10.11.23
How Old is the Earth?
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (2) And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (3) And God said, “Let there be light:” and there was light. (4) And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. (5) And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5)
The age of the earth is a hotly disputed topic. The two contrasting ideas are that the earth is about 6000 years old, or that it is 4-5 billion years old with the universe being 14 billion years old. Thus there is a Young-earth position and an Old-earth position.
Where did the Young-earth world view come from? Simply put, from the Bible. One can take God at His Word that He created the earth on the first day of creation. Then, beginning after the first week, we can count the years of the generations from Adam to Abraham in Genesis 5-11. This amounts to about 2000 years. Then, adding the years from Abraham to today gives us 4000 years, or a total of about 6000 years.
Many men through the centuries have undertaken to calculate the age of the earth based on the Bible. Each one has come up with an answer ranging from 5500 to 7500 years.
Other cultures have long taught a similar age for the earth. This would include the Babylonians, Mayans, Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Spanish, and several others. Prior to the 1700s, few believed in an old earth.
The challenge to a 6000-year age for the earth has only been recent, beginning in the late 18th century. It was only when God began to be left out of the picture, and the Great Flood discounted, that millions of years began to take hold in geology. As such, one who believed in millions of years wrote: “The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now…no powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.”
This belief is known as naturalistic uniformitarianism. It excludes the hand of God and the world-wide catastrophe of Noah’s flood. The Bible foresaw this worldview, and gave clear condemnation of it. The Apostle Peter wrote: Knowing this first, that there shall come scoffers in the last days, walking after their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” For of this they are willingly ignorant, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water; whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. (2 Peter 3:3-6)
While man uses radiometric methods for attempting to date the earth, these have been found to be unreliable. For example, when rock layers are presumed to be millions of years old, how can coal and diamonds found wedged into these layers be only thousands of years old?
The age of the earth really comes down to a matter of trust. Should we trust man’s imperfect and changing ideas, or God’s perfectly accurate eye-witness account of the past?
Thus says the LORD, “Heaven is my throne, and earth is My footstool.” (Isaiah 66:1a)