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Undo revision 400740 by Special:Contributions/Bajs (User talk:Bajs)
== The Earth is about 4.5 billon years old! ==
The '''age of the Earth''' has been a matter of interest to humans for millennia, and today still causes debate, particularly between [[young Earth Creationism|young-Earth creationists]] who hold to a date of 6,000 years or so, and [[uniformitarianism|uniformitarians]] who hold to a date of about 4,500 million years.
== Increasing ages ==
Early Jews and even some "heathens" believed that the total age of the Earth would be around 6,000 years.<ref>Burnet, p. 258.</ref>
Similarly, people such as St. Barnabas and St. Irenæus held that the Earth would be 6,000 years old.<ref>Burnet, p. 259.</ref>
In 1830, Dr. Hales published a list of 120 historical authorities from various cultures who had decided on a [[date of creation]]. These ranged from 6984 B.C. to 3616 B.C.<ref>Batten 2002 quotes from "Young’s Analytical Concordance of the Holy Bible", 1879 8th Edition, 1939, which relates this, and reproduces the selection of the dates from Young.</ref>
Included in Hales' list is [[James Ussher]], who calculated the famous date of 4004 B.C. for creation. Young-Earth creationists still consider this date to be close to the actual date.
In 1778 George-Louis Lecrerc, Count of Buffon, proposed that the Earth was about 74,832 years old.<ref name="ingv">INGV</ref>
[[James Hutton]], whilst not proposing a date, dismissed the Biblical account and claimed in 1785 that there was not evidence of a beginning at all.<ref name="ingv" />
[[Charles Lyell]] supported Hutton's idea in 1830, in ''Principles of Geology''.<ref name="ingv" />
In 1854 [[Hermann von Helmholtz]] estimated an age of between 20 and 40 million years.<ref name="ingv" />
Around the same time [[Lord Kelvin]] put his mind to deriving an age, and came up with a range between 20 million years and 400 million years. He later refined that down to between 20 million and 40 million years.<ref name="ingv" />
The 1911 edition of the [[Encyclopedia Britannica]] discussed dates up to 500 million years.<ref>Encyclopædia Britannica, pp 650-651.</ref>
By about 1930, J. H. Jeans was arguing for an age of the Earth of around 2,000 million years.<ref>Universal History of the World, p.76.</ref>
The currently-proposed age is 4,500 million years, based in part on rocks dated by [[Potassium-argon dating|Potassium-argon (K:Ar) dating]] at about 4,400 million years.<ref>Peck, 2000, p.376.</ref>
== Bibliography ==
* Burnet, Thomas, [http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/ste/ste36.htm The Sacred Theory of the Earth, chapter V], 1691.
* Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911). [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling On-line page facsimiles].
* Hammerton, J.A. (Ed.), "Universal History of the World" (8 volumes) The Educational Book Co., London, c1930.
* Batten, Don, [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/417 Old-earth or young-earth belief: Which belief is the recent aberration?], ''Creation'' 24(1):24–27, December 2001.
* [http://www.ingv.it/~roma/SITOINGLESE/activities/geomagnetismo/analysistheory/historicalresearch/age.html The age of the Earth] (Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV)).
*Peck WH, Valley JW, Wilde SA, and Graham CM (2000) Ion microprobe Evidence for Pre-4.4 Ga Continental Crust and Low Temperature Water/Rock Interaction. ''Geol. Soc. Am. Abstr'', vol 32, no. 7.
== Notes ==
<references />
[[Category:Geology]]