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Topic: Age of the Earth
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[The following post by Tom is from Thread 2 and is repeated here by way of reminder because this subthread is responding several weeks later to Tom’s original post. HR]

Tom Couchman
11/11/99 11:47:30 am
Putting the facts on the table

Brethren:
This is an interesting thread, one which I think affords a great opportunity to get viewpoints from "both sides" (only two?) into the open. IMHO, here are the key arguments which have been made.

Brother Turner rightly points out the difference between facts and interpretations of facts. Presumably, both young-earth creationists (YECs) and old-earth creationists (OECs) are dealing with the same data. All the YEC writers I have read assert that if we consider the data, without a bias toward an ancient earth, the data within the natural revelation alone—completely apart from reliance upon the verbal revelation—will convince us that the earth is very young—on the order of 10,000 years. OECs such as brother Mathews are equally confident that the data support that position.

Brother Roberts asserts that, while the YECs point out the difference between data and interpretation, they never deal with the data.

While I don’t expect a "resolution" in the sense that everyone who reads these posts is going to arrive at the same conclusion, we can certainly get both sides of the argument into e-print so that lots of people can see and judge for themselves. Therefore, I propose that, rather than "pointing elsewhere" at alleged facts and interpretations thereof, we put the facts on the table right here, and let the YECs offer their interpretation. Then readers can decide for themselves which interpretation better explains the facts. And we can all be thankful that salvation is in the Blood, and not in the rocks!

BTW, I am a very reluctant OEC who would very much like to be "converted" back to YEC-dom. So here

is your chance, guys; prove Roberts wrong, and deal with the data. Give an explanation—something, I would hope, better than "Because that’s the way God did it"—for data which appear to point to an old earth. For the sake of argument, let’s say that anything below 50,000 years is a young earth—that’s a lot more slack than most YECs ask. What interpretation would account for the following phenomena being produced in

less than 50,000 years?

1. THE SEDIMENTARY ROCKS

Sedimentary rock formation can be observed in progress today, and it produces the same kind of rocks which we see at and near the surface of the earth. Even allowing for a reasonable number of catastrophic events, the process of sedimentary rock lithification is inherently slow because it requires not only desiccation but also chemical changes in the sediments. Furthermore, these rocks are rich in fossils, which give every appearance of being the remains of once-living creatures. The sedimentary rocks occur in distinct layers—several thousand in the Appalachian Mountains where the sediments are as much as five miles thick. A single diluvial event cannot produce thousands of sedimentary layers, because catastrophic floods would mix the sediments, and there would not be enough time for one layer to harden before the superposition of another layer.

2. RIVER-MOUTH SEDIMENTS

There are massively thick layers of sediments at the mouths of all the great rivers on the earth: the sediments at the mouth of the Mississippi are seven miles thick, and full of fossils, including oil and gas which give every evidence of being the remains of once-living organisms. The rate of deposition is easily observable. Under the weight of these sediments the crust of the earth is sinking at the same rate as the rate of deposition, which keeps the deposition itself from changing the course of the rivers. A single catastrophic flood could not account for these sediments, for two reasons. First, any event which piled up sediments faster than the rate at which the crust is sinking would block the mouth of the river. Second, the sediments could not begin to be deposited until the end of the flood, when the waters had receded enough for the mouth of the river to be re-established and begin dumping sediments into the ocean at that point.

3. CORAL REEFS

Coral reef formation is easily observed today, and the rate at which such reefs grow readily calculated: the maximum rate ever observed is about a half-inch a year, and this rate cannot be accelerated no matter how much water is on the surface of the earth, because the coral polyp can only use the calcium in the seawater at its immediate disposal to build its home. For the upper layers of the reefs to grow the lower layers have to be converted into limestone by the leaching of materials from sea water, another inherently slow process. And the limestone layers at the bottom of the reefs are full of fossils. The Capitan Reef in Texas is over 1,000 feet thick, its growth time estimated at 300,000 years, and it sits between two formations each containing thousands of feet of multi-layered fossiliferous sedimentary rock.

4. CLAY VARVES

Varve formation has been studied in progress for well over 100 years. Varves begin as very thin layers of clay deposited at the bottom of still waters which, if not disturbed, are covered with more layers until the water is wrung out and lithification can proceed. In a year a varve "couplet" will form, composed of a lighter and a darker layer, the difference in color produced by the presence of summer pollen in the darker layer. The Green River shale deposits contain two million varve couplets, indicating that it took two million years to produce these sediments. Varves only form in still water, not in the turbulent waters of a flood, because it takes still water for the tiny clay particles to precipitate. Furthermore, rapidly deposited layers of sediment always show "whorls" which are absent from these varves.

5. EVAPORITE VARVES

If salt water is trapped among land masses so that circulation is limited, evaporation produces a much-observed and very predictable pattern of layered sedimentation called "evaporite varving." The Capitan Reef encloses an evaporite varve formation called the Delaware Basin, 1300 feet thick, which is composed of 400,000 layers of varves. Using ratios easily observed in a laboratory the amount of sea water

necessary to produce 1300 feet of these evaporite varves can be reliably calculated: it is over one million feet.

6. METAMORPHIC ROCKS

Metamorphic rocks were originally sedimentary rocks which were subjected to enormous pressures and so had their structure changed. This process can be performed experimentally in the laboratory (for example, in the production of artificial diamonds), and the resulting artifacts show the same microscopic structure as the rocks seen occurring naturally on the earth. These kinds of conditions can only be produced naturally by burial under several miles of rock. Metamorphic rocks are found on the surface of the earth, a condition which requires deposition of the original sediments, lithification, burial under several miles of rock, transformation into metamorphic rock over eons of periodic heat and constant pressure, erosion or tectonic movement to remove the overlaying rock and bring the metamorphosed rock to the surface. Metamorphic rocks also contain a few identifiable fossils, indicating that living things were around when these rocks were originally laid.

7. YELLOWSTONE FOSSIL FORESTS

Near Yellowstone National Park there are as many as 44 layers of fossilized trees, some of them stumps which are still upright, encased in a kind of sedimentary rock which is produced by volcanic ash. The fossil tree layers sit on top of thousands of feet of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock. The rock had to be there, and to be covered by a layer of soil from the weathering of the rock, before trees could grow. Once buried by volcanic catastrophe, the tree material underwent the "non-accelleratable" process of fossilization, in which all the original organic material is replaced by minerals.

8. IGNEOUS ROCK INTRUSIONS

Igneous rock formation can be observed in progress today in the cooling of volcanic lava. In some places igneous rock has been observed to "intrude" into formations of sedimentary rock. The igneous rock pushes up over one sedimentary formation, and displaces the sedimentary rock above it in an obvious way. The time it takes a given volume of such igneous rocks to cool into a solid form is easily measured, and from the size of an igneous intrusion the cooling time can be accurately calculated. Cooling time for one granite formation in Southern California can, by of the size of the formation, be determined to have been about one million years. This formation lies on top of sedimentary rocks which must have been lithified at the time of the intrusion or they would have been destroyed by the heat.

9. SEA FLOOR SPREADING (Brother Mathews’ favorite)

The continents we see today are spreading away from a formation in the Atlantic Ocean called the "mid-Atlantic ridge," where new crust can be observed being produced: yes, one can actually see the lava coming up from a crack in the ocean floor and spreading away from that crack as new crust. The rate of continental movement can be calculated with extreme precision by space-based lasers, so that a calculation of about 100 million years since pangea began to break apart fits a lot of data. But the most convincing evidence concerns periodic reversals in the earth’s magnetic field. Some varves contain particles of iron which, being magnetic, align themselves toward the earth’s "north" magnetic pole. When these varves are analyzed it is found that every few thousand years the earth’s magnetic field reverses itself. Similar analyses of the seafloor spreading from the mid-Atlantic ridge can be done, and magnetic readings show "stripes" of magnetic alignment on both sides of the mid-Atlantic ridge that exactly match the magnetic readings of the varves.

10. RADIOISOTOPIC DATING

Of all the radioactive isotopes present in the earth’s crust, none is found with a half-life of less than 100 million years, except in the presence of parent elements which are in the process of decay into those daughter elements. It takes about 10 half-lives for all detectable amounts of radioisotope to decay out of a given sample; that would indicate an age of the earth’s crust of at least a billion years.

There are more, but ten is a nice biblical number, and if someone can come up with an explanation of these I will be most impressed. Thanks again for raising this issue, and for giving attention to these facts.

Your brother,
Tom

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Jim Robson
12-20-99
RE: Putting the facts on the table

Dear Tom:
I would like to address a couple of your statements.

1.) First, you wrote: "Give an explanation—something, I would hope, better than "Because that’s the way God did it""

I would like to ask, why would a Christian need a "better" answer that that? I can understand why the atheistic evolutionist needs a better answer. I hear such demands from them all the time. If we can't provide a naturalistic explanation for all known phenomena, they affirm, the Bible must be invalid. (I know you are not saying the Bible is invalid, but please bear with me and I think you'll see my point.) But, if I am convinced that the Bible is from God, if I firmly believe that, then I believe what it says whether I can explain how God did everything or not. I do not need to know HOW He did things, in order to believe that He did them. Furthermore, to assume that there is a naturalistic explanation for all known phenomena is to limit God. We don't know that everything we see is the result of natural processes. We do know that God caused some things to happen that were contrary to the usual natural processes (Exodus 14; Joshua 10; Matthew 27:45-53; etc.) So, when I see some phenomenon in nature today, how can I know for certain that it is not the result of something other than a natural process? If I believe the Bible, then I must admit that some things happened that are beyond my experience - things that might produce effects which I am unable to predict.

I am a father of four young children. When I give them instructions and one of them asks me, "Why?", I generally explain my reasoning to them, because I want to teach them to think for themselves. However, I always reserve the right to answer, "Because I said so." There are occasions when it seems to me wiser to give this answer, and it has its own value: it teaches them about trust and authority. Daddy doesn't have to explain everything.

Likewise, God doesn't have to explain everything. He has told us what we need to know - written it in His word. Why should we demand to know all of the whys and hows? Why not put all of our trust in God and simply accept what the Bible says?

2.) The other thing you wrote which I would like to address - and this is really an example of a set:" Sedimentary rock formation can be observed in progress today, and it produces the same kind of rocks which we see at and near the surface of the earth."

Tom, you mentioned in another of your posts that you are not a scientist. Let me ask you then, where did you get this information? How do you know that the sedimentary rock being formed today is the same as the rock that has been there for centuries? Have you examined it yourself? Have you taken samples and analyzed their composition? Upon what do you base this statement? Is it from first-hand knowledge, or is it something you have been told? Do you know this from experience, or do you believe it because you regard the source of the information to be trustworthy? If it is the former, do you regard yourself and your means of testing to be incapable of error? If it is the latter, do you have some evidence that the source of this information is infallible? If not, then why are you so confident of its validity, that you demand that a passage of Scripture be explained in the light of this "fact"?

I am not insinuating any kind of conspiracy on the part of those who report these facts, but a healthy dose of reality should tell us that even the greatest human minds make mistakes, and general acceptance by a community of "experts" does not prove a thing to be true. For example, if we were to believe the prevailing opinion of contemporary biblical scholars, we would not believe the Bible is inspired by God. We recognize that their intellectual bias colors their conclusions.

Tom, please do not take this as an act of aggression, because it isn't. My goal here is to urge you to consider where you put your faith. As you go through your list of ten "facts", please consider how you came to "know" these things. What is it about this source of "knowledge" that is so compelling, so trustworthy, that it moved you to reject the plain teaching of Genesis 1-2?

I am not saying that we can't learn anything from science. I believe science is valuable, but I also believe that science has its proper place. The proper place for science is not on an equal level with God's word. We have no business using science as the standard by which we judge the teaching of the Bible.

Hope this helps!

Brotherly,
Jim

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Tom Couchman
12-23-99
SORRY FOR THE MISPLACED POST! and Responses

Jim:
First, my deepest apologies for failing to see your questions there in the midst of the thread, and for the "crossing posts." Thank you for going the "extra mile" and responding to my misplaced other post. Let me see if I can deal with your questions.

Answering your second question first allows some points to be made which help to answer the first one.

"Let me ask you then, where did you get this information …" (and so on, questioning the reliability of scientific findings and of my understanding of them).

Suppose you were to ask me the following questions. "Tom, do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Where did you get the information that Jesus came back to life? From the Bible? But how do you know the Bible is reliable? How do you know the text you read today is what the writers actually wrote? Did you know any of those writers? Have you ever seen the original manuscripts? Do you know where the tomb of Jesus was? Have you ever even been to Jerusalem? How do you know the resurrection story is not an allegory or a fable?" I’m afraid I wouldn’t be a very good source of "original" information on any of those points! But I would answer something like this: "No, Jim, I’ve never personally been involved with any of these people or places. I believe it all second-hand. But there are facts, which are usually conceded even by skeptics, for which I find the resurrection the best explanation. And I have examined the testimony of the witnesses. I find the witnesses themselves reliable, and their testimony believable, and I cannot see any reason for them to lie. Their word does not contradict but rather confirms historical fact, and resurrection is not inherently impossible. Ultimately, Jim, my faith in the resurrection of Jesus depends on my conviction that I am capable of making an accurate and reasoned evaluation of the evidence."

And that is the answer I have to give to your questions on "scientific" evidence. I am not an original source. I believe these assertions to be facts because they are well-attested by witnesses who have no reason, so far as I know, to be untruthful. All my sources are creationists; some are YECs. Of course, as I have readily acknowledged, my presentation of the ten lines of evidence mixed fact and interpretation (for the sake of brevity). No one has to accept my interpretation that the facts which are acknowledged even by YECs support belief that the earth is old. Indeed, I am hoping that a plausible young-earth interpretation can be supplied; that is why I submitted the evidence. But the basic reason it is my reluctantly held opinion that the earth and universe are old is the same as my joyfully held faith that Jesus rose from the dead: to the best of my knowledge I am capable of making an accurate and reasoned evaluation of the evidence. My faith in God is not primary; that faith is based upon the assumption (which I know of no way to test) that I can absorb, understand and interpret the facts.

You ask, "Why not put all of our trust in God and simply accept what the Bible says."

I do. But you are asking that the claims on which faith in the Bible is based be given a special status different from the claims on which science is based, and we cannot take that position without either engaging in intellectual dishonesty or making the Augustinian/Calvinist plea that God forces us to believe independent of the evidence. I accept your premise that the Bible is superior to human science as the source of ultimate information, but the only way I discovered that premise was by using the same reason and intellect to investigate the claims of scripture that I use to investigate the claims of science. The Bible must be found to be true in the open marketplace of ideas: "Wisdom cries out by the gates, at the entry to the city."

Your first question was: "What’s wrong with just saying, ‘That’s the way God did it’?" In the broadest sense, nothing; for those of us who are theists, that statement is, of course, the ultimate answer. But the issue here is narrower. If there is no evidence for "how" God did it, then I am willing to be blissfully ignorant. But there is evidence for "how" He did it, and that is the evidence I presented. The OEC interpretation of that evidence is that He used eons of natural processes. The YEC interpretation involves some combination of catastrophes and changes in natural laws. And I have never read a YEC scientist who was content to say, "Because that’s the way God did it." Of course, it is possible that humans are inherently unqualified to evaluate the evidence in nature, in which case we will never get the right answer. But that possibility takes us back to the epistemological dilemma implied in your previous questions: arguing that humans are unqualified to absorb and evaluate the facts of nature puts one on the slippery slope toward saying that humans (absent divine compulsion) are unqualified to absorb and evaluate the evidence for the resurrection or the veracity of the Bible. And I have never heard of a YEC scientist saying, "I am going to resign from being a scientist because human reason is incapable of understanding how God’s creation works."

"...to assume that there is a naturalistic explanation for all known phenomena is to limit God."

I agree. I do not think there is a naturalistic explanation for all known phenomena. Given that God is the creator of nature, to assume that there is no possible natural explanation for the ten lines of evidence I presented is also to limit God.

"What is it about this source of ‘knowledge’ that is co compelling, so trustworthy, that it moved you to reject the plain teaching of Genesis 1-2."

I do not believe I have rejected the plain teaching of Genesis 1-2.

Concerning (specifically) sedimentary rock and (generally) scientific evidence. "...why are you so confident of its validity (I have now explained this confidence), that you demand that a passage of Scripture be explained in the light of this ‘fact’?" I do not make any such demand; I am not aware of any statement in scripture which I would "explain" in light of the existence or the alleged antiquity of sedimentary rock.

Here is the question you did not ask, which is behind the ones you did ask. "How can you reject the traditional teaching that the earth was created in 4004 BC?" I would love to be convinced that the earth was created 6,000 or 10,000 or even 10,000,000 years ago. At the moment I cannot because the Bible does not, to my knowledge, make any claim about the age of the earth or of the universe, and because the easiest interpretation of the evidence I have presented is that the heavens and earth are very old. I am not unaware of the tension between the evidence for an ancient earth and the most obvious interpretation of Genesis 1-2. At the moment I do not see either an outright contradiction or an easy way of releasing that tension. So here is where I am: by no means satisfied with my position, but not ready to turn my back completely on natural science and certainly not willing to renounce my faith in divine inspiration. My hope is to find that millennial meadow where science and scripture, which have too often been lion and lamb, can lie down together. I trust I will get some help searching for it.

Concerning my other, misplaced, post and your gracious response…

Let me make my question about Joshua’s long day more pointed. The Bible says specifically that it is the sun which moves around the earth, and not vice-versa. Your posts appear to manifest an objection to using any "fact" discovered by science to help us understand the Bible. Please tell me how you "interpret" the statement in Joshua and certain texts in Psalms about the movement of the sun around the earth without extra-scriptural "scientific" knowledge about the relative positions of earth and sun.

My question about the "context" of Genesis 1-2 draws on my first question, and the more "pointed" version of it in the previous paragraph. Is the Bible intended to be a "scientific" treatise, so that we must regard every literal or historical statement as a datum to be evaluated according to the rules of science?

Concerning the Gentiles, I specifically have in mind the fact that they did not have a verbal revelation to guide their inquiry into nature. They must find God entirely from the natural revelation, and in fact God holds them responsible for correctly reading that natural revelation without guidance from a verbal revelation. I would agree with your statement that scientists who investigate nature from the perspective of a belief in God (as OEC scientists do) will sometimes get different answers from atheist/agnostic scientists. If you approached the study of nature, as the Gentiles were held responsible by God for doing, without the "guidance" of Genesis 1-2, what would you conclude about the methods God used to produce the natural features that we see today?

Your brother,
Tom