How old things are can give considerable insight into it’s origins and expose truths that once lay hidden.
So how old is the earth? How old is our solar system? What do you know? What do you believe? The exact date of earth’s creation may not be known but we can use current facts and data to show a close estimate.
If you were to measure the age of the oldest known rocks dated on earth and studied samples of meteorites which have landed on earth you would conclude the earth is close to 4.54 billion years old.
If you were to use the Christian dating system you would conclude the age of the earth at about 5800-6000 years old. So where does this number come from? In order to compute this you need to take a known date from the Bible which is Saul’s reign as the first king of Israel. This was around the date of 1020 BCE. The exact date is up for interpretation, but for this discussion the exact date is not necessary. Moving on you would need to work backwards through the Book of Judges, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, the arrival of Abraham in Canaan, and then use the ages of the famous pre-flood personages in the Bible to estimate the number of years between creation and the flood. Instead of doing all this you could pick up a book written in 1650CE called “Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti” (“Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world.”) by Bishop James Ussher, a 17th century Irish archbishop from Armagh, Ireland which already traced it back for you. He calculated that God had created the Earth in 4004 BCE. A decade earlier, Dr. John Lightfoot, (1602 – 1675), an Anglican clergyman, rabbinical scholar, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge had already arrived at an estimate of 4004-OCT-23 BCE.
Lets say both of these estimates are off by a considerable amount. There is a HUGE difference between 6000 and 4.54billion. One is based on a book written with questionable origins and the other is based on measurable proof. There is no indication that these 2 theories will ever agree. If we base our belief’s on the Bible we will have to accept 6000 or so years as the creation of Earth which we know using facts and real data that this date is not possible.
This data and these presented facts leave me no choice but to side with science and say that this only further proves that the Bible may just be a book. Although a well thought out book… it’s not completely bulletproof!?
