Dark Virtue
New Member
I blame you for dragging this discussion off-topic!
I don't even remember what we were discussing
I don't even remember what we were discussing
Creationism: Right or Wrong?
- Thread starter Jim
- Start date
Arkanjel
New Member
it was kinda off topic yet I did manage to work evolution into it. Ok so a topic of creation vs. evolution
Under normal circumstances, creatures give birth to the same kind of creatures. One does not expect a lizard to hatch from a chicken egg. Chickens have baby chickens. It is established scientific fact that like begets like.
On rare instances, the DNA in an embryo is damaged, resulting in a mutant child that differs in some respect from its parent. Only a few mutations have been scientifically observed that are arguably beneficial. It is well known that mutations produce inferior offspring. For the theory of evolution to be true, there must be a fantastic number of creative mutations that produce new kinds of offspring which are better suited for survival, and therefore are favored by natural selection.
It is claimed that the reptile-to-mammal evolution is well documented. But for reptiles to evolve into mammals
scales had to have mutated into hair
breasts had to have evolved from nothing
hard-shelled externally laid eggs had to evolve into soft-shelled eggs that were nourished by an umbilical cord and placenta in a womb
etc.
None of these transformations have ever been observed in a laboratory.
The notion that random genetic changes can produce creative mutations is not consistent with scientific observation.
Under normal circumstances, creatures give birth to the same kind of creatures. One does not expect a lizard to hatch from a chicken egg. Chickens have baby chickens. It is established scientific fact that like begets like.
On rare instances, the DNA in an embryo is damaged, resulting in a mutant child that differs in some respect from its parent. Only a few mutations have been scientifically observed that are arguably beneficial. It is well known that mutations produce inferior offspring. For the theory of evolution to be true, there must be a fantastic number of creative mutations that produce new kinds of offspring which are better suited for survival, and therefore are favored by natural selection.
It is claimed that the reptile-to-mammal evolution is well documented. But for reptiles to evolve into mammals
scales had to have mutated into hair
breasts had to have evolved from nothing
hard-shelled externally laid eggs had to evolve into soft-shelled eggs that were nourished by an umbilical cord and placenta in a womb
etc.
None of these transformations have ever been observed in a laboratory.
The notion that random genetic changes can produce creative mutations is not consistent with scientific observation.
Dark Virtue
New Member
Sorry, but I'm not about to defend Darwinian evolution, it's got more holes than swiss cheese.
I hate this topic because it's too easy for Christians to backtrack and say God created the universe with age, God initiated the Big Bang, God created evolution, et al.
I hate this topic because it's too easy for Christians to backtrack and say God created the universe with age, God initiated the Big Bang, God created evolution, et al.
Arkanjel
New Member
Ok here is some genetic evidence for a young creation. You might want to take some asprin now, cause your head will hurt when your done.
There have been a number of evidences recently that the human race is very young. For example, a recent issue of Science (Collins, F., M. Guyer, and A. Chakravarti, "Variations on a Theme: Human DNA Sequence Variation," Science 278:1580-1581, 28 November 1997, page 1581) said that the age of the human race is roughly 1,000 to 10,000 generations:
... 1000 to 10,000 generations old, which is roughly the age of the human population, ...
We review some of this evidence for the youth of the human race, including recent findings concerning mitochondrial DNA mutation rates which give even a much younger age than 1,000 generations.
Age estimates are obtained by observing differences between the DNA of different individuals, and are calculated using estimates of mutation rates. Mitochondrial DNA is often used for this; it is separate from the bulk of the human DNA, which is found in the cell nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA has about 16,000 base pairs and mutates, apparently, much faster than the nuclear DNA. Human mitochondrial DNA has been completely mapped, and all the coding regions are known, and the proteins or RNA for which they code. Some of the mitochondrial DNA does not code for anything, and is known as a control region. This region appears to mutate faster than any other region, because the variation among humans is greatest here.
Recently, mitochondrial DNA mutation rates were measured directly (Parsons, Thomas J., et al., A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region, Nature Genetics vol. 15, April 1997, pp. 363-367). The mutation rate in a segment of the control region of mitochondrial DNA was directly measured by comparing mitochondrial DNA from siblings and from parents and their offspring. Mitochondrial DNA was found to mutate about 20 times faster than previously thought, at a rate of one mutation (substitution) every 33 generations, approximately. In this section of the control region, which has about 610 base pairs, humans typically differ from one another by about 18 mutations. By simple mathematics, it follows that the human race is about 300 generations old. If one assumes a typical generation is about 20 years, this gives an age of about 6000 years.
This calculation is done in the following way. Let us consider two randomly chosen human beings, assuming all human beings initially have identical mitochondrial DNA. After 33 generations, two such random humans will probably differ by two mutations, since there will be two separate lines of inheritance and probably one mutation along each line. After 66 generations, two randomly chosen humans will differ by about four mutations. After 100 generations, they will differ by about six mutations. After 300 generations, they will differ by about 18 mutations, which is about the observed value.
We see that the mathematics is extremely simple. However, this timetable would revolutionize the history of humanity from a scientific standpoint, so biologists attempt to explain away the data. They do this in the following way: They assume that in this control region, most of the mutations are harmful. This means that individuals having more mutations are more likely to die, so that among surviving individuals, the number of mutations increases more slowly.
However, this explanation is implausible for the following reasons. First, we know that the control region does not code for any protein or RNA, so it is unlikely that mutations there would be harmful. Second, the fact that there is a lot of variation between individuals in this region suggests that mutations there do not have a harmful effect. Finally, one study noted that humans evolve (that is, accumulate mutations) 1.8 times faster in the control region than in silent sites in the mitochondrial DNA. (See ``Recent African origin of modern humans revealed by complete sequences of hominoid mitochondrial DNAs'' by S. Horai, K. Hayasaka, R. Kondo, K. Tsugane, and N. Takahata, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 1995 Jan 17;92(2):532-536.) Silent sites do not affect the amino acid coded for, and so they generally do not have much of an effect. The fact that the control region evolves 1.8 times faster (that is, mutations accumulate 1.8 times faster) indicates that the control region has even less of an influence than the silent sites, also making it unlikely that mutations in the control region are harmful. A similar result was found for ducks, in which the control region evolves 4.4 times faster than the mitochondrial DNA in general. See Michael D. Sorenson and Robert C. Fleischer, Multiple independent transpositions of mitochondrial DNA control region sequences to the nucleus, PNAS 1996 93: pp. 15239-15243. This is additional evidence that the control region is not constrained much, and that mutations there are not very harmful.
Despite the sensational impact of this calculation on the chronology of the human race, we see that the most reasonable interpretation of the data is to assume that the human race is in fact about 6000 years old. It is possible that the mutation rate has changed to some extent throughout history, but it is hard to imagine this making much of a difference in the end result. Since mitochondria in all organisms are quite similar today, it is reasonable to infer that they were also similar in the past and had a similar mutation rate. Furthermore, because of the high intrinsic mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA, any environmental effect would be very small by comparison. Any environmental agent that would increase the mitochondrial DNA mutation rate by 10 percent would wreak havoc with the nuclear DNA because the nuclear mutation rate is so much smaller and the nuclear DNA is so much larger.
Another piece of data indicating a young humanity is the striking uniformity among human males in the Y chromosome. (See Dorit, R.L., Akashi, H. and Gilbert, W. 1995. Absence of polymorphism at the ZFY locus on the human Y chromosome, Science 268 (26 May 1995):1183-1185.) This has been used to give an age estimate of about 40,000 years or less for the human race. (L. Simon Whitfield, John E. Sulston, and Peter N. Goodfellow, "Sequence Variation of the Human Y Chromosome," Nature 378 (1995), pp. 379-380.) It is now known that mutations accumulate much faster in males than in females. This means that the Y chromosome will tend to mutate twice as fast as other chromosomes, since it is always in the male line, which might reduce this estimate of about 40,000 years to about 20,000 years. A more recent discussion may be found in Gibbons, Ann, "Y Chromosome Shows that Adam Was an African," Science, Volume 278, Number 5339 (31 October, 1997), pp. 804 - 805, which gives older ages.
Yet another piece of evidence is the tremendous uniformity found among humans in a 50 kb segment of an ALU region of the nuclear DNA (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. vol. 93 Number 09 pp. 4360-4364, 1996). Only one difference was found between humans in this region, also implying a very young age for the human race. More discussion of the origin of humanity may be found at http://christiananswers.net/creation/.
It will be interesting to see the results of similar studies on other organisms. Probably the only reason that the human race seems so young compared to other species is that it has been studied more. When mutation rates are measured for other species, probably revealing significantly greater rates than in humans, similar young ages will probably be obtained.
In fact, there is already some evidence in this direction, based also on mitochondrial DNA. Since mitochondria are similar in all organisms, it is reasonable to assume that mitochondrial DNA mutates at about the same rate in all organisms. Also, all organisms that are roughly the same size as humans should have roughly the same number of cell divisions per generation in the female line. For humans, this is 24 divisions. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that all organisms whose size is in the range mouse to elephant probably have about the same rate of mitochondrial DNA mutation per generation as humans. One biologist informed me that these assumptions are reasonable.
Now, in a portion of the control region that has about 600 base pairs, human mitochondrial DNA mutates about once every 33 generations. This translates to about one percent divergence between two random individuals every 100 generations. In another portion of the control region, humans appear to mutate a little slower, at about one percent every 150 generations. (This follows because typical humans differ by about 8 mutations in a region of about 400 base pairs that was used to study neanderthal DNA. This amounts to a difference of about two percent.) Therefore, it is also reasonable to suggest that other species in the mouse to elephant range will diverge at about one percent every 100 to 150 generations in the mitocondrial DNA control region.
In this regard, it is interesting to see what the typical differences are between individuals in different species. For example, in the control region, wolves and coyotes differ by about 7.5 percent. (See The Origin of Dogs: Running With the Wolves Science 1997 June 13; 276 (5319):1647 (in Research News) by V. Morell.) By our previous calculations, it would take about 750 to 1000 generations to achieve this divergence. With a generation time of a few years, this would imply a separation time of a few thousand years ago. Wolves differ from each other by about 2 percent in the control region. (See C. Vila, P. Savolainen, J. E. Maldonado, I. R. Amorim, J. E. Rice, R. L. Honeycutt, K. A. Crandall, J. Lundeberg, and R. K. Wayne, "Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog," Science, June 13, 1997, vol. 276, no. 5319, pp. 1687-1689 (in Reports)). This implies an origin about 200-300 generations ago. With a few years generation time, this would be a thousand years or so ago. This low figure might be explained because the whole control region changes somewhat more slowly than the parts considered earlier. The same reference states that dogs also differ by about 2 percent, leading to a similar time of origin. Most dog species differ within themselves by about one percent, implying a more recent origin.
Seven species of diving ducks were studied in (Multiple independent transpositions of mitochondrial DNA control region sequences to the nucleus, PNAS 1996 93: pp. 15239-15243). The control region divergence was less than 17 percent. This translates to 1700 - 2500 generations, which at a few years per generation is also in the several thousands of years range. Closely related species of birds were studied in (The Importance of Recent Ice Ages in Speciation: A Failed Paradigm Science 1997 September 12; 277 (5332): p. 1666 (in Reports), by J. Klicka and R. M. Zink). The difference in total mitochodrial DNA was about 5 percent or less. This probably translates to about 20 percent in the control region, and thus about 2000 to 3000 generations. With 2 or 3 years per generation, this again translates to a separation time of a few thousand years ago.
We can also obtain similar young ages for bacteria and Drosophila based on nuclear DNA mutation rates. The generation time for E. Coli is about 20 minutes, or about 50 generations per day and 15,000 generations per year. In 6,000 years there would be about 100 million generations. The mutation rate per base pair per generation is about 10-9 in bacteria (see Spetner, Not by Chance, Judaica Press, Brooklyn, New York, 1997, page 92). Thus in 100 million generations, there would be about a 10 percent change in the non-functional DNA and a 20 percent difference between two random individuals. The actual difference observed for E. Coli is about 5 percent. (See Moreel, V., "Bacteria Diversify Through Warfare," Science, Volume 278, October 24, 1997, page 575.) This low figure might be explained by a lower mutation rate and by the fact that a considerable portion of the bacterial DNA is functional.
For Drosophila, the generation time is about 2 weeks. This leads to 25 generations per year, and about 150,000 generations in 6,000 years. The mutation rate for Drosophila is about 2 x 10-8 per nucleotide per generation or even twice as high or more, according to (Kondrashev, A.S., 1988, "Deleterious mutations and the origin of sexual reproduction," Nature vol. 336 Dec. 1 pp. 435-440). This rate may also be computed from the fact that Drosophila has about 20,000 genes, each gene has about 1,000 base pairs, and there appears to be about one slightly harmful mutation per zygote per generation in Drosophila. (See James F. Crow, "The high spontaneous mutation rate: Is it a health risk?", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 94, pp. 8380-8386, August 1997.) In 150,000 generations, there would be a change of about 3 x 10-3 in non-functional DNA, and about a .6 percent difference between two random individuals. Since the mutation rate is likely twice as high, this difference could be as high as 1.2 percent. The observed value is about 1.5 percent. The increase could be due to a slightly higher mutation rate, a slightly smaller generation time, mutational hot-spots, differences at the Creation, or an origin slightly longer than 6,000 years ago.
This is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg, and many similar results will undoubtedly soon be reported. We hope that these results will cause biologists to give more serious consideration to the possibility that the Biblical record of a recent creation is historically accurate.
There have been a number of evidences recently that the human race is very young. For example, a recent issue of Science (Collins, F., M. Guyer, and A. Chakravarti, "Variations on a Theme: Human DNA Sequence Variation," Science 278:1580-1581, 28 November 1997, page 1581) said that the age of the human race is roughly 1,000 to 10,000 generations:
... 1000 to 10,000 generations old, which is roughly the age of the human population, ...
We review some of this evidence for the youth of the human race, including recent findings concerning mitochondrial DNA mutation rates which give even a much younger age than 1,000 generations.
Age estimates are obtained by observing differences between the DNA of different individuals, and are calculated using estimates of mutation rates. Mitochondrial DNA is often used for this; it is separate from the bulk of the human DNA, which is found in the cell nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA has about 16,000 base pairs and mutates, apparently, much faster than the nuclear DNA. Human mitochondrial DNA has been completely mapped, and all the coding regions are known, and the proteins or RNA for which they code. Some of the mitochondrial DNA does not code for anything, and is known as a control region. This region appears to mutate faster than any other region, because the variation among humans is greatest here.
Recently, mitochondrial DNA mutation rates were measured directly (Parsons, Thomas J., et al., A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region, Nature Genetics vol. 15, April 1997, pp. 363-367). The mutation rate in a segment of the control region of mitochondrial DNA was directly measured by comparing mitochondrial DNA from siblings and from parents and their offspring. Mitochondrial DNA was found to mutate about 20 times faster than previously thought, at a rate of one mutation (substitution) every 33 generations, approximately. In this section of the control region, which has about 610 base pairs, humans typically differ from one another by about 18 mutations. By simple mathematics, it follows that the human race is about 300 generations old. If one assumes a typical generation is about 20 years, this gives an age of about 6000 years.
This calculation is done in the following way. Let us consider two randomly chosen human beings, assuming all human beings initially have identical mitochondrial DNA. After 33 generations, two such random humans will probably differ by two mutations, since there will be two separate lines of inheritance and probably one mutation along each line. After 66 generations, two randomly chosen humans will differ by about four mutations. After 100 generations, they will differ by about six mutations. After 300 generations, they will differ by about 18 mutations, which is about the observed value.
We see that the mathematics is extremely simple. However, this timetable would revolutionize the history of humanity from a scientific standpoint, so biologists attempt to explain away the data. They do this in the following way: They assume that in this control region, most of the mutations are harmful. This means that individuals having more mutations are more likely to die, so that among surviving individuals, the number of mutations increases more slowly.
However, this explanation is implausible for the following reasons. First, we know that the control region does not code for any protein or RNA, so it is unlikely that mutations there would be harmful. Second, the fact that there is a lot of variation between individuals in this region suggests that mutations there do not have a harmful effect. Finally, one study noted that humans evolve (that is, accumulate mutations) 1.8 times faster in the control region than in silent sites in the mitochondrial DNA. (See ``Recent African origin of modern humans revealed by complete sequences of hominoid mitochondrial DNAs'' by S. Horai, K. Hayasaka, R. Kondo, K. Tsugane, and N. Takahata, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 1995 Jan 17;92(2):532-536.) Silent sites do not affect the amino acid coded for, and so they generally do not have much of an effect. The fact that the control region evolves 1.8 times faster (that is, mutations accumulate 1.8 times faster) indicates that the control region has even less of an influence than the silent sites, also making it unlikely that mutations in the control region are harmful. A similar result was found for ducks, in which the control region evolves 4.4 times faster than the mitochondrial DNA in general. See Michael D. Sorenson and Robert C. Fleischer, Multiple independent transpositions of mitochondrial DNA control region sequences to the nucleus, PNAS 1996 93: pp. 15239-15243. This is additional evidence that the control region is not constrained much, and that mutations there are not very harmful.
Despite the sensational impact of this calculation on the chronology of the human race, we see that the most reasonable interpretation of the data is to assume that the human race is in fact about 6000 years old. It is possible that the mutation rate has changed to some extent throughout history, but it is hard to imagine this making much of a difference in the end result. Since mitochondria in all organisms are quite similar today, it is reasonable to infer that they were also similar in the past and had a similar mutation rate. Furthermore, because of the high intrinsic mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA, any environmental effect would be very small by comparison. Any environmental agent that would increase the mitochondrial DNA mutation rate by 10 percent would wreak havoc with the nuclear DNA because the nuclear mutation rate is so much smaller and the nuclear DNA is so much larger.
Another piece of data indicating a young humanity is the striking uniformity among human males in the Y chromosome. (See Dorit, R.L., Akashi, H. and Gilbert, W. 1995. Absence of polymorphism at the ZFY locus on the human Y chromosome, Science 268 (26 May 1995):1183-1185.) This has been used to give an age estimate of about 40,000 years or less for the human race. (L. Simon Whitfield, John E. Sulston, and Peter N. Goodfellow, "Sequence Variation of the Human Y Chromosome," Nature 378 (1995), pp. 379-380.) It is now known that mutations accumulate much faster in males than in females. This means that the Y chromosome will tend to mutate twice as fast as other chromosomes, since it is always in the male line, which might reduce this estimate of about 40,000 years to about 20,000 years. A more recent discussion may be found in Gibbons, Ann, "Y Chromosome Shows that Adam Was an African," Science, Volume 278, Number 5339 (31 October, 1997), pp. 804 - 805, which gives older ages.
Yet another piece of evidence is the tremendous uniformity found among humans in a 50 kb segment of an ALU region of the nuclear DNA (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. vol. 93 Number 09 pp. 4360-4364, 1996). Only one difference was found between humans in this region, also implying a very young age for the human race. More discussion of the origin of humanity may be found at http://christiananswers.net/creation/.
It will be interesting to see the results of similar studies on other organisms. Probably the only reason that the human race seems so young compared to other species is that it has been studied more. When mutation rates are measured for other species, probably revealing significantly greater rates than in humans, similar young ages will probably be obtained.
In fact, there is already some evidence in this direction, based also on mitochondrial DNA. Since mitochondria are similar in all organisms, it is reasonable to assume that mitochondrial DNA mutates at about the same rate in all organisms. Also, all organisms that are roughly the same size as humans should have roughly the same number of cell divisions per generation in the female line. For humans, this is 24 divisions. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that all organisms whose size is in the range mouse to elephant probably have about the same rate of mitochondrial DNA mutation per generation as humans. One biologist informed me that these assumptions are reasonable.
Now, in a portion of the control region that has about 600 base pairs, human mitochondrial DNA mutates about once every 33 generations. This translates to about one percent divergence between two random individuals every 100 generations. In another portion of the control region, humans appear to mutate a little slower, at about one percent every 150 generations. (This follows because typical humans differ by about 8 mutations in a region of about 400 base pairs that was used to study neanderthal DNA. This amounts to a difference of about two percent.) Therefore, it is also reasonable to suggest that other species in the mouse to elephant range will diverge at about one percent every 100 to 150 generations in the mitocondrial DNA control region.
In this regard, it is interesting to see what the typical differences are between individuals in different species. For example, in the control region, wolves and coyotes differ by about 7.5 percent. (See The Origin of Dogs: Running With the Wolves Science 1997 June 13; 276 (5319):1647 (in Research News) by V. Morell.) By our previous calculations, it would take about 750 to 1000 generations to achieve this divergence. With a generation time of a few years, this would imply a separation time of a few thousand years ago. Wolves differ from each other by about 2 percent in the control region. (See C. Vila, P. Savolainen, J. E. Maldonado, I. R. Amorim, J. E. Rice, R. L. Honeycutt, K. A. Crandall, J. Lundeberg, and R. K. Wayne, "Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog," Science, June 13, 1997, vol. 276, no. 5319, pp. 1687-1689 (in Reports)). This implies an origin about 200-300 generations ago. With a few years generation time, this would be a thousand years or so ago. This low figure might be explained because the whole control region changes somewhat more slowly than the parts considered earlier. The same reference states that dogs also differ by about 2 percent, leading to a similar time of origin. Most dog species differ within themselves by about one percent, implying a more recent origin.
Seven species of diving ducks were studied in (Multiple independent transpositions of mitochondrial DNA control region sequences to the nucleus, PNAS 1996 93: pp. 15239-15243). The control region divergence was less than 17 percent. This translates to 1700 - 2500 generations, which at a few years per generation is also in the several thousands of years range. Closely related species of birds were studied in (The Importance of Recent Ice Ages in Speciation: A Failed Paradigm Science 1997 September 12; 277 (5332): p. 1666 (in Reports), by J. Klicka and R. M. Zink). The difference in total mitochodrial DNA was about 5 percent or less. This probably translates to about 20 percent in the control region, and thus about 2000 to 3000 generations. With 2 or 3 years per generation, this again translates to a separation time of a few thousand years ago.
We can also obtain similar young ages for bacteria and Drosophila based on nuclear DNA mutation rates. The generation time for E. Coli is about 20 minutes, or about 50 generations per day and 15,000 generations per year. In 6,000 years there would be about 100 million generations. The mutation rate per base pair per generation is about 10-9 in bacteria (see Spetner, Not by Chance, Judaica Press, Brooklyn, New York, 1997, page 92). Thus in 100 million generations, there would be about a 10 percent change in the non-functional DNA and a 20 percent difference between two random individuals. The actual difference observed for E. Coli is about 5 percent. (See Moreel, V., "Bacteria Diversify Through Warfare," Science, Volume 278, October 24, 1997, page 575.) This low figure might be explained by a lower mutation rate and by the fact that a considerable portion of the bacterial DNA is functional.
For Drosophila, the generation time is about 2 weeks. This leads to 25 generations per year, and about 150,000 generations in 6,000 years. The mutation rate for Drosophila is about 2 x 10-8 per nucleotide per generation or even twice as high or more, according to (Kondrashev, A.S., 1988, "Deleterious mutations and the origin of sexual reproduction," Nature vol. 336 Dec. 1 pp. 435-440). This rate may also be computed from the fact that Drosophila has about 20,000 genes, each gene has about 1,000 base pairs, and there appears to be about one slightly harmful mutation per zygote per generation in Drosophila. (See James F. Crow, "The high spontaneous mutation rate: Is it a health risk?", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 94, pp. 8380-8386, August 1997.) In 150,000 generations, there would be a change of about 3 x 10-3 in non-functional DNA, and about a .6 percent difference between two random individuals. Since the mutation rate is likely twice as high, this difference could be as high as 1.2 percent. The observed value is about 1.5 percent. The increase could be due to a slightly higher mutation rate, a slightly smaller generation time, mutational hot-spots, differences at the Creation, or an origin slightly longer than 6,000 years ago.
This is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg, and many similar results will undoubtedly soon be reported. We hope that these results will cause biologists to give more serious consideration to the possibility that the Biblical record of a recent creation is historically accurate.
Dark Virtue
New Member
Let's look at both sides:
18 INDICATORS OF AN "OLD EARTH"
(About 4.5 billion years old)
Age of the galaxy
There is one good indicator that our galaxy is very old:
Indicator: The sun is one of countless numbers of stars in our galaxy. The galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. This means that light from some stars in our galaxy has taken many tens of thousands of years to reach earth. This would indicate that our galaxy is much older than 10 millennia.
Rebuttal: Believers in a young earth might argue that God created our galaxy less than 10,000 years ago, complete with light rays going in all directions from each star, in order that the galaxy would appear to be more ancient than it really is. That is, God created the universe as if it had a history at the time of creation. Also, the above indicator assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicators that the earth is over 8,000 years old
There are three direct indicators that the earth's age is in excess of 8000 years:
Indicator: Some bristlecone pine trees in the White-Inyo mountain range of California date back beyond 2000 BCE. One, labeled "Methuselah" germinated in 2726 BCE, centuries before the date that conservative Christians assign to the Noahic flood. But their tree rings have been matched with those of dead trees; this shows that the latter germinated about 6000 BCE, which predates the year 4004 BCE by 2 millennia.
Rebuttal: When God created the pine trees which are now dead, he may have created them complete with tree rings as if they had been alive before they were created.
Indicator: In the Green River there are varves (millions of annual layers of sediment) laid down over the past 20 million years. 4
Rebuttal: These varves may not represent annual layers of sediment; perhaps they are something like hourly layers caused by some unknown factor. Alternately, when God created the river, he might have created it as if it had a multi-million year history of varves.
Indicator: During each springtime, tiny, one-celled algae bloom in Lake Suigetsu, Japan. They die and sink to the bottom of the lake. Here, they create a thin, white layer. During the rest of the year, dark clay sediments settle to the bottom. The result are alternating dark and light annual layers -- much like the annual growth rings on a tree. Scientists have counted about 45,000 layers; they have been accumulating since about 43,000 BCE. This is far beyond the estimates of 6 to 10 millennia made by many creation scientists.
Rebuttal: Perhaps in the past, many layers were laid down each year, due to temperature fluctuations. Thus, 45,000 layers could have taken fewer than 10 millennia. 6
Indicator: Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice.
Rebuttal: Again, these may not be annual layers of ice; perhaps they are seasonal layers. Or, God may have created the ice layers, so that they looked as if they had been formed over a very a long time.
Indicators that the earth is much older than 10,000 years of age
We have selected 13 indicators:
Indicator: The Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a method of measuring the length of time that surface rocks have been exposed to cosmic rays. Cosmic rays stream into the atmosphere from all directions in outer space and break neutrons free when they collide with air molecules. When these neutrons hit rocks on the ground, they sometimes react with a tiny number of mineral atoms which create radioactive isotopes. At sea level, a few hundred modified atoms are created each year in a gram of quartz which is near the surface of the ground. New measuring techniques can detect very small numbers of these atoms and thus estimate the number of years that the rocks have been exposed. Scientists have found ages of about 8,500 years for "recent" glacial moraines in Newfoundland and 830,000 years for extinct volcanoes in Nevada.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that cosmic ray levels have remained constant over the past years, and that the degree of reaction between the cosmic rays and the quartz has also been constant. Perhaps these rates in the past have been much higher than at present; this would generate the observed level of modified atoms over a few thousand years.
Indicator: The "nuclide" argument is one of the best proofs of an "old earth". Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. Each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. After an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of the original material is left. Scientists have found that: Every nuclide with a half-life over 80 million years can be found naturally occurring on earth.
All Nuclides with a half-life under 80 million years do not exist naturally at detectable levels.
The only logical explanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the latter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides.
Rebuttal: As before, God might have decided to create the world so that it appeared to have a pre-creation history. Thus, he would have not included nuclides with short half-lives.
Indicator: Because of tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 1 second every 50,000 years. About 380 million years ago, each day would have been very close to 22 hours long! There would have been about 398 days in the year. Studies of rings on rugose coral fossils that were independently estimated to be 370 million years old revealed that when they were alive, there were about 400 days in the year. This relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is rather good evidence that the world was in existence a third of a billion years ago. 1
Rebuttal: The radiometric method used to predict the age of the coral fossils assumes that the speed of light has been constant over the life of the corals. The ring calculations would have assumed that the current rate by which the earth's rotation is decelerating is the same as it has been in the past. The agreement of the two age calculations may thus be coincidental and without significance. Both calculations may be equally flawed.
Indicator: The thickness of the coral reef at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean has been measured at up to 1380 meters. Even the most optimistic coral growth rates would require that the atoll be over 130,000 years of age.
Rebuttal: The temperature, oxygen content of the atmosphere, etc. in ancient times may have been much higher than they are at present. These factors could have caused much faster coral growth in the past. The estimate is without significance.
Indicator: It takes thousands of years of below-freezing temperatures to build a 100 foot layer of permafrost. But large areas in the north are permanently frozen to depths of almost one mile! This took many tens of millennia to accomplish.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the freezing point of water has remained constant over the past thousands of years. There is no proof that this has happened.
Indicator: Radiocarbon dating of wood, using accelerator mass spectrometry, is accurate as far back as 50,000 years. The method has identified many wooden and textile objects to be many tens of thousands of years old.
Rebuttal: Radiocarbon dating assumes that the speed of light is constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicator: Reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 80 million years.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the Atlantic Ocean is increasing in width at a constant rate. Under the influence of the Noahic flood, the rate of increase may have been much higher in the past than it is at present. This would greatly influence the accuracy of the above calculation.
Indicator: The rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 million years old.
Rebuttal: Same as for Indicator 7.
Indicator: Accelerator mass spectrometry measures particles of high atomic mass. Surface rocks have had their ages measured up to 10 million years old by detecting their level of Beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes. 2 Other methods are used for older rocks. Radioactive dating of some earth rocks gives an age of almost 4,000 million years. Some moon rocks and meteorites from outer space give dates in excess of 4000 million years.
Rebuttal: All of these calculations assume that the decay constant (the fraction of the radioactive atoms in a sample which disintegrates per unit of time) is constant. This, in turn, assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that these assumptions are true.
Indicator: If we assumed that all of the minerals which are carried by rivers into the oceans remains trapped in the oceans, then it would take 260 million years for the concentration of sodium to reach its present level. If plankton, fish or other plants adsorb sodium, then it would take much longer. We can conclude that the age of the earth is something greater than a quarter billion years, and is in all probability much longer.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that all of the sodium entered the oceans via rivers. When the "fountains of the great deep," mentioned in Genesis 7:11 and Genesis 8:2, were opened, water rushed to the surface from deep under the earth. This water may well have brought a high concentration of sodium with it.
Indicator: Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. (A nanogram is one thousandth of a million of a gram.) This rate would require 4.5 billion years to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is approximately the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon. This agrees rather well with radioactive dating of moon rocks.
Rebuttal: There is absolutely no indication that the rate at which space dust is deposited on the moon is constant. The solar system may have passed through a region of the universe where the amount of space dust was millions of times higher that it is at the present. The measured age of the moon rocks may well have a massive error.
Indicator: Estimates for the length of time for the galaxies to have spread apart to their present spacing are in excess of 10,000 million years.
Rebuttal: Many astronomers base their age calculations on the Hubble constant (H0). This "constant" describes how fast the universe is expanding. By extrapolating backwards, scientists can estimate when the universe was concentrated into a single point, at the time of the "Big Bang". But this assumes that the entire universe did actually originate in one location in the form of a Big Bang. God could just as easily created the galaxies, say 8,000 years ago. He might have separated them across vast stretches of space and set them moving away from each other.
What astronomers have done is to observe the present location, velocity and acceleration of many galaxies, and assume that the entire universe has existed long enough so that one can extrapolate backwards in time to the time of the big bang. The result is an estimate of the age of the universe at between 10,000 and 16,000 million years. There is faulty logic here. First they assume an old universe, then calculate its age, and find that it is old. They have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indicator: Evolutionary principles applied to geology indicate that about 100 million years ago, the ancient super continent of Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa drifted apart. At first, the drift caused some shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later, the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. This theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. Before this split in land mass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. Since 100 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differently in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.
Rebuttal: The tremendous stresses on the earth's crust which happened during the world-wide flood of Noah may have caused the Atlantic Ocean to have widened from nothing into its present width over a period of a few years circa 2350 BCE, not tens of millions of years as estimated by some scientists. At the time that the split began, there may simply have been different species of dinosaurs created by God, who found the climate and food supply better suited to their needs on either side of the embryo Atlantic Ocean. Over a period of a few years they might have found themselves isolated from each other. Neither the old world nor the new world dinosaurs evolved into new species. The belief in evolution of the species is simply a mistake in interpreting the fossil record. All of the species of land animals, with the exception of humans, were created in a single day.
Indicator: The human genome project has mapped all of our genes. Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics has written: "The genome reveals, indisputably and beyond any serious doubt, that Darwin was right — mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive animal ancestors...The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria. There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development...The theory of evolution is the only way to explain the arrangement of the 30,000 genes and three billion letters that constitute our genetic code...The message our genes send is that Charles Darwin was right." Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., said that if you look at our genome it is clear that "evolution...must make new genes from old parts." Since evolution of the species must have taken billions of years to evolve from bacteria to humans, the earth must be very old.
Rebuttal: That is an invalid conclusion. When God created humanity a few thousand years ago, he could have decided to re-use building blocks that he had already formed in order to create bacteria, mold, etc.
Where did all the fossils come from?
Creation science teaches that all of the land animals (except the ones in the ark) who were alive at the time of the flood drowned. Some turned into fossils and were trapped in the layers of sedimentary rock which were laid down by the flood. Robert Schadewald computed that if all of the animals in the Karroo Formation in Africa were alive at one time and evenly spaced around the entire land surface of earth, that there would be 21 animals (ranging in size from a small lizard to a cow) per acre. A very conservative estimate is that there are 99 fossils elsewhere on earth for each fossil in the Karroo Formation. Thus, assuming that all of these animals were evenly distributed, there would have been over 2,100 living animals per acre of land - "ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs" when the flood hit. This is clearly impossible.
To make the creation science story even more unlikely, only a small percentage of animals ever form fossils when they die. Assuming that 1 of each 100 land animals is fossilized, (an outrageously high number) then there would be 5 land animals per square feet of earth. There would have been wall-to-wall animals, if not multiple-layers of animals. Of course, if all of the fossils had been formed over hundreds of millions of years, then only a very small fraction of the animals would have been present at any one time. There would not have been sufficient animals alive at any one time to crowd each other excessively.
Summary:
Old earth proof: Most scientists accept these indicators, and many more like them, as proof of an old earth and universe. However, those scientists are forced to make a basic assumption: that naturally occurring processes and fundamental constants in the past behaved in the same way as they do today. For example: Radiometric dating techniques assume that the speed of light has remained constant.
Measuring methods involving cosmic rays assume that the number of cosmic rays hitting the earth has not changed much over time.
Space dust has accumulated at about the same rate over many thousands of years
The coral reef argument assumes that the rate of growth of coral is similar in the past to what it is today.
Even if you assume that coral growth was once 10 times faster than today, the atoll is still over 13,000 years old. If you assume that the cosmic ray rate was once 80 times the current level, the hills in Nevada are still over 10,000 years old. If you assumed that space dust accumulated 1000 times faster in the past, then the moon would still be 5 million years old.
Any one of these examples indicates that the earth is probably much older than 10,000 years old, Taken together, they are even more convincing.
Some of the examples can have reduced accuracy caused by sample contamination. For example, nuclide tests assume that no "parent" or "daughter" isotopes migrated in or out of the sample. Fortunately, these errors can been eliminated by testing of multiple samples from a variety of locations.
Failure of old-earth proof: The main weaknesses of the old earth indicators is that they all make assumptions about the uniform nature of certain fundamental factors: the speed of light, mass of the electron, gravitational constant, decay rates of radioactive substances, etc. These various parameters do seem constant today. However, there is no totally convincing proof that they have remained that way over long periods of time in the past. If one assumes that the Bible is correct, and that the earth and the rest of the universe was created between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, then one can estimate roughly how these "constants" have varied over the past millennia.
From: http://www.religioustolerance.org/oldearth.htmLet's look at both sides:
18 INDICATORS OF AN "OLD EARTH"
(About 4.5 billion years old)
Age of the galaxy
There is one good indicator that our galaxy is very old:
Indicator: The sun is one of countless numbers of stars in our galaxy. The galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. This means that light from some stars in our galaxy has taken many tens of thousands of years to reach earth. This would indicate that our galaxy is much older than 10 millennia.
Rebuttal: Believers in a young earth might argue that God created our galaxy less than 10,000 years ago, complete with light rays going in all directions from each star, in order that the galaxy would appear to be more ancient than it really is. That is, God created the universe as if it had a history at the time of creation. Also, the above indicator assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicators that the earth is over 8,000 years old
There are three direct indicators that the earth's age is in excess of 8000 years:
Indicator: Some bristlecone pine trees in the White-Inyo mountain range of California date back beyond 2000 BCE. One, labeled "Methuselah" germinated in 2726 BCE, centuries before the date that conservative Christians assign to the Noahic flood. But their tree rings have been matched with those of dead trees; this shows that the latter germinated about 6000 BCE, which predates the year 4004 BCE by 2 millennia.
Rebuttal: When God created the pine trees which are now dead, he may have created them complete with tree rings as if they had been alive before they were created.
Indicator: In the Green River there are varves (millions of annual layers of sediment) laid down over the past 20 million years. 4
Rebuttal: These varves may not represent annual layers of sediment; perhaps they are something like hourly layers caused by some unknown factor. Alternately, when God created the river, he might have created it as if it had a multi-million year history of varves.
Indicator: During each springtime, tiny, one-celled algae bloom in Lake Suigetsu, Japan. They die and sink to the bottom of the lake. Here, they create a thin, white layer. During the rest of the year, dark clay sediments settle to the bottom. The result are alternating dark and light annual layers -- much like the annual growth rings on a tree. Scientists have counted about 45,000 layers; they have been accumulating since about 43,000 BCE. This is far beyond the estimates of 6 to 10 millennia made by many creation scientists.
Rebuttal: Perhaps in the past, many layers were laid down each year, due to temperature fluctuations. Thus, 45,000 layers could have taken fewer than 10 millennia. 6
Indicator: Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice.
Rebuttal: Again, these may not be annual layers of ice; perhaps they are seasonal layers. Or, God may have created the ice layers, so that they looked as if they had been formed over a very a long time.
Indicators that the earth is much older than 10,000 years of age
We have selected 13 indicators:
Indicator: The Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a method of measuring the length of time that surface rocks have been exposed to cosmic rays. Cosmic rays stream into the atmosphere from all directions in outer space and break neutrons free when they collide with air molecules. When these neutrons hit rocks on the ground, they sometimes react with a tiny number of mineral atoms which create radioactive isotopes. At sea level, a few hundred modified atoms are created each year in a gram of quartz which is near the surface of the ground. New measuring techniques can detect very small numbers of these atoms and thus estimate the number of years that the rocks have been exposed. Scientists have found ages of about 8,500 years for "recent" glacial moraines in Newfoundland and 830,000 years for extinct volcanoes in Nevada.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that cosmic ray levels have remained constant over the past years, and that the degree of reaction between the cosmic rays and the quartz has also been constant. Perhaps these rates in the past have been much higher than at present; this would generate the observed level of modified atoms over a few thousand years.
Indicator: The "nuclide" argument is one of the best proofs of an "old earth". Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. Each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. After an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of the original material is left. Scientists have found that: Every nuclide with a half-life over 80 million years can be found naturally occurring on earth.
All Nuclides with a half-life under 80 million years do not exist naturally at detectable levels.
The only logical explanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the latter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides.
Rebuttal: As before, God might have decided to create the world so that it appeared to have a pre-creation history. Thus, he would have not included nuclides with short half-lives.
Indicator: Because of tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 1 second every 50,000 years. About 380 million years ago, each day would have been very close to 22 hours long! There would have been about 398 days in the year. Studies of rings on rugose coral fossils that were independently estimated to be 370 million years old revealed that when they were alive, there were about 400 days in the year. This relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is rather good evidence that the world was in existence a third of a billion years ago. 1
Rebuttal: The radiometric method used to predict the age of the coral fossils assumes that the speed of light has been constant over the life of the corals. The ring calculations would have assumed that the current rate by which the earth's rotation is decelerating is the same as it has been in the past. The agreement of the two age calculations may thus be coincidental and without significance. Both calculations may be equally flawed.
Indicator: The thickness of the coral reef at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean has been measured at up to 1380 meters. Even the most optimistic coral growth rates would require that the atoll be over 130,000 years of age.
Rebuttal: The temperature, oxygen content of the atmosphere, etc. in ancient times may have been much higher than they are at present. These factors could have caused much faster coral growth in the past. The estimate is without significance.
Indicator: It takes thousands of years of below-freezing temperatures to build a 100 foot layer of permafrost. But large areas in the north are permanently frozen to depths of almost one mile! This took many tens of millennia to accomplish.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the freezing point of water has remained constant over the past thousands of years. There is no proof that this has happened.
Indicator: Radiocarbon dating of wood, using accelerator mass spectrometry, is accurate as far back as 50,000 years. The method has identified many wooden and textile objects to be many tens of thousands of years old.
Rebuttal: Radiocarbon dating assumes that the speed of light is constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicator: Reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 80 million years.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the Atlantic Ocean is increasing in width at a constant rate. Under the influence of the Noahic flood, the rate of increase may have been much higher in the past than it is at present. This would greatly influence the accuracy of the above calculation.
Indicator: The rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 million years old.
Rebuttal: Same as for Indicator 7.
Indicator: Accelerator mass spectrometry measures particles of high atomic mass. Surface rocks have had their ages measured up to 10 million years old by detecting their level of Beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes. 2 Other methods are used for older rocks. Radioactive dating of some earth rocks gives an age of almost 4,000 million years. Some moon rocks and meteorites from outer space give dates in excess of 4000 million years.
Rebuttal: All of these calculations assume that the decay constant (the fraction of the radioactive atoms in a sample which disintegrates per unit of time) is constant. This, in turn, assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that these assumptions are true.
Indicator: If we assumed that all of the minerals which are carried by rivers into the oceans remains trapped in the oceans, then it would take 260 million years for the concentration of sodium to reach its present level. If plankton, fish or other plants adsorb sodium, then it would take much longer. We can conclude that the age of the earth is something greater than a quarter billion years, and is in all probability much longer.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that all of the sodium entered the oceans via rivers. When the "fountains of the great deep," mentioned in Genesis 7:11 and Genesis 8:2, were opened, water rushed to the surface from deep under the earth. This water may well have brought a high concentration of sodium with it.
Indicator: Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. (A nanogram is one thousandth of a million of a gram.) This rate would require 4.5 billion years to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is approximately the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon. This agrees rather well with radioactive dating of moon rocks.
Rebuttal: There is absolutely no indication that the rate at which space dust is deposited on the moon is constant. The solar system may have passed through a region of the universe where the amount of space dust was millions of times higher that it is at the present. The measured age of the moon rocks may well have a massive error.
Indicator: Estimates for the length of time for the galaxies to have spread apart to their present spacing are in excess of 10,000 million years.
Rebuttal: Many astronomers base their age calculations on the Hubble constant (H0). This "constant" describes how fast the universe is expanding. By extrapolating backwards, scientists can estimate when the universe was concentrated into a single point, at the time of the "Big Bang". But this assumes that the entire universe did actually originate in one location in the form of a Big Bang. God could just as easily created the galaxies, say 8,000 years ago. He might have separated them across vast stretches of space and set them moving away from each other.
What astronomers have done is to observe the present location, velocity and acceleration of many galaxies, and assume that the entire universe has existed long enough so that one can extrapolate backwards in time to the time of the big bang. The result is an estimate of the age of the universe at between 10,000 and 16,000 million years. There is faulty logic here. First they assume an old universe, then calculate its age, and find that it is old. They have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indicator: Evolutionary principles applied to geology indicate that about 100 million years ago, the ancient super continent of Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa drifted apart. At first, the drift caused some shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later, the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. This theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. Before this split in land mass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. Since 100 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differently in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.
Rebuttal: The tremendous stresses on the earth's crust which happened during the world-wide flood of Noah may have caused the Atlantic Ocean to have widened from nothing into its present width over a period of a few years circa 2350 BCE, not tens of millions of years as estimated by some scientists. At the time that the split began, there may simply have been different species of dinosaurs created by God, who found the climate and food supply better suited to their needs on either side of the embryo Atlantic Ocean. Over a period of a few years they might have found themselves isolated from each other. Neither the old world nor the new world dinosaurs evolved into new species. The belief in evolution of the species is simply a mistake in interpreting the fossil record. All of the species of land animals, with the exception of humans, were created in a single day.
Indicator: The human genome project has mapped all of our genes. Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics has written: "The genome reveals, indisputably and beyond any serious doubt, that Darwin was right — mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive animal ancestors...The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria. There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development...The theory of evolution is the only way to explain the arrangement of the 30,000 genes and three billion letters that constitute our genetic code...The message our genes send is that Charles Darwin was right." Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., said that if you look at our genome it is clear that "evolution...must make new genes from old parts." Since evolution of the species must have taken billions of years to evolve from bacteria to humans, the earth must be very old.
Rebuttal: That is an invalid conclusion. When God created humanity a few thousand years ago, he could have decided to re-use building blocks that he had already formed in order to create bacteria, mold, etc.
Where did all the fossils come from?
Creation science teaches that all of the land animals (except the ones in the ark) who were alive at the time of the flood drowned. Some turned into fossils and were trapped in the layers of sedimentary rock which were laid down by the flood. Robert Schadewald computed that if all of the animals in the Karroo Formation in Africa were alive at one time and evenly spaced around the entire land surface of earth, that there would be 21 animals (ranging in size from a small lizard to a cow) per acre. A very conservative estimate is that there are 99 fossils elsewhere on earth for each fossil in the Karroo Formation. Thus, assuming that all of these animals were evenly distributed, there would have been over 2,100 living animals per acre of land - "ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs" when the flood hit. This is clearly impossible.
To make the creation science story even more unlikely, only a small percentage of animals ever form fossils when they die. Assuming that 1 of each 100 land animals is fossilized, (an outrageously high number) then there would be 5 land animals per square feet of earth. There would have been wall-to-wall animals, if not multiple-layers of animals. Of course, if all of the fossils had been formed over hundreds of millions of years, then only a very small fraction of the animals would have been present at any one time. There would not have been sufficient animals alive at any one time to crowd each other excessively.
Summary:
Old earth proof: Most scientists accept these indicators, and many more like them, as proof of an old earth and universe. However, those scientists are forced to make a basic assumption: that naturally occurring processes and fundamental constants in the past behaved in the same way as they do today. For example: Radiometric dating techniques assume that the speed of light has remained constant.
Measuring methods involving cosmic rays assume that the number of cosmic rays hitting the earth has not changed much over time.
Space dust has accumulated at about the same rate over many thousands of years
The coral reef argument assumes that the rate of growth of coral is similar in the past to what it is today.
Even if you assume that coral growth was once 10 times faster than today, the atoll is still over 13,000 years old. If you assume that the cosmic ray rate was once 80 times the current level, the hills in Nevada are still over 10,000 years old. If you assumed that space dust accumulated 1000 times faster in the past, then the moon would still be 5 million years old.
Any one of these examples indicates that the earth is probably much older than 10,000 years old, Taken together, they are even more convincing.
Some of the examples can have reduced accuracy caused by sample contamination. For example, nuclide tests assume that no "parent" or "daughter" isotopes migrated in or out of the sample. Fortunately, these errors can been eliminated by testing of multiple samples from a variety of locations.
Failure of old-earth proof: The main weaknesses of the old earth indicators is that they all make assumptions about the uniform nature of certain fundamental factors: the speed of light, mass of the electron, gravitational constant, decay rates of radioactive substances, etc. These various parameters do seem constant today. However, there is no totally convincing proof that they have remained that way over long periods of time in the past. If one assumes that the Bible is correct, and that the earth and the rest of the universe was created between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, then one can estimate roughly how these "constants" have varied over the past millennia.
From: http://www.religioustolerance.org/oldearth.htm
18 INDICATORS OF AN "OLD EARTH"
(About 4.5 billion years old)
Age of the galaxy
There is one good indicator that our galaxy is very old:
Indicator: The sun is one of countless numbers of stars in our galaxy. The galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. This means that light from some stars in our galaxy has taken many tens of thousands of years to reach earth. This would indicate that our galaxy is much older than 10 millennia.
Rebuttal: Believers in a young earth might argue that God created our galaxy less than 10,000 years ago, complete with light rays going in all directions from each star, in order that the galaxy would appear to be more ancient than it really is. That is, God created the universe as if it had a history at the time of creation. Also, the above indicator assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicators that the earth is over 8,000 years old
There are three direct indicators that the earth's age is in excess of 8000 years:
Indicator: Some bristlecone pine trees in the White-Inyo mountain range of California date back beyond 2000 BCE. One, labeled "Methuselah" germinated in 2726 BCE, centuries before the date that conservative Christians assign to the Noahic flood. But their tree rings have been matched with those of dead trees; this shows that the latter germinated about 6000 BCE, which predates the year 4004 BCE by 2 millennia.
Rebuttal: When God created the pine trees which are now dead, he may have created them complete with tree rings as if they had been alive before they were created.
Indicator: In the Green River there are varves (millions of annual layers of sediment) laid down over the past 20 million years. 4
Rebuttal: These varves may not represent annual layers of sediment; perhaps they are something like hourly layers caused by some unknown factor. Alternately, when God created the river, he might have created it as if it had a multi-million year history of varves.
Indicator: During each springtime, tiny, one-celled algae bloom in Lake Suigetsu, Japan. They die and sink to the bottom of the lake. Here, they create a thin, white layer. During the rest of the year, dark clay sediments settle to the bottom. The result are alternating dark and light annual layers -- much like the annual growth rings on a tree. Scientists have counted about 45,000 layers; they have been accumulating since about 43,000 BCE. This is far beyond the estimates of 6 to 10 millennia made by many creation scientists.
Rebuttal: Perhaps in the past, many layers were laid down each year, due to temperature fluctuations. Thus, 45,000 layers could have taken fewer than 10 millennia. 6
Indicator: Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice.
Rebuttal: Again, these may not be annual layers of ice; perhaps they are seasonal layers. Or, God may have created the ice layers, so that they looked as if they had been formed over a very a long time.
Indicators that the earth is much older than 10,000 years of age
We have selected 13 indicators:
Indicator: The Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a method of measuring the length of time that surface rocks have been exposed to cosmic rays. Cosmic rays stream into the atmosphere from all directions in outer space and break neutrons free when they collide with air molecules. When these neutrons hit rocks on the ground, they sometimes react with a tiny number of mineral atoms which create radioactive isotopes. At sea level, a few hundred modified atoms are created each year in a gram of quartz which is near the surface of the ground. New measuring techniques can detect very small numbers of these atoms and thus estimate the number of years that the rocks have been exposed. Scientists have found ages of about 8,500 years for "recent" glacial moraines in Newfoundland and 830,000 years for extinct volcanoes in Nevada.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that cosmic ray levels have remained constant over the past years, and that the degree of reaction between the cosmic rays and the quartz has also been constant. Perhaps these rates in the past have been much higher than at present; this would generate the observed level of modified atoms over a few thousand years.
Indicator: The "nuclide" argument is one of the best proofs of an "old earth". Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. Each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. After an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of the original material is left. Scientists have found that: Every nuclide with a half-life over 80 million years can be found naturally occurring on earth.
All Nuclides with a half-life under 80 million years do not exist naturally at detectable levels.
The only logical explanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the latter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides.
Rebuttal: As before, God might have decided to create the world so that it appeared to have a pre-creation history. Thus, he would have not included nuclides with short half-lives.
Indicator: Because of tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 1 second every 50,000 years. About 380 million years ago, each day would have been very close to 22 hours long! There would have been about 398 days in the year. Studies of rings on rugose coral fossils that were independently estimated to be 370 million years old revealed that when they were alive, there were about 400 days in the year. This relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is rather good evidence that the world was in existence a third of a billion years ago. 1
Rebuttal: The radiometric method used to predict the age of the coral fossils assumes that the speed of light has been constant over the life of the corals. The ring calculations would have assumed that the current rate by which the earth's rotation is decelerating is the same as it has been in the past. The agreement of the two age calculations may thus be coincidental and without significance. Both calculations may be equally flawed.
Indicator: The thickness of the coral reef at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean has been measured at up to 1380 meters. Even the most optimistic coral growth rates would require that the atoll be over 130,000 years of age.
Rebuttal: The temperature, oxygen content of the atmosphere, etc. in ancient times may have been much higher than they are at present. These factors could have caused much faster coral growth in the past. The estimate is without significance.
Indicator: It takes thousands of years of below-freezing temperatures to build a 100 foot layer of permafrost. But large areas in the north are permanently frozen to depths of almost one mile! This took many tens of millennia to accomplish.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the freezing point of water has remained constant over the past thousands of years. There is no proof that this has happened.
Indicator: Radiocarbon dating of wood, using accelerator mass spectrometry, is accurate as far back as 50,000 years. The method has identified many wooden and textile objects to be many tens of thousands of years old.
Rebuttal: Radiocarbon dating assumes that the speed of light is constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicator: Reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 80 million years.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the Atlantic Ocean is increasing in width at a constant rate. Under the influence of the Noahic flood, the rate of increase may have been much higher in the past than it is at present. This would greatly influence the accuracy of the above calculation.
Indicator: The rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 million years old.
Rebuttal: Same as for Indicator 7.
Indicator: Accelerator mass spectrometry measures particles of high atomic mass. Surface rocks have had their ages measured up to 10 million years old by detecting their level of Beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes. 2 Other methods are used for older rocks. Radioactive dating of some earth rocks gives an age of almost 4,000 million years. Some moon rocks and meteorites from outer space give dates in excess of 4000 million years.
Rebuttal: All of these calculations assume that the decay constant (the fraction of the radioactive atoms in a sample which disintegrates per unit of time) is constant. This, in turn, assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that these assumptions are true.
Indicator: If we assumed that all of the minerals which are carried by rivers into the oceans remains trapped in the oceans, then it would take 260 million years for the concentration of sodium to reach its present level. If plankton, fish or other plants adsorb sodium, then it would take much longer. We can conclude that the age of the earth is something greater than a quarter billion years, and is in all probability much longer.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that all of the sodium entered the oceans via rivers. When the "fountains of the great deep," mentioned in Genesis 7:11 and Genesis 8:2, were opened, water rushed to the surface from deep under the earth. This water may well have brought a high concentration of sodium with it.
Indicator: Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. (A nanogram is one thousandth of a million of a gram.) This rate would require 4.5 billion years to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is approximately the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon. This agrees rather well with radioactive dating of moon rocks.
Rebuttal: There is absolutely no indication that the rate at which space dust is deposited on the moon is constant. The solar system may have passed through a region of the universe where the amount of space dust was millions of times higher that it is at the present. The measured age of the moon rocks may well have a massive error.
Indicator: Estimates for the length of time for the galaxies to have spread apart to their present spacing are in excess of 10,000 million years.
Rebuttal: Many astronomers base their age calculations on the Hubble constant (H0). This "constant" describes how fast the universe is expanding. By extrapolating backwards, scientists can estimate when the universe was concentrated into a single point, at the time of the "Big Bang". But this assumes that the entire universe did actually originate in one location in the form of a Big Bang. God could just as easily created the galaxies, say 8,000 years ago. He might have separated them across vast stretches of space and set them moving away from each other.
What astronomers have done is to observe the present location, velocity and acceleration of many galaxies, and assume that the entire universe has existed long enough so that one can extrapolate backwards in time to the time of the big bang. The result is an estimate of the age of the universe at between 10,000 and 16,000 million years. There is faulty logic here. First they assume an old universe, then calculate its age, and find that it is old. They have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indicator: Evolutionary principles applied to geology indicate that about 100 million years ago, the ancient super continent of Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa drifted apart. At first, the drift caused some shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later, the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. This theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. Before this split in land mass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. Since 100 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differently in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.
Rebuttal: The tremendous stresses on the earth's crust which happened during the world-wide flood of Noah may have caused the Atlantic Ocean to have widened from nothing into its present width over a period of a few years circa 2350 BCE, not tens of millions of years as estimated by some scientists. At the time that the split began, there may simply have been different species of dinosaurs created by God, who found the climate and food supply better suited to their needs on either side of the embryo Atlantic Ocean. Over a period of a few years they might have found themselves isolated from each other. Neither the old world nor the new world dinosaurs evolved into new species. The belief in evolution of the species is simply a mistake in interpreting the fossil record. All of the species of land animals, with the exception of humans, were created in a single day.
Indicator: The human genome project has mapped all of our genes. Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics has written: "The genome reveals, indisputably and beyond any serious doubt, that Darwin was right — mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive animal ancestors...The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria. There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development...The theory of evolution is the only way to explain the arrangement of the 30,000 genes and three billion letters that constitute our genetic code...The message our genes send is that Charles Darwin was right." Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., said that if you look at our genome it is clear that "evolution...must make new genes from old parts." Since evolution of the species must have taken billions of years to evolve from bacteria to humans, the earth must be very old.
Rebuttal: That is an invalid conclusion. When God created humanity a few thousand years ago, he could have decided to re-use building blocks that he had already formed in order to create bacteria, mold, etc.
Where did all the fossils come from?
Creation science teaches that all of the land animals (except the ones in the ark) who were alive at the time of the flood drowned. Some turned into fossils and were trapped in the layers of sedimentary rock which were laid down by the flood. Robert Schadewald computed that if all of the animals in the Karroo Formation in Africa were alive at one time and evenly spaced around the entire land surface of earth, that there would be 21 animals (ranging in size from a small lizard to a cow) per acre. A very conservative estimate is that there are 99 fossils elsewhere on earth for each fossil in the Karroo Formation. Thus, assuming that all of these animals were evenly distributed, there would have been over 2,100 living animals per acre of land - "ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs" when the flood hit. This is clearly impossible.
To make the creation science story even more unlikely, only a small percentage of animals ever form fossils when they die. Assuming that 1 of each 100 land animals is fossilized, (an outrageously high number) then there would be 5 land animals per square feet of earth. There would have been wall-to-wall animals, if not multiple-layers of animals. Of course, if all of the fossils had been formed over hundreds of millions of years, then only a very small fraction of the animals would have been present at any one time. There would not have been sufficient animals alive at any one time to crowd each other excessively.
Summary:
Old earth proof: Most scientists accept these indicators, and many more like them, as proof of an old earth and universe. However, those scientists are forced to make a basic assumption: that naturally occurring processes and fundamental constants in the past behaved in the same way as they do today. For example: Radiometric dating techniques assume that the speed of light has remained constant.
Measuring methods involving cosmic rays assume that the number of cosmic rays hitting the earth has not changed much over time.
Space dust has accumulated at about the same rate over many thousands of years
The coral reef argument assumes that the rate of growth of coral is similar in the past to what it is today.
Even if you assume that coral growth was once 10 times faster than today, the atoll is still over 13,000 years old. If you assume that the cosmic ray rate was once 80 times the current level, the hills in Nevada are still over 10,000 years old. If you assumed that space dust accumulated 1000 times faster in the past, then the moon would still be 5 million years old.
Any one of these examples indicates that the earth is probably much older than 10,000 years old, Taken together, they are even more convincing.
Some of the examples can have reduced accuracy caused by sample contamination. For example, nuclide tests assume that no "parent" or "daughter" isotopes migrated in or out of the sample. Fortunately, these errors can been eliminated by testing of multiple samples from a variety of locations.
Failure of old-earth proof: The main weaknesses of the old earth indicators is that they all make assumptions about the uniform nature of certain fundamental factors: the speed of light, mass of the electron, gravitational constant, decay rates of radioactive substances, etc. These various parameters do seem constant today. However, there is no totally convincing proof that they have remained that way over long periods of time in the past. If one assumes that the Bible is correct, and that the earth and the rest of the universe was created between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, then one can estimate roughly how these "constants" have varied over the past millennia.
From: http://www.religioustolerance.org/oldearth.htmLet's look at both sides:
18 INDICATORS OF AN "OLD EARTH"
(About 4.5 billion years old)
Age of the galaxy
There is one good indicator that our galaxy is very old:
Indicator: The sun is one of countless numbers of stars in our galaxy. The galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. This means that light from some stars in our galaxy has taken many tens of thousands of years to reach earth. This would indicate that our galaxy is much older than 10 millennia.
Rebuttal: Believers in a young earth might argue that God created our galaxy less than 10,000 years ago, complete with light rays going in all directions from each star, in order that the galaxy would appear to be more ancient than it really is. That is, God created the universe as if it had a history at the time of creation. Also, the above indicator assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicators that the earth is over 8,000 years old
There are three direct indicators that the earth's age is in excess of 8000 years:
Indicator: Some bristlecone pine trees in the White-Inyo mountain range of California date back beyond 2000 BCE. One, labeled "Methuselah" germinated in 2726 BCE, centuries before the date that conservative Christians assign to the Noahic flood. But their tree rings have been matched with those of dead trees; this shows that the latter germinated about 6000 BCE, which predates the year 4004 BCE by 2 millennia.
Rebuttal: When God created the pine trees which are now dead, he may have created them complete with tree rings as if they had been alive before they were created.
Indicator: In the Green River there are varves (millions of annual layers of sediment) laid down over the past 20 million years. 4
Rebuttal: These varves may not represent annual layers of sediment; perhaps they are something like hourly layers caused by some unknown factor. Alternately, when God created the river, he might have created it as if it had a multi-million year history of varves.
Indicator: During each springtime, tiny, one-celled algae bloom in Lake Suigetsu, Japan. They die and sink to the bottom of the lake. Here, they create a thin, white layer. During the rest of the year, dark clay sediments settle to the bottom. The result are alternating dark and light annual layers -- much like the annual growth rings on a tree. Scientists have counted about 45,000 layers; they have been accumulating since about 43,000 BCE. This is far beyond the estimates of 6 to 10 millennia made by many creation scientists.
Rebuttal: Perhaps in the past, many layers were laid down each year, due to temperature fluctuations. Thus, 45,000 layers could have taken fewer than 10 millennia. 6
Indicator: Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice.
Rebuttal: Again, these may not be annual layers of ice; perhaps they are seasonal layers. Or, God may have created the ice layers, so that they looked as if they had been formed over a very a long time.
Indicators that the earth is much older than 10,000 years of age
We have selected 13 indicators:
Indicator: The Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a method of measuring the length of time that surface rocks have been exposed to cosmic rays. Cosmic rays stream into the atmosphere from all directions in outer space and break neutrons free when they collide with air molecules. When these neutrons hit rocks on the ground, they sometimes react with a tiny number of mineral atoms which create radioactive isotopes. At sea level, a few hundred modified atoms are created each year in a gram of quartz which is near the surface of the ground. New measuring techniques can detect very small numbers of these atoms and thus estimate the number of years that the rocks have been exposed. Scientists have found ages of about 8,500 years for "recent" glacial moraines in Newfoundland and 830,000 years for extinct volcanoes in Nevada.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that cosmic ray levels have remained constant over the past years, and that the degree of reaction between the cosmic rays and the quartz has also been constant. Perhaps these rates in the past have been much higher than at present; this would generate the observed level of modified atoms over a few thousand years.
Indicator: The "nuclide" argument is one of the best proofs of an "old earth". Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. Each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. After an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of the original material is left. Scientists have found that: Every nuclide with a half-life over 80 million years can be found naturally occurring on earth.
All Nuclides with a half-life under 80 million years do not exist naturally at detectable levels.
The only logical explanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the latter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides.
Rebuttal: As before, God might have decided to create the world so that it appeared to have a pre-creation history. Thus, he would have not included nuclides with short half-lives.
Indicator: Because of tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 1 second every 50,000 years. About 380 million years ago, each day would have been very close to 22 hours long! There would have been about 398 days in the year. Studies of rings on rugose coral fossils that were independently estimated to be 370 million years old revealed that when they were alive, there were about 400 days in the year. This relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is rather good evidence that the world was in existence a third of a billion years ago. 1
Rebuttal: The radiometric method used to predict the age of the coral fossils assumes that the speed of light has been constant over the life of the corals. The ring calculations would have assumed that the current rate by which the earth's rotation is decelerating is the same as it has been in the past. The agreement of the two age calculations may thus be coincidental and without significance. Both calculations may be equally flawed.
Indicator: The thickness of the coral reef at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean has been measured at up to 1380 meters. Even the most optimistic coral growth rates would require that the atoll be over 130,000 years of age.
Rebuttal: The temperature, oxygen content of the atmosphere, etc. in ancient times may have been much higher than they are at present. These factors could have caused much faster coral growth in the past. The estimate is without significance.
Indicator: It takes thousands of years of below-freezing temperatures to build a 100 foot layer of permafrost. But large areas in the north are permanently frozen to depths of almost one mile! This took many tens of millennia to accomplish.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the freezing point of water has remained constant over the past thousands of years. There is no proof that this has happened.
Indicator: Radiocarbon dating of wood, using accelerator mass spectrometry, is accurate as far back as 50,000 years. The method has identified many wooden and textile objects to be many tens of thousands of years old.
Rebuttal: Radiocarbon dating assumes that the speed of light is constant. There is no proof that this is true.
Indicator: Reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 80 million years.
Rebuttal: This calculation assumes that the Atlantic Ocean is increasing in width at a constant rate. Under the influence of the Noahic flood, the rate of increase may have been much higher in the past than it is at present. This would greatly influence the accuracy of the above calculation.
Indicator: The rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 million years old.
Rebuttal: Same as for Indicator 7.
Indicator: Accelerator mass spectrometry measures particles of high atomic mass. Surface rocks have had their ages measured up to 10 million years old by detecting their level of Beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes. 2 Other methods are used for older rocks. Radioactive dating of some earth rocks gives an age of almost 4,000 million years. Some moon rocks and meteorites from outer space give dates in excess of 4000 million years.
Rebuttal: All of these calculations assume that the decay constant (the fraction of the radioactive atoms in a sample which disintegrates per unit of time) is constant. This, in turn, assumes that the speed of light has remained constant. There is no proof that these assumptions are true.
Indicator: If we assumed that all of the minerals which are carried by rivers into the oceans remains trapped in the oceans, then it would take 260 million years for the concentration of sodium to reach its present level. If plankton, fish or other plants adsorb sodium, then it would take much longer. We can conclude that the age of the earth is something greater than a quarter billion years, and is in all probability much longer.
Rebuttal: This indicator assumes that all of the sodium entered the oceans via rivers. When the "fountains of the great deep," mentioned in Genesis 7:11 and Genesis 8:2, were opened, water rushed to the surface from deep under the earth. This water may well have brought a high concentration of sodium with it.
Indicator: Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. (A nanogram is one thousandth of a million of a gram.) This rate would require 4.5 billion years to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is approximately the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon. This agrees rather well with radioactive dating of moon rocks.
Rebuttal: There is absolutely no indication that the rate at which space dust is deposited on the moon is constant. The solar system may have passed through a region of the universe where the amount of space dust was millions of times higher that it is at the present. The measured age of the moon rocks may well have a massive error.
Indicator: Estimates for the length of time for the galaxies to have spread apart to their present spacing are in excess of 10,000 million years.
Rebuttal: Many astronomers base their age calculations on the Hubble constant (H0). This "constant" describes how fast the universe is expanding. By extrapolating backwards, scientists can estimate when the universe was concentrated into a single point, at the time of the "Big Bang". But this assumes that the entire universe did actually originate in one location in the form of a Big Bang. God could just as easily created the galaxies, say 8,000 years ago. He might have separated them across vast stretches of space and set them moving away from each other.
What astronomers have done is to observe the present location, velocity and acceleration of many galaxies, and assume that the entire universe has existed long enough so that one can extrapolate backwards in time to the time of the big bang. The result is an estimate of the age of the universe at between 10,000 and 16,000 million years. There is faulty logic here. First they assume an old universe, then calculate its age, and find that it is old. They have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indicator: Evolutionary principles applied to geology indicate that about 100 million years ago, the ancient super continent of Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa drifted apart. At first, the drift caused some shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later, the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. This theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. Before this split in land mass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. Since 100 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differently in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.
Rebuttal: The tremendous stresses on the earth's crust which happened during the world-wide flood of Noah may have caused the Atlantic Ocean to have widened from nothing into its present width over a period of a few years circa 2350 BCE, not tens of millions of years as estimated by some scientists. At the time that the split began, there may simply have been different species of dinosaurs created by God, who found the climate and food supply better suited to their needs on either side of the embryo Atlantic Ocean. Over a period of a few years they might have found themselves isolated from each other. Neither the old world nor the new world dinosaurs evolved into new species. The belief in evolution of the species is simply a mistake in interpreting the fossil record. All of the species of land animals, with the exception of humans, were created in a single day.
Indicator: The human genome project has mapped all of our genes. Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics has written: "The genome reveals, indisputably and beyond any serious doubt, that Darwin was right — mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive animal ancestors...The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria. There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development...The theory of evolution is the only way to explain the arrangement of the 30,000 genes and three billion letters that constitute our genetic code...The message our genes send is that Charles Darwin was right." Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., said that if you look at our genome it is clear that "evolution...must make new genes from old parts." Since evolution of the species must have taken billions of years to evolve from bacteria to humans, the earth must be very old.
Rebuttal: That is an invalid conclusion. When God created humanity a few thousand years ago, he could have decided to re-use building blocks that he had already formed in order to create bacteria, mold, etc.
Where did all the fossils come from?
Creation science teaches that all of the land animals (except the ones in the ark) who were alive at the time of the flood drowned. Some turned into fossils and were trapped in the layers of sedimentary rock which were laid down by the flood. Robert Schadewald computed that if all of the animals in the Karroo Formation in Africa were alive at one time and evenly spaced around the entire land surface of earth, that there would be 21 animals (ranging in size from a small lizard to a cow) per acre. A very conservative estimate is that there are 99 fossils elsewhere on earth for each fossil in the Karroo Formation. Thus, assuming that all of these animals were evenly distributed, there would have been over 2,100 living animals per acre of land - "ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs" when the flood hit. This is clearly impossible.
To make the creation science story even more unlikely, only a small percentage of animals ever form fossils when they die. Assuming that 1 of each 100 land animals is fossilized, (an outrageously high number) then there would be 5 land animals per square feet of earth. There would have been wall-to-wall animals, if not multiple-layers of animals. Of course, if all of the fossils had been formed over hundreds of millions of years, then only a very small fraction of the animals would have been present at any one time. There would not have been sufficient animals alive at any one time to crowd each other excessively.
Summary:
Old earth proof: Most scientists accept these indicators, and many more like them, as proof of an old earth and universe. However, those scientists are forced to make a basic assumption: that naturally occurring processes and fundamental constants in the past behaved in the same way as they do today. For example: Radiometric dating techniques assume that the speed of light has remained constant.
Measuring methods involving cosmic rays assume that the number of cosmic rays hitting the earth has not changed much over time.
Space dust has accumulated at about the same rate over many thousands of years
The coral reef argument assumes that the rate of growth of coral is similar in the past to what it is today.
Even if you assume that coral growth was once 10 times faster than today, the atoll is still over 13,000 years old. If you assume that the cosmic ray rate was once 80 times the current level, the hills in Nevada are still over 10,000 years old. If you assumed that space dust accumulated 1000 times faster in the past, then the moon would still be 5 million years old.
Any one of these examples indicates that the earth is probably much older than 10,000 years old, Taken together, they are even more convincing.
Some of the examples can have reduced accuracy caused by sample contamination. For example, nuclide tests assume that no "parent" or "daughter" isotopes migrated in or out of the sample. Fortunately, these errors can been eliminated by testing of multiple samples from a variety of locations.
Failure of old-earth proof: The main weaknesses of the old earth indicators is that they all make assumptions about the uniform nature of certain fundamental factors: the speed of light, mass of the electron, gravitational constant, decay rates of radioactive substances, etc. These various parameters do seem constant today. However, there is no totally convincing proof that they have remained that way over long periods of time in the past. If one assumes that the Bible is correct, and that the earth and the rest of the universe was created between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, then one can estimate roughly how these "constants" have varied over the past millennia.
From: http://www.religioustolerance.org/oldearth.htm
Arkanjel
New Member
Ill start at the top, here is a scientific rebuttal for the age of the galaxy
Astronomers have recently announced that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. This is inferred because distant supernovae are unexpectedly dim. This is interpreted as implying that the expansion of the universe is faster now than it was before. This expansion is in turn explained by some mysterious repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart.
Another possible explanation is that the speed of light is slowing down. This explanation would avoid the need for such a repulsive force. But in order to understand this explanation, we need to understand more about the red shift.
Cosmologists believe that the red shift of light is caused by the expansion of space as light travels from distant objects. This expansion of space causes the light waves to become farther apart, and thus longer, and red shifted. The more time light has been traveling, the more time there has been for space to expand, and the greater the red shift. Thus more distant objects have a larger red shift.
Originally, it was believed that the red shift was proportional to distance (Hubble's law). However, the accelerating expansion of the universe was inferred because distant supernovae are fainter than expected based on their red shift. This means that they are farther away than one would expect based on the linear increase of red shift with distance. So if we let r(d) be the red shift of an object that is distance d away from us, then r(d) increases rapidly for objects near us, but then more slowly for objects farther away. Thus these objects are fainter than they would be if the red shift function r(d) were a constant multiple of d.
This is interpreted as evidence that the universe was expanding more slowly in the past, so that the red shift of distant objects is less than one would expect. When the light from distant objects began its journey, the universe, and therefore space, was expanding more slowly. Thus there was a smaller contribution to the red shift than for light that traveled more recently. Nearer objects are less subject to this slowdown, because the universe was expanding faster when light left them. Thus their red shift is comparatively larger, in proportion to their distance from us.
Suppose that a distant object is at distance d = d1 + d2 from us. Its red shift is then r1(d1) + r2(d2), where r1(d1) is the contribution to its redshift during the initial transit of light through a distance of d1, and r2(d2) is the contribution to the redshift from the final transit through a distance of d2. We can assume that r1(d1) = c1 * d1 and r2(d2) = c2 * d2, where c1 < c2 because the universe was expanding more slowly in the past. For an object at distance d2 from us, the red shift will be c2 * d2. Hubble's law would give the red shift for the distant object as c2 * (d1 + d2), which is c2 * d1 + c2 * d2. Since c1 < c2, this is larger than the observed red shift for the distant object. Thus we have that distant objects have a smaller red shift than one would expect, based on Hubble's law. In this way, this observation can be explained by an accelerating expansion of the universe.
This effect can also be explained by a slowdown in the speed of light. If light were traveling faster originally, then a slowdown would make distant objects appear fainter. The reason these supernovae would appear fainter is that light was traveling faster when it left them. This would make these objects appear farther away than they really are. This would also mean that the light spent less time in transit, so that there would be less time for space to expand, and thus the red shift would be reduced. Since light was traveling faster through the initial distance of d1 than through the final distance of d2, the contribution to the redshift would be proportionally larger from d2 than from d1. Both effects would mean that distant objects would tend to be much dimmer, and apparently farther away, than one would expect based on their redshift according to Hubble's law.
This explanation does not assume that the red shift itself is caused by a slowdown in the speed of light, although that is another interesting possibility. We are assuming that when light slows down, its apparent frequency is unchanged. However, other assumptions can also be considered.
Astronomers have recently announced that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. This is inferred because distant supernovae are unexpectedly dim. This is interpreted as implying that the expansion of the universe is faster now than it was before. This expansion is in turn explained by some mysterious repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart.
Another possible explanation is that the speed of light is slowing down. This explanation would avoid the need for such a repulsive force. But in order to understand this explanation, we need to understand more about the red shift.
Cosmologists believe that the red shift of light is caused by the expansion of space as light travels from distant objects. This expansion of space causes the light waves to become farther apart, and thus longer, and red shifted. The more time light has been traveling, the more time there has been for space to expand, and the greater the red shift. Thus more distant objects have a larger red shift.
Originally, it was believed that the red shift was proportional to distance (Hubble's law). However, the accelerating expansion of the universe was inferred because distant supernovae are fainter than expected based on their red shift. This means that they are farther away than one would expect based on the linear increase of red shift with distance. So if we let r(d) be the red shift of an object that is distance d away from us, then r(d) increases rapidly for objects near us, but then more slowly for objects farther away. Thus these objects are fainter than they would be if the red shift function r(d) were a constant multiple of d.
This is interpreted as evidence that the universe was expanding more slowly in the past, so that the red shift of distant objects is less than one would expect. When the light from distant objects began its journey, the universe, and therefore space, was expanding more slowly. Thus there was a smaller contribution to the red shift than for light that traveled more recently. Nearer objects are less subject to this slowdown, because the universe was expanding faster when light left them. Thus their red shift is comparatively larger, in proportion to their distance from us.
Suppose that a distant object is at distance d = d1 + d2 from us. Its red shift is then r1(d1) + r2(d2), where r1(d1) is the contribution to its redshift during the initial transit of light through a distance of d1, and r2(d2) is the contribution to the redshift from the final transit through a distance of d2. We can assume that r1(d1) = c1 * d1 and r2(d2) = c2 * d2, where c1 < c2 because the universe was expanding more slowly in the past. For an object at distance d2 from us, the red shift will be c2 * d2. Hubble's law would give the red shift for the distant object as c2 * (d1 + d2), which is c2 * d1 + c2 * d2. Since c1 < c2, this is larger than the observed red shift for the distant object. Thus we have that distant objects have a smaller red shift than one would expect, based on Hubble's law. In this way, this observation can be explained by an accelerating expansion of the universe.
This effect can also be explained by a slowdown in the speed of light. If light were traveling faster originally, then a slowdown would make distant objects appear fainter. The reason these supernovae would appear fainter is that light was traveling faster when it left them. This would make these objects appear farther away than they really are. This would also mean that the light spent less time in transit, so that there would be less time for space to expand, and thus the red shift would be reduced. Since light was traveling faster through the initial distance of d1 than through the final distance of d2, the contribution to the redshift would be proportionally larger from d2 than from d1. Both effects would mean that distant objects would tend to be much dimmer, and apparently farther away, than one would expect based on their redshift according to Hubble's law.
This explanation does not assume that the red shift itself is caused by a slowdown in the speed of light, although that is another interesting possibility. We are assuming that when light slows down, its apparent frequency is unchanged. However, other assumptions can also be considered.
Dark Virtue
New Member
LOL, look at my post, each one HAS a rebuttal.
Dark Virtue
New Member
Does anyone know anything about the "gap theory"?
The theory suggests that everything including and after Gen. 1:2 describes a DIFFERENT Earth than Gen. 1:1. Gen. 1:2 on fits in the suggested 6,000 year old earth model, but Gen. 1:1 could have existed millions/billions/trillions of years before God renewed the face of the earth.
The theory suggests that everything including and after Gen. 1:2 describes a DIFFERENT Earth than Gen. 1:1. Gen. 1:2 on fits in the suggested 6,000 year old earth model, but Gen. 1:1 could have existed millions/billions/trillions of years before God renewed the face of the earth.
CCGR
Member
God wears Gap jeans?
seriously some CHristians debate wether it's 6 literal days or time periods for creation. I'm a believer in days.
seriously some CHristians debate wether it's 6 literal days or time periods for creation. I'm a believer in days.
Dark Virtue
New Member
But WHY do you believe that?
What is your rationale behind believing that?
What is your rationale behind believing that?
CCGR
Member
well a couple reasons. For starters why can't God do it in 6 days? Also I believe the hebrew translation of the word used for day (yom) is the literal 24 hour day.
here's a good page and a small quote
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c002.html
a study of the Hebrew text of Genesis 1 states in clear language that creation took place during the period of six, normal 24-hour type days. Further evidence of this conclusion is given in Exodus 20:11. This passage, written in stone by the finger of God Himself, states, "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day." God, the only witness to the creation events, testifies that all things were created within a literal six day period.
here's a good page and a small quote
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c002.html
a study of the Hebrew text of Genesis 1 states in clear language that creation took place during the period of six, normal 24-hour type days. Further evidence of this conclusion is given in Exodus 20:11. This passage, written in stone by the finger of God Himself, states, "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day." God, the only witness to the creation events, testifies that all things were created within a literal six day period.
Dark Virtue
New Member
Actually, the Hebrew word "yom" (which translates into the English "day") can mean more than one thing. In Gen. 7:11 it is used to refer to a 24-hour period. In Gen. 1:16 it is used to refer to the period of daylight between dawn and dusk. It is also used to refer to an unspecified period of time in Genesis 2:4.
So there are a few meanings here in addition to the 24-hour translation.
Do I think an omnimax could make the world in 6 days? Sure. Do I think an omnimax could do it in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye? Sure. Why 6 days? Who knows.
My point here was that if it was so clear, Christianity would be united in a single thinking. There wouldn't be countless theories. That's what annoys me most about Christianity, there isn't ONE notion that everyone agrees on.
So there are a few meanings here in addition to the 24-hour translation.
Do I think an omnimax could make the world in 6 days? Sure. Do I think an omnimax could do it in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye? Sure. Why 6 days? Who knows.
My point here was that if it was so clear, Christianity would be united in a single thinking. There wouldn't be countless theories. That's what annoys me most about Christianity, there isn't ONE notion that everyone agrees on.