I've been thinking again about the Creation/Evolution debate lately, and I think I've distilled it into one main question in my mind, one to which I've never heard a satisfactory answer (at least, from a Creationist). One can argue back and forth all day about this or that piece of evidence, and which side it "really" supports, but let's cut to the heart of the matter.

[i]Why does the Earth look old?[/i]

In other words, why is it that the sum total of mankind's knowledge on this subject paints a coherent picture of an ancient Earth? It would be bad enough if the preponderance of evidence merely seemed to rule out a 10,000-year-old planet, without being more specific than that. But we actually have strong convergence on a very specific age: 4.55 billion years. God, being omniscient, must have known that things would appear thus. So why would He give us one message with His Word, and another, contradictory one with His works?

Obviously, I've heard the question asked before, and answers have been given. One of the most popular ones is "apparent age": just as God created Adam as a mature adult, He created the Earth in a mature state. This is completely unsatisfactory. God created Adam as an adult so that he could function as one. However, differing levels of radioactive elements make no practical difference for the functioning of practically anything on the planet. Even if they did, it's hard to imagine a reason for them to be set in a coherent manner within an individual sample to converge on a specific age.

Probably the most common answer is, "it doesn't". Anyone making this argument is almost certainly under-informed, and in any case they're wrong. Unless they have access to significant amounts of data which the scientific community does not -- which is unlikely -- they simply haven't examined the situation in detail and thus cannot be expected to give a meaningful answer to the question. (I say "almost" certainly because of the existence of the Creationist leadership, who have no excuse for being unaware of the evidence. Many of their opponents simply say that they are lying, but I prefer to believe the best, so frankly I don't know quite what to make of them.)

I suppose another answer to the question would be that the ways of God are mysterious, and we cannot know why He did things this way. I agree, but look at where that leaves us. We have a consistent and coherent picture painted of the history of this planet, which seems to be the only one that stands up to rigorous examination. This cannot be an accident: either it is a true account of the way things actually happened, or it is an illusion that was intentionally created by God for purposes unknown, or both. What could He be trying to tell us? Is it a test, to see whether we cling to His Word in the face of strong evidence to the contrary?

Going along with this, is it conceivable that the consistency of the evidence might serve as a sign, from God, that we have to change our interpretation of the Bible? If not, that raises the interesting question: just what form could such a sign possibly take, if not this?

Clearly, the same sort of question applies to evolution and people's objections to it. However, I chose to frame it in terms of the age of the Earth for two main reasons. First, given what we know about evolution and how it proceeds, the Earth's antiquity is a logical prerequisite for evolution to be true. And second, I'm revealing my physics-centric bias once again. :)

I am genuinely curious to hear other answers to the question, or even to hear why the answers I listed were dismissed unfairly if you feel that they were.

Good entry Chip.
Why would people hold fast to the belief that the earth (or even the universe for that matter) is only around as old as humanity itself? Possibly a limit of imagination (and technology of course) on behalf of ancient people? Possibly the belief that humanity is the gem of the cosmos and that without us, it really shouldn't exist at all?

"If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?"
-- Carl Sagan ("The Demon-Haunted World")

I am a creationist (small "c" intended). God created this world and he created me.

I'll leave the science up to you, Chip. You can run circles around me in that department.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say the universe was created within the past few millenia. The early chapters of Genesis are a poetic rendering of the event of creation. And that teaching is confirmed throughout the Scriptures. Now, Chip, you know very well that the Bible does not claim to be the sole authority or repository of truth (you're not a latent "Sola Scriptura" believer are you?). So don't expect the Bible to give answers to all of your questions. You refer to "our interpretation of the Bible". Who is this "our"? The truth is, God created the world. The details of HOW he did it aren't going to have much effect, if any, on my faith.

It's doesn't have to be scientific fact in order to be true.

Now, here's something else to consider: most people find it odd that some Christians believe in a short six-day creation. From what I've learned about God, I believe that it's strange that he took that long! After all, if he's really God, couldn't he have snapped his celestial fingers and poof! one new world? The truth is, he took time and effort to create the world with his hands. Don't ever lose that truth.

How do we know the early chapters of Genesis are merely a poetic rendering? If THEY can be, what else can? The Flood? Sodom & Gomorrah? Pillars of fire? Food falling from the sky? Why not? (I'm aware some of these events are also in Genesis but past the creation story)

You're right Mr. McQuiggin. Any god (if we permit the characteristics of "omnipotence" and "omniscience") SHOULD be able to "snap its fingers" and create a universe like that. Putting a temporal limit on something so powerful would merely be us humans making a god in OUR image. So why did he take "time and effort" to create our world? Such concepts (time & effort) are meaningful to mere humans but are not applicable to a god as we have described it here. The outcome of such a project (earth) should be no different regardless of the time taken. The earth, as a god intended it, will be exactly the same whether it takes a second, 6 days, or a billion years. Just like the word "papercut" will appear the same on my computer screen if I take 3 seconds or 10 minutes to type it.

It's hard to try to think like an all-powerful and all-knowing being. The less we impose our limitations and characteristics onto gods, the less like us they become. This may be troubling to some.

Cheers gentlemen.

Firstly, good and interesting post Chip... it's been a while since I've visited Greenpen, and Creationism has always been of great interest to me.

"This is completely unsatisfactory"

I guess all I can say with sincere certainy is... I'm a firm believer in that the Will of God surpasses 'all' knowledge and understanding.

There's alot I could say, but I'm interested to know what you talking about when referring to "radioactive elements". Are these elements that are found to have been existant, but had no role in the creation of todays minerals/resources? (so basically they never had a role to begin with?)

Science is a great thing, and we have learned so much in the past what... 20 years even?
It might just be me, but it seems like there's a general attitude in the world that we have things figured out, and all we have to do now is work out the details. It will be interesting to see what type of findings are discovered in the 20 years to come ;)

Hey James,

Great to hear from you again! I think you're the first young-earther to respond, which is probably more than I could have hoped for. (I didn't really think through before posting this here, as opposed to some online discussion forum where young-earthers tend to hang out.)

When I talked about "radioactive elements" I was unclear. Each element from the periodic table has a number of isotopes. What determines which element something is, is the number of protons it has: any atom with 2 protons is helium, any atom with 6 protons is carbon, etc. But different atoms of the same element might have different numbers of neutrons. They are called "isotopes". For example, the most common (by far) isotope of carbon has 6 neutrons (called "carbon-12"). It happens to be stable, which means an atom which is carbon-12 today will surely be carbon-12 billions of years from now (if you don't do anything funky to it!)

By contrast, a few other carbon atoms have 8 neutrons and are called carbon-14. These are not stable, so they are called "radioactive". Each carbon-14 atom has a very small probability per unit time to turn into nitrogen-14 (one of its neutrons turns into a proton and spits out an electron and an antineutrino). When you get a bunch of carbon-14 atoms together, the total amount of carbon-14 undergoes exponential decay.

(Here's a neat experiment you can do: get a ton of dice, and roll 'em all. Remove all the ones that come up with a 6. Repeat until no dice are remaining. Then plot the number of dice versus the number of times you've rolled them. The exponential curve just pops right out!)

Anyway, I used the example of carbon-14, but that's not relevant to our present discussion. Its half-life is about 5760 years or so, which means that after only 100,000 years, there's not nearly enough left to do any sort of dating! It'd be like trying to measure the distance to the moon with a metre-stick. For longer times, different elements are used: Potassium-Argon, Argon-Argon, Rubidium-Strontium, etc. These have half-lives measured in billions of years, so they're ideal for dating really old stuff.

Now to the point. The "naive" way of doing radiometric dating is to assume we know the initial ratio of "parent" (the unstable atoms) to "daughter" (the atoms they turn into), and further assume that no parent or daughter product got in or out. Obviously if any of those assumptions are violated, the results would be nonsense.

Several methods, called "isochrons", do not suffer from those assumptions. The only assumptions they have are that 1) decay rates have been constant over time, and 2) if the radiometric "clocks" are wrong, they will give nonsense results. The reason we believe 1) is because decay rates are based on extremely fundamental physics, and there is no evidence that they have ever changed in the past 10 billion years or more. The reason we believe 2) is because we have never encountered any process that would theoretically cause all the data points to agree on the same wrong result.

Here is a flat-out awesome resource by an evangelical Christian:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html

The info here is very good, and it's explained in layman's terms (well... as much as possible considering the subject matter).

So to my question. Obviously God knew that these radiometric clocks would make it look like the Earth was very old. So either it's young but He's painted a deceiving picture, or it really is old and we can trust God, or there's some 3rd option I can't conceive of.

It's getting really late and I'm pretty tired, but I wonder if you could do me a favour. Could you ask the AIG dude at the retreat, "Why does the Earth look old, and why does it appear that species evolved?" I am curious to hear his answer but not very hopeful.

Hey Chip,

I wrote a longer/detailed response, but I guess it got lost in Cyber Space... but here is a link that pretty much has alot of the info that was covered, and the expressed views from group the speaker is related to:

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/21/65/

Cheers,

jg

Thanks for the link, James! I'm familiar with the site. (Actually another young-earth friend of mine showed it to me a couple of weeks ago.) It's hard to respond because there's so much material, I barely know where to begin. But I happened across this page, which seems the most germane to my main question.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/373

The invocation of Newton as somebody who did not "see" an "old" Earth is not a valid comparison. Newton lived at a time when there was no compelling evidence for the Earth's antiquity. He didn't know a thing about isotopes -- heck, about atoms even! The clear implication is that, even if he had been aware of the evidence for an old earth, he would have rejected it. This is completely unjustified, and moreover it is almost certainly false given Newton's character.

1) I can't say much about the continents having eroded "several times over" because I'm no expert on the subject. However, isn't it worth noting that the people who *are* experts on the subject overwhelmingly believe in an old earth? Something doesn't add up here.

2) Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is "too little" helium in the atmosphere. (I suspect they have not taken proper account of the helium cycle, specifically the parts where the helium leaves the atmosphere, but never mind for now.) We would chalk that up as one piece of evidence for a young Earth. On the other hand, we have the radiometric clocks, which "miraculously" line up with each other and paint a concordant picture. One of the two types of "clock" must be wrong, so there must be some kind of physics we don't know about that accounts for the discrepancy. Is that new physics likely to be with the rocks, making the various radiometric clocks agree on the same wrong dates? Or is it some process that gets rid of excess Helium? It seems clear that the latter is orders of magnitude more likely. (Indeed, it seems difficult even to conceive of any possible physics that would cause the isotope ratios to come out as they do if the earth is young!)

3) I don't really see how the fact that many fossils formed quickly somehow translates into a young Earth. And it's dubious to use Noah's flood to explain all of the fossils that were rapidly buried, when the different rapid burial sites don't match up with one another. (i.e. they are due to many different local catastrophes, according to best evidence.)

4) There are indeed processes, commonly thought to require millions of years, which can take significantly less time. But first off, there are processes that are thought to take millions of years that really do seem to need that long! (I guess the implication is that, just you wait, we'll discover that they can happen really quickly!) Secondly, and more importantly, the "quick" versions of these processes tend to leave indications of their rapidity. In other words, there's some way to tell the difference between the genuinely million-year processes and the speedy impostors. The most obvious example I can think of are lake varves, in which each layer has clear annual patterns and there are several sites with multiple tens of thousands of layers extending over several kilometres.

5) The ocean salt argument is known not to take into account processes which remove salt from the ocean. There is strong evidence that influx and efflux rates of salt for the ocean are statistically the same. You cannot use a process which is known to be at equilibrium to measure time, ever!

Too bad your response got lost. I know how disheartening that can be! Anyway, if there are other articles I missed that are relevant to the topic or if you want to throw in your own 2 cents, I'm game.

Unfortunately I don't have the scientific background/knowledge to truly understand where you are coming from and to provide answers. But perhaps these are all questions that are also in the minds of some Young Earth scientists aswell, and hopefully they will be addressed.

Just like science, Young Earth creation theories have been known to change and improve as time goes by.

But there are many reasons (other than Science) why I believe it is important to believe in a 6 literal day creation.

Cheers,

jg

Indeed: based on Lutheran theology as I understand it, the Genesis story must be taken absolutely literally from verse 1 of the first chapter, otherwise the Faith has no basis. And I'll also comment that out of everybody I know who holds to a young (6-10 ky) Earth, not one person holds that belief for scientific reasons.

And there's nothing wrong with that, in my book. If part of somebody's religion requires that they believe in a young Earth, then I'll defend their right to believe it. And if their faith would be destroyed were they to stop believing in it, then I wouldn't press the matter. Since Christianity is true, it would be wrong of me to damage somebody's relationship with Christ for something that ultimately doesn't matter. (Although, if somebody tries to teach a young Earth in public schools, or Intelligent Design, or tries to remove evolution, I'd of course have to fight their efforts.)

My main question, though, is essentially this. There is a strong and coherent body of scientific evidence which flatly contradicts the idea that the Earth is less than several million years, never mind the 4.55 billion that best evidence indicates. If the Earth was created by God at that time, why would he make it look otherwise? And if the answer is "I don't know," then I can respect that.

Actually, that reminds me of something funny I thought to say, to show my position on evolution. "Goodness, no! I don't really believe in evolution! I just think that if God went to all the trouble to fake it, we might as well play along." That really sums it up for me. :)

I 'think' might know where your coming from. (It's always difficult with 'text' and always more enjoyable having these types of discussions at 3am over a campfire, hahaha :)

Just a few things pop into my mind:

-If the 'earth' itself was proven by scientific means to be thousands of years old (and I'm talking the whole kit-and-kabutle). Would this basically have no impact in the way we understand things in the scientific world. (ie: the way we understand everything on earth, living and non-living, as well as the everything around earth like other planets, and current knowledge of the universe)

The second one (which is a little more "juicier" is something has been pecking at my brain for several years now). You might have already read this page, but basically it's an AiG response to a reader who questioned one of their articles on the dinosaur bone that contained fresh tissue inside it.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/0325RBCs.asp

I particullary liked this statement by the AiG person:
"I would not claim that the preservation proves the millions of years is wrong, but it strongly suggests it, and it is certainly more consistent with the belief that the fossil is only thousands of years old."

thanks,

jg

That's a really interesting question! I don't think I've ever heard it before. If the Earth were scientifically proven to be thousands of years old, I think it would have a very big impact on the way we do science. It would be a mini-revolution. My reason for saying this is that the established age of the Earth is based on very fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. Chemistry is based on these same principles, and biology on chemistry, so this would really shake the foundations of science in general.

And it's worth pointing out that any scientific proof that the Earth is young would have to explain why the proofs we currently have that it's old are wrong. This is true in general: if a new theory comes along to replace an established one, it has to explain why the old one worked so well. As a physics-centric example, the relativistic physics of Einstein, Lorentz, Minkowski, et al replaced the classical Newtonian physics that came before. But it included Newtonian physics as a special case: when the speeds of the particles involved are very small compared to the speed of light. (Obviously, this applies to most things in our everyday experience, which is why Newtonian physics worked so well for so long!)

And I can think of a specific example relating to the age of the earth. Lord Kelvin (an antievolutionist and a fine scientist) calculated how long it would have taken the Earth to reach its present temperature from its initial molten state. Now, Kelvin knew a thing or two about thermodynamics (remember, they named the absolute temperature scale after him!) and he calculated a maximum possible age of 100 million years. There was nothing wrong with his math. So what's the deal? Turns out he made the calculation before radioactivity was discovered, and the Earth is heated quite a lot by radioactive decay, which when you take it into account brings this estimate for the age of the earth in line with the presently accepted value of 4.55 billion years. So the new result explains why the old one was wrong (incomplete model).

As for the dinosaur bone, you happened to pick a particular favourite of mine. First, the age of the bone in question is very reliably known. It comes from the Hell Creek formation, which has been dated by several independent methods and is between 64 and 66 million years old. The media reports gave the impression that the tissue was soft when they found it, but actually it had to be rehydrated first. I think the explanation is that a sort of micro-fossilization took place, such that the DNA was largely degraded (as it had to be), but the morphology of the cells was preserved. I have heard of similar material being recovered from samples as old as 440 My before this, so while it's a rarity the phenomenon wasn't completely unknown.

I have to disagree with the author who says that the dinosaur bone is "more consistent" with a 6 ky earth than a conventionally aged one. If the dinosaur bone really was young, that doesn't contradict the theory of evolution, nor does it contradict an old earth; all it means is that dinosaurs lasted longer than we thought they did. Not that I'm understating the significance of that conclusion -- if it were true, it would be a huge freakin' deal! And it would raise a ton of questions too, about why they have never been spotted by humans, and why they don't appear in the fossil record at all past the KT boundary.

Also, while I was looking up stuff about the dinosaur bone, I came across the following interesting point. We've recovered good DNA from samples ranging up to 300,000 years in age. If dinosaurs were alive in historical times, then getting DNA from them should be pretty common; instead, it's never happened. That seems to contradict the idea that they lived at the same time that man did.

Chip,

I was going to send you a personal email (didn't wan't to tie up your blog more than I already have, unless you don't mind).

Any rate, I just wanted to be sure I expressed myself properly.

When I said "What if science proved the Earth was young", I should have clearly said "What if Science had always shown that the earth was young. What kind of effect that would have."

I think you may have already answered it, but just wanted to make sure you didn't think I was wondering if there was a sudden discovery that would contradict todays science.

I was trying to think of reasons/purposes behind giving the Earth an apparant age.

jg

Hi James,

Not quite sure I understand the question, but anyway, feel free to email me.

Chip