Why An Old Earth?...
(by Bob Pulliam)
Back
The age of the earth is a continual thorn in the side for some people. They see mountains, caves, and canyons, and cannot conceive of them being young. The reason is that they have been trained to look at things from a uniformitarian standpoint. In other words, they believe that the forces seen at work on these objects today have remained constant and unchanged (uniform) through the years. So when we look at the Grand Canyon, and believe that the river and the wind carved it, we must conclude that it took an immense span of time to do so. But what if the little Colorado River didn't carve that canyon? What if a catastrophe did it? (Like a flood) Then we must admit, "The canyon could have been formed in hours, rather than millions of years." But what if God created the Grand Canyon just as it pleased Him (basically as it is now)? Then we must admit, "The canyon could have been formed in a second, rather than millions of years."
Do you believe the earth to be billions of years old? Why? Here are a few of the usual reasons given by people:
Reasons People Think the Earth is Billions of Years Old:
Scientists Have Dated Rocks and Found Them to be Ancient...Radioactive dating methods have been in use for years, and have been the mainstay for those who wish to stretch an object's date back into the past. The method must assume certain variables about the atmosphere at the time a specimen died (or came to it's present state as in the case of lava), and variables concerning the state of that specimen through time before it was found. Small changes in these variables allow tests to come out with vastly different results. For example, 150 year old lava from Hawaii was dated at millions of years old. Coal from the USSR (which is supposed to have formed billions of years ago) was dated at 30,000 years. On the whole, radiometric dating is only useful for fairly recent objects, or for those who wish to massage the numbers to make a point. When it comes to science, and the subject of origins, they are useless.
The age of the earth is a continual thorn in the side for some people. They see mountains, caves, and canyons, and cannot conceive of them being young. The reason is that they have been trained to look at things from a uniformitarian standpoint. In other words, they believe that the forces seen at work on these objects today have remained constant and unchanged (uniform) through the years. So when we look at the Grand Canyon, and believe that the river and the wind carved it, we must conclude that it took an immense span of time to do so. But what if the little Colorado River didn't carve that canyon? What if a catastrophe did it? (Like a flood) Then we must admit, "The canyon could have been formed in hours, rather than millions of years." But what if God created the Grand Canyon just as it pleased Him (basically as it is now)? Then we must admit, "The canyon could have been formed in a second, rather than millions of years."
Do you believe the earth to be billions of years old? Why? Here are a few of the usual reasons given by people:
Reasons People Think the Earth is Billions of Years Old:
Scientists Have Dated Rocks and Found Them to be Ancient...Radioactive dating methods have been in use for years, and have been the mainstay for those who wish to stretch an object's date back into the past. The method must assume certain variables about the atmosphere at the time a specimen died (or came to it's present state as in the case of lava), and variables concerning the state of that specimen through time before it was found. Small changes in these variables allow tests to come out with vastly different results. For example, 150 year old lava from Hawaii was dated at millions of years old. Coal from the USSR (which is supposed to have formed billions of years ago) was dated at 30,000 years. On the whole, radiometric dating is only useful for fairly recent objects, or for those who wish to massage the numbers to make a point. When it comes to science, and the subject of origins, they are useless.
Could you find a candle burning, time it's rate of burning in inches-per-hour, and determine how long it had been burning when you found it? Let's say it's burning at a rate of one inch per hour... How long had it been burning when you found it? There is no way of knowing without having the original length. You could assume what that may have been, but that would make your calculation a guess. This is one of the basic flaws of radiometric dating. Scientists do not know a key variable, and assume it to have been the same as it is presently.
It Looks Old...I suppose it may look old, but how old? To say it looks billions of years old would indicate that one has lived billions of years to know what something billions of years old looks like! Something must first be proven to be billions of years old before you know what billions of years of age looks like. What things look like is a very subjective area, and has no ground as evidence.
People look at the Grand Canyon and say, "That must be millions of years old." They base this on the assumption that the same forces at work now (wind and river), have always been at work at the same rate. The truth is, we do not know that! We are told that billions of years must have formed the layers we see on the sides of the canyon, and millions of years were required to cut through those layers (to make what we see now). But those are both assumptions. All kinds of catastrophes have formed marvelous sights on our globe. Why couldn't the Grand Canyon be the result of catastrophe, rather than slow uniform development?
The eruption of Mount St. Helens has shown the power of God's creation, not only for disaster, but also for creation. A huge mud flow, 300 feet deep, destroyed a great deal on one side of the mountain. But before the mud set up, water rushed through to create a beautiful miniature of the Grand Canyon. The erosion revealed that the flow laid the mud out in one-quarter inch laminations. Today, the formation has set up like rock. Having studied the formation, we know it only took days to form. Had we discovered it long afterwards, we easily could have concluded a formation time of millions of years, thinking that each lamination was laid out over a vast span of time.. One could just as easily conclude that it took a long period of time for wind and water to erode the canyon. Both assumptions would be dead wrong. Now, what about the Grand Canyon?.......
Cave Formations...Anyone who has been on a guided tour through a cave knows that it took millions of years for caves to form. The tour guide tells you so! How does he know? Has he been alive for millions of years? The scientists have told him. Have they been around for millions of years to watch it form? No, they've measured the growth of cave formations (stalagmites, stalactites, etc...) and extrapolated that rate back to determine how long it took to form.
Well, I guess I need to pull those candles out again. We saw with radiometric dating that variables have to be assumed before the process will yield an answer. The scientist does not know whether the variables he inserts will yield the truth. He can actually fudge the answer by millions of years. With cave formations, there are actually more variables at work than with radiometric dating. Seven, to be exact. Factors such as mineral content of water, temperature, and ventilation could easily have changed through the years. But could they be changed enough to make such formations grow rapidly? The basement of the George Rogers Clark Memorial in Vincennes, Indiana gives a very emphatic yes (pictures). The memorial is made out of limestone, and is less than sixty years old. Over the years, rainwater has eroded the minerals in the stone and created some spectacular results. There are full eleven foot columns that would otherwise have been thought to have taken tens of thousands of years to form. How did they form so quickly? The variables were just right!
Petrified Wood..."We went to the Petrified Forest last summer, and the guide told us it took thousands of years for wood to petrify." We won't go through the routine of how they know that again. Let's just get right to the answer. Petrified wood can be produced in a very short period of time. Tie a rope around a log, throw it into a hot mineral spring up in Yellowstone, give it a week, and you have a petrified log (and rope)! Companies that make knives with petrified wood handles, don't carve them from stone. They carve wood into the shape of the finished product, and them petrify the wood with a hot mineral solution under pressure. Petrified wood has never actually proven anything other than the powers of mineralization.
Fossils...Here's where people really go nuts. Who has seen a fossil form? It is not uncommon for uneducated and educated alike to repeat the oft told scenario of gradual burial. A fish dies, and over time sediment covers it, and it fossilizes. How absurd! Is there nothing hungry in that pond? Any fish I know of disintegrates before sediments have a chance to fossilize it. What about those beautiful pictures of fossilized ferns we see? How do you keep that thing from drying out and blowing away before it gets fossilized? What about a dragonfly?
The truth is, a vast majority of fossils we find were created by a rapid burial in a mineral bearing substance (e.g. limestone). A rapid cooling and drop in barometric pressure causes limestone to precipitate out of sea water. What does not form chemically can be washed by flood and tidal action, quickly burying thousands of creatures at once. Within days, they have fossilized for a future find, and speculation on age. This also answers the question as to why we find so many fossils. If fossils do not form under usual circumstances, then we would not expect to find many. Yet millions of fossils have been found and catalogued. Did it take a great deal of time to form this many? No, it took catastrophic action.
The Progression of Fossils...What is meant by this is evolution. It must have taken a vast amount of time for all of the different forms of life to evolve. The fossil record proves this vast amount of time by the progression it shows. That's uninformed nonsense. Listen to these leading evolutionists and scholars:
"We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence. ...I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. ...we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it." (Gould, Stephen J., Natural History, 2/82, p22)
"And it has been the paleontologist – my own breed – who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: .... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not." (Eldredge, Niles, Time Frames, 1986, p144)
"...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." (Ridley, Mark, New Scientist, June, 1981, p831)
Although the scholars say this, your Junior High and High School students are assailed with all kinds of phony evidence produced by a trumped up fossil record.
Light From Distant Galaxies...We know that light travels only so fast. For light to reach us from the most distant galaxies would require billions of years. Therefore these must have existed for billions of years. But haven't we assumed something again? We are still assuming that all that is now, has always been just as it is now. We are assuming that these things were produced by "natural(?)" processes. Here is the problem with that assumption. If all we see was created by an all-powerful God, then the light from those sources would have been a part of His creative force. Why create something to be seen by man and then wait billions of years for man to be able to see it? When God created the stars, He would have created the sight of those stars as well by placing the intermediary light in space. Light from distant galaxies only proves something if we can prove the big bang to begin with. An expanding universe and vast distances proves nothing. Such only fuels the guesses and assumptions of men who do not wish to even consider the alternative.
Conclusion...Is the earth really billions of years old? I haven't seen the evidence for it yet. A good scientist can make it look good, but does the logic demand his claim. There really is no evidence for the theory of evolution, nor an age of billions of years for the earth.
It Looks Old...I suppose it may look old, but how old? To say it looks billions of years old would indicate that one has lived billions of years to know what something billions of years old looks like! Something must first be proven to be billions of years old before you know what billions of years of age looks like. What things look like is a very subjective area, and has no ground as evidence.
People look at the Grand Canyon and say, "That must be millions of years old." They base this on the assumption that the same forces at work now (wind and river), have always been at work at the same rate. The truth is, we do not know that! We are told that billions of years must have formed the layers we see on the sides of the canyon, and millions of years were required to cut through those layers (to make what we see now). But those are both assumptions. All kinds of catastrophes have formed marvelous sights on our globe. Why couldn't the Grand Canyon be the result of catastrophe, rather than slow uniform development?
The eruption of Mount St. Helens has shown the power of God's creation, not only for disaster, but also for creation. A huge mud flow, 300 feet deep, destroyed a great deal on one side of the mountain. But before the mud set up, water rushed through to create a beautiful miniature of the Grand Canyon. The erosion revealed that the flow laid the mud out in one-quarter inch laminations. Today, the formation has set up like rock. Having studied the formation, we know it only took days to form. Had we discovered it long afterwards, we easily could have concluded a formation time of millions of years, thinking that each lamination was laid out over a vast span of time.. One could just as easily conclude that it took a long period of time for wind and water to erode the canyon. Both assumptions would be dead wrong. Now, what about the Grand Canyon?.......
Cave Formations...Anyone who has been on a guided tour through a cave knows that it took millions of years for caves to form. The tour guide tells you so! How does he know? Has he been alive for millions of years? The scientists have told him. Have they been around for millions of years to watch it form? No, they've measured the growth of cave formations (stalagmites, stalactites, etc...) and extrapolated that rate back to determine how long it took to form.
Well, I guess I need to pull those candles out again. We saw with radiometric dating that variables have to be assumed before the process will yield an answer. The scientist does not know whether the variables he inserts will yield the truth. He can actually fudge the answer by millions of years. With cave formations, there are actually more variables at work than with radiometric dating. Seven, to be exact. Factors such as mineral content of water, temperature, and ventilation could easily have changed through the years. But could they be changed enough to make such formations grow rapidly? The basement of the George Rogers Clark Memorial in Vincennes, Indiana gives a very emphatic yes (pictures). The memorial is made out of limestone, and is less than sixty years old. Over the years, rainwater has eroded the minerals in the stone and created some spectacular results. There are full eleven foot columns that would otherwise have been thought to have taken tens of thousands of years to form. How did they form so quickly? The variables were just right!
Petrified Wood..."We went to the Petrified Forest last summer, and the guide told us it took thousands of years for wood to petrify." We won't go through the routine of how they know that again. Let's just get right to the answer. Petrified wood can be produced in a very short period of time. Tie a rope around a log, throw it into a hot mineral spring up in Yellowstone, give it a week, and you have a petrified log (and rope)! Companies that make knives with petrified wood handles, don't carve them from stone. They carve wood into the shape of the finished product, and them petrify the wood with a hot mineral solution under pressure. Petrified wood has never actually proven anything other than the powers of mineralization.
Fossils...Here's where people really go nuts. Who has seen a fossil form? It is not uncommon for uneducated and educated alike to repeat the oft told scenario of gradual burial. A fish dies, and over time sediment covers it, and it fossilizes. How absurd! Is there nothing hungry in that pond? Any fish I know of disintegrates before sediments have a chance to fossilize it. What about those beautiful pictures of fossilized ferns we see? How do you keep that thing from drying out and blowing away before it gets fossilized? What about a dragonfly?
The truth is, a vast majority of fossils we find were created by a rapid burial in a mineral bearing substance (e.g. limestone). A rapid cooling and drop in barometric pressure causes limestone to precipitate out of sea water. What does not form chemically can be washed by flood and tidal action, quickly burying thousands of creatures at once. Within days, they have fossilized for a future find, and speculation on age. This also answers the question as to why we find so many fossils. If fossils do not form under usual circumstances, then we would not expect to find many. Yet millions of fossils have been found and catalogued. Did it take a great deal of time to form this many? No, it took catastrophic action.
The Progression of Fossils...What is meant by this is evolution. It must have taken a vast amount of time for all of the different forms of life to evolve. The fossil record proves this vast amount of time by the progression it shows. That's uninformed nonsense. Listen to these leading evolutionists and scholars:
"We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence. ...I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. ...we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it." (Gould, Stephen J., Natural History, 2/82, p22)
"And it has been the paleontologist – my own breed – who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: .... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not." (Eldredge, Niles, Time Frames, 1986, p144)
"...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." (Ridley, Mark, New Scientist, June, 1981, p831)
Although the scholars say this, your Junior High and High School students are assailed with all kinds of phony evidence produced by a trumped up fossil record.
Light From Distant Galaxies...We know that light travels only so fast. For light to reach us from the most distant galaxies would require billions of years. Therefore these must have existed for billions of years. But haven't we assumed something again? We are still assuming that all that is now, has always been just as it is now. We are assuming that these things were produced by "natural(?)" processes. Here is the problem with that assumption. If all we see was created by an all-powerful God, then the light from those sources would have been a part of His creative force. Why create something to be seen by man and then wait billions of years for man to be able to see it? When God created the stars, He would have created the sight of those stars as well by placing the intermediary light in space. Light from distant galaxies only proves something if we can prove the big bang to begin with. An expanding universe and vast distances proves nothing. Such only fuels the guesses and assumptions of men who do not wish to even consider the alternative.
Conclusion...Is the earth really billions of years old? I haven't seen the evidence for it yet. A good scientist can make it look good, but does the logic demand his claim. There really is no evidence for the theory of evolution, nor an age of billions of years for the earth.