Bible Articles

C A R L   B.   G A R N E R THE EARTH – YOUNG? OR OLD? Our young people are accustomed to being told the earth is billions of years old. They hear it on TV and in classrooms. They see it in textbooks. Movies are based on the assumption that the earth is very old and man's ancestry very ancient. 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 much more specific than the text demands. There is, however, biblical and scientific evidence that the earth and man are of more recent origin. Recently we discussed this question, and facts were cited that bear on this subject. The following is a review of some of those facts. IN THE BEGINNING It is true that a general chronology of events is given, but obviously there are gaps between generations. The purpose of those 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 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 makes the following astonishing statement: "Since the origin of life belongs in the category of "at-least-once" phenomena, time is one its side. However improbable we regard this 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 becomes probable, and the probable becomes virtually certain. One only has to wait; time itself performs miracles." Now we see why the earth's being billions of years old is so important to the proponents of evolution. EVIDENCE FOR A YOUNG EARTH I have before me two documents listing over 100 scientific experiments, the results of which give an age to the earth that is far less than the 4.6 billion years accepted today. Their results vary widely, giving an age for the universe from 100 years (!) 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 incapable of scientific discovery. 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 scientific 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 know that evolution will never be anything more than a theory. IS THE SUN SHRINKING? "Uniformitarianism"is a term used by scientists that means "the present is the key to the past." It states that if we can measure certain factors presently occurring in space, we can know what happened millions and even billions of years ago. It is a popular theory, and it led NASA to fear that space dust on the moon would be such that the space capsule could not land on the moon in 1969. Their conclusions were wrong, but Uniformitarianism is still a "given" in most evolutionist circles. Conclusions demanded by their own calculations have been a major complication for proponents of that theory. 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. Further, going back 210,000,000 years, based upon their own uniformitarian theory, the sun must have been large enough to touch the earth! It is obvious that if that were true, life in our solar system, whether human or otherwise, would have been impossible. This is one reason so many biologists are abandoning Darwin's views for Punctuated Equilibrium, a second cousin theory to Goldschmidt's "Hopeful Monster Theory" of the early 1900s. It is a move born out of desperation. Christians need not be intimidated by theories, even when otherwise learned men and women promote them. Remember, God said, "In the beginning," Genesis 1:1.