"Younging Up"--The Rest of the Story

By Jon Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita K. Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

Most geologists would say that radiometric dates of strata tend to become younger from the lower to the upper parts of the geologic column. Professor Kurt Wise refers to this trend as "younging up," but it might be an artifact of geochemical processes, basic assumptions made during the dating process, and reporting bias as a byproduct of evolutionary presuppositions. John Woodmorappe, author of Studies in Flood Geology and The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, says that the "younging up" tendency has never been established. He means that, among other things,

  1. There is no control over the number of dates obtained per stratigraphic interval;
  2. There is no control for dates obtained per area of granitic crust;
  3. Most discrepant results are not published, especially those which geologists view as "too old" and those which are the most severely deviant.

Woodmorappe recommends that until these matters are subject to a careful controlled experiment, we withhold judgement as to whether a "younging up" tendency exists [and, if so, is it strong enough to warrant a special explanation?].

In other words, we might be falling into the same trap as evolutionists, believing that there actually is a "younging up" trend in the geologic strata when no one has actually confirmed it scientifically. Geologists may have simply assumed it is true and repeat it as fact without ever having established it.

The influence of uniformitarian doctrine is probably at fault here. Ever since James Hutton and Charles Lyell produced their works on the geologic record over 150 years ago, geologists have accepted the axiom that present processes are the key to the past. This is the heart of the uniformitarian working model. The slow, gradual processes of the erosion and sedimentation operating today past were essentially the same in the past. These processes produced the stratigraphic layers over millions of years.

Many, if not most, geologists no longer accept the uniformitarian doctrine. Now they say that over millions of years, catastrophic events, such as the asteroid bombardment that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs, have periodically punctuated earth’s history. Such catastrophic events produced much of the stratigraphic record. Derek Ager was probably the most influential proponent of the new catastrophism among evolutionary geologists. In The New Catastrophism, he explained that he became a believer in catastrophism through his study of turbidites, which are rock formations produced by fast moving, underwater turbidity currents known to cover thousands of square miles from several feet to many hundreds of feet thick in only a few hours. Other geological sedimentary features, ranging from limestone to conglomerates and covering more than a million square miles, appear to have formed rapidly. Some formations span several continents, indicating that at one time those continents were possibly all part of the same land mass, Pangea.

We should expect that radiometric data will not properly reflect the time element, especially if the strata formed during the Flood, but also if past catastrophic events produced one or more geologic layers. Failure by previous isotope geologists to consider this when they derived dates correlated with index fossils, could misguide the researcher, causing him to make erroneous assumptions. This could produce false dates and a "younging up" trend.