The Age Of Earth And The Bible?

Question

Why is it that the majority of Christians will argue w/ you that Earth is only 6,000 years old according to the Bible, when Science has proven it to possibly be 3 billion years old? I myself am a Christian, and I don't understand why other Christians can't support or handle Science. God Is Good, but Logic has got to give somewhere along the line.

Answer 1

Well said Nat.

Love and blessings Don

Answer 2

I personally believe that life on Eath is not 3 billion years old, nor do I believe in evolution. And its not only Christian that believe that life on Earth is young. According to the Jewish Calender, life on Earth is young to. Dont for get that the Old Testament of the Bible is also part of the Jewish Bible. According to the Bible God created the All life on Earth in 6 days. So the question is it 6 earth days or six Heaven days. Heaven days are alot longer than earth days.
But the bibile also says that The eath was formless and empty, darkness covered the suface, and that the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. So that means that was already there before God devided the waters to make land, sea, air and all other life on earth. So it is possible that the original mass could be 3 billion years old or even older. But Life on earth is only around 6,000 years or so if it is calculated in earth years.
And science is based on theory, so based on a persons belife.Sometimes they can prove it sometimes they cant.
Science relys on carbon dating alot. carbon dating isnt always accurate. I rusty bolt manuafactured aroun 1940ad was carbon dated once and the carbon dating said that the bolt was billions of years old too.
Dont foget that science says that God didnt create life and that God is only a belief. So answer me this. How can you believe Both. that There is a God and the Bible is the Word of God, And that science is right in its theory that the earth is three billion years old.
According to the Bible its not that old. And if the Bible is the Word of God and you dont belive what the Bible says about the Age of the earth How can you possibly Believe that that God is who the bible says he is. And you said that your a Christian, well according to the Bible Jesus is the Son of God and the only way to get to Heaven. And since Jesus is part of God he was there when God created everything. If you dont believe what the Bible says about the age of the earth how can you belive what it says about Jesus.
You cant believe both the Bible and the scientists.
To me its a no brainer.
I believe in God and I believe the Bible is the word of God.
God was there in the beginning, in fact he created the beginning.
So he was there. were scientists there 3 billion years ago?
I dont think they were, because humans cant live that long.
Bit God is infinate and eternal. He was there. So if he says the Bible is his word and the Bible says that life on earth is only around 6 thousand years old then Im going to believe that.

Answer 3

In some Christian denominations, they believe that the earth is about 6000-7000 yrs old. My sister-in-law is Lutheran and she believes that. But she won't discuss it further.

I am of the Catholic faith. What I believe and the other Catholics I know, is that the 6 days of creation are not 24-hour days. The first day when God created the heavens and earth took many years (the BIble says that one year to God is like 1000 years) (there is no time to God); the 2nd day when He light from darkness took millions or billions of years; 3rd day was water and land took a million years or so; 4th day He put the sun in the sky during day & the moon in the sky at night took another million years; 5th day He created fish and birds took millions of years (first sign of living life on earth) (also He put the sea weed, octopus, jellyfish, & so on in the oceans), He then created land animals taking millions & millions of years starting with what we call dinosaurs; 6th day He created man - Adam. Hence we didn't evolve from apes. Adam was created 6000-7000yrs ago. HE and Eve didn't have huts to live in, after living in the Garden of Eden, they had to live on the ground, in caves, find their our food, hunt animals, make sure that plants continued to grow each year so they figures out 'gardening'. Adam and Eve lived for hundreds of years before having children. This family would be like the 'cavemen' that we have found as well as their descendents.

So the world isn't 6000 yrs old. It is VERY old. We don't know exactly accept by what scientists have figured out. God created it all in a very long time. Man has been here for 6000 yrs.

Answer 4

In the early years of the 17th century Bishop Ussher made calculations of the earth's age by simply adding up the Bible's asserted lifespans of the earliest characters mentioned from Adam to Abraham and then adding in the generations after at the then going rate of 70 (three score and ten) to his own time.

Since then, those Christians who take the Bible literally have accepted his calculations as accurate. Sorta funny when you consider that most of them are anti-Catholic and Bishop Ussher WAS a Catholic bishop.

Anyway, the sciences of astronomy, geology, biology and ecology have since shown the earth's true age to somewhere around 4 billion years, not a mere 6,000. Shucky darn, the city of Jericho is older than that!

And I hate to disabuse you of another fond illusion, but the majority of Christians are Catholics; over 1 billion. ALL the various Protestant, Orthodox and way-out Christian sects together have fewer than half that many members. So they CANNOT be in the "majority".

Answer 5

You just found a Christian that can, Yes Friend this earth is millions & millions of yrs. Old, There was a prehistoric time frame, & it is in the bible, I have several verses I can use , but here is the one I have use more, But not limited to these verses, Gen.9:1 God tells Noah to Replinish the earth, Replinish means to fill it up again, & in Gen.1:28 God also tells Adam & Eve to replinish the earth or to fill it up again.

Answer 6

Conservative Christians are the ones who tend to believe the early chapters of Genesis; more Liberal Christians tend to accept "science" as knowing more than the Bible.

And I notice you say "Science has proven it to POSSIBLY be ..."

The Bible says that "death" entered the world through Adam. All of creation became subject to death. So, how was it that dinosaurs, pond slime, etc. was dying for some 3 billion years before that?

Some think both may be correct:
http://aish.com/societywork/sciencenature/Age_of_the_Universe.asp

Answer 7

I'm a Muslim and I think that you're mistaken all God's books said that the Univers (not only Earth) was created in 6 days and God's day is equal to 1000 years of ours. They maybe say that the univers was created in 6000 years and not 6000 years old.

Answer 8

Natalie, it's called ignorance. It's basically them not WILLING to know these things b/c it scares the living Hell out of them, therefore, they dismiss it. Dismissing Science is in itself ignorant.
And actually, Carbon Dating proves Earth to be more around 5 billion years old.

Answer 9

It is actually closer to 4.5 billion years. I know what you are saying. I am an atheist, so I don't let feelings get in the way of my pursuit of science. You are of the educated few Christians who are realists. So you know, your question just gave me a little more credit/respect for Christians.

Answer 10

No no no no no no no.

Because scientific "proof" is based on faith-based assumptions. You are posing the greatest mistaken belief of our age: the deification of science.

Science is conditional truth, not truth. Why people don't understand this I don't know.

The debate is too long for this post, but someday I do hope to write a book eradicating this over-faith in science. This mistaken belief is the single-greatest ingredient in the decline of western civilization.

-Aztec276

Answer 11

There are a couple of answers to your questions. One answer is that many theologians support what is commonly known as the "gap" theory of interpretation. According to this theory there is a large gap of unknown duration between verses one and two of Genesis.

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was (hāyāh) without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

hāyāh - A verb meaning to exist, to be, to become, to happen, to come to pass, to be done.

The theory is that after the initial creation Satan rebelled and that the earth became without form and void and that from verse 2 onward we get a picture of God's restoration of the creation on earth. There are some difficulties with this because it would appear that the whole universe was also disrupted or had not yet existed if that was the case.

The second answer comes from a scientific view. Science has not "proved" anything about how old the earth is. Scientists have gathered data from current observations and constructed models used to calculate the ages of various objects. One of those models is where they use the sedimentary layers of soil to calculate the age of fossils that have been dug up from the earth.

They observe how soil layers are formed today and they estimate how long it would take for similar layers to have formed in the past. However, this model is flawed because it assumes that layers were all formed under similar conditions to the ones the model is based upon.

In the 1980's Mt Saint Helens erupted and as part of that catastrophe there were massive mud slides. When scientists investigated the results of these mud slides they found sedimentary layers that according to the accepted methods of dating looked like they had started 12 million years earlier but in reality they had formed in about 4 hours. If this eruption had occurred say 1,000 years earlier and a native American had been caught in it and his body had fossilized then a modern scientist who found that body would calculate that a human being had lived in the area 12 million years ago.

Another intersting observation of the results of the Mt Saint Helens eruption was the formation of canyons, smaller in scale but similar to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Scientists look at the Grand Canyon and they postulate a great river that flowed for millions of years slowly eroding the earth until the canyon we see today was the result. But due to the violent eruption similar canyons were created in a single day.

You do know that fossils are not the usual result of what happens when a plant or an animal dies don't you? Some extra ordinary circumstances have to surround the death in order for fossilized remains to be the result. If we had a catastophic flood around 4 thousand years ago as the Bible relates and as many other cultures have stories about then there would have been unimaginable changes taking place on the surface of the earth as well as climactic changes. Fossils could have been formed at the same time as soil layers were rapidly produced. Up in the arctic region they have found wooly mammoths totally frozen in blocks of ice with food from a semi-tropical climate still in their stomachs.

Another method used by scientists is the radiometric dating method. Scientists measure the amount of radioactive decay of certain elements in an object and they calculate how long the object has been in existence based upon that rate of decay. However another method of dating that scientists use is to measure how much helium remains in an object. This method can only be used on objects that are less than 10,000 years old because after that there should be no helium left in an object.

Surprisingly people at the creation research institute used this method on diamonds because diamonds unlike a lot of other materials are not subject to contamination from outside sources since they are so hard and stable. When they used this method and compared it to the radiometric dating method the results were startling. They found significant amounts of helium that showed the diamonds to be between 4 to 6 thousand years old. The radiometric dating method showed that the diamonds were millions or billions of years old because that method brings with it an assumption of how much of the radioactive material was in an object to begin with.

I wrote all of this out for you so that you might begin to consider how much trust you put in what society claims that scienitists have "proved" and the fact that God our creator was here all along and gave us his written word for our learning. The book of Genesis wasn't written in order that we could know all of the details of what happened on the earth before God created humanity. It was written so that we could understand our purpose for being here and why the earth is so messed up if God is perfect and good. That having been said, as a Christian your first instinct when reading the Bible should be to trust what God has said and to reject any theories of mankind when they contradict the clear teaching of the Bible.