The year was 1969, and the big event was the “Lunar Landing” of Apollo 11. Neil Armstrong was better known then than Lance is today. “The Eagle Has Landed” gave millions of people a sigh of relief. Man was literally on the moon! However, the days and hours before lift-off had seen a great deal of apprehension for mission’s safety because of concerns scientists had about “dust” on the moon and the danger it might hold for the landing.
Science had debated the age of the earth for years, and that now became a factor in this mission. Satellites had circled the moon for months to determine how much cosmic dust was settling on the moon’s surface. Their findings were influenced by their “Uniformitarian” view that the moon was part of an ancient universe – millions of years old. And, if that depth of cosmic “dust” had been settling on the moon for millions of years, the landing of Apollo 11 might stir up the dust and foul the mechanisms that allowed the satellite to retro-fire and leave the moon’s surface.
Many of us heard newsmen deliver the news of the possible danger. Would the men be stranded on the moon because the dust was so thick? It turned out that the amount of dust indicated an age of the universe that was closer to ten thousand years than the “millions” claimed by biological evolutionists.
Some had claimed the Apollo 11 mission would “settle once and for all the theological and scientific questions of the ages.” If it did, the results were not what scientists who advocate evolution needed and wanted.
Our youth are accustomed to hearing that the earth is billions of years old. They hear it on TV and in classrooms. They see it in textbooks and movies based on that assumption. They are then surprised to hear that many scientific studies conclude that the earth and man are relatively young – probably less than 10,000 years old. In a study of the Bible you will not find a passage that gives a specific date for the creation of the earth and man. You may find 4004 B.C. in the margin of some Bibles printed years ago, but that date originated in the mind of Anglican Bishop Ussher, and his conclusions are more specific than the text demands. However, there is biblical and scientific evidence that the earth and man are of more recent origin.
“In The Beginning”
A general chronology of human events is given but obviously not every individual is discussed. The purpose of the genealogies in Genesis is to reveal the continuity in the Messianic line. Rather than a complete genealogical record, we are given the ancestry of Jesus and proof of ancestry for Abraham’s descendants. When was the earth created? The only answer I can give is: “In the beginning.” When was “the beginning”? No one can give a specific date, but any gaps found in the aforementioned genealogies would not come close to providing the “eons” of time demanded by Darwin’s Evolution. That is the reason this question is raised in academic circles: Darwin needed lots of time for Natural Selection to have any possibility.
Harvard’s George Wald once made the following astonishing statement:
“Since the origin of life belongs in the “at-least-once” phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard an event, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its capability for growth and reproduction, once may be enough. Time is the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal here is on the order of 2 billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible then becomes
probable, and the probable becomes virtually certain. One only has to wait; time itself performs miracles.”
We see why it is so important to the proponents of evolution that the earth be proven to be billions of years old.
Is The Earth “Old” or “Young”?
I have before me two documents listing well over 100 “scientific" experiments, the results of which give a wide range of possible ages for the earth. Their results vary widely, some giving an age for the universe from 100 years to 10,000 years, while others go all the way to millions of years. What are we to conclude from these experiments? Just what man has known for ages: Origins are once-for-all events, and are therefore outside the realm of the scientific method. If by such experiments we can “prove” that the earth is both billions of years old and only about 100 years old, it’s obvious that there are some serious problems with the methods employed. Because of their nature, those studies require many assumptions, and it is clear that some of those assumptions are faulty. That’s another reason why we boldly declare evolution will never be anything more than a theory.
Is The Sun Shrinking?
Uniformitarianism is still a “given” for most evolutionists. The U.S. Naval Observatory states that, based upon their experiments and calculations, “the sun is shrinking at a rate of almost 6 feet per hour.” That would mean that the sun was twice its present size only 1,000,000 years ago, and going back 210,000,000 years, based upon their own uniformitarian theory, the sun must have been large enough to touch the earth! Obviously, if that were true, life in our solar system, human or otherwise, would have been impossible.
There were too many “nots” on the moon for evolution’s theories to be valid. Christians need not be intimidated by such theories. God said,
“In the beginning,” Genesis 1:1.
