Age of the Earth
As we’ve discussed, the age of the earth is a central topic within the evolution/creation debate. Here is a quick clip of Bill Nye and Ken Ham discussing age of the Earth as Bill Nye tours the Ark Encounter.
You probably noticed that Bill Nye referred to radiometric dating and the geologic column as the evidence for his belief in millions of years. You may have also noticed his level of confidence. Either he hasn’t studied all the issues or he simply isn’t concerned with the truth because given the obvious flaws, saying you are 100% positive your opinion is right is a statement of faith.
If you are familiar with Dr. Ham, he always admits that the creation model starts with the Bible and then looks at evidence to support the Bible’s claims. Evolutionists do the same thing. They start with their belief that the earth is old, then look for evidence to try and support that claim. The difference is that evolutionists want people to believe that their claim was based on evidence (such as the geologic column and radiometric dating) rather than faith. As you have learned, however, that is not the case. Their belief came first, then the case for the belief.
There is no dating method that can assign an age of the earth or the universe. However, you can limit the age of the earth very easily by finding contradictions to billions of years. Let’s review just a few.
The Population of the Earth
Creationists are often asked how it could have been possible for the population of the earth to grow from two people to over seven billion people in only 6,000 years. Using some basic math, we can test to see if population growth supports or contradicts the creation model. Starting with 1 man and 1 woman, let’s assume they doubled every 150 years. In reality, the world population currently doubles every 40 years (and this includes natural disasters as well as disease and famine), so 150 is a conservative rate. After doubling 32 times (which is 4,800 years) the world population would be over 8.5 billion people. This is almost two billion more than we had in 2006 and easily fits with the Biblical model (which states that the world started with 8 people, Noah and his family, about 4,500 years ago).
Ironically, much like carbon dating, this question becomes an evidence for creationism and against evolution. If you performed a similar calculation assuming the most conservative estimate from the evolutionary timescale (that humans have been around for 50,000 years), the results would be unbelievable. The population would have doubled 332 times and the current population of the planet would look like this:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000.
That is a one followed by 100 zeros. Just to put it in perspective, this number is billions of times greater than the number of atoms in the entire universe. Most evolutionary estimates claim humans have been around for much longer!
Bent Rock Layers
We’ve already examined the claim that the earth is billions of years old (which is based on the many rock layers, each assumed to be millions of years old). We’ve seen many examples why this seems unlikely, but let’s look at another one.
Imagine if the story told by evolutionists were true and one layer endured for millions of years. It would harden, then another layer would sit on top of it, compressing and hardening the original layer even more.
The Grand Canyon, even according to evolutionists, is the best example we have for viewing geologic layers. At the bottom of the Grand Canyon is the Tapeats Sandstone layer (sitting right on top of the granite crust), which was supposedly deposited over North America 520 million years ago. Then came the other layers, Bright Angel Shale and Muav Limestone over the next 460 million years. The graphic below depicts these layers. Keep in mind that sandstone, shale and limestone are extremely brittle and hard.
We can see from the inside of the Grand Canyon that a plateau was formed which pushed all the rock up over a mile. This caused the many layers to be different elevations. Supposedly, this happened 60 million years ago and now there is another layer of limestone above the Muav (the white layer below represents the time frame when the plateau happened according to the evolutionary timescale).
Below is an image of those layers today where they bend. Do you notice something strange? Imagine if you had 3 layers of hardened concrete hundreds of feet thick that had been there for millions of years. Now imagine you raised one side of the stack and not the other side. What would happen? All the layers would crumble and break. They would not bend.
Short-Lived Comets
We know that comets exist and that they orbit our sun. We’ve seen the beautiful “tails” on comets such as the famous Halley’s comet (shown below).
A comet is made of dust and ice. Most of the orbit of a comet is in the deep freeze of space. However, once per orbit a comet comes very close to the sun, which melts the comet’s ice and dislodges dust to form a beautiful tail. Each close pass to the sun greatly reduces a comet’s size, and eventually comets fade away.
Based on what we know about comets, they can’t last longer than 10,000 years. If comets are a result of remnants of dirt from the creation of our solar system billions of years ago as claimed in the evolutionary model, how are there any remaining? They would have all dissipated billions of years ago!
Evolutionary proponents hypothesize that a cloud exists outside our galaxy which generates comets. They have named it the “Oort Cloud” and claim that a comet periodically escapes the Oort cloud and orbits around our sun. This Oort Cloud has never been observed. There is no evidence that it exists at all. It exists only because if it didn’t, there would be no way to explain the existence of comets (that didn’t threaten their current beliefs).
Recorded History
According to the evolutionary timescale, stone age man existed at least 50,000 years ago (but maybe more than a million years ago). The earliest writing systems are thought to date back to 3,400 B.C. at the earliest, even by secular historians. This differs from the Biblical account by a few thousand years, but this discrepancy can be explained – see our resource page for more information. Have you ever wondered why pre-historic man, who was intelligent enough to build megalithic monuments, make beautiful cave paintings and kept records of lunar phases didn’t figure out how to write until about 5,000 years ago?
Consider what mankind has done in the last 100 years. Is it reasonable to assume that mankind existed 45,000 years before they learned to write things down? The Biblical timescale of a 6,000-year-old Earth and the dispersion of people and creation of different languages less than 4,500 years ago fits much better based on the evidence.
Rapidly Decaying Magnetic Field
The earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that protects living things from solar radiation. Without it, life could not exist. Unfortunately, it appears to be losing its strength. Since 1845 scientists have been measuring the magnetic field and have determined its decay rate is about 5% per century.
At the current decay rate, the field (and thus the earth) could be no older than 20,000 years. It appears that the other planets in the solar system still have (or have had) a magnetic field. A well-known creation scientist, Dr. Russel Humphreys, made a prediction about the measurement of Uranus’ magnetic field prior to Voyager 2’s trip in 1986 (based on the Biblical timescale). NASA believed the magnetic field would be long gone because they believed Uranus to be billions of years old. However, Dr. Humphrey’s prediction proved to be successful. The same thing happened in 1990 with Neptune. Evolutionary scientists were very surprised by this but it was not surprising to creationists as it fit perfectly within the Biblical model.
There are dozens and dozens of methods that can be used to gauge the age of the earth. Most of those methods refute an earth that is billions of years old. The evidence overwhelmingly refutes the idea of deep time. Yet evolutionary theory continues to try and convince us that, given enough time, things that seem to be counter-intuitive are true without providing evidence or sufficient explanations.
Evolutionary theory is often supported through repetition as opposed to evidence. This method is very effective on children. This is why dinosaurs are so important to the secular strategy. Kids love dinosaurs. People go to museums to see the magnificent giant skeletons of these fantastic creatures. They are told the story that dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago and then became extinct.
Let’s test this theory and see if we can discover the truth about dinosaurs and how the evidence regarding these fantastic creatures fits perfectly within the Biblical context.