Comparison of Age of Earth according to Biblical theories

Question

I Have read that according to Biblical references the age of earth is 6000 years. Even if you quote Young Earth Creationism they too will give only 10,000 years old.

While in different belief like Hinduism, the age of the earth is comparable to that arrived to by contemporary scientific cosmology. Doesn't this imply the notion that the Bible isn't perfect at all?

Answer 1

There's not really much to say here. There are really only a few of options:

• Those who think the Biblical texts are broadly historical and believe they indicate that both humanity and the earth have existed for only a few thousand years (typically between six and ten).
• Those who think the Biblical texts are broadly historical in relation to humanity, believing that humanity have only existed for a few thousand years, but that the earth is much older. Specific options here include the Gap Theory and the Framework view of Genesis 1 (though many Framework proponents would say humanity is also much older).
• Those who think the early chapters and genealogies in Genesis are either analogical, mythical, or just inaccurate, and so don't believe we can learn an accurate age for humanity or the earth from the Bible, and therefore turn to secular geology for the answer to these questions.

Answer 2

I used to blindly believe that what I was taught as the age of the earth being "proven" by radioisotope dating was unquestionable. I only found out somewhat recently how poor the methodology was to arrive as these calculations. Most Christians don't even know the flaws. There is a book published by 7 PhDs in 2005 titled "Thousands Not Billions" that is written as a technical primer or summary of a larger body of research some years earlier that set out to test the three core assumptions secular researchers rely on to arrive at their large age calculations.

A quick background on radioisotope dating: The dating of a rock occurs by taking a portion of an igneous rock and breaking it down into its separate elements. Measurements have been performed in the last hundred years to get a pretty good calculation of half-lives for various radioactive materials. We know which elements (parent) will decay into what other elements (daughter) and what type of radiation is given off in the process. A half-life is simply a strange effect that every X number of years half of the remaining nuclear material will break-down into daughter elements and release some type of high energy radiation in the process. At face value we ought to be able to look at how many parent atoms are still present in a rock and how many daughter atoms are present in a rock and walk backwards through these half-lives until all the daughter atoms are back to their radioactive parent elements. For example, we know uranium breaks down into lead:

From Page 41:

• U-238 -> Pb-206 + 8-alpha + 6-beta
• U-236 -> Pb-207 + 7-alpha + 4-beta

So if we find a rock with 5 Uranium 238 atoms and 5 Lead 206 atoms in it then they would conclude the rock must be 1 Uranium-238 half-life old which is about 4.47 billion years. This is the number put into your history textbook.

What assumptions were made:

1. Initial Conditions: The assumption that no daughter molecules were present when the rock first formed. From our example these would be the Lead 206 atoms. How can we know the rock wasn't formed 1 year ago but these lead atoms were already present? We'll get to that later.
2. Closed System: The assumption that no atoms of either the uranium or lead left the system (the rock) and no new atoms of either entered the system. With the knowledge that water seeps through rock and displaces elements of different weight and density at different rates how can we know uranium wasn't extracted at higher rates than lead manipulating the ratio and making the rock appear older than it truly is? We'll get to that later too.
3. Constant Rate: This one is my favorite because of how cool it is. The assumption that the ticking clock of the half-life has always been running at the same rate throughout the lifetime of that rock's existence. Just like a clock that runs fast or runs slow if the half-life was not the same in the past then this method will give us an inaccurate age.

Not even one of these assumptions can be proven true. To believe an ancient age of rocks is to believe not by evidence but by faith.

What were the team's results of testing these assumptions? I can't go info full detail otherwise I'd just be repeating the whole book to you since the book is a summary of their findings from a much larger volume of work. The chapter subjects are:

1. A Brief History or Radiation Studies
2. Overview of Radioisotope Dating
3. Carbon-14 Dating
4. Helium Retention in Zircon Crystals
5. Radiohalos in granite
6. Fission Tracks in Zircons
7. Discordant radioisotope dates
8. Radioisotope Dating Case Studies
9. Theories of Accelerated Nuclear Decay
10. A Proper Reading of Genesis 1:1-2:3
11. Conclusions

Each of these chapters brings physical evidence that either disproves the assumptions subsequently disproving the possibility of an ancient earth or also brings strong evidence the earth is indeed 6000 years old as Genesis records.

To follow up on the assumptions 1 and 2, a secular researcher may point out they use a tool called an isochron to (help) mitigate the effects of sample contamination and initial daughter elements but even if we believed their claim of fully fixing the sample there's still two major problems:

1. Not only can they not prove their assumption that the decay rate has stayed the same over time. These chapters provide good evidence it hasn't. If the cosmological constant is a canary in the coal mine then physicists and geologists alike will soon be admitting too, if they aren't letting their faith get in the way ;-), that nuclear decay rates are also not constants. Exhibit A Exhibit B
2. Even with isochron "corrected" data the ending dates don't match. This is much bigger than a secular researcher is willing to admit to and is covered in chapter 7. If radioisotope dating is claimed to be accurate and when applied to different elements the dates don't match then which date is the correct date? The younger one or the older one? Neither? How can we have any certainty in either? It's equivalent to an engineer making a rocket ship boldly claiming all their math was right and we can trust it's a well-made rocket but then it explodes on the launchpad. If radioisotope dating methods give correct dates, then they all should match. They don't match. Naturalists know this too, quote:

"To pin down the age of older rocks, geologists rely on radiometric dating, which tracks the radioactive decay of elements within a sample. But in the past decade it has become clear that the results from different techniques and different labs don't agree." John Whitfield (Ph.D. in insect evolution, former science writer for Nature), Time lords, Nature, 429:125, 2004.

Answer 3

"I Have read that according to Biblical references ... Doesn't this imply the notion that the Bible isn't perfect at all?"

No. There is another, very obvious, possibility: perhaps whatever it was that you read isn't perfect.

It may very well be that the material you were reading was written by someone that misunderstood what the Bible actually says, and so it isn't the Bible that is imperfect.

The Bible itself doesn't say the Earth is only 6000 years old. It does imply that the seven days of creation happened somewhere around then, but it says nothing about the age of the Earth (or the rest of the universe).

There are other theories, compatible with a literal reading of the Bible, that don't require the universe to be only 6000 years old. One in particular is the "Gap Theory", which observes (among other things) that:

• There is an indeterminate amount of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.
• The "was without form" in Genesis 1:2 should be translated as "became without form".
• The Hebrew word translated as "without form" is "tohu", and Isaiah 45:18 says that God "did not create it tohu".
• Lucifer ruled the Earth long before Man was created.