The fossil of a fish buried quickly, while eating

AMERICA is filled with natural wonders of tremendous beauty: gorges, waterfalls, rock formations and canyons. Tourists who visit these sites will almost always encounter “educational” plaques that are insistent: What you see before you is many millions or billions of years old. These dates are always presented as beyond dispute. And it’s not surprising. Evolutionary theory has not produced conclusive evidence for gradual creation of species and must appeal to long stretches of time. The naturalists who create the commentary at our national and state parks are often actually making philosophical statements under the guise of science. It is a worldview that cancels true wonder.

The average person never encounters — in scientific language — the evidence that the earth is much younger. When you stand by a gorge and read that little plaque that tells you its almost incomprehensible age, there is never any footnote that warns you that radiometric dating is not a settled matter. The science has definitely not been settled, either in favor of an old earth or a young earth. But in recent years the arguments for the latter have become stronger.

Here is a list of 101 evidences for a young earth. Don Batten writes:

The widely accepted age of the universe is currently 13.77 billion years and for the solar system (including Earth) it is 4.543 billion years. However, no scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe, and that includes the ones we have listed here that strongly suggest that these accepted ages are in serious error. Although age indicators are called ‘clocks’ they aren’t, because all ages result from calculations that necessarily involve making assumptions about the past. The starting time of the ‘clock’ has always to be assumed as well as the way in which the speed of the clock has varied over time. Further, it has to be assumed that the clock was never disturbed.

There is no independent natural clock against which those assumptions can be tested. For example, the amount of cratering on the moon, based on currently observed cratering rates, would suggest that the moon is quite old. However, to draw this conclusion we have to assume that the rate of cratering has been the same in the past as it is now. And there are now good reasons for thinking that it might have been quite intense in the past, in which case the craters do not indicate an old age at all (see below).

Ages of millions of years are all calculated by assuming the rates of change of processes in the past were the same as we observe today—called the principle of uniformitarianism. If the age calculated from such assumptions disagrees with what they think the age should be, they conclude that their assumptions did not apply in this case, and adjust them accordingly. If the calculated result gives an acceptable age, the investigators publish it.

Examples of young ages listed here are also obtained by applying the same principle of uniformitarianism. Long-age proponents will dismiss this sort of evidence for a young age of the earth by arguing that the assumptions about the past do not apply in these cases. In other words, age is not really a matter of scientific observation but an argument about our assumptions about the unobserved past.

The assumptions behind the evidences presented here cannot be proved, but the fact that such a wide range of different phenomena all suggest much younger ages than are currently generally accepted, provides a strong case for questioning the accepted ages.

— Comments —

Patrick O’Brien writes:

Thank you for delving into this question. The arguments of the creationists are ironclad. Too bad the Catholic Church has capitulated to the evolutionists.

Laura writes:

You’re welcome. It’s only heretical modernists in the Church who have embraced Darwinian evolution — or rather failed to counter it. Nevertheless, here’s a good Novus Ordo Catholic site against materialistic evolution, but there is much more on Protestant sites.

Terry Morris writes:

Ah, nice post. Right up my alley, or at least used to be. Moody Bible Institute used to do a lot of stuff on this, but I haven’t looked at their videos in years.

I was aware of the findings of geologists in the aftermath of the Mt. St. Helens disaster twenty years ago. The article you link speaks of this overnight Grand Canyon-like gorging of the local landscape. Very intriguing and interesting.

Scanning the article further, I didn’t find any references to the large bowl-shaped feet on the lunar lander of the Apollo era. When Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder and onto the lunar surface, he reported that the lunar dust was like a powder but only an inch deep, or thereabouts. The whole idea behind the ‘landing pads’ seems to have been that, according to old earth theory more or less accepted at the time by the big brains of NASA, the dust on the lunar surface might have been as much as several feet deep – deep enough to essentially swallow the LEM up to its belly minus inclusion of the feet. Which turned out to be big brain nonsense. Duh!

I remember a video I watched (many moons ago) in which a PhD in Geology was giving a presentation on this topic and showed a cutaway of a large hillside in his presentation. In this photo were a bunch of large trees turned wrong-side up, roots and all. He asked the question of the audience, “how many here believe these trees grew this way.” Unbelievably about 90% of the audience raised their hands indicating belief in such nonsense. He then began to school them on why this was impossible; why, in point of fact, that these trees were buried in this deep sediment upside-down was the result of a earth-shattering cataclysmic event in the not-too-distant past that deposited them in this way in little more than an instant. Before it was over the whole room (save the 10%) felt like utter fools.

Mr. Morris adds:

I used to argue with Lawrence Auster about this problem (old earth vs young earth theory) fairly often. He was a firm disbeliever in Darwinian Evolution and criticized it often. He was, however, also a big believer in the theory that the earth (and the universe, for that matter) is billions and billions of years old.

I suppose I shouldn’t say that I “argued” with him about this since he wouldn’t really argue his position when I would question it; all he would say (and not to put words in his mouth, but I no longer have the emails of our discussions on the matter to refer back to) is that ‘the universe has to be billions of years old because it is impossible that it is only a few thousand years old.’ That’s of course not a very good argument, so I would sometimes press him to explain. If and when I pressed him further on the problem, he would just say that he didn’t have time to get into it.

Well, anyway, that’s really neither here nor there. I certainly understood the limitations on his time, and therefore would drop the issue when he would make that appeal.

I’m not sure whether the paper you link to discusses polonium halos in granite and what they tell us about instantaneous geological formations, but that is something else modern “scientism” has no answer for. I watched a video about them a long time ago, but I had forgotten what they were called so I had to look it up. Here is a paper I found on the subject of polonium halos that you and some of your readers might find interesting.:

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