Fighting the Crowd Over a Young Earth
It is difficult indeed to find any common ground between evolutionists and creationists. In fact, the two groups disagree on just about every subject in the Universe. But there is one area where they see eye to eye: the age of the Earth. Now, of course, they do not agree about how old the Earth is, but they do agree that if it has an age measured in thousands of years rather than billions, then evolution never could have occurred.
Therefore, evolutionists use every means at their disposal to “prove” that the Earth is very, very old. In Darwin’s day, the age of the Earth was around 20 million years. It is interesting to note, however, that from a scientific viewpoint, the age of the Earth has effectively doubled approximately every 15-20 years—so that planet Earth should be celebrating approximately 5 billion years of existence (or 250 times as old as it was thought to be during Darwin’s day).
TRUE SCIENCE AND THE AGE OF THE EARTH
Even though most science textbooks and journals teach that the Earth is billions of years old, many scientific findings do not agree. In fact, there are over a hundred different scientific methods for calculating the age of the Earth, and roughly 70 of those render an age of the Earth measured in thousands of years, not billions.
One of the strongest scientific arguments for a young Earth comes from the field of human population statistics. According to the records that are available, the human population on Earth doubles approximately every 35 years. If you break down that figure, it represents an annual increase of 20,000 people per every million (Morris, 1996, pp. 317-320). Let’s suppose that humankind started with just two individuals (we will call them Adam and Eve, for the sake of argument). And suppose that they lived on the Earth 1 million years ago (some evolutionists suggest that man, in one form or another, has been on the Earth 3-5 million years, but we will use the more conservative figure of 1 million). Suppose, further, that an average generation was 42 years, and that each family had an average of 2.4 children (they probably had many more than that but again, we will use conservative estimates). Allowing for wars, epidemic diseases, etc., there would be approximately 1 x 105000 people on the Earth today! That number is a 1 followed by 5,000 zeroes. But the entire Universe (at an estimated size of 20 billion light-years in diameter) would hold only 1 x 10100 people.
On the other hand, if one set the age of the Earth at about 6,000 years, the current world population would be approximately 4.34 billion people. Evolutionary figures thus would imply an Earth population 104900 times greater than would fit into the entire Universe! The question is: which of the two figures is right on target, and which could not possibly be correct? Allowing for an Earth measured in billions of years compromises both the biblical text and the scientific evidence. It is a young Earth after all.
Morris, Henry M. and John D. Morris (1996), The Modern Creation Trilogy—Volume 2: Science & Creation (Green Forest, AR: Master Books).