How Old Is The Earth?

GENESIS 1: 1

JESUS CHRIST Is spoken of as Creator: Colossians 1. When?

How old is the earth, really?

Estimated ages for the earth range from 6,000 years to 5 billion years. The two age estimates are so different they can’t be reconciled. One has to be wrong. The disparity is illustrated by the following.

If you were to stack Bibles with thin pages, allowing each page to represent a year, the stack representing 6,000 years would be about knee high.

Using the same ratio, the stack representing 5 billion years would reach 114 miles into the stratosphere.

Which stack do you choose as representative of the age of earth?

The science of dating the age of the earth is called GEOCHRONOLOGY. “Geo” means Earth and “chronology” refers to the sequence of time.

There are approximately 70 methods of dating the Earth. Each is based on the principle that natural processes have occurred steadily through time, producing cumulative results that can be measured. These studies reveal the upper age of the Earth. Only a few of them suggest the Earth is very old. These are the ones the secular press emphasizes to the uninformed public.

There is a principle that can account for the great variance. The dating processes that suggest an old Earth are based on GRADUALISM. This theory suggests that through a slow process everything has evolved. The time required is up to 5
billion years.
DYNAMIC large scale cataclysmic events suggest accelerated transformation.

Following are some methods of dating about which the public is generally uninformed. CHECK THE EARTH’S OIL PRESSURE
Have you ever seen one of the old movies that depicted the explorers striking oil? They were called gushers. Great pressure caused the well to spout oil high into the air when the oil deposit was tapped and the pressure released. All of this pressure had been trapped beneath sedimentary rock. Even the most dense sedimentary rock is porous to some degree. With time that pressure would lead out.

Discoveries have exposed high pressure wells at great depths. If those oil deposits had been there more than 5,000 years in some cases, based on the porous nature of the soil, the pressure would have left.

The pressure of these wells suggests a young earth.

STAR LIGHT STAR BRIGHT
Some things are so technical and complex they are hard to make simple. This is one worth struggling with.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, that being 6 trillion miles. There are galaxies that are alleged to be billions of
light years away. That means light that left these solar bodies 5 billion years ago would just now be reaching the Earth. This appears to be a point in favor of an old Universe. It isn’t.

Now scientists, using what is known as Riemannian Distances, know light might well be taking what they call a “shortcut” as it travels through space. Based on observations of 27 binary star systems, it appears that light in deep space travels in curved paths on Riemannian surfaces. Using a very complex scientific formula, light from infinite space would reach the earth in only 15.71 years.

Using this formula, if the distances in space are measured correctly and some solar bodies are billions of light years away, light from them would reach us in 15.71 years.

Another explanation that would discount the theory that light from deep outer space supports evolution deserves consideration. A number of observations over the last 300 years indicate that the speed of light is slowing. It extrapolates to having been 500 billion times faster 6000 years ago. If that is true, light from a 5 billion light year star would have reached Earth in only 3 days.

THE MAGNETIC FIELD HAS A LOT OF PULL FOR CREATION
The rate of the depletion of the strength of the earth’s main magnetic field is measurable. The electromagnetic dipole magnet in the conductive core of the earth is being consumed at an observable rate. Using this known rate of decay, it can be projected how weak the signal will be at a certain time.

By running this formula in reverse, it can be determined how strong the magnetic force would have been at a certain time in the past. If the earth were more than a few thousand years old the magnetic force would have been so great it would have exploded. There is no way this magnetic force could have been in existence for billions of years. It requires a young earth explanation.

MOON DUST
Earth is consistently gathering dust from the cosmos at a measurable rate. Because of wind and water erosion it does not build up appreciably. The rate is known, however. The Earth and its moon travel through the same region of space. Thus, the same rate of interplanetary dust falls on both. With an awareness of this rate, and assuming the Universe to be billions of years old, NASA space scientists were able to calculate how deep the dust would be on the moon. They, knowing this, designed the lunar lander with large pods for feet to prevent it from sinking into the dust. Estimates of the depth of the dust, based on the known rate of its falling, was conservatively 54 feet on the moon. This would surely prove an old Universe.

Touchdown, lunar lander. Surprise, the depth of the dust varied from 1/8 of an inch to three inches. Required time for such a collection of interplanetary dust? Fewer than 8,000 years.

JUVENILE WATER
The era of fish was suppose to have occurred about 340 million years ago. According to evolutionary theory, the oceans are at least 2,000 million years old.

When volcanoes erupt, the content of the erupting material consists of as much as 20% water. This extremely hot water, having been under the Earth under high pressure, is spewed into the atmosphere as steam and upon cooling, condenses in the form of rain. This is new water on the earth’s surface and is called “juvenile water.” Each time a volcano erupts, more water is added to the oceans.

Question: How long would it take for all the ocean water to have accumulated from volcanic eruptions?

About twelve eruptions occur a year, producing roughly one cubic mile of water. By calculating backwards, it can be determined how long it would have taken to produce the 340,000,000 cubic miles of water in the oceans. At the rate of one cubic mile per year, it would have taken 340,000,000 years. Problem!

That means that 340,000,000 years ago there was no ocean. How could fish have evolved if there was not water?

NIAGARA FALLS
The rim of Niagara Falls is wearing away at a predictable rate. To have eroded from its natural precipice would have taken only about 5,000 years.

STALACTITE GROWTH
Upon visiting a cave with limestone stalactites you will likely be told they were created in 100 thousand years. Under the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., stalactites have grown to a length of 5 feet in less than 50 years. No more than 10,000 years would have been required at this rate to produce large stalactites.

The World That Perished, John C. Whitcombe, Jr., Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, 1973, p. 114.