Even the Pope knows the Earth is 4.54 billion years old.
#THOUSANDS OF YEARS LATER DOWNLOAD SERIES#
Okay, you might need a degree in geology to tell desert sand deposition from silt and to follow the series around the West to account for disconformities, but even a casual, unbiased evaluation will convince you utterly of two things: 1) The canyon was laid down by erosion through ancient sediments, not cut by any flood, and 2) those sediments were laid down over many, many, many millions of years.Īnd that’s just scratching the surface, so to speak. Those lines are sedimentation lines that form 40 major layers spanning 2 billion years of deposition. No fancy science required.Īnd at a certain point, the dendro dates line up with ocean core dates and pack ice dates, both of which go back hundreds of thousands of years-but that might take a little scientific know how. For this reason, overlapping ring patterns from living, dead, and fossilized trees can be lined up to build continuous series stretching back through thousands and thousands of years. Tree rings form a unique fingerprint as trees across a region are exposed to similar conditions. Buy a magnifying class and a box of Twinkies and visit a dendro lab. You don’t trust radiometric dating? Fine. Various groups of humans started domesticating crops and animals between 16,000 and 8,000 years ago, which is why most young Earth wackados now argue for an Earth around 10,000 years old instead of Ussher’s increasingly ridiculous 6,000.īut here’s the thing, the dendrochronologic record-last I checked-now goes back 12,000 years in some parts of the world.They might even do better than those now in Congress (that is). If they were alive today, they could probably run for congress (that’s not an insult). Neanderthals appeared in Europe about a quarter million years ago.We’ve gone through roughly twenty species since then (though the concept of species is our own invention). Our linneage split off from the other apes about 5.5 million years ago.By this time, mammals had appeared and some were well on their way to evolving into whales.Half of all known reserves are less than 65 million years old. Oil formed before that (from bacteria and plankton), but few older deposits have been protected from geologic processes that destroy hydrocarbons. Almost all the Earth’s known petroleum was formed less than 160 million years ago.Simple swimmers gave rise to armored swimmers, then bony fish, tetrapods, amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs-all built on the same basic body shape.By half a billion years ago, complex life had spread through the ocean and diversified into all the basic body plans that still exist today (and a lot that don’t).Half a billion years later, oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere, and in another half billion, rose high enough to trigger an ecological collapse and rebalancing in which plants and animals came to dominate the biosphere.A billion years later, cyanobacteria started producing oxygen as a waste product, and this started precipitating iron dissolved in the oceans into the deposits we now quarry for ore.Life appeared no less than 3.8 billion years ago.The Earth formed a persistent solid surface 4.54 billion years ago.Nature tells us Ussher was off by six orders of magnitude. When nature disagrees with scripture, scripture must necessarily be wrong.
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In other words, even if Ussher’s calculation were correct (it isn’t) it would only tell us when Abraham lived, not when the world was made.īut even this doesn’t matter, for as Thomas Paine reminded us, the only revelation we can really trust is the creation itself. As William Henry Green wrote, “The Scriptures furnish no data for a chronological computation prior to the life of Abraham and the Mosaic records do not fix and were not intended to fix the precise date either of the Flood or of the creation of the world.” Usher made a lot of assumptions, chose to ignore inconsistencies within even those scriptural sources known at that time, and was unaware of certain, now obvious translation issues, importantly including the way the Babylonians counted, but that’s beside the point. The 6,000 year age was arrived at by James Ussher, a 17th century Irish Archbishop who counted up estimates of the ages of Abraham’s family listed in the Old Testament and calculated that the creation began (on the Julian calendar) on Saturday, OctoBC, at 6 pm. True, scientific progress repeatedly found our home to be much older than previously suspected, but the widespread view that the planet is only a few thousand years old is relatively new, and has no basis in either fact or scripture. This age is arrived at by several cross-checking lines of evidence, but the great antiquity of the Earth has been apparent for much of human history.