Old Paths Baptist Ministries


Is The Earth Really Old?


The following is an edited and shortened version of a much larger article by Dr. Russell Humphreys. He is a highly respected nuclear physicist who used to work in the Sandia National Laboratory, White Sands, NM. He now works full time for creationist movements in our country. Dr. Humphreys original article is well documented and contains much more information that we could put in this short tract. It may be accessed by going to www.icr.org

Evidences For A Young Earth
by Dr. Russell Humphreys.

Here are a dozen natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the universe is billions of years old. The numbers I list below in bold print (often millions of years) are maximum possible ages set by each process, not the actual ages. The numbers in italics are the ages required by evolutionary theory for each item. The point is that the maximum possible ages are always much less than the required evolutionary ages, while the biblical age (6,000 to 10,000 years) always fits comfortably within the maximum possible ages. Thus the following items are evidence against the evolutionary time scale and for the biblical time scale. Much more young-world evidence exists, but I have chosen these items for brevity and simplicity. Some of the items on this list can be reconciled with an old universe only by making a series of improbable and unproven guesses; others can fit in only with a young universe. The list starts with distant astronomic phenomena and works its way down to earth, ending with everyday facts.

  1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast. The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.
    Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this "the winding-up dilemma," which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same "winding-up" dilemma also applies to other galaxies. For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the dilemma has been a complex theory called "density waves." The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and lately has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the "Whirlpool" galaxy, M51.
  2. Comets disintegrate too quickly. According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about 5 billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of 10,000 years. Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical "Oort cloud" well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed. So far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated either by observations or realistic calculations. Lately, there has been much talk of the "Kuiper Belt," a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Even if some bodies of ice exist in that location, they would not really solve the evolutionists' problem, since according to evolutionary theory the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it.
  3. Not enough mud on the sea floor. Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean. This material accumulates as loose sediment (i.e., mud) on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 meters. The main way known to remove the mud from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year. As far as anyone knows, the other 24 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present amount of sediment in less than 12 million years. Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged 3 billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometers deep. An alternative (creationist) explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of mud within a short time about 5000 years ago.
  4. Not enough sodium in the sea. Every year, rivers and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year. As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today's input and output rates. This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, 3 billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations which are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years. Calculations for many other sea water elements give much younger ages for the ocean.
  5. The earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast. The total energy stored in the earth's magnetic field has steadily decreased by a factor of 2.7 over the past 1000 years. Evolutionary theories explaining this rapid decrease, as well as how the earth could have maintained its magnetic field for billions of years, are very complex and inadequate. A much better creationist theory exists. It is straightforward, based on sound physics, and explains many features of the field: its creation, rapid reversals during the Genesis flood, surface intensity decreases and increases until the time of Christ, and a steady decay since then. This theory matches paleomagnetic, historic, and present data. The main result is that the field's total energy (not surface intensity) has always decayed at least as fast as now. At that rate the field could not be more than 10,000 years old.
  6. Many strata are too tightly bent. In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.
  7. Helium is found in the wrong places. All naturally-occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the earth's atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in 5 billion years. This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape. Though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old, their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years.
  8. Not enough stone age skeletons. Evolutionary anthropologists say that the stone age lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Neanderthal and Cro-magnon men was roughly constant, between 1 and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artifacts. By this scenario, they would have buried at least 4 billion bodies. If the evolutionary time scale is correct, buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 100,000 years, so many of the supposed 4 billion stone age skeletons should still be around (and certainly the buried artifacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the stone age was much shorter than evolutionists think, a few hundred years in many areas.
  9. Agriculture is too recent. The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years during the stone age before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years ago. Yet the archaeological evidence shows that stone age men were as intelligent as we are. It is very improbable that none of the 4 billion people mentioned in item 10 should discover that plants grow from seeds. It is more likely that men were without agriculture less than a few hundred years after the flood, if at all.
  10. History is too short. According to evolutionists, stone age man existed for 100,000 years before beginning to make written records about 4000 to 5000 years ago. 'Prehistoric man' built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases. Why would he wait a thousand centuries before using the same skills to record history? The biblical time scale is much more likely. (End of article.)

The deliberate ignorance of evolutionists is very revealing. John 9:39-41 is certainly true in the case of those who believe in the fairy tale of evolution. There are many evidences of a young earth, and all it takes is one of the above to be true to disprove evolution. Yet all are true. The magic wand of evolution is time. Without long lengths of time, even evolutionists concede there is no hope for their theory. If you would like more information on this subject please contact us.

This article is available as a tri-fold tract in pdf format.


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