How old is this rock? How old is this piece of timber burnt in a lava flow, how far to distant stars? Though science can give answers they are all based on some assumptions which we currently believe to be true. Many can be tested by science and measured accurately, radioactive decay is measured accurately at todays rate, but was it always thus, red shift is used to calculate the distance to stars, but Halton Arp and others have listed many anomalies showing that the red shift is not due to recession, as some are linked to objects and systems of a considerably different red shift. Halton's evidence is so convincing that he has been denied access to telescopes lest he finds even more proof that the red shift is not due to recession, it upset too many people who don't want to change their ideas from what they were taught, and that they are comfortable with.

These and other problems show that our science has a lot to learn, and extrapolating our present understanding into the distant past, the future, or to distance stars, may have some serious errors. Radioactive carbon ¹⁴C has a short life and should not be detectable after 50,000 years, but it is always detectable in coal, supposedly millions of years old, and also in diamonds, indicating that fossils and diamonds are less than 50,000 years old, not millions or billions of years. Fresh lava from volcanoes already has an age according to samples, so any lava deposits started with an unknown age when deposited so radiometric dating cannot tell the age of the deposit. Where the date of an eruption is known the radiometric date does not correspond because the lava started with an apparent great age, and different radiometric methods give discordant dates.

Back in August 1987 Stanford Research Institute International published a science report "THE ATOMIC CONSTANTS, LIGHT, AND TIME" by Trevor Norman and Barry Setterfield. Barry had found that some research could not be solved if the speed of light was constant, so he researched all the records he could find of past measurements of the speed of light. The best fit was a decay curve which is now nearly at its minimum, for those into electronics its similar to the decay discharge of a capacitor through a resistor, very steep at the beginning, very slow at the end. The scientific community was scathing in its attack as " everyone new that the speed of light was a constant".

The duration of a second was defined as a part of the earths rotation, but has now been determined as so many oscillations of a cesium atom, and we are run by atomic clocks because of their guaranteed accuracy over hundreds of years. The speed of light is in all atomic and many other parameters, so there are many measurements that should change slightly if the speed of light changes. Now we are getting many reports of changes indicating that light is not constant but is slowing down. Using atomic time indicates that the planets have speeded up in their orbits, requiring an enormous power to increase their speed, alternatively the atomic clocks have slowed down, which is much more likely, as other measurements indicate a slowing down. A constant that "everyone knew to be true" wasn't. So how many more things have we got wrong? Dating based on atomic decay must be wrong, the further back the steeper the decay curve was and the more drastic the error. The decay attributed to billions of years could be condensed to a few tens of thousands. There are other assumptions involved in radiometric dating, and paleontologists have always discarded any radiometric date they didn't agree with, but trumpeted acceptable dates as absolute proof of the age of the fossils or strata.

Creationist researchers got it right back in 1987, strongly opposed by evolutionists, but now 20 years later the scientific community is getting around to accepting the truth, the speed of light is not a constant. So who says that creationists don't do real science? Its just that they get too far ahead of the "stick in the mud" evolutionists.

The message that Darwinists convey to the public is often very different than what they recognize as true among themselves. Although they state to the public that, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," most scientists can "conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas" (Witham, 2002, p. 43).
One "notable aspect of natural scientists in assembly is how little they focus on evolution. It’s day-to-day irrelevance is a great ‘paradox’ in biology" (Witham, 2002, p. 43).