Science and the Earth's Age
First, radiometric dating methods do not prove an earth that is millions of years old. For years, creation scientists – including our own PhD scientists -- have done their own field research and have cited numerous examples in the published scientific literature of these dating methods clearly giving erroneous dates (e.g., a date of millions of years for lava flows that occurred in the past few hundred years—or even decades). In recent years, creationists in the RATE project have done experimental, theoretical, and field research to uncover more such evidence (e.g., diamonds and coal, which the evolutionists say are millions of years old, were dated by carbon-14 to be only thousands of years old) and to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years to thousands of years, confirming the Bible.
Some additional arguments for a young earth include:
--Comets disintegrate too quickly
According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system—about five billion years. But each time a comet orbits near the sun, it loses so much material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of less than 10,000 years.
Evolutionists propose an “Oort cloud” that generates new comets to overcome this problem, but nobody has seen such a cloud. It’s just a convenient guess.
--Not enough salt in the seas
Every year, rivers and other sources of water dump over 450 million tons of sodium into 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 rates of input and output. This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean (which is about 3 billion years). The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations that are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years.
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Maybe get someone to do your studies who doesn't pay a tithe? Someone who perhaps doesn't own a bible ?
The scientific investigation into the question of the age of the Earth, and of the universe has been going on for hundreds of years. For the past two centuries, and with accelerating access to increasingly sophisticated and reliable methods and more data, there no longer is possible to be in denial about the results science have provided.
It is also worth stressing this simple fact: This is a vast scientific field of its own, involving so much detailed knowledge that a short 'debunking statement' like the one I am responding to now, is absolutely worthless. The question is so complex that it takes a lot of study to even begin to appreciate all the facts and evidence, and to properly evaluate the validity or lack of same of the results provided by science.
As a non-professional in geology, radiometric dating, dendrochronology, palaentology, glaciology and probably many other related fields of science too, I can only conclude that it is impossible for 99.99% of lay people to decide who is right or wrong regarding the question of the age of the Earth.
I think it would be more fair if AiG would just say "We do not know, except we believe the Bible says the Earth is 6000 years old, and here we stand."
You probably are familiar with paleontologist Kurt Wise's statement about this question, and it is my humble opinion that creationism would appear more honest and reasonable if it would adopt the same attitude: "We acknowledge the scientific data, but we stand by the Bible."
After all, isn't religion about spiritual matters, man's soul, and not about the material world?
Calling the ort cloud a "guess" is disingenuous at best. While no direct observational data confirms its existence, the statistically unlikely clustering of the aphelia (the furthest point in orbit away from the sun) of long period comets strongly imply its existence. And of course, most short period comets, the ones that matter to AiG's calculations, come from the Kuiper belt, which we have directly observed.
Imagine you found a grain of rice and you wanted to measure its length. Of a caliper, meter stick, and odometer, which instrument would you use? If by some stretch of incompetence you opted to use the odometer, you might conclude that our length measurement techniques are wildly inaccurate. How else could a grain of rice have a length of 0.001 kilometers?
This is the same technique that AiG's "PhD scientists" use to cast doubt on radiometric dating methods. The isotope potassium-40 decays with a half life of 1.25 billion years, so it isn't appropriate for measuring very young volcanic rocks. The margin of error with that technique is millions of years wide. Likewise, carbon-14 decays with a half-life of 5730 years, making it accurate only up to about 10 half-lives, or about 60,000 years. Past that point, the remaining carbon-14 is far too scarce to make any accurate age measurement. Yet AiG's professionals admit to using this approach to date diamonds? Incomprehensible.
As for the salinity of the oceans, AiG fails to consider any process that removes salt from seawater, of which many have been examined and documented. A full analysis will show that the salinity of the ocean is in equilibrium. The amount of salt entering the sea is almost exactly equal to the amount being removed.