I would like to explain why I believe that the earth and the universe are about 6000 years old. My premise is that the Bible is the Word of God. As the Word of God, the Bible is completely trustworthy. Because it is completely trustworthy, I can accept the plain reading of it. The plain reading of the Bible leads me to accept the historical narrative found in the book of Genesis. I also believe that if the historical record in the Bible is not accurate, then I would have no reason to trust the theology or the morality of the Bible because it can no longer be considered the Word of God.
The Bible is the Word of God
If the Bible is the Word of God, it is completely trustworthy. Also, if the Bible is the Word of God, then He (God) wants us to know what He means. Therefore, it is perspicuous (understandable). If the Bible is perspicuous, then we can trust the plain reading of this Word. If we affirm the plain reading of this Word, then we should let Scripture interpret Scripture (see rules below). When we let Scripture interpret Scripture, we never find billions of years of history. We only find other verses (such as Exodus 20:8-11 and Exodus 31:14-17) that fully support the plain reading of Genesis chapter one. Actually, when Jesus stated that “From the beginning of creation God created them male and female” (Mark 10:6) and you accept its plain meaning, there is no way that you can get billions or even millions of years. If the earth is millions of years old then Adam and Eve were created at the end of creation (about 6000 years ago), not the beginning. Hint – draw a time line.
Rules for Interpreting Scripture
We should be using certain rules to interpret the Bible. These rules, based on the conservative understanding of God’s Word, include the following criteria:
A. The Bible is perspicuous in nature. The Bible is generally easy to understand. Most verses and passages are plain and clear. Therefore, accept the plain reading of God’s Word. However, some verses are difficult to understand, so we turn to other important hermeneutical rules.
B. Scripture interprets Scripture. When trying to understand the confusing parts of scripture we find out what other parts of Scripture say about the subject.
C. Evaluate the literary genre. There are many types of literature within the Bible. These include narrative, poetry, song lyrics, proverbs, teaching passages, and prophetic sections among others. We interpret based on the type of literature. Historical narrative should be read as historical narrative; i.e., it means what it says.
D. Evaluate the context. Look at the historical and cultural context of the book or passage. Also, evaluate the context of the verse within the passage. Often the words adjacent to the verse will help one understand the meaning of the passage. After one looks at the verses surrounding the verse in question look to the paragraph, then look to the chapter, then look to the book, then see how all that fits into the entire Bible.
For greater detail click here.
The Bible – Magisterial or Ministerial
If the Bible is God’s Word, then it requires us to accept its magisterial position, that is, its ruling authority. When we use science or reason to reinterpret the plain reading of Scripture, then the Bible becomes servant to science or reason; it takes on a ministerial position. Science, then, takes on the magisterial position. The main problem with this position is that science only provides provisional truth. Provisional truth is only truth for the time being, until more informed truth comes along. As Alister McGrath wrote in The Science of God, “…any theology which is based on contemporary scientific theories will find itself outdated with embarrassing speed.” An ancient earth is exactly that, a contemporary scientific theory. We should also look at the implications of letting science rule in other areas of the Bible. If science should take precedence over the plain reading of Holy Scripture, then the virgin birth never happened. The resurrection of Jesus never happened. The Noachian flood was not global, but local (I will write more about this later). None of the miracles God the Father and God the Son did in either the Old or the New Testaments ever happened. Why stop with Genesis when a huge portion of the Bible would be obliterated if science became the ruling authority.
The problem is this; when you do not place the Bible in the magisterial position a number of Bible passages change their meaning (Jonathan Sarfati wrote similar statements in his Feedback article #37 for the week of April 4, 2005. See archives at creation.com):
One might also ask how someone determines whether a historical event took place and when that event took place. Most people would look for a history book, not a science text book. An eye witness account would be the most accurate report. The Bible provides the most reliable historical account available as it is provided to us by the only eyewitness, God Himself.
Sola Scriptura
I do not understand why any informed Reformed Christian would reinterpret the plain reading of Scripture in order to accommodate the current fallible ideas of man. The focus of Martin Luther was to get back to believing the Word of God as written, hence the term Sola Scriptura. “In raising the text of Scripture to the level of highest authority in all things, and using reason as a servant captive to Scripture, Luther preshadowed the very principles upon which modern science was founded—and we ought not to forget it was founded by creationists.” The previous quote is from http://creation.com/luther-on-evolution. When Ken Ham, a leader in the Creation Movement, asked a Hebrew scholar “If you started with the Bible alone, without considering outside influences whatsoever, could you ever come up with millions or billions of years of history for the earth and universe? The answer from this scholar? Absolutely not!” So when we take the Bible alone one simply cannot get millions or billions of years of history. Why, then, do so many Protestant Christians, leaders and lay people, accept an ancient earth, especially in the light of knowing that Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards all accepted the plain reading of Scripture concerning creation? The only thing that I have come up with is this: These Christians do not want to commit intellectual suicide. In other words, they do not want to look foolish in the eyes of their peers.
Other Cultures and the Age of the Earth
When you do the research, you will find that “…many cultures, not just those based directly on the Bible, attest to an age of creation of thousands of years.” This is from an article at the Answers in Genesis website called Old Earth or Young Earth Belief – Which Belief is the Recent Aberration?
Global Flood
The Bible speaks of the global flood of Noah’s day. I speak of a global flood because of the many Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, that specifically describe the flood that
1. covered all the high mountains under all the heavens (Gen 7:19),
2. killed all the people, land animals and birds on the surface of the earth that did not get on the ark (Gen 7:23, Luke 17:26, 27, 2 Peter 2:5, 2 Peter 3:6),
3. destroyed the earth (Gen 6:13NIV, Gen 9:11, Isaiah 54:9, 2 Peter 3:6), and
4. was so large that God told Noah to build a boat big enough to fit all the different kinds of land animals and birds (Gen 6:15).
One of the main arguments for an old earth requires that the sedimentary layers were laid down over millions of years. These layers are supposed to indicate the ancient age of the earth. The deeper that one goes down into the sedimentary layers is supposed to yield older and older rocks and fossils. According to the old earthers, the entire dating scheme is set up this way. So a global flood, which would have greatly disturbed these layers, could not have occurred if the earth is old. The global flood would have destroyed the entire dating scheme the old earthers have set up.
Therefore, one has people like Hugh Ross, a progressive creationist, who realizes this problem and reinterprets the clear reading of the Word of God, to claim that the flood was local, not global. Some people claim that they do not know if the flood was global or local. How could any Christian, having read Genesis, not believe that the flood was global. It is against all reason to believe that the flood was local. As noted above, the Bible could not be clearer that the flood was global.
Also, if the flood was only a local flood, then the global flood legends from over 200 people groups located all over the world would be all wet (pun intended). Please google “Flood Legends” for specifics concerning the many different people groups with flood legends.
Also, check out this web site: http://www.nwcreation.net/noahlegends.html
Meaning of the Word Yom
Let us talk about the word ‘yom’ in the Old Testament which means day. According to The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon the word yom has several meanings. The first meaning given is day as opposed to night. This gives us the daylight portion of a day (see Gen 1:5 “And God called the light day and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and morning, one day.) The second meaning given is a division of time. In this section item d is listed as “day as defined by evening and morning (Gen 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31)”. The seventh meaning given is “as a phrase meaning in the general sense=the time of “(Gen 2:4). It is clear that the word can have several meanings depending on the context. Therefore, it is clear that, while some might claim that the word yom has an elastic meaning, the meaning is clearly dependent upon and specific to its context.
Let’s evaluate the meaning of the word yom in the Old Testament. The following quote comes from an Answers in Genesis publication written by Ken Ham called Six Days or Millions of Years. This quote refers to research by James Stambaugh titled The Days of Creation: a Semantic Approach.
‘Outside of Genesis 1, yom is used with a number 410 times, and each time it means an ordinary day.’
‘Outside Genesis 1, yom is used with the word ‘evening’ or ‘morning’ 23 times. ‘Evening’ and ‘morning’ appear in association, but without yom, 38 times. All 61 times the text refers to an ordinary day. Why would Genesis 1 be any exception?’
‘In Genesis 1:5, yom occurs in context with the word ‘night’. Outside of Genesis 1, ‘night’ is used with yom 53 times – each time it means an ordinary day. Why would Genesis 1 be the exception? Even the usage of the word ‘light’ with yom in this passage determines the meaning as ordinary day.”
So, it is clear from the statistical analysis that the word yom in Genesis 1 means an ordinary day.
Some people make the following statement: “Gen 2.4 in the Hebrew clearly uses yom for more than a 24-hour period.” They make this statement as if there are no words that have more than one meaning. Trying to make a word mean something other than its meaning in the context in which it is used is a logical fallacy called an unwarranted expansion of an already expanded semantic field. Therefore, using this type of argument is faulty logic. Also the Gen 2:4 occurrence of yom is accompanied by the preposition “be”. As the NIV clearly states, beyom means “when”. When you do not take words in context you can get all manner of weird statements. Even the late liberal theologian Dr. Marcus Dods understood this based on the following quote. “If the word ‘day’ in this chapter [Genesis 1] does not mean a period of 24 hours, the interpretation of Scripture is hopeless”. Even he could understand that trying to change the plain reading of the word yom in the Genesis 1 context to mean something other than an ordinary solar day renders useless any hope of understanding the Word of God.
Genesis 1 is Poetry?
Let us now continue our journey to the intent of the text in Genesis 1. Some people try to make the text poetic or semi-poetic, and therefore say that we do not have to believe it or we do not have to accept its sequence or chronology. Charles Hummel tries to do this very thing in his book The Galileo Connection. However, Jonathan Sarfati, with Creation Ministries International, writes in ID Theorist Blunders on the Bible – Reply to Dr. William Dembski
“The key is the author’s intent, which is in turn determined by the historical and grammatical context of the words used. That’s why we interpret Genesis as historical narrative and the Psalms as poetry. And that was a problem with the church with Galileo. They reinterpreted poetic passages in accordance with the science fashion of their day. Ironically, many people castigate YECs for supposedly making the same mistake as the church in Galileo’s day. Yet the opposite is true ― it’s the long-age compromisers and theistic evolutionists who are the true heirs of Galileo’s opponents, because both are making the same mistake of trying to twist Scripture to fit the scientific fashions of their day.” (emphasis mine)
These statements are further supported with the latest statistical analysis comparing Hebrew poetry to Hebrew narrative. In an article on the Institute for Creation Research website called The Biblical Hebrew Creation Account: New Numbers Tell The Story,
http://www.icr.org/article/biblical-hebrew-creation-account-new-numbers-tell-/
Steven Boyd PhD identifies several obvious narratives and compares them to several obvious poems in the Old Testament. He studied the distribution of Biblical Hebrew finite verbs to find out what constitutes narratives versus poetry. He found a distinct difference in verbs between the two types of texts. His conclusion follows.
The distribution of preterites to finite verbs in Hebrew narrative differs distinctly from that in Hebrew poetry. Moreover, a logistic regression model fitted to the ratio of preterites to finite verbs categorizes texts as narrative or poetry to an extraordinary level of accuracy. With its probability of virtually 1, Genesis 1:1-2:3, therefore, is a narrative, not poetry.
Three major implications from this study are (1) it is not statistically defensible to read Genesis 1:1-2:3 as poetry; (2) since Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 is a narrative, it should be read as other Hebrew narratives are intended to be read as a concise report of actual events, couched to convey an unmistakable theological message; and (3) when this text is read as a narrative, there is only one tenable view of its plain sense: God created everything in six literal days. (emphasis mine)
Therefore, it is an untenable position to call Genesis 1:1 to Gen 2:3 poetry.
Biblical Consequences to Believing in an Old Earth
There are a great many Biblical or theological consequences to believing in an old earth. I will outline many of them for you.
1. Believing in an old earth requires God to call death, pain, suffering and disease of animals for millions of years “very good.” How, in the old earth scenario, could God have called everything “very good” at the end of the sixth day (Genesis 1:31)? If the earth is old, animals have been killing other animals for millions of years, diseases such as arthritis and cancer existed before man existed because bone cancer is found in the fossil record, and catastrophes destroyed living things that had the breath of life. This old earth belief results in impugning the integrity of God, because one would have to conclude that God is the author of death, pain, suffering and disease, including arthritis and cancer. This makes God, not a God of love, but of death. The problem with this idea is that God calls death “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26). How could death be the last enemy if it was “very good”?
Carl Wieland with Creation Ministries International makes the following statement in his article Waves of Sadness, 30 December 2004:
“…why is there any death and suffering at all?” And it has to be faced squarely by Christians, since we claim to have the answers to the true meaning of life, the universe and everything.
But how can one even begin to give a Christian answer, one with biblical integrity, without taking Genesis history seriously? That history tells of the creation of a once-good world, in which death and suffering are not “natural” at all, but are intruders. They occur because of humanity’s rebellion against its maker (Genesis 3). But if fossils formed over millions of years, which so many Christians just blithely accept as “fact”, then that wipes out the Fall as an answer to evil, especially “natural evil”. Because the fossils show the existence of things like death, bloodshed and suffering. So if these were there millions of years ago, they must have been there before man, and hence before sin.” (emphasis mine)
2. Believing in an old earth requires death, pain, suffering and disease (including cancer) to have existed for millions of years before sin. That means that death, pain, suffering and disease are not the penalty for sin. Therefore, this belief fails to show why Jesus would need to be sacrificed. It is my understanding that Jesus was sacrificed to set me free from the power of sin in my life and that in a similar manner to God’s sacrifice of the animals to cover Adam and Eve for their sin, Jesus’ sacrifice was for the remission of my sins (Matthew 26:28, Acts 10:43). The Bible clearly teaches that pain, suffering, death and disease are the result of sin. However, in the old earth scenario sin has no power because death, pain, suffering and disease all existed prior to sin. Are death, pain, suffering and disease the result of sin, or not?
3. Believing in an old earth requires one to change the obvious Noachian global flood to a local flood. In the old earth scenario the sedimentary layers represent time. The deeper you go, the older the earth. If the earth is old (millions and billions of years) and the Noachian flood occurred about 4300 years ago as is evident from the Biblical record, this flood would have ripped up and redeposited the sedimentary layers during the year long event. This global flood would have destroyed the time record the old earthers use as their justification for an ancient earth. On the other hand, if the Noachian flood was only local, then the global flood, so clearly taught in Genesis Chapters 6 to 9 is just a myth or a fairy tale. This makes the Bible simply mythology.
Another reason we must believe the flood of Noah’s day was global rather than local involves the integrity of God. In Genesis 9:11 God states “And I will establish my covenant with you; and all flesh shall never again be cut off by the water of the flood, neither shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth.” We constantly see local floods occurring today. If God was talking about a local flood then He would have lied to us. Isaiah 54:9 confirms the global flood of Noah’s day. “For this is like the days of Noah to me; when I swore that the waters of Noah should not flood the earth again,..”
4. Believing in an old earth does not explain why God would sacrifice an animal for the remission of sins if animals have been dying for millions of years.
5. Believing in an old earth denies the plain reading of Scripture concerning a young age for the earth. The Bible consistently supports a young age for the earth. Please see Genesis Chapters 1 and 5 and 11, Exodus 20:8-11, Exodus 31:14-17, Matthew 19:4, Mark 10:6.
6. Believing in an old earth fails to show how there will be a restoration of everything (Acts 3:21 and Isaiah 11:6-9 and 65:25) to no death if there has been pain, suffering, death and disease for hundreds of millions of years. You cannot restore something that did not exist.
7. Believing in an old earth has the earth at creation as a fiery, molten blob with no liquid water. However, the Bible clearly states that “the earth was formed out of water and with water” (Gen 1:2 and 2 Peter 3:5). These statements are simply irreconcilable.
8. Believing in an old earth and believing Scripture requires the creation account sequence of events to coincide with the evolutionary history of the earth. The evolutionary sequence and the Biblical sequence of events are incompatible. I will only list a few of these deviations in this sequence.
There is a more comprehensive list at the following web site address: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2006/0404order.asp
a. Evolutionists and many old earth creationists claim that the stars were formed by the big bang and only much later did the planets develop. The Bible states that the earth was created on day one and the stars were created on day four.
b. Evolutionists teach that fish came before fruit trees. The Bible states that fruit trees were created on day three and fish were created on day five.
c. Evolutionists teach that the earth’s sun came before plants. The Bible states that the plants were created on day three and the earth’s sun was created on day four.
9. Believing in an old earth denies the historicity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis and the fact that the New Testament writers and Jesus Himself understood these chapters to be historical narrative. There are 52 verses in the New Testament that either refer to or directly quote the first eleven chapters of Genesis. In each verse the writer accepts the plain reading of the Genesis account as historical narrative.
Operational Science vs. Historical Science
Most people do not understand the difference between operational science and origins or historical science. Operational science is the highly reliable repeatable science that has a tremendous reputation. This is the type of science that put men on the moon, builds computers and automobiles, does genetic mapping, etc. Historical science, on the other hand, is not repeatable because it deals with events in the past. Evolution and radiometric dating involve historical science. These ideas are filled with assumptions. These assumptions are made to help reconstruct the past, may or may not be valid, and often change over time. Your presuppositions determine your assumptions.
While operational science is highly reliable, historical science is not. Many people confuse operational and historical science and apply the same great reputation operational science has to historical science. This is a fallacy of transfer.
It is far better to use the Bible, which is the infallible Word of God, as the basis for interpreting the evidence of origins rather than using fallen man’s fallible ideas. It is much easier to trust something that is not cursed than to trust someone who is cursed.
Scientific Evidence for a Young Earth
I will now show you that there is a large body of scientific evidence to support a young earth and a young universe. This evidence clearly indicates that the earth and the universe are much younger than the evolutionists tell us – 4.5 and 13.7 billion years old, respectively. The following information comes from a booklet titled Evidence for a Young World by Dr. Russell Humphreys. Dr. Humphreys provides many references in his article which I have not included. Please refer to his booklet for complete information. It is also available online at creation.com. There is also a reference that provides 101 evidences of a young earth and a young universe. It can be found at the following web site: http://creation.com/age-of-the-earth
1. “Galaxies wind themselves up too fast. The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.’
‘Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma’, which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same ‘winding-up’ dilemma also applies to other galaxies.’
‘For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the dilemma has been a complex theory called ‘density waves’.1 The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and lately has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, M51.’
2. “Comets disintegrate too quickly. According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about 5 billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of 10,000 years.’
‘Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical ‘Oort cloud’ well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed.4 So far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated either by observations or realistic calculations.’
‘Lately, there has been much talk of the ‘Kuiper Belt’, a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Even if some bodies of ice exist in that location, they would not really solve the evolutionists’ problem, since according to evolutionary theory the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it.’
3. “Not enough mud on the sea floor. Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean. This material accumulates as loose sediment (i.e., mud) on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 meters.’
‘The main way known to remove the mud from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year. As far as anyone knows, the other 24 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present amount of sediment in less than 12 million years.’
‘Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged 3 billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometers deep. An alternative (creationist) explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of mud within a short time about 5000 years ago.’
4. “Not enough sodium in the sea. Every year, river and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year. As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today’s input and output rates. This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, 3 billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations which are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years. Calculations for many other sea water elements give much younger ages for the ocean.”
5. “The earth’s magnetic field is decaying too fast. The total energy stored in the Earth’s magnetic field has steadily decreased by a factor of 2.7 over the past 1000 years. Evolutionary theories explaining this rapid decrease, as well as how the Earth could have maintained its magnetic field for billions of years, are very complex and inadequate.’
‘A much better creationist theory exists. It is straightforward, based on sound physics, and explains many features of the field: its creation, rapid reversals during the Genesis flood, surface intensity decreases and increases until the time of Christ, and a steady decay since then. This theory matches paleomagnetic, historic, and present data. The main result is that the field’s total energy (not surface intensity) has always decayed at least as fast as now. At that rate the field could not be more than 10,000 years old.”
6. “Many strata are too tightly bent. In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.”
7. “Injected sandstone shortens geologic ‘ages’. Strong geologic evidence exists that the Cambrian Sawatch sandstone — formed an alleged 500 million years ago — of the
8. “Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic ‘ages’ to a few years. Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay. ‘Squashed’ Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the
9. “Helium in the wrong places. All naturally-occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the Earth’s atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in 5 billion years. This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape. Though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old, their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years.”
10 “Not enough Stone Age skeletons. Evolutionary anthropologists say that the Stone Age lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men was roughly constant, between 1 and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artifacts. By this scenario, they would have buried at least 4 billion bodies.24 If the evolutionary time scale is correct, buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 100,000 years, so many of the supposed 4 billion stone age skeletons should still be around (and certainly the buried artifacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the Stone Age was much shorter than evolutionists think, a few hundred years in many areas.”
11. “Agriculture is too recent. The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years during the Stone Age before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years ago. Yet the archaeological evidence shows that Stone Age men were as intelligent as we are. It is very improbable that none of the 4 billion people mentioned in item 10 should discover that plants grow from seeds. It is more likely that men were without agriculture less than a few hundred years after the flood, if at all.”
12. “History is too short. According to evolutionists, Stone Age man existed for 100,000 years before beginning to make written records about 4000 to 5000 years ago. Prehistoric man built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases. Why would he wait a thousand centuries before using the same skills to record history? The Biblical time scale is much more likely.”
I would also like to add a few more.
13. Mercury has a magnetic field. Creation magazine has an article about the planet Mercury titled Mercury – The Tiny Planet that Causes Big Problems for Evolution. This article explains that this planet is so small and so close to the sun, that it should not have a magnetic field, if it is, in fact, billions of years old. However, a 6000 year old planet can have a magnetic field. Evolutionists “admit that any attempt to include Mercury in their evolutionary models will doom the models to failure.”
14. Exploding stars point to a young universe. Creation magazine has another article about a young universe. The article is titled Exploding Stars Point to a Young Universe. This article was written by Jonathan Sarfati in June 1997.
“A supernova, or violently exploding star, is one of the most brilliant and powerful objects in God’s vast cosmos. On average, a galaxy like our own, the Milky Way, should produce one supernova every 25 years.’
‘When a star has exploded in this way, the huge expanding cloud of debris is called a SuperNova Remnant (SNR). A well-known example is the Crab Nebula in the constellation of Taurus, produced by a supernova so bright that it could be seen during daytime for a few weeks in 1054. By applying physical laws (and using powerful computers), astronomers can predict what should happen to this cloud.’
‘According to their model, the SNR should reach a diameter of about 300 light years3 after 120,000 years. So if our galaxy was billions of years old, we should be able to observe many SNRs this size. But if our galaxy is 6,000–10,000 years old, no SNRs would have had time to reach this size. So the number of observed SNRs of a particular size is an excellent test of whether the galaxy is old or young. In fact, the results are consistent with a universe thousands of years old, but are a puzzle if the universe has existed for billions of years. The conclusions can be seen from the simple table shown below:’
|
Supernova |
Number of observable SNRs predicted if our galaxy were… |
Number of SNRs |
|
|
…billions of years old |
…7000 years old |
||
|
First |
2 |
2 |
5 |
|
Second |
2260 |
125 |
200 |
|
Third |
5000 |
0 |
0 |
As can be readily seen above, a young universe model fits the data of the low number of observed SNRs. If the universe was really billions of years old, there are 7000 missing SNRs in our galaxy.”
15. Polystrate trees. There is visual evidence of polystrate trees in rock formations. Polystrate trees are trees in the upright position that traverse through at least two sedimentary layers. Oftentimes these layers are dated at millions of years apart from each other. The fact that the tree connects these layers means that these layers could not be more than a few dozen years apart because older trees would have disintegrated and would not connect the two layers.
16. Red blood cells in dinosaur bone. Based on current scientific knowledge of the maximum age that red blood cells can stay intact, the dinosaur bones that are supposed to be over 65 million years old could not be greater than 10,000 years old. All the evolutionist can say about this conundrum is that there must be some unknown method of preservation to keep the red blood cells from deteriorating. Therefore, the evolutionist is appealing to faith, not science. The science clearly indicates young dinosaur bones.
I could go on and on about scientific evidences for a young universe and a young earth. In fact, according to Chapter 4 of The Creation Answers Book by Creation Ministries International, about 90% of the methods used to measure the age of the earth and the universe show ages much younger than the ages that evolutionists come up with. A good book to read to get a handle on many of the scientific reasons creationists believe that the earth is young is The Young Earth by John D. Morris, PhD.
Conclusion
I have attempted to provide you with valid theological and scientific reasons for accepting the plain reading of God’s Word. I provided you with the scientific reasons last because these reasons are subject to further evaluation if additional data are provided. While much data concerning an old earth are made known to the populace, very little data concerning a young earth is provided to the general public. There is obviously a huge bias against believing the plain reading of the Scriptures, even in the church. I would hope that you would consider the theological and scientific implications of accepting the old earth position. If you hold to an old earth position, I would hope that you can defend your position in light of the theological consequences given above.
I appreciate the opportunity to share with you why it is vital that we accept the plain reading of the Bible concerning creation. I hope that you are challenged by this essay.
I hope that your heart is stirred, For additional information, please see the article: How old is the earth?
Ron Bessette is a native of Randolph, MA, a suburb of Boston. He went to Northeastern University and received a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering in 1977. He came to Virginia and graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University with a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1979.
