Category: Age of the Earth

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
– Robert Jastrow

Everyone has moments in their life when they ponder their existence. Occasionaly it’s simply a question of ancestry; many times it involves the origins of life on Earth and the universe itself. I’m no exception to this. I was given a basic concept of how our existence might have come to be throughout my public school education. Teachers explained that a big bang quickly dispersed gases and such throughout the universe very quickly. Then, things cooled and slowed down; galaxies, stars, and planets formed. On Earth, there must have been a pre-biotic soup of complex chemicals that formed the earliest simple cells. The rest of the story is documented in the fossil record and the subsequent evolution of these simple cells eventually produced all life we see today. Of course, all of this must have happened over billions of years. It all seemed logical and well-supported; I thought all that was left was to figure out the steps involved in going from our evolutionary beginnings to the present day.

Imagine my utter shock when I learned that the basic premises for all of this were based on mere speculation or flawed evidence and that there was another explanation staring me right in the face my whole life. The answer was in Genesis. I had heard about creation scientists who believe everything was created in six days as described in the Bible and that Earth is merely a few thousand years old. In the face of what we’ve been taught and led to believe our whole lives, this seems preposterous at first glance.

Much of the criticism stems from a perception that all creationists do is try to show the impossibility of evolution and that they say such things because they simply don’t understand how it works or they stubbornly refuse to abandon their faith despite scientific knowledge or reason. After over a year of obsessive investigation I’ve uncovered a network of qualified PhDs in all disciplines that have done serious research, written volumes of technical papers and produced informative videos showing how the Biblical model makes better sense of scientific observations. This investigation is what led me to reject my faith in evolution and put my faith instead in our Creator. I couldn’t come close to covering the details which led me to this realization, but I’ll try to cover the basics.

Religion and Science

First, let me clarify some things about science and religion. Religion is a worldview. Your beliefs and moral practices are based on that view. Science is a way to test a hypothesis. In science, you make predictions based on logic or mathematics that are testable and (preferably) falsifiable. Then, you interpret the results to see if they fit in to an overall theory, which is sometimes predicated on assumptions which are shaped by one’s worldview or the reigning paradigm.

There are thousands of different religions, but on the question of origins they fall neatly into two categories: naturalist and creationist. The former is a belief that everything that’s in the universe is self-existent and was shaped exclusively by natural processes. The latter is a belief that the universe was created by a supernatural being that is eternal and exists outside of what we know as space and time. The difference is especially obvious concerning the origins of life on Earth.

By their very nature, scientific experiments must operate independently of any religious bias. It involves the careful observation of facts to see if a prediction makes sense. If the results falsify the theory or fail to adequately support it, it’s time for a new theory. As I have seen lately, the evidence used to support evolution as a basis of origins simply doesn’t hold up. It’s past time to abandon it as an explanation of origins. However, the only alternative is to believe in special creation. That’s simply too hard to swallow for a lot of people who are reluctant to give up beliefs held their whole lives.

Compromise

Before getting into the details, you might be wondering why such a discussion of evidence is important. Why spend so much time and effort disproving evolution if it is possible that God used evolutionary processes to create the world? Couldn’t Genesis be interpreted as a day being comparable to a geological age? Should we “limit” God by having a narrow view of origins? There are many ways to interpret the six days as described in Genesis, but all of them result in compromising key doctrines and scripture as a whole, as I will show.

The word “day” in our language can be used to describe the 12 or so hours that we can see the sun, it can be a full 24-hour day, or it can be sometime in the past (i.e. “Back in my day…”). In the Hebrew language (the language of the Old Testament), when that word is combined with words like “evening” and “morning” or when it’s given a number in front like “first”, “second”, and so on, it always means a 24-hour day. Every single one of the verses in Genesis that describe the creation says “and the evening and the morning were the (insert # here) day”.

The Bible is filled with references to God’s six-day work of creation. The fourth commandment in Exodus 20:11 spells this out clearly and Jesus used the history found in Genesis to explain his teachings in Matthew 11:23, Matthew 12:39, Matthew 19:4-6, Matthew 22:31-32, Matthew 23:35… and that’s just in one book! If you think most of the creation story is metaphor or merely poetic, think about the genealogies from Adam all the way down to Jesus Christ as detailed in Genesis 5, Matthew 1, and Luke 3. Then ask yourself, “Where do the metaphors end and the where does reality begin?”

Now, here’s the bigger issue: death. Unless death came as a result of sin (Romans 5:12), then it existed before God declared everything “very good.” For old-earth advocates, this means death carried on for millions of years before that declaration. Yet, every sane human being intrinsically knows that there is nothing “good” about death. The existence of such suffering and evil is often used as an argument against the existence of a loving God. Only the young-earth view that death (physical and spiritual) came through original sin sees it as an enemy in this world – an imposter that Jesus Christ conquers.

We mere humans have no business telling God how he must have gone about creating our world. He told us already! There’s no need for re-interpretation – no need for compromise. Let me show you why so many credible scientists (and theologians) see no conflict between scientific evidence and a young Earth.

The Evidence

Take it from the beginning: how did a primordial soup of chemicals form the first cell? In Darwin’s day, they thought cells were a blob with a dark spot in the middle. It wasn’t much of a stretch at that time to hypothesize that the first cells might have come about by unguided chemical interactions. Now we know that even the simplest cell has at least as many complex systems as a space shuttle, making this argument far less convincing. But even complex things like crystal formations can be seen forming all over the place in nature, so complexity by itself is not enough to prove that something is the result of an intentional mind.

One way to empirically asses whether something is the result of deliberate design is through a concept that Michael Behe calls “irreducible complexity.” Consider his example of this using a mousetrap. A mousetrap has several parts. If you take any of the parts away, it ceases to have any useful function. Darwinian evolution would require that mousetrap to have formed step-by step, keeping the parts that helped and rejecting the parts that were useless (natural selection). An irreducibly complex system is one in which no parts are useful (therefore gaining a survival advantage) until all the respective parts are in place and functioning properly. Evolutionists have no good answer for this problem when it comes to the origin of life and many of the systems we see in biological organisms.

For the sake of argument, suppose that first cell could have formed naturally and survived. Now, it has to manage a way to reproduce. It also has to modify genetic code to form entire organisms and produce the diversity we see today. Unfortunately, scientists have not yet found anything in nature that can increase the information content DNA and retain it for generations. The main argument is that this happens through mutation, but many fail to realize that this usually destroys parts of the code rather than producing it.

At this point, an evolutionist might chime in by saying that I’m ignoring the fact that we see evolution happening today with things like antibiotic resistance in bacteria. We see new species all the time, and living things evolve to adapt to their environment extremely well. Creationists have no beef with this because that’s a form of evolution which takes place through mechanisms we can observe and test – mechanisms which have never been observed to make something new (morphological novelty). A dog can beget different dogs, a bird can beget different-looking birds (like Darwin’s finches), but can an ape-like creature beget some transition to a human? There are limits to evolution and adaptation.

An evolutionst might also point out that fossils are observational evidence that creatures have changed throughout the eons. You have probably visited a museum with a display of the “ascent of man” with clay replicas of fossils that show the transition from apes to humans. What you don’t know is that many of those transitional forms are either hoaxes that are still presented as proof or the fossil was nothing more than that of a tooth or small fragments of a skull. Fossils displayed as complete skeletons are usually a “Frankenstein” collection of other fossils found at different sites. Darwin himself said that if his theory were to be true, there must be thousands of these transitional forms. Millions of fossils later, we still see very little in the way of potential transitional forms. Even if you arranged enough complete fossils in a certain order to show the transition, this still requires interpretation which is open to argument and preconceived biases.

What about the age of the earth? Doesn’t carbon dating (and other radiometric dating methods) show us beyond any real doubt that the earth is billions of years old? No, it doesn’t. The first problem is that radiometric dating assumes uniformitarianism; that is, it assumes decay rates (and other necessary values) have always been constant. A group of researchers with the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) has found remarkable evidence that several radioactive elements decayed much faster at some point in the past. They have also used other means of dating elements (such as helium diffusion rates through zircon) to determine the true age of the earth. Do you know what they found? That the data show the earth is between 4,000 and 10,000 years old! What’s worse – fossils that are supposed to be millions of years old should have no measurable C-14 left in them. C-14 has been found and measured in fossils found all over the earth. This error can’t always be explained by C-14 contamination because excessive amounts have been found in diamonds which are not prone to an influx of outside carbon. For more on the Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth (RATE) project, see ICR’s web site.

One might wonder how so many fossils and sedimentary layers could have formed in a short time period; doesn’t that take millions of years? The truth is that in lab experiments (by secular scientists) we see that fossils can form in a matter of hours under the right conditions, and in a matter of a few years under conditions commonly found in nature. Dr. Dino (Kent Hovind) has an impressive collection of fossilized pickles, hats, and even a fossilized cowboy boot with his leg still in it. It doesn’t take all that long to form a fossil or the rock layer which has preserved it.

Geology can bee seen two ways: layers formed by sediments that were laid down and shuffled around over millions of years, or the strata were formed and features were carved by a massive worldwide flood (ring any bells?). The Grand Canyon is a favorite subject among creation junkies such as myself. I was always told it was formed by the Colorado River over millions of years. Did you know the highest point on the canyon’s ridge is several thousand feet higher than where the river enters? Rivers don’t flow uphill. You might explain that away by assuming that tectonic shifts rose the edge over time. In fact, there is evidence of uplift, but the angles at which the layers are bent indicates that the sediment had not hardened into rock yet. Also, if you look at a satellite photo, you’ll see that certain eroded features were made pointing in the opposite direction of the river flow.

Now for the universe: physicists generally explain that the Big Bang or something like it is a reasonable, naturalistic explanation of how our universe began. The main evidence for it is expansion of the universe and the cosmic background radiation. There’s another proposal by physicist Russell Humphrys, Ph.D, called White Hole Cosmology which explains this evidence much more fully while showing it could all take place within the biblical time scale.

The best way to understand the concept of a white hole is to compare it to a black hole. Just as everything sinks inward beyond the event horizon of a black hole, so does everything expand outward beyond the event horizon of a white hole. When Einstein’s General Relativity theory is applied to this concept, we can explain the problem of stars being billions of years old and millions of light-years away while only 6,000 years have passed. Time is very different when you include massive speeds and gravitational forces in terms of Einstein’s relativity.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, it’s only the snowman on top of the tip of the iceberg. There are still many, many questions to be answered. I questioned this a lot at first, but in searching deeper I’m thoroughly convinced of all of it. If you require more explanation, more proof, there are a few web sites you can start with on our links page or use our custom search tool: a Google engine which finds results from a group of creation-focused sites selected by the editors at soulliberty.com.

Bias

I would hope that the amazing discoveries and scientific experiments carried out by creationists would get roaring applause the world over, especially from Christians. They’ve taken what we already know about many fields of science and have moved the research a step further to test assumptions through experimentation. They’ve scientifically shown that we can trust Bible and that faith and reason are not in any way opposed. Then, why aren’t they getting peace prizes and a wealth of funding to carry on their research?

A fundamental tenet of the scientific community is never to invoke supernatural explanations. That’s a reasonable assumption when examining ongoing processes, but it presupposes that such a supernatural being could never exist or interact with our world. When a creationist comes forward with experimental validation of a young earth, they are ridiculed and labeled as religious fundamentalists who don’t understand science. I don’t think it’s necessary to point out examples from history, but humans have seen a lot of great scientists come and go that were ridiculed in their time for their “radical” notions. American society is based on freedom and tolerance, but that doesn’t really apply when it comes to religion in academia.

Most scientific research is funded by government grants or universities. Under the guise of religious tolerance, neither the US government nor major universities will fund research that is clearly aimed at promoting one religious concept over another. As a case-in-point, a creationist that works at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History got a paper on Intelligent Design published in a secular scientific journal. That caused frenzy at the Smithsonian and sparked quite a lot of name-calling and bluffing. It was presented in documentary form in Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” (For the record, Intelligent Design is quite different from biblical creationism. ID simply holds that life is designed, is not interested in who did it or when, and refuses to use the Bible as evidence.) Creationist researchers are funded by private donations, eliminating the restrictions on academic freedom found at leading research institutions.

Evolutionists claim creationists have no authority because they haven’t been published in any peer-reviewed scientific journals. They actually have, but the papers used to support a young earth or refute evolutionary hypotheses can only get published in peer-reviewed creationist journals. No one who questions evolution, no matter their qualifications or validity of their argument, is allowed by secular publishers. Most of the creationists who have published their work earned Ph.Ds from the top schools in the world. Many of them didn’t turn to creationism until long after they graduated. Still, the anti-Christian bias trumps truth in our fallen world.

The Truth

What’s simple is true: you did not get here by some chance event that formed life from rain and lightning on rocks or in the sea billions of years ago. You are a direct descendant of Adam, the divine and special creation of God. It happened exactly as He described through the penmen of the Bible and is confirmed by the teachings of Jesus with no need for re-interpretation or revision. Don’t just take my word for it. Look into it yourself. Read the Bible and the findings of those who have devoted their lives to studying the science behind it. Find the answers you want in as little or as much detail as needed to thoroughly convince you. I pray you’ll find your way.