How old is the earth?

Diamond7 said:

Chedder man lived 12,000 years ago and his DNA matches someone alive today.

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You’re assuming that scientists dating methods are correct and that the genealogy records in the scriptures are wrong.

Diamond7 said:

I do not know of any two people who interpret the Bible the same. Everyone has their own understanding.

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That’s irrelevant because there’s only one truth. The Bible is not a choose your own truth or believe whatever you want to believe book.

BNR32FAN said:

You’re assuming that scientists dating methods are correct and that the genealogy records in the scriptures are wrong.

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I read that they dated the skeleton twice and came up with the same age, that he lived about 10,000 years ago.

Jonathan_Gale said:

The answer to this depends on your faith - not in God or the bible, but the carbon dating method. If you believe in the bible, then the earth is merely about 6000 years old, you can actually add up all the years recorded in the various genealogies and chronicles and Daniel's 490 years and reach a sum total about 4030; if you believe in carbon dating despite its glaring flaws, errors and limitations, then the earth is 4.6 billion years old as so called "scientists" think.

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Technically they say carbon dating can only go back a maximum of 50,000 years, it’s thermoluminescence dating that they claim can go back further. I don’t remember how far back it can go but it all still hangs on THEORIES. Which means they’re basically saying IF X,Y, & Z are true then that would mean that the earth is X amount of years old. We don’t know that X, Y, & Z are true we just think they are. It’s a best guess with the very limited data we have. So we can trust a theory or we can trust the One who was there who actually created the universe and everything in it.

FaithT said:

I read that they dated the skeleton twice and came up with the same age, that he lived about 10,000 years ago.

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There’s a saying “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.

BNR32FAN said:

There’s a saying “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.

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Wouldn’t the fact that they got the same results both times show that the earth is older than the creationist side believes? Or disprove the Bible?

BNR32FAN said:

Technically they say carbon dating can only go back a maximum of 50,000 years, it’s thermoluminescence dating that they claim can go back further. I don’t remember how far back it can go but it all still hangs on THEORIES. Which means they’re basically saying IF X,Y, & Z are true then that would mean that the earth is X amount of years old. We don’t know that X, Y, & Z are true we just think they are. It’s a best guess with the very limited data we have. So we can trust a theory or we can trust the One who was there who actually created the universe and everything in it.

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Yes, and according to the One, "My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for that he also is flesh; therefore shall his days be a hundred and twenty years." (Gen. 6:3) Contrary to conventional wisdom, this 120 years is NOT referring to human lifespan. Abraham lived 175 years, that was centuries after the Flood and far beyond 120. On face value, God gave humanity a grace period of 120 years from that announcement to Noah till the global Flood; from a prophetic perspective, however, these are 120 JUBILEE years, which means 6000 years in total, that's the entirety of time for mankind to govern themselves. After that, Christ will take over and reign a thousand years. The seven days in the creation week foreshadows the 7000 years of humanity, that's God's grand plan. "the end was declared at the beginning," (Is. 46:10) and hence the "one day for a thousand years" in 2 Peter 3:8.

tonychanyt said:

I distinguish between these two concepts of time. The Bible speaks of events that happened in the historical witnessed-time. Scientific research speaks in terms of space-time. Both are real as far as today's people are concerned. In terms of First-Order Logic, they are both true. Both are real depending on your definition of time. It only proves God's creative power

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That sounds like another false dichotomy which I reject. "Millions of year" and "billions of year" are an inconceivable astronomical number that's almost equal to eternity. If you challenge that, you'll always hear this argument that the history of religion and the idea of this monotheistic creator God is only a few thousand years old. That is psychological warfare, it gives you a false impression that the earth is eternal, God is man made illusion, while the Torah states the opposite, that God is the creator of all things, the earth is finite.

If anyone is interested in understanding why I don’t trust the dating methods here’s why.

If you’re really interested read the first 3 paragraphs from this link and that will show you just how unreliable is actually is. This is from Wikipedia not some YEC website or some unknown source.

Radiocarbon dating - Wikipedia​

en.m.wikipedia.org

Here’s the most important part.

NOTE: because of the format they used on Wikipedia every time they mentioned C14 it ended up pasting backwards. So where it says 14C it should say C14.

“Research has been ongoing since the 1960s to determine what the proportion of 14C in the atmosphere has been over the past 50,000 years. The resulting data, in the form of a calibration curve, is now used to convert a given measurement of radiocarbon in a sample into an estimate of the sample's calendar age. Other corrections must be made to account for the proportion of 14C in different types of organisms (fractionation), and the varying levels of 14C throughout the biosphere(reservoir effects). Additional complications come from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, and from the above-ground nuclear tests performed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Because the time it takes to convert biological materials to fossil fuels is substantially longer than the time it takes for its 14C to decay below detectable levels, fossil fuels contain almost no 14
C. As a result, beginning in the late 19th century, there was a noticeable drop in the proportion of 14C in the atmosphere as the carbon dioxide generated from burning fossil fuels began to accumulate. Conversely, nuclear testingincreased the amount of 14C in the atmosphere, which reached a maximum in about 1965 of almost double the amount present in the atmosphere prior to nuclear testing.”

The important thing to notice here is how much the level of C14 fluctuates just in the last 70 years. It was noticeably decreased as a result of burning fossil fuels then doubled as a result of nuclear testing. Then there’s different amounts in different biomes and different types of organic materials. The readings are all over the place and they have no idea what took place during the last 6,000 years that would also affect the C14 amounts. Furthermore they can only guess at what the amounts were 6,000 years ago. If the planet was created 6,000 years ago one would expect the levels of C14 to be on the extreme low side making everything they test near that period of time to appear to be much older than it actually is. Scientists don’t believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago so their calibration is based on the assumption of C14 levels being much higher than what they actually would’ve been which would naturally make everything appear to be much older than it actually is because of the low C14 count. This is why I keep saying that the dating methods are based on IF X, Y, & Z are true then the earth is X amount of years old. They’re not basing their calibration on the earth being 6,000 years old because they think that idea is ridiculous so they’re not expecting a very low amount of C14 in the atmosphere during that time. If the amount of C14 has drastically changed both decreasing then doubling in just the last 70 years like Wikipedia says then how can they have any idea what it was doing for the last 6,000 years? They’re guessing, that’s all they can do and most of these guesses are coming from geologists guessing at how old sediment layers are where these fossils are found. Thermoluminescence dating has the exact same problems because they have to guess at the amount of heat or radiation an object has been exposed to in order to measure the crystalline decay. Neither of these methods are reliable because of the huge absence of data that has to be filled in with nothing more than their best guess.

tonychanyt said:

What is a false dichotomy according to you?

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Presenting two mutually exclusive options, pitting one against another and forcing you to pick one, when in fact there are plenty of other options, or those two are NOT exclusive at all. "Faith and work", "secular and sacred", "religion and science" "sex is dirty and forbidden vs sex is casual and free“ are some examples. In many cases, those two options are more like two sides of the same coin, one comes naturally with another.

tonychanyt said:

Can you quote my words where I did that?

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"I distinguish between these two concepts of time." Time is time, there's no such distinction. The way I see it, all the "millions of years" and "billions of years" are the fruits of a poisonous tree that is carbon dating. For instance, fossils don't necessarily take that long to form, there were doscoveries of fossilized hat and boot, and there were experiments of fossilization,

tonychanyt said:

I distinguish them by definitions. Did you read my OP?

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I did, it's kind of confusing, and you've missed the real purpose of the creation account. This early portion of Genesis was orginally written as a polemic to debunk polytheism. In ancient sumerian mythology there was similar stories of creation, but of course, multiple deities did it, including but not limited to "hosts of heavens" and "great sea creatures". In Genesis 1, though, God created those, they were no longer deities, but entities created for mankind. By indoctrinating you to believe that these entities were "millions" and "billions" years old, they are effectively deified and we begin to worship them again like the pagans without awareness.

tonychanyt said:

Which is?

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Polemics.

tonychanyt said:

Let proposition P1 = The creation account was written for the purpose of polemics.

True?

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If you say so. Please keep in mind of the historical context, that worship of nature deities was the norm, the default status, and it still is in modern time - cue "save the planet”. Genesis 1 specifically debunked these nature deities.