We are living in the information age and it often feels like we are bombarded with information 24/7. Quite frankly, I see it as a great achievement that you are able to take the time to read this article.
I hope and trust that it will be worth your time.
My articles are usually a lot more faith and Bible focused, but for the sake of this topic I will be using a different approach. I would like to discuss the age of the Earth primarily from a scientific point of view. This article is not written with the purpose of convincing someone to be a Christian. It is written to broaden our thinking and highlight what is happening to the world around us.
So much of what we see around us today is based on the theory of evolution. We see it in our education system (primary school all the way to University), we see it in advertisements, in TV sitcoms (Big Bang Theory - Listen to the theme song) and the list truly goes on. It is almost scary to see how much of what is going on around us is based on evolution theory and how we are developing into bigger and greater beings. This idea seems all good enough, but is everything evolution claims true? Or does it maybe take more faith to believe in evolution than in creation?
"Is everything we are taking in really as scientifically sound as so many of us seem to believe?"
Please feel free to check anything stated in the article via the links provided.
Evolution for many people is simply put: How apes evolved into humans after a big bang.
Even though this is not far off, please allow me to be a bit more clear about what evolution theory actually is all according to a scientific understanding with this brief summary.
About 14 Billion years ago, NOTHING exploded and formed everything (Read more about this in this article by New Scientist Magazine). Some other sources say that everything was concentrated into a tiny point and then exploded (Big bang). After everything settled and the earth formed about 4 billion years ago, it started raining on the earth for millions of years. As it rained on the rocks, it formed a primordial soup. Then from this primordial soup, the first single celled organism spawned and over time all living creatures we see today, evolved from this cell.
When examining the age of the earth, there are many different ways to approach it, but for the purpose of this article, I will be starting the discussion with a few limiting factors. If something is limited, then obviously it cannot exceed the limit, except if a way/reason is found to change the limit.
A simple example is: If you were born 20 years ago, then obviously you can't say you have been alive for 30 years. In this case there is no possible way to change the limit.
In 2011 the world population hit the 7 Billion mark and it sent shock waves around the world. Newspapers and scientific magazines alike were discussing the impact this would have on the economy and on nature itself, all while trying to figure out how fast it would continue growing in the years to come. All fair enough, but my question is simple:
According to the graph from the United Nations above, we see that we have only been in existence for a few thousand years at the most. If not, then why did our population stay so low for millions of years? Now even though this does not determine the age of the earth, it can't be overlooked when covering this topic. We also need to ask:
"When and why did all the semi-human or semi- apes die off leaving only us normal humans and apes?".
Some scientist do however think they have found an answer to this problem:
Scientists believe that the Moon was formed when a planet about the size of Mars collided with the Earth around 4.5billion years ago. The debris left over from impact came together to form the Moon... My questions are as follows: How does the earth survive that type of impact, and how does another planet hit earth causing the moon to break off and not leave observable evidence? And then make a perfectly round moon from the debris without any other large pieces? Where is the rest of the debris? What about the other planets in our solar system that also have moons? Mars has 2 moons and Saturn has 53, to just name 2 planets. What hit all these planets, and how do they keep surviving the impact?
If we are looking at the Moon, then let's also look at the sun.
When anything burns, it eventually burns up, except if a fuel of some kind is added. Nothing is excluded from this law of nature. According to Newsweek.com, Einstein was right in saying that the sun is losing mass. We can scientifically observe that the sun is burning and will eventually burn up completely in the distant future. Some of the questions this poses are:
How big was the sun when it started burning about 4 billion years ago (according to evolution)? Why was the earth not completely burned up from the intense heat? How can something burn for billions of years without having new fuel added to it?
Now moving away from speculation, I feel quite confident that everyone would agree that textbooks should be error free. I also believe that if it is discovered that there is an error in a textbook, it should be corrected and/or completely removed. The unfortunate truth is that science textbooks are not always written or published in this manner. There are certain things that have been proven wrong hundred years ago, but are still found in textbooks all over the world. Here are a few examples of how the evolution theory forced into the education system even though it has been proven as false many years ago:
In 1866 a man named Ernst Haeckel first published drawings that illustrate how the human embryo goes through various evolutionary stages, such as having gills like a fish, a tail like a monkey, etc., during the first few months it develops in the womb (Picture left). This still is in most biology textbooks and is used as one of the proofs for evolution.
The problem with this is that in 1984 Haeckel’s peers, one being Wilhelm his Sr, professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig uncovered his fraudulent claims and extracted a confession out of him, in which he blamed the draughtsman for the mistake - without acknowledging that he himself was the draughtsman!
An article titled: "An Embryonic Liar" from the London Times reads as follows:
London Times - August 11, 1997 p.14
Now my question is: Why do they still keep this in so many textbooks? Why are we being taught these lies? - Some have however adapted the pictures a bit, but kept this lie as proof.
Scientists keep saying that they have proof in the fossil record of human evolution. This means that they say they have found fossils that show the transition from ape to man. From these fossils, they create pictures and scenes like the one on the left. The missing link pictured to the left was named Nebraska man, because they found the fossil In the Nebraskan valley.
The thing is, the fossil proof that was found to construct this whole scene to the left... was just a single tooth. They created a whole new species from a single tooth and then put it in scientific textbooks as proof for evolution. All this from a single tooth, and to make it even worse - It was then later discovered that the fossil tooth was actually a pig's tooth. I know people make mistakes, but this is not science, this is trying to prove a lie.
Another example of faked evidence like this is Piltdown man. - Feel free to read more about how Charles Dawson faked the evidence with the link provided.
The Coelacanth was used as an example in textbooks of a fish about to evolve to the next stage of evolution. It was said that it was about to progress to the walking stage of evolution, and it was dated as having died off about 65 million years ago.
However, the surprise capture of numerous living specimens forced evolutionist to try and explain what happened, and why it has stayed unchanged for "millions of years". These fish are currently breeding comfortably off the coast of South Africa still completely fish and not even close to walking. At least this has been removed from most textbooks.
Many people believe in evolution because some species of monkeys are said to be as close as 96% genetically similar to humans. If this was a valid argument, we might as well say that watermelons are evolving into clouds. The reason being watermelons are 92% water while clouds are 100% water. - Being similar to something does not determine origin.
Let's continue to the topic of dinosaurs. Fossils of dinosaurs are found all over the world. No one can deny the fact that these great beasts lived. The question just remains: When did they live?
According to scientists dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. They believe this because of dating methods like carbon dating (Read more about what carbon dating is here). The thing is, the idea of carbon dating is great, but it doesn't work. Here are just a few examples of why:
- The lower leg of the Fairbanks Creek mammoth had a radiocarbon age of 15,380 years, while its skin and flesh were dated as 21,300 years old. - Harold E. Anthony, “Natures Deep Freeze,” Natural History, Sept. 1949, p. 300
- Shells from living snails were carbon dated as being 27,000 years old. - Science vol. 224, 1984, pp. 58-61
- A freshly killed seal was carbon dated as having died 1,300 years ago. - Antarctic Journal vol. 6, Sept-Oct. 1971, p. 211
Another method of dating is the use of the geologic column (Picture to the right). It was created by a man named James Hutton in 1795. He arranged the fossils the order in which he thought they would be if evolution was true.
Here is how it works:
They use this column to do the following:
- They date the rocks by the fossils they find in the rock.
- Date the fossils by the rock they find them in.
"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately."
- *J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy,"
American Journal of Science, January 1976.
This shows their preconceived beliefs, not observable science. It's purely what they want to believe. As much as 85% of earth's surface doesn't even have 3 of these layers in the correct order. This is not a scientific dating method.
Have a look at the picture to the right. This was drawn by the Ica people about 3000 years ago, and many more like it are found all around the world. How would prehistoric people know anything about dinosaurs?
Then strangely enough, in 1271 Marco Polo reported that on special occasions the royal chariot was pulled by dragons and that the Emperor had appointed the post of a “Royal Dragon Feeder”.
Marco Polo said near the end of his life that he only told half of what he saw because no one would believe him - It seems he was right.
It is interesting to note that the word "Dinosaur" comes from two Greek words: “Deinos” meaning fearful or terrible and “Sauros” meaning lizard. Which tells us that the word dinosaur means fearful or terrible lizard, which sounds about right to me, but did you know that the word dinosaur was only created in 1841. Meaning, that before this, they used something another word to describe these creatures. This word comes from the Latin and Greek word “Dracōn” or drákōn meaning “a kind of serpent”. So only until about 160 years ago whenever people would talk about great and big terrible lizards, they would use the word dragon and not dinosaur.
Personally I believe dinosaurs lived with man and were called dragons back then. The word "Dinosaur" was only created in 1841, before that, they were called dragons. This is why there are so many stories about dragons from the past. The reason we find them buried so deep under the ground is because of the world wide flood from about 4400 years ago in the days of Noah and that he took babies with him on the ark. This flood destroyed everything, and explains everything we see in regards to fossils and the geological changes.
So did Noah take them all on the ark? Yes, he did, he was smart enough to realize it would be better to take babies. Babies are smaller, they sleep more and they live longer to reproduce later. Then they were hunted to extinction over the next few thousand years, as we see with so many animals today. This was the short version of my personal beliefs on the topic.
The reason for this article is not to convince someone to believe what I believe or to become Christians, even though I believe they should. The reason is to help us realize we are bombarded with so much useless information, that we sometimes don't really investigate whether it is true or not.
This being said, we should never feel inferior when people say science disproves God.
My prayer for you as you finish this article is that you will start to question the world around you. It is only by doing this that we can find the truth. May we all grow in our realization that life does have a purpose and nothing just happens by chance, not even you reading this article.
9/2/2014