Why is it Important?

In my experience presenting the previous pages of information to adult Christians, they nod their heads and mention to me how impossible evolution seems. However, I find there is a lot more resistance when discussing how and when the Earth was created.  Once my wife and I finish a class, many seem amazed at the overwhelming evidence but there are usually a few people who cling to the secular model to explain the creation of the Earth. But why does the age of the Earth matter?  What impact does it have if the Earth is billions of years old versus just thousands?  Let’s hear from Dr. Terry Mortenson (PhD in Geology) of Answers in Genesis.

In Genesis, God clearly outlines when and how He created the world.  He makes it abundantly clear that the world was created perfectly and that man caused sin, and therefore death, to enter the world.  This picture of a fallen world due to man, not God, is a core pillar of Christianity.  Christ was sent to save us from our own sin and to save us from death.  According to Romans 5:12, Paul states, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned”.  With this in mind, the secular version of creation has the following consequences:

1. It would shatter this crucial pillar of Christianity. If the planet is 4.6 billion years old and animals (dinosaurs for example) lived millions of years before man, that means they would have died before man sinned.  Disease would have also occurred before man’s sin.  There would have never been a perfect, sinless world.  So why would we need saving?  It would not have been man’s fault that sin, and therefore death, exists.
2. It undermines the authority of the Bible, Jesus and the apostles.  A straightforward reading of Genesis clearly outlines that the universe and the world was created in 6 days (evening and morning) and the genealogies provide evidence for a young Earth (the number of years between Adam and Jesus were about 4,000).  God could not have been more clear about this.  He Himself wrote on stone tablets the Ten Commandments including the assertion that everything was created in 6 days (Exodus 20:11).  Jesus referred back to Genesis in Matthew 19:4 and said that God “created them from the beginning…”.  The apostles and early church fathers all believed in a young Earth.  So if this fundamental claim of the Bible is not true, how can we claim any of the Bible is true?  This can be an easy trap to fall in for a potential or new believer.

The good news is that it is very easy to avoid this trap if you are looking for it.  The evidence against the secular model is overwhelming.  Anyone who seeks the truth can see it clearly.

So what is the secular, evolutionary model?  We go over the opening act, the Big Bang at the end of our discussion, so for now we will jump to Act II. Act II of the secular model starts with the formation of the Earth.  According to secular textbooks, Earth started off as molten lava that cooled over millions of years.  As the planet cooled, it turned into rock and water began to form on the surface.  Life first evolved about one billion years ago.  Since then, as life evolved and changed, the bodies of plants and animals were buried in sediment and have continued to be buried up to the present day.  In any location on this planet, if you dig into the layers (according to the secular model), you are digging through time.

But why do people believe this is true?  How did the idea originate?  What is the evidence for it and the science behind it?  Before we get into this, let me issue a warning – this is where it gets a little more technical and if this isn’t a topic you particularly care about, feel free to skip to the next page, Age of the Earth.  However, if you are interested in the science and support for the Biblical timeline as stated in Genesis, there is a lot of really interesting information below.

Let’s first take a step back and take a few minutes to see how long societies around the world have believed the Earth to be millions of years old. Below is a summary of the age that ancient cultures have assigned to the Earth:

The geologic column is one of the pillars of evolution.  Without the belief that the earth is billions of years old, evolution has no time to work.  It is the backbone of any kind of perceived evolutionary support.  Let’s look at a quick history of the infamous geologic column.  It was primarily authored by a man named Charles Lyell.  Although Lyell was a lawyer and not a geologist, he was determined to free science from the “old disposition of Moses”.  Lyell was the most successful of his atheist and deistic predecessors to sway the opinion of the geological community and by 1830 the belief that the Earth was created over billions of years as a result of slow natural processes was mainstream thought.

Lyell’s famous three-volume work, Principles of Geology, set the perfect stage for Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859.  Without the belief that the Earth was billions of years old, there would be no room to imagine the possibility of animals slowly evolving from one kind into another. Keep in mind that, at this time, there were no dating methods of any kind so the belief of millions of years was simply based on a uniformitarian philosophy and the desire to discredit the Biblical account of Earth’s history.  Even today, the geologic column is supported only by its popularity – so many people believe it to be credible.  Dr. Hovind illustrates the circular reasoning problem that is so damning to the geologic column.

The next video is from another popular creationist, Ian Juby.  Mr. Juby is the president of CORE (Citizens for Origins Research and Education) in Ottawa.  He has created hundreds of videos which demonstrate the many challenges for evolution and the proofs of the creation model.  Mr. Juby has been studying this topic for almost two decades and is extremely knowledgeable.  He is also not afraid to be candid and has very little appreciation for the story delivered by the evolutionary community. Be prepared for some sarcasm.  Let’s hear what Mr. Juby has to say about the accuracy of the geologic column.

We have learned that the geologic column seems to be missing all over the planet. We have seen that it has trees growing through supposedly million-year-old layers all over the world. The dating methods utilized to assign its time table are supported with circular reasoning – which of course is no support at all.  How then is it that the geologic timescale is taught as absolute fact everywhere?

​I know what you are thinking.  What about radiometric dating?  Doesn’t that prove the earth is really old?  For one, keep in mind that most of the geologic column was designed before radiometric dating was even invented.  But let’s just forget that for now and take a look at radiometric dating.

​Before we jump in, let’s clarify that there are two types of radiometric dating – one for rocks (only igneous) and one for plants and animals (as shown below):

We will dig into the differences between these two types of dating methods. But first, let’s look at a video that outlines the basics.  The following (secular) video does a pretty good job explaining how radiometric dating, and specifically carbon dating, is supposed to work.

Did you notice he said that carbon dating works up to 60,000 years but for older fossils other dating methods are used?  We will come back to that.

Essentially, radiometric dating is based on an assumption that we know how much of certain unstable elements existed in either 1) igneous rock when it was first formed or 2) organic matter (plants and animals) when it died. Because unstable elements decay, we can measure the quantity at the present time and calculate the length of time from now back to the starting point.  For example, let’s assume we analyze a plant today and it has 100 atoms of C-14.  We then dig up a fossil of another plant, perform carbon dating and find that the fossil has 50 atoms of C-14 remaining.  Because the half-life of C-14 is 5,730 years, we make an assumption that the plant has been dead for 5,730 years because it now only has half the amount of C-14 than the plant that is alive today has.

When I first started my research on this topic, carbon dating was one of the topics that most surprised me.  I had always heard that it was used to support an old earth. In reality, that isn’t true at all.  In fact, carbon dating very much supports a young Earth model.  Let’s look at a few examples:

According to the evolutionary story, coal formed over millions of years.  Coal is made from plants (so it can be tested with carbon dating). If it formed millions of years ago, there should be no carbon left.  Yet coal has been carbon-dated with an age of less than 60,000 years.  How is C-14 still present in coal?  If the coal really was millions of years old, all of the C-14 would have decayed a long, long time ago.

Evolutionists use a rescue device to explain away this evidence that challenges their model.  They claim that the coal was contaminated by C-14 somehow.

Learning that coal and diamonds aren’t millions of years old chips away at the old earth mindset. But let’s talk about the creature that has been most commonly used to convince us that the earth must be millions of years old – dinosaurs. These creatures have captured the imagination of children and adults and are synonymous with “millions of years”. Yet they are probably the most convincing evidence against an old earth. One reason is that carbon dating on dinosaurs results in a relatively young age.

In 1989, an Allosouras (pictured above) was excavated in Colorado and the carbon dating test resulted in an age of 31,360 years.  This dinosaur should be tens of millions of years old according to the geologic column.  Was the sample contaminated and was this an isolated case? No. There have been dozens of cases like this. Below is a list of 20 dinosaurs that have been tested with radiocarbon dating and the resulting age.

Oddly enough, the result is astounding when you consider these dinosaur fossils should be tens of millions of years old.  Explaining this evidence away by assuming that C-14 snuck into every sample simply isn’t a sufficient explanation.  Carbon dating clearly demonstrates that the evolutionary model has a lot to explain.

Now let’s discuss why these ages (20,000 – 40,000) are so different from the 6,000 year time frame that creationists subscribe to (based on the Biblical chronologies).  First, dating methods are only as good as their starting assumptions.  One assumption is that the atmosphere has always had the same ratio of carbon-14 (compared to normal carbon).  So let’s review our earlier example of the plant that has 100 C-14 atoms today.  If you dig up a fossil and it only has 50 C-14 atoms left, you would conclude that it is 5,730 years old because it must have had 100 atoms when it died (and when the quantity splits in half, you estimate 5,730 years).  But what if it didn’t? What if it only had 60 atoms when it died because the atmosphere was different?  In that case it would be much younger (because 50 isn’t half of 60).

Now, keep in mind, this doesn’t work the other way around.  Evolutionists can’t claim the assumptions are wrong to explain why it doesn’t come up with an age of millions of years.  As long as there is some carbon-14 found in the fossils – they can’t be any older than 60,000 years.

This example is just a simple illustration to help you understand the concept (without getting too technical).  Carbon dating proves that animals are much younger than evolution claims and, therefore, the rocks in which the animals are found are also much younger.  But what about radiometric dating of igneous rocks?

Radiometric dating of rocks is a bit different.  Only igneous rocks (rocks that were made from the cooling of molten rock material – like lava from volcanoes) can be measured with radiometric dating.  Therefore, radiometric dating methods can’t be used to determine the age of shale, sandstone or limestone.  Basically, the premise is that when a rock is created it has certain unstable elements (such as uranium) present and over time as those unstable elements begin to decay they change into other elements which are more stable (such as lead). This seems complicated but bear with me. It isn’t difficult to understand the gist of these dating methods.

Uranium is one of many unstable elements.  Uranium is unstable because its nuclei (center) is too large.  As a result, its nuclei starts to reduce in size and, eventually, turns into lead.  You can see (below) that Uranium starts with an atomic number of 92 (the bigger the number, the greater the size).  Anything over 83 is unstable and must shrink to 83 (or under) to become stable.  Lead (Pb) has an atomic number of 82 (so it is stable).

So let’s say we find an igneous rock, like basalt (a rock that can form when lava cools) and date it using Uranium-Lead dating.  This defines the “Parent Isotope” as Uranium and the “Daughter Isotope” as Lead.  The calculation goes as follows:

1. Measure all of the uranium in the rock

2. Measure all of the lead in the rock

3. Make the assumption that when the rock was first created, there was no lead and that all the lead was the result of the decay of uranium over a long period of time

4. Measure how long it would take for the lead that exists in the rock to result from uranium decay based on the half-life calculation (similar to carbon-14)

5. The half-life of Uranium (to Lead) has been calculated at 4.46 billion years

6. Therefore, if you start with a rock that has 50 atoms of uranium and 50 atoms of lead, you would assume that it originally had 100 atoms of uranium, and after 4.46 billion years, half of the uranium decayed into lead.

Lastly, Uranium-Lead is only one of the Parent/Daughter combinations that can be used to measure the age of a rock.  You can use a slew of different combinations such as Potassium to Argon or Rubidium to Strontium.  When secular scientists date rocks, they usually perform a variety of tests using different parent/daughter combinations.

OK, that was pretty technical but if you didn’t understand it completely, don’t worry about it. The science of it makes sense, but the problem is that it uses false assumptions and simply isn’t consistent or reliable.  Let me prove that to you.  If you wanted to test the dating methods to see if they worked, it would be very easy.  You would simply find a rock where you actually know the age (like from a volcano that erupted recently) and measure the rock to see how closely the calculated age is to its known age.  This has been done many times. Let’s look at some examples.

Remember the “How Carbon Dating Works” video?  When the guy said carbon dating doesn’t work on fossils 60,000 years or older? What he meant was that it kind of works, but we don’t like the results so we simply say “it doesn’t work” and use the geologic column to date those fossils instead (because it gives an age that fits in with the mindset of millions of years).

How can these dating methods be taken seriously?  They have been proven over and over to be wildly inaccurate.  It seems like scientists will continue testing a rock until they find a dating method that produces an age that lines up with the geologic column. They publish that age and discard the other ages that don’t match the geologic column and the millions of years mindset.

The Hualalai volcano in Hawaii erupted in 1800 -1801 creating a layer of basalt rock.  Using a variety of radiometric dating methods the age of the basalt was measured.  12 dates were given with an average of 1.41 billion years. That is a margin of error of 7,000 percent.

In 1980, Mt. St. Helens erupted for the entire world to see.  Many rock layers were created in a matter of weeks.  These rocks that are now around 40 years old were dated using radiometric dating and the results were up to 2.8 billion years old.  That is a margin of error of around 70,000 percent.

In Australia, engineers drilled down 69 feet to find a layer of basalt (rock created by lava).  When tested using Potassium to Argon dating, the resulting age was 45 million years old.  Interestingly enough, there was petrified wood found in the basalt.  Using carbon dating, the wood was assigned an age of around 45,000 years old.