Creation Bullet #9: The Limits of Variation — Apparent Age and Radiometric Confusion

Creation Bullet Series: Destroying Darwinism, One Bullet at a Time

“In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is…” — Exodus 20:11

Creation Bullet by Larry Ingels:

ESTIMATING THE AGE OF THE EARTH

If someone had seen Adam the day after he was created and asked  him his age he could have said “one day old.” However, looking at him one might have guessed that he was about 20 years old. God created him as a grown man, not a baby. Instead of one day old, his apparent age could have been 1x365x20= 7300 days.  Because of the special nature of God’s creation, Adam would have appeared to be over 7000 times as old as he actually was. So it is with the earth and heavens. They acquired an apparent age upon creation that someone looking back over time may not be aware of. Rocks newly created may most likely appear to be thousands of years older than they really are.

            Most evolutionists use radiometric dating techniques to estimate the age of the earth. This method is very unreliable. 1) We don’t know the starting state of decaying material; 2) we don’t know if the decay rate has changed over time; and 3) we don’t know if the system was closed with no key material entering or leaving the system over the period of interest. Radioisotope dating of volcanic rocks starts when a rock is cooling. Rocks formed from the Mt. St. Helen’s eruptions in the early 1980’s were sent out for aging to various labs and estimates came back ranging from 0.5 to 2.8 million years for rocks that were less than 20 years old. This radiometric system of dating is clearly inconsistent and unreliable.

            Two unique events have shaped the face of the earth. First there was creation and about 3500 years later Noah’s flood. Scientists use their theories to estimate the age of the earth. Christians use the Bible. Neither can be factually proven by the scientific method and require “faith” by the person supporting their method.    

Commentary:

When God created Adam, He didn’t make a baby. He made a fully formed man—complete, mature, and functioning. To the human eye, Adam would have appeared to be perhaps 20 years old, even though he was only one day old. This is the doctrine of apparent age, and it applies not only to mankind but to creation itself.

In Creation Bullet #9, Larry Ingels makes a compelling case: God created a world with the appearance of maturity—not because He was deceiving us, but because function required it.

Apparent Age: A Biblical Lens

When Genesis 1 says God created plants, stars, animals, and people in six literal days, it implies they were created with age built in. Trees with rings. Stars with light already en route. Earth with sedimentary layers. Oceans filled with adult sea life. These are not signs of an ancient world—they are marks of immediate purpose and function.

So, when today’s scientists claim the earth must be billions of years old based on observation, they are missing the reality of supernatural origin. God’s creation, like Adam, looked older than it was. Not because it evolved, but because it was spoken into existence mature.

The Myth of Radiometric Accuracy

Radiometric dating is often paraded as science’s strongest evidence for an old earth. But as Ingels rightly points out, this method rests on three unverifiable assumptions:

1. The starting conditions are known.

2. The decay rate has always been constant.

3. The system remained closed (no contamination).

If any of these assumptions fail, the results are invalid.

Case in point: Mt. St. Helens. Rocks formed in the 1980s were dated by laboratories at up to 2.8 million years old. How could this be? Because radiometric dating assumes conditions that simply cannot be known—especially in a world shaped by two massive events: Creation and the global Flood.

Two Catastrophic Events That Changed Everything

Science tries to explain the earth’s features through slow, gradual processes over billions of years. But Scripture presents a different view:

• Creation — Six days of divine command bringing everything into being.

• The Flood — A global cataclysm that reshaped the earth’s surface, stratified rock layers, and fossilized vast numbers of organisms.

These events are not minor footnotes. They are the lenses through which biblical Christians interpret geology, biology, and the history of the earth.

Dating methods rely on human guesses. The Bible relies on the eyewitness testimony of the Creator.

In the end, both the secularist and the Christian exercise faith—one in the assumptions of man, the other in the authority of God.