The Impossibility of a Young Earth

Gary Petersen of Country Keepers has responded to my post concerning him yesterday. In that post he claims that my reference to evidence that the earth is 4.55 billion years old "just doesn't stand up to a sound, thorough evaluation." He further states:

I believe the evidence found in the world speaks more clearly to a young earth created in six literal days several thousand years ago than it does to a old earth that evolved its way to present day form over billions of years.

This is a statement I will gladly challenge. I think it might be informative to examine the arguments over the age of the earth in more detail. I suppose I could opt for a more subtle and understated approach, but I've never been one to mince words. So let's call a spade a spade here. The claim that the earth is only a few thousand years old is, to be blunt, utter nonsense. It is simply ridiculous. I will gladly accept the burden that comes from making such a strong statement.

In order to argue for a young earth, one must find a way to explain how the evidence of processes that we see all around us that took millions and in some cases billions of years to occur formed in only a few thousand years. This includes the entire geologic column and all of the events recorded therein - floods, volcanic eruptions, the formation of all of the geological deposits of shale, sandstone, chalk, limestone, etc., meteoritic impacts, and radiodecay. This poses an insurmountable problem, especially when it comes to heat and radioactivity.

The earth's crust and mantle are filled with radioisotopes - elements that break down into other elements over time. They do so by releasing particles to the surrounding environment and these particles are radioactive. This process also releases a great deal of heat. Now, if you take all of the radioisotopes in the crust of the earth and compress the amount of radiation and heat that have been released over 4.5 billion years into only 6000 years, you're left with an impossible situation. Joe Meert, a geologist from Florida State who specializes in paleomagnetism, has worked out all the calculations and shows how this one factor alone would raise the temperature of the earth beyond the ability of life to survive. And that doesn't even include the fact that the radioactivity, quite apart from the heat it produces, would have sterilized the planet.

To the heat from the accelerated radioisotope decay you also have to add the heat from all of the volcanic activity that we see recorded in the geologic column, but again compressed into only a few thousand years. There are about 8 x 10²⁴ grams of magma flows and igneous intrusions in the geologic record. Using conservative estimates of the specific heat, these flows would have released 5.4 x 10²⁷ joules in the process of cooling 1100 degrees - enough, by itself, to vaporize the oceans entirely.

To those two sources of heat, add the heat released from all of the meteoritic impacts found in the geologic record, with over 300 large craters found at all depths. Each of those impacts also releases an enormous amount of heat. It is estimated that for just one of the largest impact craters that we see on the moon, 3 x 10²⁶ joules were released. Add all of these up and it would be enough to literally boil off the earth's atmosphere completely.

Another huge problem with the young earth position is that you must take all of the animals that have lived in the entire 4.5 billion year history and assume that they all lived more or less simultaneously. And forget the big animals, just think about all of the microscopic animals whose shells have been left behind in chalk, chert and limestone deposits. These formations are made of billions and billions of carbonate shells of microscopic plankton and coccoliths anddiatomsthat settle very slowly and form over very, very long periods of time. If all of those formations on the earth formed in only a few thousand years, then all of those microscopic creatures must have been alive virtually simultaneously. But if that was true, Jesus wouldn't be the only one who could walk on water - it would be solid from the concentration of these creatures in the water! Glenn Morton does the math for just a single chert formation and the sheer number of diatoms it contains:

A deposit that is similar to chalk is diatomaceous chert. These siliceous deposits are made of little more than dead diatoms. A diatom is a small single-celled animal that lives in the sea. As diatoms collect on the ocean floor and are buried deeper and deeper, they are compressed and changed from a form known as diatomite, which is used in swimming pool filters, to opal. Upon further burial, with increased temperature and pressure, the opal is changed into chert. The Monterey formation of California is such a deposit. It is the light-colored rock that forms much of the landscape of southern California. The deposit is 1,200 kilometers long, 250 kilometers wide and averages half a kilometer in thickness. This single deposit of dead diatoms is large enough to cover the earth to a depth of nearly 1 foot, or 0.28 meters. But this is not all. There are over 300 such siliceous deposits around the world. If each one of them is only one-fourth the size of the Monterey, then there are enough dead diatoms to cover the earth uniformly to a depth of 21 meters, or 70 feet!

And none of this includes actual land creatures, which would crowd the earth to the tune of about 2100 animals per acre - not including humans - if all of the animals that we know have existed all were in just the last few thousand years.

As I said, the notion that the earth is only a few thousand years old is patently ridiculous. There's a reason why the only people who claim that it is that young all share the same dogmatic belief in a literal interpretation of Genesis. Without starting from that assumption, no sane human being who understands even a little bit of science could believe it was that young.