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HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?  BILLIONS OF YEARS OR THOUSANDS?

Eric V. Snow

First edition, incomplete

Just how old is the earth?  Is it clearly 4.5 billion years old, as evolutionists generally believe?  Or could it be only 6,000 or 10,000 years old, as the young earth creationists believe?  Should we be open-minded about the scientific arguments that the young earth creationists make that the earth could be far younger that 4.5 billion years old?  Although I’ve never been able to quite sign off on the earth being a mere 6,000 years old or even 10,000 years old, I do believe we should listen to the young earth advocates with an open mind instead of dogmatically rejecting them as being in error without further thought.  So here it’s necessary to analyze some the radioactive decay methods’ assumptions, which aren’t as solid as their advocates believe, since a number of anomalies appear which undermine their reliability.  It also is useful to summarize a series of arguments that the young earth advocates make, which use the same scientific reasoning of extrapolating current geological processes into the past based on the same principle of uniformitarianism that’s employed to justify reliance on radioactive decay methods.

The following anomalies countering the prevailing paradigm of “deep time” come from the John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris’ seminal young earth work, “The Genesis Flood:  The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications” (1961), pp. 379-390.  (Some of these specific examples appear also in William Stansfield’s “The Science of Evolution” (1977), despite he is an evolutionist).  For instance, perhaps some 14,300,000 tones of meteoritic dust settles on the earth each year.  Even the like of the popular science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who was an atheist, calculated that this would amount to a layer 54 feet thick on the earth’s surface over a period of 5 billion years.  There’s hardly any evidence of such a layer anywhere on the earth.  It can’t be explained away by crustal mixing over the eons because meteorites are 2.5% nickel on average, but the earth’s crust is about 0.008% nickel.  It would need to be mixed down more than three miles, even assuming the earth’s crust had no nickel in it to begin with, which is absurd.  Similarly, the high percentage of iron in meteorites would indicate that their dust would make up for all the iron in the top 1.5 miles of the earth’s crust, which assumes that it has none to begin with, which is equally implausible.  

Radioactive decay methods can produce their own anomalies for “deep time,” a point that the ICR’s RATE project has also done, which will be examined further below.  In the case of radioactive meteorites, Paneth found their ages ranged from 60 million to 7 billion years.  Then when the solidification of stony meteorites was examined, they came up with 4.6 billion years simply by changing arbitrarily the method of calculation.  Of course, since 60 million years was too low from the viewpoint of how much time biological evolution needs to be intellectually plausible, it “had” to be wrong a priori (before experience) and thus deemed “wrong.”  Meteorites, as well as the teklites formed by their impacts on earth, can’t be found in layers older than the Tertiary Period, which makes no sense if rocks from outer space have been hitting the earth for billions of years.

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer, observed that at the rate comets were breaking up in the solar system that they couldn’t have been flying around for more than a million years.  They would last only a few hundred or a few thousand trips around the sun. The ad hoc “solution” by evolutionists to explain away this problem  and to “save the phenomena” is to postulate the existence of the “Oort Cloud.”  They claim, without any experimental proof, that there are a large number of unobserved hibernating, inactive comets lurking at the edge of the solar system which are periodically released by the gravitational field of a passing star.  

 The helium content of the atmosphere is another potential way to date the age of the earth.  Helium is escaping into the earth’s atmosphere at a rate that indicates the earth is much younger than evolutionists believe.  Unlike hydrogen, this gas can’t easily escape into outer space. The radioactive decay of uranium and thorium can be safely assumed to have generated all of this helium (H-4).  If we assume that radioactive decay has been going on for 2 billion years, but that only 1.3% of the amount of primary rock has been eroded that could have produced that helium, the maximum age of the earth (or at least its atmosphere) is 26 million years.  Evolutionists attempt to avoid this problem by asserting that all this helium simply escaped into outer space, but actually that assertion remains to be proven.  The high temperatures of the high exosphere to make this loss plausible, in the range of 1800 degrees or even 2300 degrees Celsius, simply aren’t accurate.  Indeed, it can be as cold as 0 degrees Celsius instead, such as at night.  Before better data existed, evolutionists simply asserted such high temperatures existed to save their theory from facing an anomaly.  If the earth’s atmosphere were millions and billions of years old, the concentration of helium would be much higher than 1 part in 200,000.  

The concentration of salt in the ocean’s water presents another means for applying the uniformitarian geological assumption to another natural phenomenon.  For example, the oceans have around 315,000,000 cubic miles of water in volume.  Rivers have around 50,000 cubic miles of water, of which around 8200 annually run into the oceans each year.  If rivers have a concentration of sodium of 0.0085 and chlorine of 0.0083 parts per thousand, but the oceans currently have about 10.8 parts per thousand of sodium and 19.6 parts per thousand of chlorine, one can readily calculate how many years it would take for the current levels of salinity of the oceans to be reached.  For chlorine, it would take 90 million years and for sodium it would be 50 million years.  Notice that these calculations assume that the oceans had no salt in them in the beginning.  These calculations place an upper limit on how old the oceans and thus how old the earth can be that’s way less than 4.5 billion years.  Normally evolutionists attempt to duck this problem by saying the salt was precipitated out and then re-transported to the oceans repeatedly, but even the most generous estimates of how much this process really occurs don’t begin to solve the problem.  Nor can the problem be avoided by saying the salinity of the oceans have been rising over the eons.  Evolutionists can be cited who believe that the basic level of salt in the oceans hasn’t changed since the Cambrian or pre-Cambrian time periods, such as C.S. Fox and G. Evelyn Hutchinson.  

Surprisingly enough, volcanoes give off water, which is called “juvenile water,” which originates from deep within the earth.  It has been calculated, such as on the basis of what the Mexican volcano Paricutin emitted, when it was the most active (1943-1952), some 39 million metric tons of water.  This amounts to roughly 1/1000 of a cubic mile of water per year.  If there are some 400 to 500 active volcanoes on the continents of the world and several times more having been active in the past, it becomes reasonable to believe that at least one cubic mile of juvenile water is being produced per year.  Current estimates of volcanic activity indicate there are roughly 1,350 potentially active volcanoes in the world and 600 have erupted in historic times, excluding the belts of those on the mid-Atlantic ridge.  So then, let’s go back to the amount of seawater in world, which is around 315,000,000 cubic miles’ worth.  Even if only one cubic mile of water is being emitted from volcanoes per year, the world’s oceans would be filled in 315,00,000 years.  Even if we add another 25,000,000 for all the water in the atmosphere, lakes, rivers, and the earth’s crust, that doesn’t begin the solve the problem this calculation poses against the concept of “deep time.”  Notice that this reasoning assumes that the areas that the oceans occupy today started out completely dry, which seems simply absurd.  

Another line of reasoning that indicates that the earth is much younger than 4.5 billion years comes from the average rate at which volcanoes generate igneous rocks from their lava flows.  In particular, based on the reasoning of J.T. Wilson using an estimate of Sapper, the emission of lava is some 0.8 cubic kilometers per year on average since c. 1500.  If this rate of deposit is projected backwards indefinitely 3 billion or 4.5 billion years, the accumulated lava flows would be equal to the total volume of rock of the continents, which Wilson calculated as being 30 km. X 1.1 x 10 raised to the 8 km.  However, igneous rock is a relatively low percentage of the total rock laid down in the continents, since sedimentary rocks are much more common. The Mexican volcano Paricutin, which famously started to grow one day from a cornfield, by itself put out 0.2 cubic kilometers of rock per year, which is one fourth of Wilson’s estimate.  Furthermore, volcanic activity seems certainly to have been more common in the pre-historic past than the present.  If there have been an average of 1000 volcanoes each giving off this amount of material (0.2 cubic kilometers) on average going back historically indefinitely, the maximum age of the earth’s continents would be suddenly reduced from 4.5 billion to less than 20 million years.  And we have to keep in mind that the rocks of the continents mostly aren’t igneous rocks, which originated from volcanoes.

William Stansfield, who isn’t a creationist, candidly listed in “The Science of Evolution” (1977) a number of geological processes that, when extrapolated into the past at today’s current rates of change, produce ages far less than the radioactive decay processes often do.  In particular, the build-up of radiocarbon (C-14) in the atmosphere could have been produced  in several thousand years.  (See generally Henry M. Morris and Gary E. Parker, “What is Creation Science?” (1987), pp. 283-293).

The earth’s di-polar magnetic field has been weakening at a rate with a half-life (i.e., 50% loss) of 1,400 years.  If we assume it will reverse itself, and grow stronger, that contradicts the uniformitarian assumption that “the present is the key to the past,” that major rates of change in geological processes don’t happen, which was the traditional assumption of geology for many decades, this method is as good or even better than others.  The conclusion to draw, based on Thomas G. Barnes’ research (“Origin and Destiny of the Earth’s Magnetic Field”) is that the earth’s magnetic field can’t be more than 10,000 years old.  Critics will claim that the magnetic field is maintained by some kind of dynamo action in the earth’s core instead of by decaying electrical currents.  Hence, they claim the magnetic field will oscillate and reverse itself periodically.  Barnes’ reasoning straightforwardly applies the second law of thermodynamics (entropy increases or useful energy that do work declines in a closed system) to this phenomenon.  The dynamo theory faces serious problems, since it lacks a known cause to explain it and it can’t really be proven at all.  Individual rocks with magnetic fields “frozen” into various positions don’t prove that the magnetic field was about the same strength in the past since it is a wild extrapolation from much too small of a sample.  As Morris and Morris observe, because local and regional conditions of magnetism can affect measurements of the magnetic field as a whole, this kind of extrapolation is very dubious.  Much like the Oort cloud, the “dynamo theory” appears to be a non-testable arbitrary ad hoc construct invented by evolutionists to escape the falsification of “deep time” from the decline of the earth’s magnetic field.

As Henry Morris and John Morris (“Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth,” 1989, p. 53), measurements of worldwide geological processes like those outlined above have significant advantages over dating individual rocks by radioactive decay methods.  By itself, such processes have much larger samples or measurements taken over many years.  Furthermore in the particular case of the decay of the earth’s magnetic field, it has been measured for over 145 years (they were writing in 1989), unlike radioactive decay methods, which are essentially a product of the 1950s for the currently accepted dates of the earth by evolutionists (i.e., Clair Patterson’s date of the earth’s being 4.5 billion years old).  The magnetic field is generated deep within the earth’s interior, thus insulating extrapolations based on its rate of decay from the risk of contamination that affect radioactive decay methods since they are open systems.  Furthermore, what is being measured is more stable and better defined for a longer period of time compared to the radioactive decay methods.  So if we going to uncritically extrapolate into the unobserved past based upon uniformitarian/naturalistic assumptions, processes based upon worldwide processes are a priori going to be more reliable than ones based on individual rocks s and local conditions.

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