Do We Have More Evidence That the Earth Is Young?

Posted On November 12, 2021

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Introduction

As discussed in an earlier post, the Bible suggests that the earth is very young. Hebrew scholars agree that the “days” in Genesis are definitely normal days. And chronologies give us an age of the earth of about 6,000 years. This seems incredible, considering that we’ve all been taught that the earth is billions of years old. How do we as Christians reconcile this? Well, we carefully look at the evidence.

In our last two posts, we saw that the rock layers may not be the product of millions of years of gradual deposition, as we’ve all been taught. Instead, the evidence is compelling that they were put down rather quickly during the global flood of Genesis, about 4,500 years ago.

But the rock layers are not the only evidence for a young earth. The team at Creation Ministries International has compiled an amazing list of 101 evidences, supported by serious scientific research, that the earth must be much younger than the secular timeline.[1] I’ll let you delve into that evidence at depth on your own if you like. Following is a summary of just a few of them.[2] In bold are the maximum possible ages considering the evidence. In italics are the ages required by the secular evolutionary timeline.

Galaxies wind themselves up too fast

The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, orbit about the center of the galaxy with different speeds. The inner stars rotate faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disk of stars instead of its present spiral shape. Yet our galaxy is supposed to be 10 billion years old. This is known as the “winding-up dilemma.”

Comets disintegrate too quickly

According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as our solar system, about 5 billion years old. Yet each time a comet, which is basically a “dirty iceberg” orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of 10,000 years. Scientists explain this by postulating a spherical “Oort cloud” well beyond Pluto, which is supposed to re-supply comets to the solar system when a passing star’s gravity disturbs the cloud. But there is no evidence of any kind for such a cloud.

Not enough mud on the sea floor

Each year, water and winds erode about 20 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit them into the oceans. Plate tectonic subduction removes about 1 billion tons per year. As far as anyone knows, the other 19 billion tons simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present mass of sediment in only less than 12 million years. But according to evolutionary theory, these processes have been taking place as long as the oceans have existed, which would be 3 billion years. If that were true, then the oceans today would be massively choked with sediment dozens of miles deep.

Not enough sodium in the sea

Every year, rivers and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the oceans. Only 27% manages to get back out of the sea each year. As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates. Even granting generous secular estimates of possible less Sodium input, and higher output, in the past, the maximum age of the oceans would be only 62 million years, much less than the evolutionary age of 3 billion years.

The earth’s magnetic field is decaying too fast

The total energy in Earth’s magnetic field is decreasing with a half-life of 1,465 years. Evolutionary theories explaining this rapid decrease as well as how the earth could have maintained its magnetic field for billions of years are very complex and inadequate. A much better creationist theory exists involving sound physics and explains many features of the field such as its creation and rapid reversals during the Genesis flood. The main result is that the field’s total energy has always decayed at least as fast as now. At that rate the field could not be more than 20,000 years old. But evolutionists say the field is as old as their age for the earth, which is 4.7 billion years.

Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic “ages” to a few years

Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay. Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado Plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the evolutionary timescale.

Helium in zircons has not had time to diffuse out

The RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) measured the amount of helium in tiny zircon crystals, which are found in granite. Helium is a product of radioactive decay, and will quickly diffuse out of the zircon because helium is such a small molecule. Experiments show us that helium diffuses so quickly that it should have all but disappeared after about 100,000 years. In fact, the rate of helium leakage dates zircons at 5,680 +/- 2,000 years, when evolutionary theory puts them at billions of years old.

Not enough stone age skeletons

Evolutionary anthropologists say that the “stone age” lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men was roughly constant, between 1 and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artefacts. By this scenario, they would have buried at least 4 billion bodies. Secular science tells us that buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 100,000 years, so many of the supposed 4 billion stone age skeletons should still be around (and certainly their artefacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the stone age was much shorter than evolutionists think, a few hundred years in many areas.

Agriculture is too recent

The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years during the stone age before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years ago. Yet the archaeological evidence shows that stone age men were just as intelligent as we are. It is very improbable that none of those estimated 4 billion people would ever discover that plants grow from seeds. It is more likely that men were without agriculture only less than a few hundred years after the Flood, if at all.

History is too short

Again, according to evolutionists, stone age man existed for 100,000 years before beginning to make written records about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Prehistoric man built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases. Why would he wait a thousand centuries before using the same skills to record history? The biblical time scale is much more likely.

Ubiquitous Carbon-14

Carbon-14, or radiocarbon is used in a well-known dating method. Many have the impression that it “proves” millions of years, but this is impossible because it decays so fast. Its half life is only 5,730 years. That is every 5,730 years it decays down to half its original amount. This means that after no more than 100,000 years, there should be no detectable Carbon-14 left in a sample. Yet Carbon-14 is routinely found in coal seams that are supposed to be millions of years old. It is often found in diamonds, which are supposed to be billions of years old. A better explanation is that coal and diamonds are not that old at all.

Soft tissue found in dinosaur bones

In the late 1990s, Dr. Mary Schweitzer analyzed T. rex bones under a microscope and discovered red blood cells. Later, after dissolving the bone matrix, she discovered soft, fibrous tissue remaining, including blood vessels containing more blood cells. Since that time many other discoveries have been made of dinosaur bones that are not fully fossilized and contain different kinds of soft tissue, including fragments of very fragile protein and DNA molecules. This suggests that those dinosaur bones are only thousands of years old, not the minimum 65 million years as required by evolutionary theory.

Too few supernova remnants

According to astronomical observations, galaxies like our own experience about one supernova (an exploding star) every 25 years. The gas and dust remnants from such explosions (like the crab nebula) expand outward rapidly and should remain visible for over a million years. Yet the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants. That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years’ worth of supernovas, not millions of years.

Conclusion

We continue to see evidence revealing serious problems with billions of years. On the other hand, there is so much compelling evidence that leads to the Biblical worldview. There is nothing wrong with reading Genesis (and the rest of the Bible for that matter) in a plain, straightforward way. We can take God at his word.

But is the age of the earth really that important? Can a Christian believe that the earth is billions of years old and still be saved? The answer is yes, but is does raise some troubling questions. And we’ll take a look at that in our next post.

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[1] See “Age of the Earth: 101 Evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe” along with its many in-depth citations, at https://creation.com/age-of-the-earth, accessed 11/11/21.

[2] The bulk of this post is adapted from the booklet by Dr. Russell Humphreys, Evidence for a Young World, as found at  https://usstore.creation.com/product/21-evidence-for-a-young-world, accessed 11/11/21.