To celebrate, I asked a friend to give us some food-for-thought on the issue.
I thought this would be particularly interesting for home schoolers.
Old Earth, Young Earth, Atheism and Scripture
by Neil Aarons
One of the sites dedicated to ridiculing people who say odd
things on Facebook and other social media had a picture of an odd comment. On
New Year’s Day 2014, she wrote something like, “Wow, the world is 2,014 years
old today!” Actually, that is just the current calendar’s date from the birth
of Jesus (2014 A.D.), and there are a few thousand years before him (in the
B.C. numbers). Personally, I think she was just trying to be funny. Someone
else rudely commented, “Idiot! The earth is 20 billion years old!”
Unfortunately, the guy embarrassed himself, because secular scientists tell us
that the earth is about 4-1/2 billion years old, and, according to them, the
universe is just under 14 billion years old. Whoops!
But just how old is the earth, really?
To go after this highly argued topic, I will have to use
some specialized words. They apply to more than just the study of the earth, so
you will probably be glad that you learned them now. One of those words is worldview. Everybody has a worldview. It
is made up of things you know (or think you know), your learning, experiences,
things you assume and so on. It adds up to how you live your life.
There is really no way
to prove the age of the earth (or of
the universe). People use evidence and observations, and then interpret it
based on their worldviews.
Many people believe that evolution is true. They also assume that the world is very old, and need the earth to be old because most
views about evolution require huge amounts of time for it to happen.
But do they know
that the earth is so very old? People tend to believe what secular scientists
tell them. One assumption is that “the present is the key to the past”. That
is, what we see happening in nature today is constant, and it has always
happened this way. But belief is not
always based on truth. Methods used
for coming up with the age of the earth as based on atheistic (God-denying)
evolutionary worldviews. Although there are dating methods that can be
calculated using the same principles, evolutionists reject them because they
give ages that are too small; it does not fit their worldviews.
This is going to get fancy, but just hear me out, OK? You
will hear and read about radiometric
dating, which is based on comparing certain elements in igneous rocks with
the elements that they decay into. Potassium into argon, rubidium into
strontium, uranium into lead, and others. This demands assumptions: That they
know how much, say, uranium was in the rock at the beginning, how much lead was
there, and that the rate of decay did not change.
Think of filling the bathtub with water. You start with an
empty tub, turn on the water, stand right there and time it. Look at this, it
takes 15 minutes to fill up the tub, yippie. But wait! Suppose you saw that the
tub was filling, but didn’t know how much water was there at the start. You
could assume that it was empty, and
start timing how long it takes to fill it. Then you stepped out for a minute. Somebody
crept in and poured a bucket of water into the tub! There are two things wrong
now. First, you didn’t know how much water you had to start with, and the rate of change was messed up because
someone poured more water in when you weren’t looking. The same thing happens
with radiometric dating, secular scientists make assumptions on three important
things that they cannot prove.
Worse for them, there are certain elements in places that
they do not “belong”. Diamonds are assumed to be billions of years old, but they
contain Carbon-14. According to evolutionary assumptions, that is impossible,
since Carbon-14 would have decayed and been gone a long time ago!
Although the Bible does not say that the earth is a certain
number of years old, the chronologies (ages calculated from ancestries, the
“begats”) add up to vastly different results than evolutionists and liberal
Christians want to believe. These people insist on an old earth (“deep time”),
and dismiss
over a hundred
reasons to believe that the earth is young, not old!
Evolutionists of various sorts rely on atheistic assumptions
and interpretations of the evidence. Like I said, they need the world to be old because evolution requires it. Biblical
creationists interpret the evidence by starting with the Bible as our
foundation. We see that the evidence supports the biblical worldview, which
includes the global Flood at the time of Noah (which gives a great deal of
evidence for a young earth), and do not need to pretend that the Bible says
things that are not there. That is, you cannot find millions of years in the
Bible. Exodus 20:11 clearly states that God created the world in six days.
Jesus, Peter, Paul and others in the New Testament referred to the Old Testament
as literal history (see Matt. 24:37-39, Mark 10.6, Romans 1:20, 1 Cor. 15:45).
Let me mention the Flood. People portray Noah’s Ark as some
kind of cute bathtub-like thing with giraffe heads sticking through the roof.
No, it was a huge vessel. God judged the world with the Flood, and only eight
people were saved (Noah and his family), and certain animals. People who want
to dismiss the Flood as a local flood have to make excuses through the rest of
Scripture, since it was talked about as a real event. Also, look closely at 2
Peter 3:3-7. Peter is not only talking about the Flood as a global judgment,
but that another judgment is coming — this time by fire. Jesus is the only way
to avoid that judgment. Because of his love for us, he died on the cross for
our sins, was buried, then bodily raised from the dead on the third day. If we
repent (turn away) from our sins, we can not only be free from the wrath to
come, but become adopted as sons and daughters of the Creator of the universe.
