I was surprised to learn that creation dates are not included in stat output. I really thought stat would include something so basic. You get time of last access, time of last data modification, and time of last file status change, but creation date isn’t in there.
On the Mac, this info is stored in the resource fork. You can get it from the command line using GetFileInfo which is installed when you install Apple’s free Developer Tools.
/Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo -d path/to/file
In Applescript you can use info for:
creation date of (info for (choose file))
