Is the Earth really 4.5 Billion Years Old?

Evolutionism says that the earth is around four and a half billion years old. One of the reasons for this age being given is because that is the realistic timescale for the present state of earth to have come about if everything evolved instead of God more recently creating it. But if the earth is in fact this tremendous age, there ought to be confirmations of this everywhere. The following are just a very few examples which indicate evidence which denies this :

Mineralization of the Oceans
Salt accumulates in the world's oceans at an estimated rate each year from the earth's rivers. Yet the oceans today only have a 3.5% salinity, indicating that this process has been going on for a much shorter time.

Silting of the Oceans
Mud also is delivered into the oceans via rivers and dust storms. Again, if this has been happening for billions of years, the oceans ought to have silt beds many kilometres thick, to the point of  the choking of much aquatic life. But this is not the case either.

Continental Erosion
Evolutionists believe that the continents formed about 3.5 billion years ago. But current continental erosion rates indicate that complete erosion of the continents would have taken place more than dozens of times over during that timescale. A study by the Geological Society of America showed that one recognized way of quantifying Earth crust erosion involves calculations based upon ¹⁰Be, an Isotope of the element Beryllium. According to the study, the average erosion rate for rock outcrops is 40 feet for every million years. Since the average thickness of the earth's crust above sea level is just 2,044 feet, it would only have taken 50 million years to entirely erode the earths current exposed crust at this rate. *
This only applies to rocky outcrops such as mountains. Even more interestingly, continental basins, that are more affected by rainfall, erode much faster, meaning that they would have eroded in perhaps less than 3 million years. So the age of the continents would be somewhere between three million and fifty million years on this basis. Evolutionists try to explain this away by saying that tectonic uplift recreates mountainous ranges on a cyclical basis. But if this has been repeatedly occurring, the layers of the geological column found today would have been eradicated long ago, taking the fossil record with it.The presence of the fossil record as it is, bereft of intermediary forms, indicates only one tectonic uplift has occurred, not multiplied ones.

Rock Strata Bending
Evolutionary theory insists that rock strata thousands of feet thick were present and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before Catastrophic events caused them to uplift and concertina into the present configurations, which includes many acute hairpin bends. However, if this were true, the uplifting of the strata would have splintered and fractured the strata rather than bending them. This suggests that the bending of the strata took place while they were still young, wet and unsolidified, affirming the creationist model and denying the evolutionary account. **

Homo Sapiens recording of History
According to evolutionists, Homo Sapiens existed for around 190,000 years before beginning to record history in written forms 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Yet we know that so-called pre-historic man was intelligent enough to build megalithic monuments, create beautiful cave paintings and record lunar phases. *** So the question is, why would he have waited a further 2,000 centuries before using the same skills to record history?

* Portenga, E. W. and R. R. Bierman. 2011. Understanding Earth's eroding surface with ¹⁰Be. GSA Today. 21 (8): 4-10.

** Austin, S. A. and J. D. Morris, Tight folds and clastic dikes as evidence for rapid deposition and deformation of two very thick stratigraphic sequences, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1986), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 3-15, out of print, contact www.creationicc.org/proceedings.php for help in locating copies.

*** Marshack, A., Exploring the mind of Ice Age man, National Geographic 147:64-89 (January 1975).

A Personal Account

I can't remember a time when I didn't believe in God's existence. And I never doubted that somehow Jesus and the Bible were at the centre of the mystery. But it was all still a puzzle to me, because I certainly had no assurance that I was in right relationship with this God I believed existed. I knew something was definitely askew and I can remember going on a search that began in earnest at the age of 12, when three events coincided - first, my father's death from a stroke at the age of 59, then the arrival at my front door two months later of two Baptist young people on a Summer Missionary trip from the U.S. They chatted with me on my doorstep for about 90 minutes, with them standing under an umbrella in the Irish summer rain - and left a lasting impression. I was raised a Catholic and felt I couldn't ask them in, partly because of that and also I guessed because my mum might not have appreciated it! Finally, a couple of months after that, my sister brought home a comic book gospel tract called "This Was Your Life" by Chick Publications that somebody had handed her which blew me away. I kept it for a long time, puzzling over what I needed to do about it.

Five years later, at the age of 17, having finished secondary school, I came across my next Christian, at work, and after a number of weeks chatting at lunch breaks, they invited me to a large Catholic Charismatic meeting held at the time in Dublin city centre, that took place each Friday night. There were about 500 people there and a couple of things immediately impressed me : firstly, that these people were at church, voluntarily, on a Friday evening and seemed to be enjoying it - and secondly, that there was a sense of the presence of God in the meeting when they sang and worshipped. It was the first time in my life that I'd felt God's presence in a church service. To cut a long story short, soon after that someone explained the gospel to me and how I could invite Christ into my life. I did exactly that and so began my Christian journey. I had ups and downs, but one thing I always had from that point on was that I knew, that I knew, that I knew that I belonged to God, that "the mystery" search was over. As you can imagine, this was a great relief.

About eight years afterwards in the mid-1980s, I began to realize that there was a debate "out there" between evolutionists and creationists. So, I started reading up on the arguments. I was not from a scientific background and I had never attended university at that point. On one hand, I kind of wish I had done, but I guess that having a degree in Economics or Psychology would not particularly have benefited me in grasping arguments concerning Biology or Geology in any event.

In the spring of 1988, I was taking a night course in Trinity College Dublin. Trinity is one of the oldest of the Irish Universities. Two of the big Student Societies in Trinity are the Hist and the Phil. Both ran a monthly Debate among the Students, chaired by one of the Lecturers. I saw a poster one evening in the college advertising that months debate, "That Science has killed God". There was a sign up section for anyone who wanted to take part as a debater. I signed up against the motion and had a week or so to get my thoughts together. When the night came, there were three speakers for the motion and two against. The chairman of the debate turned out to be Professor Ernest Walton, who as well as being a College Lecturer had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951 for his work on what later became known as "splitting the atom". There were around 120 students present.

I was second last to speak and it turned out the other person speaking "against" only did it as a dare and in fact spoke for the motion as well. What was readily apparent was that none of the other speakers expected that anyone might make a serious attempt to speak against the motion from a scientific point of view. That is what I did. After the five of us spoke, there was a question time from the floor, where points could be put to any of the debaters. Those speaking "for" were quite unprepared for either creationist arguments or even for seriously trying to field questions from those listening to the debate.

At the end of the closing statements, Professor Walton asked for a vote on the debate as they had heard it from those attending. The result was that the students voted 110-10 against the motion and, if I'm not mistaken, Professor Walton seemed to me to smile with a degree of satisfaction when the count was announced. All this to say that the scientific argument for creationism, whilst not having all the answers, has a lot more to offer than evolutionists care to admit. It concerns me that there is a lack of debate twenty five years on and that the pro-evolutionary lobbies among the scientific community are so deeply invested in backing up one side of the argument that there to this day remains a virtual monopoly on what public schools teach today on Origins. This is particularly true in Europe where there are few, if any, Christian Third Level colleges apart from actual Bible colleges and generation after generation of science students hear only a one-sided view on the subject, perpetuating the imbalance.

Entrance to TCD, Dublin

Evolution does not Explain Natural Beauty

beauty ˈbjuːti/ noun. plural noun: beauties

1.

a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.

~

Evolutionists tend to focus a lot on explanations as to why they think the theory explains the progress of functionality in living organisms over enormous timescales. Evolution needs to assign enormous timescales to every change, as that usually succeeds in lulling the hearer into accepting that enough time can explain almost anything, even though in every other way, the change appears implausible. It's a neat little trick. Like a magician who relies almost entirely on creating illusions to deceive the observant eye, evolutionists can get us to habitually bypass the objections of our normal logic flows by simply adding another billion years onto the time to be given for the proposed change to have "worked out". There are basically no upper limits that evolutionists impose on themselves in terms of timescales. Few seem to be willing to contradict, so no matter how elastic things get, general acceptance is just round the corner.

I don't believe that functionality is explained by evolutionary processes, but something that evolution completely fails to explain is natural beauty. Even if nature in all it's aspects did somehow evolve to it's present state, why did so much of it turn out to be beautiful and not weirdly ugly? Surely the "survival of the fittest" does not require the fittest to also be aesthetically pleasing? What evolutionary mechanism requires many evolutionary changes to not only be functional improvements, but also to be visually so? In fact, there is no need to confine the argument to the visually pleasing. You could just as easily ask why does music sound beautiful, why does food taste delicious, why does receiving a hug feel pleasurable, why does getting a promotion in work boost our confidence? It amazes me why any artist would ever be an evolutionist, when so much of what they observe and strain so diligently to capture on canvas yells out "Look at me, I'm gorgeous!"

Not only do we see evidence literally everywhere of Design in functionality, but we also see a super-abundance of evidence of Care taken in appearance and form. Not the kind of fussy care that people often fall into today that has more to do with vanity than beauty, but the kind of care that shows how much the Designer was at pains to express something of His own feelings towards every thing and every creature He made.

"The heavens declare the glory of God, 

and the skies proclaim the work of His hands"

Psalm 19:1

And it doesn't stop at what is above our heads. All around us we find things about life that could not possibly have evolved by accident and fill us with wonder.

And bringing it even closer to home, there is no reason at all for us humans ourselves, to be blunt, not to be pig ugly. Evolution involves chance, right? And all that the supposed evolutionary processes were concerned with was that the fittest species should survive, yes? We should by rights, have our liver hanging in a hand-bag sized, thick-skinned, wrinkled pouch six inches below one armpit. We should have noses that are three times the average human size with a tuft of thick black hair protruding from the centre. We might easily have extraordinarily bad breath that modern toothpastes and minty gargles could do nothing at all to alleviate. Or perhaps the anus might be positioned just above the breastbone. Ridiculous? Not really. Why did everything work out so very, very well, so perfectly co-ordinated, if only chance mutations were at operation? And although I wouldn't want to cast aspersions on alleged ape-like ancestors, how come the visual improvements continued still further beyond that leathery point?

The Bible provides far more plausible answers. It says that each creature was made "after it's kind" (Gen 1:24), so monkeys never had to become human. It goes further and states, only of mankind, that we were created by God "in His image" (Gen 1:27). So God took special care over man because He had a unique purpose in placing us here on earth, which was that He made us for relationship with Himself (Gen 3:8), something he never speaks of in connection with the animals. It is this relationship, fractured by sin, but restored by response to the cross, that is at the centre of why evolutionists continually put two and two together and come up with five and an eighth. Trying to understand earth, nature and the universe outside of the context of God the Creator, as He has revealed Himself, is doomed to the endless speculations and incorrect conclusions that evolutionary theory has been dogged with from the first moment of unfortunate Darwinian misconception.

At every turn, evolution fails to find either a causative reason or working mechanism for the existence of natural beauty of any kind. That some very occasional aspects of nature might have happened to work out visually well if evolution were true is perhaps plausible. But that with continuous repetition, again and again and again, nature would turn out, not just to be ok, but to be phenomenally beautiful, by chance, is plainly beyond credibility for all but the most religiously fervent evolutionist and certainly provides a logistical problem that is easily on a par with any difficulty that for example, Noah, may have had in getting the animals into the ark, which is used as a significant enough reason for dismissing the Biblical account. Once again, we come back to the fact that all Models of Origins have scientific difficulties. The question is, which Model has the least difficulties and why is only one scientific model (the evolutionary one) taught in schools, when all models rely for their historicity to a great extent on the trusting faith of their adherents?