The Maturity of the Earth
In Genesis 1 we read of the creation of the earth in six days. God created it all. We notice that the formation of the earth is only a matter of days before the creation of man. Man was created on the sixth day, so there wasn’t much of a gap between the earth’s beginning and man’s beginning. Both the earth and man are only around six to seven thousand years old.
This gives a very different (and younger) age then what science would teach. Through various tests and speculation, scientists come to an age in the billions of years. Their tests apparently show that the earth is too old for the Bible’s version of history to be true.
We as Christians know that we can trust what we read in the Bible—that it is the inspired word of God. God is truth and all that He says in the Bible is truth. We can be confident in the creation and that the earth is thousands of years old and not billions.
There are a multiple possibilities for scientists’ conclusions being wrong. One reason is that their tests could be flawed. Some of their dating techniques that rely on the “half-life” of elements have been proven to be flawed. And scientists often have to apply correction formulas to the dates given by these tests. Tests on artefacts that are known to be only hundreds or thousands of years old will often show much older times, thus requiring the value to be corrected. They attempt to estimate the correction value for older objects, but the corrected values cannot truly be verified.
This leads to another reason: the math may be wrong! Scientists make all sorts of “educated” guesses and work on formulas until a result arrives that matches what they figure it should be. This means there is already a bias in the calculations, as they are looking for an old age. Many things cannot be truly verified, but are passed on as facts.
Another possibility is that maybe the earth was created so that it is millions or billions of years old. When we look at Genesis and the creation of everything, particularly man and woman, were things created in a “new” state, as if they had just been born? Were Adam and Eve created as babies? No! Everything was created and ready to thrive and survive. Man and woman were ready to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). So why not the earth too? It makes sense that the earth was created in a mature state that was ready to handle the abundance of life that was to grow on it.
-- John Thrower Jr.