The fine folk at Answers in Genesis still believe that there is a debate on the age of earth and the universe and Kern Ham’s son-in-law Bodie Hodge piles into the affray with a lengthy essay quoting all those who have calculated a young earth and misrepresenting the science which shows the age of the universe as 13.772 and earth as 4.543 billion years old.
The age of the earth can be estimated by taking the first five days of creation (from earth’s creation to Adam), then following the genealogies from Adam to Abraham in Genesis 5 and 11, then adding in the time from Abraham to today.
Adam was created on day 6, so there were five days before him. If we add up the dates from Adam to Abraham, we get about 2,000 years, using the Masoretic Hebrew text of Genesis 5 and 11.3 Whether Christian or secular, most scholars would agree that Abraham lived about 2,000 B.C. (4,000 years ago).
He then lists all those people who have calculated the age of earth as young, basing their efforts on the Bible and adds a lengthy list of extra biblical calculations.
Finally he gets to the debunking of scientific calculation and in particular, radiometric dating.
Radiometric dating was the culminating factor that led to the belief in billions of years for earth history. However, radiometric dating methods are not the only uniformitarian methods. Any radiometric dating model or other uniformitarian dating method can and does have problems, as referenced before. All uniformitarian dating methods require assumptions for extrapolating present-day processes back into the past
In conclusion he sums up the core reason (for young earth creationists) that earth and the universe are only some 6000 years old.
When we start our thinking with God’s Word, we see that the world is about 6,000 years old. When we rely on man’s fallible (and often demonstrably false) dating methods, we can get a confusing range of ages from a few thousand to billions of years, though the vast majority of methods do not give dates even close to billions.
Cultures around the world give an age of the earth that confirms what the Bible teaches. Radiometric dates, on the other hand, have been shown to be wildly in error.
The age of the earth ultimately comes down to a matter of trust—it’s a worldview issue. Will you trust what an all-knowing God says on the subject, or will you trust imperfect man’s assumptions and imaginations about the past that regularly are changing?
To read the whole article and enjoy its ineffable craziness go to: https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/how-old-is-the-earth/
This misinformation is being propagated by Answers in Genesis and other, similar institutions as truth and they are aiming squarely at children. They have erected an edifice of lies based on the words of an ancient text, which would be funny were it not for the fact that by some polls about 38% of Americans believe that earth and the universe were created by a god in the last 10,000 years.
https://ncse.com/blog/2013/11/just-how-many-young-earth-creationists-are-there-us-0015164
How old do you think earth and the universe are?
Why is it that so many Americans (as compared to Europeans) believe in a young earth?
This Style 10/6