Does uranium decaying to lead prove billions of years, or could lead have been created from the start?
A viewer asks whether, since radioactive decay of uranium to lead is used to argue for billions of years, a creationist could simply say lead was a created element in the original creation.
Answer
When God created the earth on the first day, He created 92 natural elements, everything on the periodic table up to uranium, and lead would be made that first day along with all the others. So both processes are going on: God creating the uranium all at once on the first day, and then the nature of uranium, being unstable, causing it to decay into lead, which is the most stable element close to it. So you have instantaneous creation and a natural process at the same time. Now the decay rates do not prove long ages, because the decay does not start until the element is created; it is not going to create itself. If an element has a very slow decay rate, it could take billions of years to reach half its amount, but that does not mean we were here for billions of years; it just means it is very stable. And their dating rests on assumptions, including uniformitarianism, which says there can be no disturbances of heat, cold, or pressure, when we know this universe is not pristine; we had one big cataclysm called the flood of Genesis. Potassium-argon is one of their favorites, but argon can leak out of the mineral at an unknown rate, and when they dated the lava from Mount St. Helens, which erupted only about 44 years ago, potassium-argon gave 1.5 to 2 million years. So do not worry about those big numbers; God created the uranium on the first day, and it started to decay into lead right away, but it takes a long time for any specimen to fully decay, so it is virtually stable.