How old is the earth? Christian arguments.....?

Question

So, as I was searching for Christian arguments for the age of the earth, I found this site. I even found a few questions I could not answer and was wondering if someone could help me out. Here it is: "Since 1836, observations of the sun indicate it is shrinking about five feet an hour. Studies show this has been true for at least 400 years. At this rate, 100,000 years ago the sun would be twice as large as it is today. Twenty million years ago the sun would have touched the earth."
Thanks

The arguments for radioactive dating or obviously ridiculous but here is the site URL: http://www.barr-family.com/godsword/old.htm

A scientific answer would be nice instead of a broad guess. thanks!

Answer 1

For a good scientific refutation of this nonsense, read this:

http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1986/PSCF9-86VanTill.html

Answer 2

I don't think the sun is shrinking at 5 feet per hour. If it were to do so, there would be tremendous gravitational effects on the planets and none are observed. The arguments or data used at the website you gave clearly are flawed.

Consider the saltiness of the oceans. All the salt in the oceans has come from the continents, yet, river water is not salty to the taste (test that at your own risk!). But there is SOME salt in river water, and making the assumption that it has always been about that salty, you can extrapolate back to see how long it has taken to put the amount of salt into the oceans. It turns out to be hundreds of millions of years. Incidentally, that argument doesn't work real well until salt in salt domes and salt beds is taken into account.

There is no way to settle the argument about the age of the earth, until you are able to convince yourself to look at the scientific data. In other words, let preachers preach and let scientists do the science. Why would you let a document that is 2000 years old guide you scientifically? Remember, evidence and faith are two entirely different things.

I assure you that, if the Bible were to be written today, it would show that the Earth was 4.5 billion years of age, because that is now common knowledge. The writers of the Bible used what they had and wrote what they knew, as honestly and piously as they could. Also, find somewhere in the Bible where it says the Earth was 4000 years old at the time the Bible was written. You cannot, it isn't there..it is only through the flawed efforts of later clerics that the age of the Earth was "found".

And, despite your statement, radioactive dating is not ridiculous. It is based on solid facts and physical laws. Again, a statement by anyone, scientist, website,or cleric, does not make the statement fact. It is only through rigorous testing does a statment become fact.

Answer 3

Geology, Volcanology, Climatology, mostly agree that the earth is about 4.4 to 4.7 Billion years old.
The "Christians" get the 6000 or so years from the NOTES that were made, at the top of the pages by the Church at Rome, at about 220 A.D., AS a Reference !!! If a "Christian" insists that the day, in Gods life is 24 hours long, ask these questions:1. How long was A day BEFORE God set the sun, moon, and stars into being, on the 4th day? 2 During the first three days of Gods work, Did God wear a Timex or a Rolex to tell time? 3. How many years have you studied the ancient Hebrew and Mesopotamia texts / recordings? 4. How come the scholars studying the "BIBLE" today, are finding at least a 50 % error rate, by omissions, changes, and additions, NOT in the original texts? 5. Who did the changing, omitting, additions, and WHO DID these help? 6. Why, where, and when did these "changes" take place, and by whom? I 1. Am NOT Jewish, 2. I consider myself to have a decent education 3. Not someone who accepts anything told simply "Because the preacher / priest / rabbi/ said it" !!
toro gringo

Answer 4

This Christian argues that according to the latest scientific data, the earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

If the solar system formed from a common pool of matter, which was uniformly distributed in terms of Pb isotope ratios, then the initial plots for all objects from that pool of matter would fall on a single point.

Over time, the amounts of Pb-206 and Pb-207 will change in some samples, as these isotopes are decay end-products of uranium decay (U-238 decays to Pb-206, and U-235 decays to Pb-207). This causes the data points to separate from each other. The higher the uranium-to-lead ratio of a rock, the more the Pb-206/Pb-204 and Pb-207/Pb-204 values will change with time.

If the source of the solar system was also uniformly distributed with respect to uranium isotope ratios, then the data points will always fall on a single line. And from the slope of the line we can compute the amount of time which has passed since the pool of matter became separated into individual objects. See the Isochron Dating FAQ or Faure (1986, chapter 18) for technical detail.

Answer 5

Sorry, questions on Y!A are not limited to specific groups, and in all honesty, if you want to actually learn you will not limit your thoughts to those that agree with what you already think. This is the major strength of approaching knowledge from a scientific point of view rather than a religious one. Science continually tests what it thinks it knows and objectively evaluates all of the evidence, while, as so nicely illustrated by your question, religion only looks at what it believes. Even more telling is that science does not look at the "arguments", it objectively evaluated the facts, while religion is swayed by argument and oratory. A simplistic illustration of this difference is that science will examine all the evidence around the claim that water is made up of 2 hydrogen molecules and one oxygen, while religion will listen to the best speaker who they believe in, even if they claim water is an element and not made up of atoms, just because the "speaker" is a person of great faith. Hopefully you actually read and understood the above, but I doubt that you have. As for your question, both "Old Earth" and "Young Earth" creation views have significant problems. Primarily, you are correct, YEC is what the Bible claims if you read it literally and pay attention to what the Bible claims as literal. The problem with this is that it in no way matches any of the hard evidence that we have and there is no chance that any evidence that might be discovered in the future will significantly change this. You may not believe this statement, but it is well supported by evidence in many branches of science to the point that you would have a better chance of arguing that the earth is flat than suggesting that the earth is around 6000 years old. On the other hand, following an "Old Earth" interpretation not only does not match the evidence (granted, it tries to be closer to the evidence), but it raises significant theological problems in both how people should interpret what the Bible says as well as what it says about the nature of God. Simplistically, if you take the Bible as literal and believe it is correct you are ignoring a huge amount of evidence across a many unrelated branches of science. But if you take a "metaphorical" approach to the Bible, you run into conflicting theology like God not being consistent with being all knowing to the point of being deceitful and you still do not match the evidence. By the way, re-read the scripture again, it is fairly explicit that death and decay were not present for anything prior to the "Fall", just as it is fairly clear that the Flood was global. Terms like "all life" tend to support this. Further, a local flood is very unimpressive and meaningless for an all powerful god and does nothing to differentiate it from any other flood myth. While you are on the right tract to question the two (or more) viewpoints of what the Bible claims, you are still doing so from a limited, subjective viewpoint. You need to be objective (no preconceived beliefs about what is true) and to look at all of the evidence. Edit: When people claim "God created the universe and the science that governs it", it is a sure sign that they are completely clueless about what science is. Science is not the answer and it does not "govern" anything. It is a rigorous methodology that we use to learn about reality. Because we understand that we will learn more, science is designed to be self correcting and to continually reexamine and retest what we think we know. As for the "God's days are longer than our days", while this might be a good explanation, the order of events in the creation story, even if they were stretched to nearly billions of years, are very incorrect and besides the fact that they are unworkable, they do not match the evidence. Simple example, we know the earth formed long after our sun and that our sun formed long after billions of other stars formed and "died". We also know that plants and animals evolved together, not separately.

Answer 6

As a Christian, I would say at least 4 billion years. I would bet that whoever made those calculations about the sun was trying to force science into religious guideline to justify thier own beliefs.
The religion, and the Bible should not be a substitute for science, they are two different things.
If the Bible is to be taken as scientifically accurate, then these statements should be true...
a) rabbits chew thier cuds
b) insects have 4 legs
c) there was a full year where the world was flooded with water
d) there are, or at least used to be fish that could swallow a man without hurting him or digesting him for 3 days.

The list could go on and on of rediculous scientific claims backed by the Bible.

My advise, the Bible is not science, its religion. I love the Bible and believe its all true, but not all literally true.

Answer 7

In 1654, Archbishop Usher (Ireland), based on genealogy in Bible, determined that Earth was created October 26, 4004 BC, 9:00am (PST). Therefore, the Earth was 6000 years old
.
While he utilized the bible, his numbers are NOT Biblical. Although lots of creationists quote the number as biblical.

One thing the bible does say about the age of the earth:

"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." Ecclesiastes 1:4

Of course this contradicts Genesis since the earth is created in that story.

Now we have millions of Creationist Christians parroting the words of Usher, while happily ignoring the specific words in the Bible. How funny is this?

Both are wrong of course, but the Teacher of Ecclesiastes comes closest, since 4.5 billion years is truly the better part of forever.

Answer 8

The authors of this website obviously cherry picked their information to support their point of view and disregarded both the information that contradicted their point of view and the information showing their cherry picked facts were wrong, out dated, and proved erroneous years ago. Your case in point, the Sun was once thought to be burning some sort of fuel to cause the heat it radiates. The calculations were made as to how much fuel the Sun would need to consume using regular combustion and that number came out at 5 feet of fuel an hour. Today we know the Sun doesn't burn anything and is powered by nuclear fusion and the calculations show that the Sun has sufficient reserves of hydrogen to have been shining for the past 5 billion years and to continue to shine for another 5 billion years before its source of energy runs out.

Answer 9

A scientific answer to what? The shrinking sun argument? There's no answer: it's a complete fabrication. Actual observations are that the Sun is NOT shrinking by five feet an hour. It has NOT been shrinking for 400 years. It was NOT twice as large 100,000 years ago.

>>>They're just making this **** up.<<< It's what creationists do. They lie. They fabricate. They make **** up. They figure that if they do it for god, it's ok.

Answer 10

Even if the sun has been shrinking for the past 400 years, you can't conclude that it has always done so. The sun contracts and expands over its lifetime. All stars do.

Answer 11

I doubt if Jesus was concerned about such matters. The politicians who took over his church made it a matter of importance to their own control of the the masses and wealth. So you needn't pay any attention to canonical dogma about the age of Earth to call yourself a Christian.