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Previously on Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, we're talking about the scientific evidence concerning

whether we're living on a young or an old earth. As we saw last episode, the sources of faith

don't settle the young earth, old earth issue one way or the other, so we need to look at what

the scientific evidence says. People of both schools of thought agree that the world's history

involves a mix of uniformitarianism and catastrophism. There have been big catastrophes in Earth's

past and between those catastrophes, there are processes that operate in a slow uniform manner.

Sometimes there are things like catastrophic volcanic explosions or catastrophic mud flows that

can create new layers or carve through them really rapidly, but we can't generalize from that

to the idea that all mountains and canyons we see on Earth were created rapidly in the last

few thousand years. What we need to do is find a way to directly date rock strata and radiometric

dating is one of the best ways to do that, but there are issues we need to be aware of with

radiometric dating. We need to be able to estimate the initial conditions of the sample of material,

that is how many parent and daughter atoms it originally contained. We need to be able to estimate

what kind of contamination it may have experienced in its history, and we need to be able to estimate

the rate of radioactive decay for the atoms in the sample. We currently have really good estimates

...