how old is the earth?

Question

what did they use tell how old the earth is

Answer 1

It's based on several things:

1) dating meteorites. When we find a meteorite from this solar system that has a similar composition to earth, you get many young ages, but the oldest and most common date to 4.6 Ga (billion years).

2) isotope trends. When you look at certain radiogenic isotope ratios that change with time, like Rb/Sr or U/Pb, you find that many rocks with differnt ratios of many ages form a line, and the line traces back to an origin of 4.6 Ga as well.

The oldest life is 3 1/2 Ga, the oldest rock is about 4 Ga, and the oldest date ever found is on the highly durable mineral Zircon from Australia, it's date is 4.2 Ga. So, there is no direct method, it is based on inferences. However, many different inferences lead to the same number 4.559 Ga (to be specific).

You would have to throw out everything we know and love about Geology to accept a young earth view. When you look at the Grand Canyon, how can you say that only took 6000 years to form?

Answer 2

Carbon 14 Dating is NOT used to date rocks! ( I wish people would get their facts straight before quoting pseudoscience from creationist websites.) The half life of Carbon14 is far too short . They use other elements (e.g. Uranium which has a far longer half life ) Carbon 14 is used for archaeology, not geology. The age of the Earth is around 4.6 billion years. Others have given the scientific explanation how this figure has been arrived at .
A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50% of the American public believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the domestication of the dog. They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world. It is only one of literally thousands of such myths from around the world, but it happened, by a series of historical accidents, to become enshrined in a book – Genesis – which, by another series of historical accidents, has been translated and disseminated to almost every home in the land plus – infuriatingly – every hotel room. Even before science told us the true story of the origin of the world and the evolution of life, there was no reason to believe the Jewish origin myth any more than the origin myths of the Yoruba or the Kikuyu, the Yanomamo or the Maori, the Dogon or the Cherokee. Now, in the 21st century as we approach Darwin’s bicentenary, the fact that half of Americans take Genesis literally is nothing less than an educational scandal.

Answer 3

you can't possibly believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old ... those "people" are using scientific data to show that the world is young, but what they seem to forget is that the universe is very nonlinear ... as something moves further away or shrinks, it doesn't shrink linearly (like .001 miles x 1 billion years = 1 million miles --> IMPOSSIBLE) but the effects are reduced as the inverse square law (if you move out 2 miles, it doesn't shrink by 50% but by 75%!!!). So the consistency that those "people" are expecting just doesn't exist because the universe doesn't work in a linear fashion. Just read up on Hubble's Law, or just the definition of gravity or velocity or energy.

that being said, we can solidly state that those referenced sites are hooey. My money goes towards the Earth being much, much older. 4.5 billion years old? Maybe. Just because science says it is so doesn't mean it is.

But the Earth sure is a lot older than 10,000 years!

Answer 4

Given the fact that, according to the Bible, Adam was created on the sixth day of our planet’s existence, we can determine a biblically based, approximate age for the earth by looking at the chronological details of the human race. This assumes that the Genesis account is accurate, that the six days of creation were literal 24-hour periods, and that there were no ambiguous gaps in the chronology of Genesis.

The genealogies listed in Genesis chapters 5 and 11 provide the age at which Adam and his descendants each fathered the next generation in a successive ancestral line from Adam to Abraham. By determining where Abraham fits into history chronologically and adding up the ages provided in Genesis 5 and 11, it becomes apparent that the Bible teaches the earth to be about 6000 years old, give or take a few hundred years.

What about the billions of years accepted by most scientists today and taught in the vast majority of our academic institutions? This age is primarily derived from two dating techniques: radiometric dating and the geologic timescale. Scientists who advocate the younger age of about 6000 years insist that radiometric dating is flawed in that it is founded upon a series of faulty assumptions, while the geologic timescale is flawed in that it employs circular reasoning. Moreover, they point to the debunking of old-earth myths, like the popular misconception that it takes long periods of time for stratification, fossilization and the formation of diamonds, coal, oil, stalactites, stalagmites, etc, to occur. Finally, young-earth advocates present positive evidence for a young age for the earth in place of the old-earth evidences which they debunk. Young-earth scientists acknowledge that they are in the minority today but insist that their ranks will swell over time as more and more scientists reexamine the evidence and take a closer look at the currently accepted old-earth paradigm.

Ultimately, the age of the earth cannot be proven. Whether 6000 years or billions of years, both viewpoints (and everything in between) rest on faith and assumptions. Those who hold to billions of years trust that methods such as radiometric dating are reliable and that nothing has occurred in history that may have disrupted the normal decay of radio-isotopes. Those who hold to 6000 years trust that the Bible is true and that other factors explain the “apparent” age of the earth, such as the global flood, or God’s creating the universe in a state that “appears” to give it a very long age. As an example, God created Adam and Eve as fully-grown adult human beings. If a doctor had examined Adam and Eve on the day of their creation, the doctor would have estimated their age at 20 years (or whatever age they appeared to be) when, in fact, Adam and Eve were less than one day old. Whatever the case, there is always good reason to trust the Word of God over the words of atheistic scientists with an evolutionary agenda.

http://www.gotquestions.org/earth-age.html

Thousands - Not Billions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ5qran1sS4

The Young Age of the Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1vJ7BN0Xw

Answer 5

Don't listen to those religious nuts out there. Geologists now think that the Earth is half a billion years old.

Answer 6

Well "carbon dating" is useless to age the earth for two reasons

Firstly the half life of C14 is MUCH too short and it would be struggling to even agree with Bishop Ussher's way off deduction.

Secondly old rocks contain little, if any carbon

The dating processes from rocks uses unstable elements with much, much longer half lives and while all such calculations have inbuilt errors they certainly do not contain the sorts of errors involved by Bishop Ussher who used conjecture and total reliance on the literal interpretation of an inspirational book written by men for a people at a time when the understanding the world around them was most baffling.

As a Christian myself, I have been taught to accept the NEW Testament as the way to live and that the NEW Testament supercedes the old Testament. I am always amazed how fundamentalist Christians will always quote from the Old Testament when Christ's teachings were all recorded in the New Testament.

AND I was taught that the bible (and other holy books) told us of the way to live with each other. These same fundamentalist Christians (and fundamentalist Jews and fundamentalist Muslems) seem to be extolling hatred and war on our world. The error in our world is not religion but fundamentalism. God gave us brains to use them not to just accept written words. He gave us brains to accept His message but to learn and grow as well. If He did not want that we would not be thinkers just ignorant unswerving thoughtless followers who accept the word of other thinkers who set themselves up as being inspired by God.

The fact that we all think was inspired by God if you are a genuine spiritualist, for man, it appears, is the only life form with this unique brain of ours. And He gave it to us to be able to use it well.

There are so many false prophets in our world!!! He told us that the greatest commandment was to love our Lord our God with our whole hearts and our whole souls and our whole minds and to LOVE OUR NEIGHBOURS as ourselves!!! There are many fundamentalist Christians who are dispensing hatred and war on our neighbours. After all, all mankind is our neighbour as He foretold in the story of the Good Samaritan!!!!!!

Answer 7

OCTOBER 23rd

On this day in history in 4004 B.C. the world began.
This is Creation Day, that is according to bishop James Usher (1581—1656). Usher scrutinised the time scale in the Old Testament and by careful and assiduous study, calculated that the world was nearly 6,000 year old, having been created on 23rd October 4004 B.C. at nine o’clock in the morning.

Usher’s theory became a matter of established wisdom until in the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin postulated the principle of the survival of the fittest known as the Theory of Evolution. Darwin and others stated that as the world could be proved to be over 6,000 years old, then the Bible must be wrong. Theologians countered saying that as the Bible was the word of God, it must be correct and that therefore the scientists had got it wrong. When questioned on skeletal remains of dinosaurs and other creatures, recently unearthed, the theologians retorted that these must have been placed there by the Devil to test man’s belief.

The dispute between the two parties reached its apogee in the twentieth century in the famous Scopes case where a teacher in Tennessee was put on trial for defying the State’s ban on teaching the Evolutionary theory. The cynical defence lawyer scoffed at Usher’s theory using comments such as ‘his Bible must be more accurate than mine’ and ‘nine o’clock in the morning. Was this Eastern Standard Time or Western Time?’

In the twenty-first century, Usher’s ideas have collapsed and Darwin’s theory predominates. It is a case of the survival of the fittest theory.

Answer 8

No one knows. It could be 10 to 16 thousand years old. Some scientist say billions years old. I personally believe the latter. This earth HAS to be billions of years old to explain the complexity of the evolution of living organisms. I dont believe in evolution of human beings because iam a christian, but i do believe it took some time for organisms to evolve and produce what we see now.

Answer 9

I think it's between 4 1/2 billions years to 4.6 billions years (in age).

Answer 10

The scientists these days use something called Carbon Dating but it is so incredibly unreliable that while some tests say it is billions of years old, other say that it is thousands. While its results are broadcast to the world as fact, scientists these days are vile in that they don't tell the truth about it to fit their agenda.

I believe that it is about 6000 years old, approximately. I'm a Christian and a believer in the Biblical story of creation which approximately ages the earth at 6000 years old. Give or take a millenia or so.