Excerpts from Imagine the Future You: Imagine the age of the earth

IMAGINE CREATION  The Age of the Universe
By Ada Brownell

 One of the biggest stumbling blocks to belief among educated people is the idea that the Earth was created in six days.

Recently a young man asked, “But how can Christians be right? I heard someone counted genealogies of the Bible and figured the Earth is about six thousand years old. We know it’s older than that!”

Do we? How do we know scientific dating is correct? During the early 1960s in Leadville, Colorado, I worked at the Leadville Herald Democrat and did a story on the town’s old opera house. On display in a small museum at the opera house was what appeared to be a petrified foot in a high-topped shoe. The toe of the shoe was torn and a very real-looking big toe and toenail protruded from the end. Every detail, including the eyelets and strings, appeared real, but the shoe and foot, broken off above the ankle, were stone. The specimen was found in a mine.

Years later I tried to find this artifact again to get more information, but it was gone from the opera house, and I couldn’t discover where it was taken.

Dr. Carl Baugh of Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, believes man and dinosaurs walked together. In his museum is a fossilized human finger and fossilized human footprints in dinosaur paw prints. He says there are other human and dinosaur footprints together in the Paluxy River Basin in Texas.[1]

Baugh[2] believes Earth’s atmospheric pressure before the flood in Noah’s day was 2.18 times what it is today, and the air was super oxygenated—enabling dinosaurs to live and pterosaurs to fly. Ultraviolet light was filtered out, and this atmosphere also gave man a longer life span.[3]

Dating methods are being challenged by some of today’s Christian scientists. The potassium-argon dating method, which dates the Earth’s age in billions of years, is said by scientists to be valid because of the amount of time needed to make evolution seem reasonable, say textbook authors Emmett L. Williams, a former metallurgical engineering professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and George Mulfinger Jr., a physics specialist (Physical Science for Christian Schools). [4] The dating method, however, assumes no argon was present when the rocks were formed. Yet, when volcanic rocks known to have been formed in 1800 to 1801 were tested, their age was said to range between 160 million and three billion years!

The radiocarbon dating method also is challenged by Williams and Mulfingers, who say it is unreliable because the calibration curve cuts off at about five thousand years ago and because the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere does not remain constant and appears to be continually increasing.

But suppose scientific dating is correct. It does nothing to undermine faith in God. Many Bible-believing Christians accept a very old Earth.

Often people try to make the Bible say something it doesn’t. The Bible doesn’t say the Earth was created in six twenty-four-hour days, although some people believe it was. Neither does the Bible say when “the beginning” was.

Here are some Christian ideas about the days of creation:

 Twenty-four Days of Re-creation: The belief there was a creation before Adam that was somehow destroyed. (This idea leaves a gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.)

Age-Long Days of Creation: The belief that creation occurred over six different ages that could have been thousands of years in length.

 Revelatory Days of Creation: The idea that the days had nothing to do with creation but with the amount of time God took giving Moses, the writer of the Book of Genesis, information about creation.

Twenty-four-hour days of creation: The belief that God literally created the Earth and all that is in it in six twenty-four-hour days, as we know days.

So when Genesis says, “So the evening and the morning were the first day,” “The evening and the morning were the second day,” and so forth until God rested on the seventh day, the length of time can be interpreted several ways.

One thing that makes me believe in a young Earth is population. Scientists use the “population J curve” to show exponential growth of the number of humans. The “J curve” is any system that grows by doubling—one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etc., or geometric growth.

Experts estimate the world’s population was two hundred million in 1 AD and population continued to double and double until 1850—the curve of the J— when eight hundred million people lived on the Earth. Estimates and censuses showed two billion by 1930, three billion in 1960, four billion in 1976, five billion in 1990, six billion in 2002, and an estimated seven billion in 2011.

It took nearly two thousand years to quadruple the number of people from the time Jesus walked the earth but only eighty years for the population to grow from one to two billion between 1850 and 1930 and twelve years to grow a billion between 1990 and 2002. The US Census Bureau estimated the world population to be 7.073 billion in 2012.

 This increase is despite diebacks because of disease and epidemics, natural catastrophes, and wars. In my mind, there is no way man could have been here millions of years. Again, science uses millions of years to make evolution seem plausible because we can’t see any evidence for it in a lifetime of one hundred years.

 But the length of time that it took to create the Earth is not exceedingly important. What is important is that we know and believe Genesis 1:1, that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

The whole world’s scientific thought constantly changes and often contradicts what scientists thought was solid evidence. On the other hand, the Creator and his witness never change and will never be outdated.

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[1] Ada Brownell, Pueblo Chieftain, Nov. 4, 1989, 1B; and Carl Baugh and Dr. Clifford Wilson, Dinosaur (Orange CA: Promise Publishing Co., 1987).

[2] Baugh’s credentials for making these claims are challenged by some experts, however, and even some creationists are skeptical about the Paluxy footprints, although they are in a protected national or state park.

[3] Carl Baugh, Panorama of Creation (Oklahoma City, OK: Southwest Radio Church), 55-62.

[4] Bob Jones University Press, Greenville, SC, 1974, 271.