1: God is the Creator, everything around us is his handiwork, and human beings are made in his image. No isotope reaches that claim. A decay rate can estimate when a living thing stopped living. It has nothing to say about whether the world was made, or by whom.
That is why Rana can say, without overstating the science, that “science should never be a reason why anybody walks away from their faith.” Fields described the real task as “trying to be honest about science and trying to be honest about Scripture at the same time.” The viral argument fails that test in both directions. Honesty about science starts with knowing what a tool can measure, and honesty about Scripture starts with knowing what a text actually claims.
