The world is only 6300 years old!!!?

Question

Ive heard Christians that state that if we take current population rates and extrapolate the numbers backwards, we find that only two people were living approximately 6300 years ago.

So, I sat down and I did the math. You know what? You people are right - sure enough, if we take current population rate changes and extrapolate backwards, there is only two people living in 4300BCE.... So you must be correct, right?!?!?!

Well, I found one slight problem with the math on this one: When I extrapolate back to 2600BCE, the number is 600 people in the entire world. Known history states that there were florishing civilizations in Egypt, Sumner, Babylon, Indus Valley and China at that time. If we generously give Egypt 1/6 of the worlds population in 2600BCE, that means that 100 people built the pyramids and all other ancient structures in Egypt....

Can you see now that the earth being only 6300 years old is absolutely ridiculous and based upon false mathematical principles???

Slickboy - I challenge you to a duel of intelligence. I know you copied and pasted all this with no REAL knowledge of what you read. Ya know what? I can refute every single one of those points using science. Evolutionists DID NOT create the geological chart - geologists did. Evolution has proof in a mixture of sources, several different sciences. Biology, chemistry, physics, zoology, boatany, etc. So, if creationism is correct, that means that every single sicence subject is wrong. Furthermore, the thing about magentic field of the earth and its half life - its been shown that the degredation of the magentic field is not a constant rate. Your population statistics - forget that people die and dont live forever...

The duel is one and the glove has been throw in your face.... Will you rise to the challenge??

Answer 1

The major trouble is that:

#1 no single function (equation) can be used to model human population growth across all of history. Birth rates, death rates, infant mortality, # of children per couple, etc... are certainly not historical constants.
Any model using a single function to model growth makes the assumption that these are constants.

#2 major changes (e.g., war, black plague, famine) will throw a huge amount of variance into such a model. And 99% of these corrections will be in the direction of moving world population DOWN rather than up. The black plague killed, what?, 1/3 of Europe's population, but the "baby boom" in comparison to this has a TINY effect.