Evolution or Creation (Young or Old Earth) Part 2
>> Thursday, September 16, 2010
The Age of the Earth: Thousands vs. Billions of Years | |
Prediction: The earth will be demonstrated to be billions of years old: If the earth is less than 3 billion years old, there would not be enough time for biological evolution to occur. | Prediction: The earth will be discovered to be relatively young (e.g. more than 6,000 years, but less than 100,000,000). (Note: Intelligent Design thinking does not require a young earth, but the Young Earth/Cataclysm model, by definition, does.) |
Astrophysical Dating: Light from distant objects in the universe suggests 10,000,000,000 light years as a possible age (and consequent size) for the expansion of the known universe from the Big Bang. The same light suggests that some of these distant objects contain chemical elements such as carbon, iron and uranium requiring multiple billions of years under current theory for these elements to form in second-generation stars. Thus, these second generation galaxies would require more than 16,000,000,000 years to mature and allow the light to reach the earth. By that time, the sun would have burned out and gone cold. The reality is that no one really knows how big the universe is, or from what distance light might really come, or even whether the speed of light has always been constant. Today, most science textbooks state that the solar system including the earth is 4.6 billion years old. There is no evidence for this arbitrary age. The likely reason for science to propose this age is that it allows enough time for evolution to happen. As to the universe, the age printed in textbooks has doubled every twenty years over the last 140 years. In the late 1920’s it was estimated that the universe was only 2,000,000,000 years old. While at the time of Darwin half a billion years was accepted. Now, with the observations of the Hubble telescope, some are proposing 16,000,000,000 years or more. (Therefore 2 billion, plus or minus 14 billion years, or 16 billion plus or minus 14 billion!) These disparate ages indicate a lack of precision in the measuring processes. Coupling these disparities with contradictory measurements from other dating systems caused one well known Darwinian astronomer to state: “There is no evidence based solely on solar observations that the Sun is 4.5-5.0 x 109 years old. I suspect that the sun is 4.5 billion years old. However, given some new and unexpected results to the contrary, and some time for frantic recalculation and theoretical readjustment, I suspect that we could live with Bishop Ussher’s value for the age of the earth and sun. I don’t think we have much in the way of observational evidence in astronomy to conflict with that. Solar physics now looks to paleontology for data on solar chronology.” From a speech by John Eddy at an astronomy conference Quoted by Kazmann in Geotimes 1978. The theory that the sun is fueled by fusion, burning hydrogen into helium, has some experimental support. This allows for the possibility, but does not prove that the sun is billions of years old. Predictions stated that the sun would give off neutrinos as a by-product of the fusion process. The quantities of neutrinos measured on the earth coming from the sun, however, are fewer than predicted to produce the sun’s temperature. Another theory originally proposed by Sir Isaac Newton is that the sun is heated by friction through gravitational collapse. This theory, too, has experimental support since measurements over several hundred years have indicated a slow reduction in the diameter of the sun. Sir Isaac Newton’s theory has been discarded only because it does not allow for the sun to be billions of years old, thus making evolution impossible. One explanation for the missing neutrinos is that the sun is young and that its energy is produced from a combination of both nuclear fusion and heat caused by gravitational collapse. If heat from the sun is caused by a combination of these two processes, then the sun is not billions of years old. Besides the question about how long the sun has been burning, there are a number of other astrophysical phenomena, which give maximum ages for the universe and the solar system that are much lower then the often-quoted 4.6 billion years. Some examples: *Spiral galaxy arms cannot continue to maintain form after billions of years. Spiral galaxies, therefore, appear to be too young for evolutionary timescales. *Venus, Uranus & Pluto spin backwards. Gravity would not allow this to happen for billions of years. *In the Solar System, at least 8 moons rotate backwards in a reverse spin from what would be predicted from the laws of physics. This reverse spin implies a designed, relatively young universe. There is no current naturalistic explanation for a reverse spin. *Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, & Neptune each have moons orbiting in opposite directions. Physical laws cannot explain how reverse orbits originated, nor can they explain how these orbits would be maintained for billions of years. Gravity should have caused the orbiting moons to slow each other down. Evolutionary time frames would have required that the moons crash into the mother planets a long time ago. *The moon’s interior is still hot. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that the interior of the moon is still hot except that it appears not to have cooled off yet! It must therefore be very young! *The earth’s interior is still hot! So are a number of the other planets. These planets are thus still cooling off. There is no other hypothetical explanation for heat in the interior of the planets unless the solar system is not billions of years old! *The moon is moving away from the earth at measurable rates. Assuming a 4.6 billion year old earth, it should have escaped the earth’s orbit several billion years ago. There is no explanation as to how the Earth, or any other of the planets captured their moons into orbit. Nor is their any accepted scientific solution for the Sun to have captured the planets. *The earth’s magnetic field has decayed by 6% in the last 150 years. Some scientists have proposed a maximum age of 20,000 years using a geometric decay profile for the magnetic field. | |
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