Is the Earth Billions of Years Old?

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. (more…)
