Have scientists found talking rocks?

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Have scientists found talking rocks?  I ask because I read this quote online once:

When the rocks say they are 4 billion years old and the Bible says they are less than 10,000 years old; who do you believe: the author of the Bible or the author of the rocks?

I thought it was strange because my family is from eastern Kentucky and I grew up visiting the hills of Appalachia. I've literally seen mountains of rocks and in all my life, I've never heard any of them “say” anything.

This is a type of fallacy called reification – specifically, it is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. You see, rocks can't tell us anything. They can't tell us how old they are. They can't tell us how they were formed. They can't say anything because they are literally dumb rocks (dumb as in can't speak). When you read somewhere that a rock is 4 billion years old, you can be certain the rock didn't say it. Someone has assigned that age to rock but he's presenting the age as though it's an objective fact rather than his untestable conclusion.

“Age” is something that cannot be observed. It's not a quality that can be measured the same way something's weight can be measured. You can't put “age” on scale or put it against a ruler or put it under a microscope. Even when I look at a person, I can't see his age. I can only see things like how gray his hair is, is his skin wrinkled, how frail he might seem, and other features. I can compare those things I associate with age and guess at a stranger's age, but I can't actually see “age.”

When scientists want to find the age of a rock, there are a couple of ways they might do it. One way is through radiometric dating. Uranium, for example, is an unstable isotope that decays very slowly over time and becomes lead. If a scientist can determine the ratio of uranium to lead, he could extrapolate backwards and try to estimate how long it would have taken the uranium to decay into that amount of lead. Other people can test the same rock sample and maybe reach the same conclusion the first scientist did. The problem is, they can't reproduce the millions of years! In other words, if a scientist says a rock is 65 million years old, there is no way to go back 65 million years and see if that's truly when the rock was formed.

When scientists tell us the ages of rocks, I'm sure they're very confident about their conclusion. But, at the end of the day, the claimed age of the rock is only their estimate which ultimately cannot be verified. I know this because the rock has said nary a word. If would be more accurate if the scientist asked, “When I say the rocks are 4 billion years old, and the Bible says they are less than 10,000 years old, who do you believe: me or the Bible?”

I believe there is a lot of scientific evidence against evolution. But if I had to decide who to believe between the secular scientists and the Bible, then the Bible wins hands down. Call me a zealot if you wish but we have the written revelation of the One who created the rocks. I trust the clear reading of His word over what the dumb rocks say because ROCKS DON'T TALK!