TIME — WHAT IS IT AND HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?

Believe it or not, one of the most important subjects that needs to be addressed in the creation-evolution controversy is the subject of time. How old is the earth? Is the earth and universe six or seven thousand years old as the Bible seems to indicate, or is it billions of years old as the evolutionists claim? If the earth is not old, if it is only six or seven thousand years old, as I contend that it is, that ends the argument for evolution. There can be no evolution in such a short time frame. Time is absolutely essential to the evolutionists. If a person starts trying to prove the fact that the earth is only six or seven thousand years old, the evolutionists get extremely defensive. They will bring up many different questions such as: What about carbon dating? What about the dinosaurs? What about cave men? What about the geologic features of the earth, etc. I will try to answer these questions as well as many others later in this book.

First we will look at the subject of time. Lack of billions of years is the Achilles’ heel to evolution. If there isn’t a lot of time, the argument is absolutely over. Time is essential to the evolutionist. Their entire argument is built on the premise that there is plenty of time.

How old is the earth? First of all, let’s discuss “What is time anyway?” Time is a measurement that we use as humans here on earth to measure the rate at which things decay. Time is a human element that does not affect God. It’s difficult for us to understand how there can be no time in heaven. How can there be another dimension? We tend to think that this is April 28, 1390 (or whatever date it is) in heaven. This is the most common mistake people make when thinking about God. God is not limited by time. There is no time at all in heaven. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever because He is in a different dimension then we are. Right away someone will say, “Now that just doesn’t make sense. Everything is affected by time.” Be careful with statements like that. You are trying to put human limitations on God. God does not have any human limitations. We are the ones locked in time and space, not God. Heaven and eternity are not things we can comprehend while we are locked in flesh. An example of this would be the story where Paul was stoned to death outside the city of Lystra. Paul went to heaven where he got a foretaste of eternity. He saw Heaven!!! God said, “I’m sorry, Paul, you must go back down to earth. I’m not done with you yet.” So, Paul went back down as they were dragging his body out of the city to throw it on the garbage heap. He crawled into that body again and arose from the dead. He said fourteen years later, “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell; God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.” (II Cor. 12:2) He said that there he saw things that were not lawful for him to utter. I believe what happened there was that he saw things that he could not describe to his listening audience because they were still bound in their human bodies. If you were talking to a blind man and you were going to try to explain to him the different colors of the rainbow, you would be wasting your time. He cannot understand the differences. You cannot explain sounds or music to a person who has been deaf all of his life. You just won’t get the information into his mind. There are five entrances into the human mind. We call those the five senses. We think that God is limited to those five. There may be thousands or millions of things beyond our comprehension. To say that it is 1990 in heaven is to put human limitations on God. I think that is a very foolish thing to do.

What time is it in heaven? Let’s imagine that you are in a helicopter above the Grand Canyon. As you hover up there, (we’ll imagine that you have the capacity to hover for days and days at a time), you notice through your telescope that some people are launching a raft at beginning of the canyon. About thirty minutes later, another group of people launch a raft. Thirty minutes later, a third group of people launch a raft. Every thirty minutes a new group of people starts their journey through the Grand Canyon on a raft. None of the groups can see each other because of the twists and bends of the river as it goes through the Canyon. They cannot see the group in front of them or behind them. As far as they are concerned, they’re all alone. However, you, in your helicopter, are able to see all of the groups at the same time. You can see the one at the beginning of the race that left four days ago, and you can see the group that is just now leaving.

Each one of the groups has a different perspective of the canyon. Each one of them sees a different section of the canyon. They are locked into position. They cannot decide to jump ahead fifty miles or to jump back fifty miles. They have to go with the flow, so to speak. You are in the same position here on earth as far as time goes. We are locked into 1991 right now. We will be here for a year, then we will be locked into 1992. We cannot speed it up or slow it down regardless of what we do. However, God is not in our time with us. He is above time. God is the one in the helicopter, so to speak. He can see the beginning and the end and the middle all simultaneously. That is absolutely beyond our comprehension. We don’t understand that at all, but by faith we have to believe that because God revealed Himself to us as being outside of time. He is omniscient, knows all things. He is omnipresent, present everywhere and at all times. God could right now from His vantage point in heaven, see Adam and Eve in the garden. He could see the end of the world, or see Christ on the cross, or any of the historical events between this roughly six thousand year history of the earth. To say that God is locked into time is a serious mistake that people need to avoid.

Someone once asked me the question, “What did God do for all of those billions of years before He made the earth?” That question indicates the faulty logic that God is locked into time like we are. You must avoid that if you are to understand anything about God. God created time. He started it about six thousand years ago and will let it run until He is finished with whatever it is He wants to do. When we get to heaven, there will be no time.

We will not be in heaven for billions of years. There will not be any years at all. There are many songs that allude to time in heaven. For instance, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years.” I’m sorry, but we will not be there for ten thousand years. We will be there forever, which is a totally new dimension. I cannot explain it, because I don’t understand it- I Just have to believe it. I do know that it says in I Corinthians 2:9 that God has things that we are not capable of understanding, things that are beyond our comprehension. There are new things for us to learn. Right now we are not able to understand what heaven is like because of our limitations.

For instance, look at the illustration of the electromagnetic spectrum. The section that we can see with our eyes we call the “color range.” These are basically six colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The spectrum goes beyond that in both directions forever. On the red side of the scale it goes down to infrared. You and I cannot see infrared with our eyes. That does not mean that it doesn’t exist. It just means that we cannot see it. The spectrum goes beyond violet to ultraviolet. We cannot see ultraviolet. We have a limited receptor, our eye. It is able to pick up just this brief range of colors from red to violet. Suppose that God decided to give us eyas that would be able to see the entire magnetic spectrum. We could then see radio waves, radar, television, or microwaves. I don’t mean pick them up with an instrument. I mean actually see them with our eye. I don’t know if that is going to happen or not, but it could be that in heaven there will be brand new colors. I don’t mean brand new shades or combinations of these colors that we are used to. I mean brand new colors. If I went to heaven for five minutes and saw brand new colors, and came back down to earth, and you said “Kent, where have you been?” I would say, “Well, I’ve been to heaven for five minutes.” You would say, “What’s it like?” I would say, “I can’t explain it to you.” You would think something was wrong, just like I’m sure people thought Paul was crazy after he came back down from heaven and said, “I saw things it is not lawful for a man to utter.” We need to get a new set of eyes and a new set of ears. We need to new sensory organs if we are to understand everything that God has for us. God has given us very limited capacities down here on earth. We can understand and see a few things, but God is by no means limited by our five senses and their limited range.

As I was thinking on this subject, I wrote a poem to try to explain this, comparing blind men and atheists.

Two blind men argued well into the night
about the great question, “Is there really sight?”
Said one to the other (and quite fervently)
“There cannot be colors or else we could see!
So take red and green and blue off the list.
If I cannot see them, they must no exist.
A crazy man told me the sky is bright blue.
I listened intently but I caught no clue
of anything out there to alter my mind.
I’m not deaf you know, I here perfectly fine.
Be quiet and listen, and then you will know
that colors aren’t real. How dare they say so?
They tell me that grass is some sort of green.
It looks like the rest of the world that I’ve seen!
It tastes a lot different than Jelly or cheese
(if I smell it too long it sure makes me sneeze).
It feels a lot different that ice cream or snow
but to say that it’s green? I’d have to say no.
I will not believe it until I have seen.
There isn’t a difference ‘twixt red, blue or green!!
And so the men argued with all of their might,
and I couldn’t show them that they were not right.
They cannot see colors because they re blind!
But I couldn’t get the truth in their mind.
Until they are given the great gift of sight;
never, not ever, will they see the light.

Two atheists argued (on university sod)
about the great question “Is there a God?”
Said one to the other (and quite fervently)
“There can’t be a God or else we could see.
So take that old Bible and God off the list.
If I cannot see Him, He must no exist.
Be quite and listen, and then you will know
that God is not real, how dare they say so??
A crazy man told me God lives up in Heaven.
I used to believe that when I was just seven.
But now that I’m older and wiser you see,
I will not believe it. You can’t prove it to me.
I cannot sense God with sight taste or smell.
I do not believe in Heaven or Hell!
I’ve never heard God or felt Him at all.
If He’s really up there, I wish He would call.”
I said, “Listen fellows, you’re spiritually blind.
You’ve only five entrances into your mind.
That limits your input. I wish you could see.
You can’t fathom God or eternity.
There are lots of things that really are real.
It doesn’t disprove God because you can’t ‘feel’.”
So you two can argue the rest of the night.
There’s no way to show you that you are not right.
When you get to Heaven (or Hell if you please)
you’ll understand God as you fall on your knees!
I wish you could see Him or hear Him somehow.
But that isn’t possible where you are now.
To deny His existence is really absurd.
You’ll have to believe Him and trust in His Word.

That is the way I see it. We have to admit by faith that God exists because we are limited in our senses. A blind person believes by faith that there are colors. He has never seen them, but he believes by faith that they exist because everyone has told him about them. I believe by faith that there is a God. I believe that there is no time in heaven.

People ask, “Where was God before the creation? How long did God wait before the Garden of Eden, before He created man?” Well, you are back into the same argument. God didn’t wait any time at all. There wasn’t any time and I can’t explain it other than to say, that’s the way it is.

It’s been explained like this. Once upon a time there was a time when there was no time. God didn’t wait a long time before creating Adam and Eve. He started time when He created the earth. To answer the question, “What did God do for billions of years?” There weren’t billions of years before or after the creation. After this is over, we will go back to a different dimension (beyond our current capacity to understand) called eternity.

Back to the question, how old is the earth? According to the Bible times given in Genesis 5, 11, and the chronologies given in many other places in the Bible, the date for the creation was about 4000 B.C. By adding up the fact that Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born, and how old Seth was when his son was born, and so on, we can come up with a fairly accurate time. That would be about six thousand years ago. I’m not one of these fellows that says that Adam was created on April 7, at 4:00 p.m. I don’t know the exact date. I would say that 4000 B.C. is probably within a couple of hundred of years. I contend that the earth is six or seven thousand years old. There may be some slight error. For instance, was Adam 130 and a half years old when Seth was born? Are the dates rounded off to the nearest year? Was it on his birthday when his son was born? Did they use a year like we us? Did they use a solar year–365 and a quarter days? Did they use a Hebrew calendar–360 days? There are some slight possibilities for some minor changes, but nothing that accounts for billions of years. There is no question that the Bible clearly teaches that the earth is young. Almost all Bible scholars of the past were peersuaded that the earth was young.

What happened? Why did Christians abandon the teaching that the earth is only 6000 yrs. old?

Many of the Christians in the late l800’s, after Darwin’s book The Origin of Species came out, began to try to compromise the historic position of the church to adjust to Darwin’s theory. They tried to blend the evolutionary theory with the Bible. They began to say that maybe there were billions of years in the Bible. Several compromise positions were created. One of these is known as the Gap theory. They tried to insert a gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. I believed the Gap theory for quite some time. I had a Scofield Bible as a new Christian. It is an excellent Bible, but his notes are not inspired. Scofield said that there was a gap between verse one and verse two. In that gap, they claim that Satan fell from heaven and the earth was destroyed. In that supposed gap, we are told to put the great ages that the evolutionists proclaim as incontestable fact. We are told that there was a “pre-adamic” civilization that included all the dinosaurs. We are told that this civilization was destroyed when Satan fell from Heaven.

There are a number of problems with that theory. The first problem is: It would be deceitful for God to ‘hide’ millions of years in a gap like that and not make it known in other scriptures. Secondly, it would be against other scriptures in the Bible which indicate that a gap of millions or billions of years couldn’t be there. The Bible says a few verses later, in Genesis 1:5, “the evening and morning were the first day.” Many modern translations of the Bible change the word ‘the’ to ‘a’ to try to overcome this conflict. If there was a lot of time before verse five, then verse 5 is telling a lie. Also, it says in Exodus 20:12 that God created the earth in six days.

Another problem with the Gap theory is the fact that it is contradicting Romans 5 where the Bible says that there was no death until Adam sinned. If there was some kind of pre-Adamic civilization with dinosaurs and giant men, or whatever they want to put in this supposed gap, they had to die when Satan fell from Heaven and the earth ‘became’ without form and void (as they read verse 2). The dinosaur fossils are still here on earth. We have the skeletons, so they did die. That would mean that the Bible is a lie in the New Testament where it says that there was no death until Adam sinned.

Probably the most serious contradiction the Gap theory proponents must overcome is the plain testimony of Jesus Himself. In Matthew 19:4 Jesus plainly said that the creation of Adam and Eve was the beginning. Was Jesus not aware of the ‘gap’ or was He lying to His followers? I absolutely do not believe in the Gap theory.

If there is indeed a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 where Satan fell, it would be only a gap of a few hours. This is because verse five says it was the first
day. There is no reason to try to put billions of years in the Bible’s framework.

The theistic evolutionists have said that the six days of creation were actually epics, ages, or eons of years. II Peter 3:8,. “A day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day with the Lord,” is a commonly used verse to Justify this compromise. This doctrine is silly if you actually analyze the argument. One reason the Day Age theory would be silly is to look at the sequence in which God created all things. If you look at the sequence of creation, you would see why this argument is not reasonable or scientific. God created the plants on day three before He created the sun on day four. If you think plants are going to survive for billions of years without the sun, you need to study more biology. I believe God did that on purpose to make us realize the days of creation were twenty-four hour days. He made the plants, herbs, trees, and grass on one day and on the next day He created the sun. The problem is further complicated when we realize that the insects to pollinate the plants were not created until day five. The Day Age Theory is another unnecessary attempt by worried Christians to try to please the evolutionists.

Let’s look at another analogy regarding the age of the earth. Let’s suppose you were to go out and find a sunken ship with a box of coins on that ship. When you open the box of coins, you find dates on the coins from all different ages. If there is a coin in the box from 1850, right away you are limited to say that the ship sank after 1850. If you find a coin in the box from 1820, that doesn’t mean that the ship sank around 1820, because you also have an 1850 coin in there. You are limited to the youngest date in the box. It may have sunk well after that, but it cannot have sunk before that. If there is a 1850 coin in the box and it is not a forgery, then the ship didn’t sink in 1849. The same analogy is true when trying to determine the age of the earth.

There are many different ways that scientists try to test the age of the earth. There are probably five or six hundred ways to try to show the age of the earth. It is a very difficult thing to do conclusively. If a few of the methods to date the earth give old ages, but others give an age that is only a few thousand years old, as many do, then you have a dilemma. You must decide which you want to accept. Because many scientists want to believe evolution, they will, of course, select the few that seem to indicate great ages and ignore the evidences that indicate a young age of the earth. Taking only evidence that supports a preconceived idea and rejecting all other evidence is not very intelligent or scientific.

I will give just a few of the ways to show that the earth and solar system are young. I have a list put out by Henry Morris, of the Institute for Creation Research, a list of seventy-six things that show the age of the earth to be very young. Here are Just a few of the evidences of a young earth given by Dr. Morris: 1. The influx of cosmic dust to the earth indicates that the earth is less than 10,000 yrs. old. Most of this dust has washed into the soil. This cosmic dust that comes from outer space, contains a high percentage of nickel. Scientists have searched and searched for the nickel content in the earth’s crust. The amount of nickel is not great enough to account for billions of years. It only accounts for several thousand years. For instance, the influx of Helium 4 into the atmosphere indicates something less than 175 thousand years. 2. Radiometric decay produces helium which has to escape into the atmosphere. By measuring the helium content in the atmosphere, we conclude that there could not have been radioactive decay for billions of years because there isn’t enough helium in the atmosphere. The percentage of helium in the atmosphere indicates a very young earth. Evolutionists are searching for a way for the helium to escape into outerspace to eliminate this evidence for a young earth, so far no method has been found.

Another evidence that the earth is young is the fact that there are still meteors and comets flying through space. We know that comets and meteors break up and decay as they pass through the solar system. We have never seen one formed, that is, get bigger or larger. We have seen many break up and fall apart. As comets circle around the solar system they come close to the earth or different planets. The gravitational forces of these planets break pieces off the comets and they fragment or fall apart. How long could a comet circle through our solar system before it would disintegrate or run into a planet? Several astronomers have said that ten thousand years is the longest a comet could survive going through our solar system time and time again (like Haley’s Comet does every seventy years) before it would disappear. If this figure is correct, why do we still have comets? The fact that we have comets at all indicates that the earth is still very young. Scientists that have analyzed this problem have come up with the “Comet Bank Theory.” They speculate that somewhere in outer space there is a bank of comets. Every once in a while something will check some out and distribute them throughout the universe. I’m making fun of them of course, this is not exactly what they believe. They say that the comets are supplied from another source, they don’t know what the source is, but we keep getting comets because of this “Comet Bank.” The very existence of short period comets is one of the proofs of a young earth.

Another evidence that the earth is young is fact that the earth’s spin is gradually diminishing. The diminishing spin is very minor, Just a second a century we are losing. Dne second per day per century is not significant in a short time frame of only a few thousand years. If you interpret that over of billions of years, however, it would mean that the earth was spinning so fast that no life could have been possible due to the shorter days, centrifical force, earth quakes and high winds created. The declining spin of the earth is another fact that indicates a young earth.

The earth’s magnetic field is declining. Dr. Thomas G. Barnes, a professor of physics at the University of Texas in El Paso, claims that the earth’s declining magnetic field is a powerful indication that the earth is extremely young. He is considered by many to be one of the world’s experts on the subject. His studied opinion is that this bit of scientific data would limit the earth’s age to less than 25,000 years.

If we can prove that the earth is young, only six or seven thousand years old, that really ends the argument of evolution. Evolutionists will fight tooth and nail to be able to hold to the faulty idea that the earth is billions and billions of years old. When a number of scientific attempts to establish some kind of age for the earth prove that the earth is really very young, reasonable people should accept the facts. Of course, evolutionists would jump at anything that would indicate that the earth is billions and billions of years old because it is such a vital part of their theory.

Someone would say, “What about stars? We know that they are billions of light years away.” I don’t want to sound, like a crackpot, but actually we don’t know that stars are billions of years away. There are two, maybe three methods of determining how far away the stars are. One of these methods is Just simple trigonometry. However, when you get to extremely minute angles, it is very difficult to measure anything less than a couple of arc-seconds accurately. You cannot measure distances accurately more than sixty to one hundred light years away. Not sixty to one hundred million light years, just sixty to one hundred light years. The other method that used is called the “Red Shift” method. We will discuss this in more detail later.

How old is the earth? I believe that the earth is only six to seven thousand years old. I taught high school science for fourteen years, and for three years taught college level science. I’m convinced that much of our modern science, especially relating to evolution, is an absolute joke. We are in the same position as the people in the days before Columbus, when people were teaching that the earth was flat, or when they taught the doctrine of humors or draining blood to cure illnesses, and many other wrong conclusions of science. They were very wrong. Science has a long history of being dogmatically wrong.

I believe that one of the areas in science and the Bible that needs to be re-studied is the critical issue of the age of the earth. This will prove to be the undoing of the doctrine of evolution.

The hypothesis of evolution has had pre-eminence in our public teaching for about the last thirty to forty years. Darwin’s book published in 1860 really started the controversy going. There have been groups teaching evolution for several thousand years. The Egyptians taught a form of evolution, saying that life evolved from the slime along the Nile River. Today we trace our modern evolutionary movement to Darwin. Darwin’s book became almost universally accepted within ten years of its release in 1860. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was extremely difficult to combat this teaching of evolution. Archaeological finds were not complete and Darwin claimed that there were thousands of intermediate species between the major kinds that we find today. He said that it was a matter of time before these missing links were dug up. It has been 130 years now, and the missing links are still missing. I believe that the earth is young and Darwin’s theory is not only unscientific, it is absolutely stupid. To believe that all of this complicated life in this complicated universe came about just by the random shaking of molecules demands an awful lot more faith than I have.

I believe that the earth was created in six literal days, not eons or epics of time like the Living Bible says in the notes given in Genesis 1. It says that each day was a period of time. There is no evidence of that and Ken Taylor needs to re-examine the evidence for that. I believe that the current teaching of evolution that is going on in our public schools and public universities has spawned a great number of social evils. For instance,
Communism is a direct offshoot of evolution.

If a frog turns into a prince instantaneously, we call that a miracle or a fairytale. But, if that frog turns into a prince very slowly, taking three or four hundred millions years to make the transition, we will teach that in our universities as scientific fact.

Let me give you Just a few evidences that the earth is young. First of all the coral reefs that are growing off of the coast of Australia is growing at a certain rate. People have said that the growth of the coral reefs aught to show us how old the earth is. With study, they discover that under certain conditions, coral grows extremely fast. Other under conditions, they grow very slowly. So the rate of growth is very difficult to determine. To prove that it happened at a constant rate. Right after the Flood, as all of the water went down, all of the decayed plant matter would have made the water very high in minerals and decayed plant and animal life would have been high in nutrients to make anything to grow. Food would have been readily available with all of the rotting carcasses of the vegetation and the animals. The coral could have grown much faster under these conditions, then it would have slowed down to its current rate. People who have studied coral reefs say that they could have been formed in four to five thousand years with no problem. If the earth is older than that, why aren’the the coral reefs much larger? Their rate of growth indicates a young age for the earth.

The Bristle Cone pine trees, the red trees, and the sequoia trees in California. The guides in California say that there is no reason that any of these trees should ever die. apparently, they will live until some disease attacks them. If they are protected from disease, they will Just keep on growing, adding a ring every year. One way, of course, to tell how old a tree is is to drill a core sample and count the rings. The Bristle Cone pine tree grows extremely slow. By the time a tree is one hundred years old, it is not quite one inch in diameter. To count a hundred rings in a half inch is difficult and must be done with a microscope. Counting rings is a little more difficult than Just sawing the tree down and looking at it. the Bristle Pine trees indicate an age of about four thousand years maximum. If the earth is millions of years old, why don’t we have a fifty thousand year old Bristle Cone Pine tree someplace or a half a million year old? The age of the oldest living thing in the biosphere, the Bristle Cone Pine, indicates a young age for the earth. The evolutionists don’t look at that one because that doesn’t support their theory.

The pressure in oil wells in Texas is another indication that the earth is young. I lived five years in Texas. I saw a flame shooting up in the sky one night and went over to investigate. There were some men burning off the natural gas as they were drilling an oil well. I began asking them questions, talked about the oil there in
Longview, Texas, they told me that they have a blowout protector that they put about a thousand feet down in the ground in case they drilled into a pocket of pressure. I asked them what kind of pressure they were talking about, how much pressure is the oil under down there in the ground. When drilling down about 35 hundred feet, often the oil has twenty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. If you have ever pumped up a bicycle tire to seventy or eighty pounds of pressure, you understand that it is pretty hard to do. That pressure would crack the rock in the strata because after a period of time the rock could only withstand the pressure for so long. Some scientists spent quite a bit of time studying different rock strata that oil is found in and the strata that the oil is found under, and try to determine how long the oil could withstand the intense pressure that it was under. Melvin Cook did quite a bit of study on this. The studies indicated that the oil could not have been under that pressure for more than ten thousand years. The fact that the oil is still under that pressure indicates that it has been down there less than ten thousand years. Often when they first began drilling oil wells in the early 1930’s, they would hit that pocket of pressure and it would blow everything up out of the ground. The thirty or forty thousand feet of pipe would just be shot up out of the ground like spaghetti because of this intense pressure. I would like to ask the evolutionists if he has some kind of answer to the fact that if the earth is indeed million of years old, why is the oil still under such incredible pressure? Why hasn’the it disipated into the rock, and formed cracks, and leaked out through the years?

Another evidence that the earth is young instead of millions of years old is the sediment in the ocean. A friend of mine out in California brought me a slab of what looked like a piece of polished marble, about the size of a small tabletop. He said, “Mr. Hovind, I brought this to you because I thought you might be interested in it.” I asked him what it was and he said that it was a slab of ocean floor. He said that he went down, blew the sediment away with a jet of high speed water, and then cut a slab of the rock out of the ocean floor. The sediment in the ocean is only a certain thickness. The thickness of the sediment could be accumulated in about thirty or forty thousand years at the current rate that sediment is being deposited. If the earth is millions of years old, why isn’t the sediment thicker? This a question that evolutionists can’t answer or avoid, because they only looking for evidences that would seem to indicate a great age of millions or billions of years. Anything that would seem to be troublesome to their ridiculous theory they simply avoid. The ocean sediment indicate a young age for the earth. Of course, the rate of the deposition of sediment is always a factor that must be considered. Right after a world-wide flood, quite a bit of sediment would accumulate just right there. That is why if you get an age of twenty-five or thirty thousand years at our current rate of deposition, it is possible that the first seventy percent was accumulated in a few years after the flood. Then the rate of deposition would have dropped to where today it would look like thirty thousand years, but actually could be accounted for in four thousand years.

The erosion of the continents indicates a young earth. At the current rate of erosion we are losing a lot of ground to the oceans. New Orleans, for instance, is built on sediment that has come down from Illinois. The major river systems have been tested fairly carefully a number of times to see how much sediment they are bringing out every year, how much material is being transported. At the current rate of erosion the continents would erode down to sea level in fourteen million years. The mountains would be gone and the entire earth would be a swamp. If the evolutionist is going to say that we have 140 million years since the time of the dinosaurs, that is enough time for the earth to erode away ten times. So they come up with the theory of the continental lifting, plate tatonics (the plates shifting around), the subduction of the earth, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, all of these may have some validity, but the rate of erosion proves that the earth is not 140 million years old. My explanation would be that most of the erosion, the formation of mountain ranges and Grand Canyon, was formed after the Flood as the water went down. Then the current of erosion would be misleading, and the earth would be only four to five thousand years old since the Flood happened. The rate of erosion is a good evidence for a young earth.

The moon is receding. As you measure the distance to the moon, it can be seen that every year the moon gets a little bit further away. If you calculate that backward in time, you should be able to calculate approximately when the moon began to leave or was captured in our orbit. I do not believe that the moon was captured. Some people say that the moon started as a part of the Pacific Ocean and was pulled out of that area. That was taught for many years and is still believe by some. They try to use that to explain all of the volcanoes in Hawaii, saying that the crust is very thin because the moon was pulled out. The rate that the moon is receding, travelling away from the earth, indicates a very young age for the earth. Thomas G. Barnes, a professor of physics at the University of Texas-El Paso, said,

It takes but one proof for a young age for the moon or the earth to completely refute the doctrine of evolution.

That initial statement is worth thinking about. “If there is one proof.” That is really all you need, Just one proof. He goes on to say,

One can see through simple laws of physics that the moon should be receding from the earth. From the same laws, one can show that the moon could never have survived a nearness to the earth less than 11,500 miles.

If the moon were any closer the tidal forces on the earth on a satellite that size would cause extreme damage to the satellite or to the earth, like the rings of Saturn. So the moon was never closer than 11,500 miles is Barnes’ contention. The present speed of recession of the moon is known. If one multiplies the recession speed by the presumed evolutionary age, the moon should be much farther from the earth than it is, even if it started out from the earth.

There is as yet no tentable alternative explanation that would yield an evolutionary age of four billion years of the moon. Here is as simple solution as science can provide that the moon is not as old as scientists claim. This is a very serious problem. Many physicists that believe in evolution understand the problem. For instance, Dr. Louis Slitter, professor of geophysicist at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, said, “The time scale of the earth/moon problem still present a major problem.” Well, it doesn’t present a major problem for me. He understands the the earth/moon system is a serious problem. The moon is receding and does not indicate a great age for the earth. The age of the whole solar system is a real problem to the evolutionists. Lord Kelvin used the changing spin rate of the earth and with his mathematics proved that because of the changing spin the earth could not be billions of years old. He said that the earth had to be down in the range of thousand of years.

There are many Christians who try to pacify the evolutionists. They came up with several different alternatives. One was the “Day Age Theory”. This said that the days mentioned in Genesis are really periods of time or evolutionary ages. This is where many of the modern translations of the Bible go bad because they change slight little phrases in Genesis 1. Get out different translations and compare how they treat Genesis 1. The King James Version says, “it was the first day.” It uses the definite article the. Many other versions of the Bible use the article a. They will say that this was a first day, and a second day. That little subtle change is Just an attempt to allow for the “Day Age Theory.” Ken Taylors’ Living Bible, I don’the garbage heap, want to be too negative because there are many good things about it, in Genesis has an attempt to pacify the evolutionists by trying to include billions of years into the Bible framework. They do that by perverting the Scripture. The Scripture teaches that it was the first day, and it was six literal days, not six periods of time. God told Moses later in Exodus 20:12 in the Ten Commandments “for in six days God created the heavens and the earth.” Moses would have been a liar. Jesus obviously taught in a young earth and an instantaneous creation. He talked about Adam and Eve beinq created, “God created them, male and female.” So Jesus would be a liar also if evolution were true.

There are some evidences that the earth is young. Most cultures that are found in the world tell of a world-wide flood in the last five to six thousand years. The population of the earth today doubles regularly. If you were to draw up the population growth on a chart you would see that it goes back to zero about five thousand years ago. If man has been here millions of years like evolutionists teach, where is the population? The whole population growth can be studied by anyone and it will be found that the population of the earth dates a young age for the earth of four to five thousand years. Since the Flood started with eight people. All of the ancient writings that we have show a young age of the earth. Why don’t we have people writing about kings that lived fifty thousand years ago? Why is it that all of recorded history happened in the last four thousand years?

These honest questions deserve an honest answer. I believe we have been lied to about the age of the earth. Satan, the father of all lies, has come up with this one to try to make a fool of Jesus Christ. Jesus said in Matthew 19:4 that the creation of Adam and Eve was the beginning. I believe Jesus was rignt.