SOME CREATIONIST AGES OF THE EARTH
Other Links:
How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?
A look at the arguments used by Kent Hovind to "prove" that the Earth is young.
An Index to Creationist Claims
A comprehensive look at the claims of all kinds of creationists arguments including young-earth arguments not debunked in "How Old is the Earth."
n spite of conclusive evidence of the Earth’s antiquity, the proponents of “scientific” creationism stubbornly maintain that the Earth is only about 10,000 years old (Table 9). How do they arrive at these numbers? They have no consistent set of data that leads to any definite age for the Earth. Their “evidence” consists of invalid criticisms of the legitimate scientific data, as discussed above, and of some calculations that supposedly show that the Earth is very young. These calculations occur throughout the literature of creation “science” (e.g., 13, 77, 92, 116, 135), and they have been conveniently tabulated by Morris (93, 95) and Morris and Parker (97) (Table 10).
Concerning this tabulation, Morris and Parker (97) make the following statement:
There are, as a matter of fact, scores of worldwide processes which give ages far too young to suit the standard Evolution Model. There are 68 types of such calculations listed in Table I, all of them independent of each other and all applying essentially to the entire earth, or one of its major components or to the solar system. All give ages far too young to accommodate the Evolution Model. All are based on the same types of calculations and assumptions used by evolutionists on the very few systems (uranium, potassium, rubidium) whose radioactive decay seems to indicate ages in the billions of years. As noted in items 25 and 26 in Table I, even these methods (when based on real empirical evidence) yield young ages.
The most obvious characteristic of the values listed in the table is their extreme variability — all the way from 100 years to 500,000,000 years. This variability, of course, simply reflects the errors in the fundamental uniformitarian assumptions.
Nevertheless, all things considered, it seems that those ages on the low end of the spectrum are likely to be more accurate than those on the high end. This conclusion follows from the obvious fact that: (1) they are less likely to have been affected by initial concentrations or positions other than “zero”; (2) the assumption that the system was a “closed system” is more likely to be valid for a short time than for a long time; (3) the assumption that the process rate was constant is also more likely to be valid for a short time than for a long time.
Thus, it is concluded that the weight of all the scientific evidence favors the view that the earth is quite young, far too young for life and man to have arisen by an evolutionary process. The origin of all things by direct creation — already necessitated by many other scientific considerations — is therefore also indicated by chronometric data. (97, p. 251-252; also 95, p. 53-54)
Table 9: Some Representative Ages of the Earth as Proposed by Creationists
Age of:Age (years)Reference
Earth 10,000 Barnes(13)
Earth 10,000 Morris (92)
Earth 13,000 Camping (22)
Earth 10,000 - 20,000 Kofahi and Segraves (77)
Galaxies nearly 6,000 Gentry (53)
Cosmos 6,000 - 10,000 Slusher (116)
Earth 7,000 - 10,000 Slusher (117)
