How Old Is The Earth?

Transcription

1 How Old Is The Earth? Introduction. The Bible gives us the foundation that enables us to build the right worldview to correctly understand how the present and past are connected. We believe it is the only foundation on which all other evidences can be correctly understand. All other documents written by man are fallible (cp. 2 Timothy 3:16). It is clear from the scriptures, in over 100 verses, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, despite the fact that some urge us to remain agnostic regarding the age of the earth. There have been several attempts to try to fit a long period of time into the biblical account of creation, but it is simply not possible. In one sense, God s testimony is all we need; but God Himself tells us to give reasons for what we believe (1 Peter 3:15). So it is also important to conduct scientific research. With this research we can challenge those who reject God s clear word and defend the biblical worldview. I. Bishop Ussher s Chronology A. Archbishop James Ussher was one of the most important biblical scholars of the 17th century. Today, he is best known for his chronology research that concluded Adam was created in 4004 B.C. As you can imagine, anti-creationists heavily criticize him, often picturing him as ignorant, anti-science, and someone whose research was superficial and based solely on the biblical record. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that Ussher is known to us today almost entirely in ridicule. In reality, Ussher was a first-class scholar very involved in scholarly research. B. By the time of the Renaissance, an age of the earth somewhere around 5,000 to 6,000 years appeared perfectly reasonable. Furthermore, it was widely accepted that the narrative given in the book of Genesis, which parallels to some extent creation narratives from other cultures of the Middle East, accounts for the origin of the physical world as the deliberate act of an Almighty Creator. In the 17th century, Ussher turned his outstanding scholarly expertise to the problem of the date of creation. This project meshed very well with his strong interest in history, astronomy, math, and geometry. C. The common claim is that Ussher reached his famous date of 4004 B.C. by simply calculating back from the time of Jesus by adding up years involved in the lineages of Christ given in the Bible and going all the way back to Adam. One problem was that the Old Testament contains the required information to achieve an accurate chronology only up to Solomon s time. After that, ambiguities exist and no straightforward data were available. And for about 400 years before the birth of Jesus, the gospel of Matthew gives the genealogy leading up to Christ, but not the chronology. D. To arrive at the date of creation, Ussher replicated the methods that others had used before him; namely, he attempted to correlate information from around 400 B.C. to Jesus birth with known dates from the histories of other cultures, specifically the Chaldeans and Persians. This all required an incredible expertise in biblical knowledge, secular history, and languages. In fact, the majority of the evidence Ussher used to arrive at the 4004 B.C. date was non-biblical. 1 of 8

2 Historians acknowledge that Ussher had one of the best minds of his time and he applied it unrelentingly to synthesize information from different sources to achieve as accurate a chronology as possible. E. Many skeptics have dismissed Ussher s work, claiming he merely used Bible dogma to solve a scientific problem. The late Stephen Jay Gould disagreed. Seeking to understand how Ussher arrived at his deductions, after detailed investigation Gould concluded that the archbishop s critics were not only ignorant but that they also entirely misunderstood his work. Gould addressed this with an entreaty: I close with a final plea for judging people by their own criteria, not by later standards that they couldn t possibly know or assess. He was delighted with Ussher s declaration that his results were determined not only by the plain and manifold testimonies of scripture, but also by light of reason well directed. F. For these reasons, Gould determined that Ussher s chronology was an honorable effort for its time and argued that the ridicule only reflects a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past. Ussher s research merits our highest respect and serves as a solid foundation for us to build on today. II. Long Ages In The Biblical Account A. Before the creation week. 1. For over 100 years those who want to hold to the teachings of evolution and the Bible at the same time, have been trying insert evolutionary timetables into the text so they can have an old earth. This is often called the Gap Theory because people reason that there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. 2. This theory states that in between that long period of time between the two verses, Satan came to earth, rebelled against God and there was a great war that took place with much devastation. Satan was defeated by God, but in the conflict the earth was destroyed. Some variations of this theory say that vegetation existed during that time and was destroyed, and some even say there was a race of people prior to Adam who were also destroyed during this period of time. a) There are several proof texts offered in support of the Gap Theory (Ezekiel 28:12-17; Isaiah 14:12-14; 45:18; Jeremiah 4:23-26). b) So the six day creation you read of in Genesis 1 is a reconstruction or a re-creation, not an original creation. c) Those who hold to this theory say this is where many of the fossils that we have today came from. The fossils can easily be dated in the millions of years because this theory can allow for massive amounts of time. 3. Those who hold to the Gap Theory want to change some of the words in the text, for example, the word for was in Genesis 1:2 is to be translated became. That is, after God created the heavens and the earth, there came that great war between God and Satan and the earth became formless and void. But no known translation says became. 2 of 8

3 4. Scriptural refutation of this theory: a) Exodus 20:11 states that God made all that is in them which includes everything. The heavens, earth, and the sea and all that is in them, God said He put it there in six days. (1) This one verse would be enough from the Bible to demolish the Gap Theory. But those who hold to the Gap Theory have tried to get around this by retranslating this verse. They make a false distinction between created (bara) and made (asah). (2) If made (Exodus 20:11) is different from created (Genesis 1:1), then proponents of this theory avoid the necessity of complete creation in 6 days. But these definitions are not contrasting; in fact, they overlap and are used interchangeably. b) In 1 Corinthians 15:45, Adam was called the first man by the inspired apostle Paul. So this passage tells us that there was not pre-adamic race that existed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. There was no death before Adam (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). That idea is totally foreign to the scripture, in fact it makes the inspired writers liars. c) The Gap Theory violates the scriptures as it has death reigning even before Adam s sin. Was there death prior to Adam s sin among humans as the Gap Theory would suggest? That is impossible (Romans 5:12-14). The scriptures teach that death began with Adam, but the Gap Theory would have us to believe that death and destruction existed on a massive scale before Adam was even created. That makes Paul a liar. B. During the creation week. 1. One theory is often called the Day-Age Theory. a) This theory states that a day is not actually a day, but is a vast geological epoch of time. This is a theory that is accepted by many who want to claim to be a Bible believer and still hold to the old age theory of the earth so they can also accept the evolutionary geological time table. b) The first time the Hebrew word for day is used is in Genesis 1:5 and it is defined there as well. God did not just use the word day and leave it ambiguous as to what He meant by the word, so that it could be taken to mean how ever long a period you want to make it. He used the word and then defined the length of the period. c) God tells us that the period of light is called day, and the period of darkness is called night, and the period of light to darkness, is one day. God s own definition of what a day consists of tells us that long geological periods of time cannot be placed in the creation week (cp. 2 Peter 3:8). (1) In fact it is interesting to notice that God made this very plain by defining this each time throughout the text, there was evening and morning a second day, third day and so on. (2) But we also find that anywhere in the Bible where this word for day is used and is preceded by a numeral, it always refers to a literal day, and is used that way over 100 times in the Old Testament and always refers to a literal day. No where in the scripture do you find the word 3 of 8

4 day referring to anything else than a 24 hour period when preceded by a number. (3) If God through Moses would have wanted us to understand that these days were actually long eons of geological periods of time, do you think he could have used some other word to get the point across? d) Just as God worked six days and rested on one, so were the Israelites to work for six literal days and rest on one (Exodus 20:11). (1) The Jew was to understand Genesis 1:5 just like he understood Exodus 20:11. No Jew read this to be saying that you work for six indefinite periods of time and then rest for one indefinite period of time. (2) The same Moses who wrote the first 11 chapters of Genesis also wrote binding regulations regarding days, months, seasons, and years. How can we say that all the time references in Genesis 1-11 are somehow different than those found in the rest of the Pentateuch? (3) Those who argue for an old earth must contend that the seven days of creation are something other than seven literal, successive 24-hour days. But if their position is true, at what point did Moses switch gears from a symbolic to a literal usage of the term? 2. Another theory is the Multiple Gap Theory which suggests that the creation days were, in fact, six literal, 24-hour days during which God actually performed the special creative works attributed to Him in Genesis 1. a) However, these literal days tell only a small part of the story. Rather than representing the totality of God s creative work, they instead represent breaks between the geologic ages. Many believe this reflects the punctuated equilibrium idea. b) In other words, after God s activity on any given literal day, that day then was followed by long ages of slow development according to historical geology. Actually, this theory is a hybridization of the Day Age and Gap theories. Instead of making ages out of the days of Genesis 1, it merely inserts the ages between the days. And instead of putting a single gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, it inserts multiple gaps between the days of Genesis 1. c) The Multiple Gap Theory has the advantage of allowing someone, when asked, to assert that they do, in fact, believe the days of creation to be 24- hour periods. And, if they are asked if they believe in the Gap Theory, again, they can decline, insisting that they do not. d) At the very least, this theory requires a most unnatural reading of the creation account, which apparently is continuous and meant to describe the creation of heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is. The context of the creation record suggests continuity. There is absolutely no exegetical evidence to document the claim that in between each of the (literal) creation days there were millions or billions of years. In fact, such evidence is conspicuously missing. It is wrong to build a doctrinal theory on the basis of the silence of the scriptures. e) If the acts of creation are left on their respective days, then there is no possible way to make the creation account agree with the geological 4 of 8

5 system gaps or no gaps. The Genesis sequence and the alleged geologic sequence do not agree. C. After the creation week. 1. If the geological evolutionary time table cannot be placed before the creation week, and it cannot placed in the creation week, some try the last option and place it after the creation week. 2. The message of the genealogies in the Bible is that man has been on the earth since the beginning of creation and indicates that that beginning was not very long ago. We know from Jesus and those He inspired to write that Adam was the first man and that Adam and Eve were on the earth at the beginning of the creation (Mark 10:6; 1 Corinthians 15:45; 1 Timothy 2:13). And by putting together the chronological record of the genealogies we can know the approximate age of the earth. 3. No one denies that it has been about 2,000 years back to the time of Christ. From Jesus to Abraham, it has be archeologically demonstrated to be about 2,000 years. Because of the biblical genealogies, we know that the time period from Abraham to Adam is roughly 2,000 years. 4. In discussing the genealogical family lines of Genesis, we must acknowledge that the word beget does not necessarily refer to a direct father/son relationship. It can and perhaps often does mean descendant of. There could be some gaps in the lineage. Yet, how many could there be? 5. In tracing the genealogy of Christ through Joseph, Matthew lists 40 individuals between Abraham to Jesus (Matthew 1:1-17). In tracing the genealogy of Christ through Mary, Luke lists 75 individuals from Adam to Jesus (Luke 3:23-38). According to Luke, Abraham is 55 generations removed from Jesus, and Adam is another 20 generations removed from our Savior. In tracing the genealogy of Adam, Moses lists 9 generations from Adam to Noah (Genesis 5:1-32). Jude acknowledges this chronology by speaking of Enoch as the seventh from Adam (Jude 1:14). This only leaves only 13 genealogies that could possibly contain gaps. 6. Ussher, making no allowance for any generational gaps in the lineages, calculated that 2,000 years elapsed between Adam and Abraham. According to the Bible, 20 generations are under dispute. How much time can one reasonably insert into these 20 generations? For the sake of argumentation, let s say that each of the 20 generations from Adam to Abraham is separated by 400 years. According to this timetable, 8,000 years would have elapsed from Adam to Abraham (20 x 400 = 8,000). Therefore, according to this method of calculation, Adam was created about 12,000 years ago (8, , ,000 = 12,000). Therefore, even if we grant that the first 20 generations of Bible history each cover over 400 years, this still does not help those who want to believe in an old earth. 7. In order to accommodate the biblical record only as far back as the appearance of man s alleged evolutionary ancestor (approximately 3.6 million years), one would have to place 291,125 years between each of the remaining 13 generations! 5 of 8

6 8. Who could believe that the first seven of these generations are so exact, while the last 13 are so inexact? Is it proper biblical exegesis to suggest that the first seven listings are correct as written, but gaps covering more than 250,000 years may be inserted between each of the last 13? Furthermore, what good would any of this do anyone? All it would accomplish is the establishment of a 3.6 million year-old earth; old-earth creationists, progressive creationists, and theistic evolutionists need a 4.6 billion year-old earth. So, in effect, all of the insertions of gaps into the biblical text is much ado about nothing. III. Young earth Evidences A. Bent rock layers. 1. In many mountainous areas, rock layers thousands of feet thick have been bent and folded without fracturing. 2. If concrete is still wet, it can easily be shaped and molded before the cement sets. The same principle applies to sedimentary rock layers. They can be bent and folded soon after the sediment is deposited, before the natural cements have a chance to bind the particles together into hard, brittle rocks. 3. The region around Grand Canyon is a great example showing how most of the earth s fossil-bearing layers were laid down quickly and many were folded while still wet. Exposed in the canyon s walls are about 4,500 feet of fossilbearing layers that were supposedly deposited over a period lasting from 520 to 250 million years ago. Then, amazingly, this whole sequence of layers rose over a mile around 60 million years ago. The plateau through which Grand Canyon runs is now 7,000-8,000 feet above sea level. 4. It supposedly took 270 million years to deposit these layers. Surely in that time the layers at the bottom would have dried and the sand grains cemented together, especially with 4,000 feet of rock layers piled on top of it and pressing down on it. The only viable explanation is that the whole sequence was deposited very quickly the creation model indicates that it took less than a year, during the global Flood (Genesis 7:11; 8:13-14). So the 520 million years never happened, and the earth is young. B. Faint sun paradox. 1. Evidence now supports astronomers belief that the sun s power comes from the fusion of hydrogen into helium deep in the sun s core, but there is a huge problem. As the hydrogen fuses, it should change the composition of the sun s core, gradually increasing the sun s temperature. If true, this means that the earth was colder in the past. In fact, the earth would have been below freezing 3.5 billion years ago, when life supposedly evolved. 2. The rate of nuclear fusion depends on the temperature. As the sun s core temperatures increase, the sun s energy output will also increase, causing the sun to brighten over time. Calculations show that the sun would brighten by 25% after 3.5 billion years. This means that an early sun would have been fainter, warming the earth 31 F less than it does now. 3. But evolutionists acknowledge that there is no evidence of this in the geologic record. They even call this problem the faint young sun paradox. While this is 6 of 8

7 not a problem over thousands of years (Genesis 1:14-19), it is a problem if the world is billions of years old. C. Rapidly decaying magnetic field. 1. The earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that protects living organisms from solar radiation. Without it, life could not exist. That is why scientists were surprised to discover that the field is quickly wearing down. At the current rate, the field and thus the earth could be no older than 20,000 years old. 2. Several measurements confirm this decay. Since measuring began in 1845, the total energy stored in the earth s magnetic field has been decaying at the rate of 5% per century. Archaeological measurements show that the field was 40% stronger in A.D Recent records of the International Geomagnetic Reference Field, the most accurate ever taken, show a net energy loss of 1.4% in just three decades ( ). This means that the field s energy has halved every 1,465 years or so. 3. Reliable, accurate, published geological field data have emphatically confirmed the young earth model: a freely-decaying electric current in the outer core is generating the magnetic field. This means that the electric current naturally loses energy as it flows through the metallic core. Though it differs from the most commonly accepted conventional model, it is consistent with our knowledge of what makes up the earth s core. Furthermore, based on what we know about the conductive properties of liquid iron, this freely decaying current would have started when the earth s outer core was formed. However, if the core were more than 20,000 years old, then the starting energy would have made the earth too hot to be covered by water, as Genesis 1:2 reveals. It all points to an earth and magnetic field only a few thousand years old. D. Carbon-14 in fossils, coals, and diamonds. 1. Carbon-14 (or radiocarbon) is a radioactive form of carbon that scientists use to date fossils. But it decays so quickly with a half-life of only 5,730 years that none is expected to remain in fossils after only a few hundred thousand years. Yet carbon-14 has been detected in ancient fossils supposedly up to hundreds of millions of years old ever since the earliest days of radiocarbon dating. 2. Even if every atom in the whole earth were carbon-14, they would decay so quickly that no carbon-14 would be left on earth after only 1 million years. Analysis of fossilized wood and coal samples, supposedly spanning million years of ago, yielded ages between 20,000 and 50,000 years using carbon-14 dating. Diamonds supposedly 1-3 billion years old similarly yielded carbon-14 ages of only 55,000 years 3. Even that is too old when you realize that these ages assume that the earth s magnetic field has always been constant. But it was stronger in the past, protecting the atmosphere from solar radiation and reducing the radiocarbon production. As a result, past creatures had much less radiocarbon in their bodies, and their deaths occurred much more recently than reported. So the radiocarbon ages of all fossils and coal should be reduced to less than 5,000 years, matching the timing of their burial during the Flood (Genesis 7:19-20). 7 of 8

8 E. Short-lived comets. 1. A comet spends most of its time far from the sun in the deep freeze of space. But once each orbit a comet comes very close to the sun, allowing the sun s heat to evaporate much of the comet s ice and dislodge dust to form a beautiful tail. Comets have little mass, so each close pass to the sun greatly reduces a comet s size, and eventually comets fade away. They cannot survive billions of years. 2. Two other mechanisms can destroy comets ejections from the solar system and collisions with planets. Ejections happen as comets pass too close to the large planets, particularly Jupiter, and the planets gravity kicks them out of the solar system. While ejections have been observed many times, the first observed collision was in 1994, when Comet Shoemaker-Levi IX slammed into Jupiter. 3. Given the loss rates, it is easy to compute a maximum age of comets. That maximum age is only a few million years. Obviously, their prevalence makes sense if the entire solar system was created just a few thousand years ago, but not if it is billions of years old. F. DNA in ancient bacteria. 1. In 2000, scientists claimed to have resurrected bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt crystal conventionally dated at 250 million years old. They were shocked that the bacteria s DNA was very similar to modern bacterial DNA. If the modern bacteria were the result of 250 million years of evolution, its DNA should be very different from the Lazarus bacteria (based on known mutation rates). 2. In addition, the scientists were surprised to find that the DNA was still intact after the supposed 250 million years. DNA normally breaks down quickly, even in ideal conditions. Even evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores (a dormant state) should not last more than a million years. Their quandary is quite substantial. 3. However, the discovery of Lazarus bacteria is not shocking or surprising when we base our expectations on the Bible accounts. For instance, Noah s Flood likely deposited the salt beds that were home to the bacteria. If the Lazarus bacteria is only about 4,500 years old, its DNA is more likely to be intact and similar to modern bacteria. Conclusion. The God of the Bible has given us a specific, infallible history, beginning with the six days of creation and followed by detailed genealogies that allow us to determine when the universe began. Based on this history, the beginning was only about 6,000 years ago. 8 of 8