How Old Is The Earth?

A potential stumbling block for many Christians is the age of the Earth. Scientists have normalized an Earth age in the billions of years, allowing them to present all manner of grotesque and fake intermediary species into the archeological record. Meanwhile, the Bible suggests an Earth age that is not much older than 7,000 years. These wide differences cannot be easily reconciled, leaving the Christian in a tough position. Should he reconfigure the Bible into a timeline presented by atheist scientists, or should he stick to a more literal view? One thing that may help him in his decision is understanding that God created the Earth with an inherent age.

Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

When God created the animals, they were fully grown. In other words, on the day after Creation there were some animals that were already many years old. There were animals living alongside parents that were not physically born from those parents. If a scientist was present on this day, he would estimate the ages of the animals based on their size and maturity, but again, everything was only one day old.

The same was true for the plants and the trees. God created fully grown trees from nothing, in instant time. A scientist could cut down the trees and count their rings to come up with an age in years, but he would be wrong no matter how sure he was, because the tree would only be one day old.

How about the rocks and mountains? The moment after creation, the valleys and the hills were already in a state of lushness and completion. The mountain tops were covered with snow, home to various vegetation and critters that could handle the thin air of the high altitude. Would the scientist approach the mountain and say, “This is obviously one day old”? No, he would drill through the layers underneath, of which God fashioned like an artist using layers of paint on a canvas, and conclude that the mountain was too old for his instruments to measure. He would have to conclude that the Earth was thousands or millions or billions of years old, because the Earth was in completed form when God created it even though it would have taken billions of years of time had it been formed through the handful of natural processes that feeble man can only slightly understand.

Techniques like carbon dating or DNA analysis do more to reveal the arrogance of man than the truth of our world. Scientists believe the Earth is old, and are already in a state of rebellion against God, and so settled on techniques that confirmed their tightly-held convictions. They hate God and so they will believe that which allows their hatred to manifest. They will invent animals that never existed and use the discovery of one oddly-shaped finger bone to declare a brand new human species. Consider that all the bones found of pre-Homo Sapien man can fit in a medium-sized cardboard box. Is that what you base your history of man on? People have more faith in a box of dubious bones than in the truth God gave us through his prophets, which becomes more self-evident by the day as the field of science degrades into politics, fraud, and death.

From Father Seraphim’s Rose Orthodox Survival Course:

There are certain basic principles, presuppositions, which these dating systems must have. The carbon-14 system, which traces the radioactive decay of half-life of carbon-14 to carbon-12, requires: 1) that there is absolute uniformity — that the decay rate has always been the same for as long as the process has been going on, 2) that there has been no contamination from outside sources — which they admit does happen, and 3) that the thing being dated has been isolated, buried somewhere and nothing else has been touching it from outside, no organic matter, and finally, 4) that there was no carbon-12 in the first place, it was all carbon-14. All these things are assumptions; they are not proved.

Many people, even among non-evolutionists, will admit that carbon-14 is the most reliable of all the dating systems; even the scientific creationists admit that it has an accuracy back perhaps 2,000 years. It has been tested on certain articles whose age has been determined and it has proved to be not too far off in most cases. But beyond 2,000 or 3,000 years it becomes extremely dubious. And even those adherents to this system admit that because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,600 years or so, it cannot be accurate beyond 20,000 or 30,000 years at the most. The other systems, potassium-argon, uranium and so forth claim to [have a] half-life of one billion, three-hundred million years; and therefore when they talk about improving the age of old rocks they use these systems.

The carbon-14 system is used only on organic matter, on the fossils themselves; and potassium-argon and uranium systems on rocks. But the same things are true: there must be uniformity throughout the billion years, no contamination from outside. We must assume that it was all potassium in the beginning before it decayed to argon; and all these things you have to take on faith. And if you try to measure anything recent, say only a million years ago, and you take this system with a half-life of a billion years, it is like trying to measure a millimeter with a yard stick; and is not very accurate even assuming it is valid. And there have been numerous cases when they have applied this system to new rocks; and they give them a life of two billion years old. Therefore, the whole thing is very shaky. And it requires that those billion years exist in the first place.

I don’t know exactly how old the Earth is, but I don’t believe it to be older than 10,000 years. Since I don’t work in a dinosaur museum, there is nothing in my daily personal experience that begins to even hint to an age older than that. What I notice on my path to salvation is that there is nothing new under the sun, and that what was written in the Holy Bible about man and faith has not at all clashed with what I encounter experientially. The Bible speaks to me, the scientists lie to me, and so I have thrown in my lot with God, for I cannot have two masters. I ignore the studies that suggest a fossil was a gazillion years old, I ignore DNA studies that state we’re just like the apes, and I continue building my faith in the God of creation, because when he created my ancestors, Adam and Eve, they were already a fully grown man and woman, and once they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they encountered a world that—modern civilization and technology aside—was not that much different from ours.