Age of the Earth
The age of the Earth has been a matter of interest to humans for millennia, and today still causes debate, particularly between young-Earth creationists who hold to a date of 6,000 years or so, and uniformitarians who hold to a date of about 4.5 billion years.
Increasing ages
Early Jews and even some "heathens" believed that the total age of the Earth would be around 6,000 years.[1]
Similarly, people such as St. Barnabas and St. Irenæus held that the Earth would be 6,000 years old.[2]
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.[3]
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.[4] 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.[4] Charles Lyell supported Hutton's idea in 1830, in Principles of Geology.[4]
In 1854 Hermann von Helmholtz estimated an age of between 20 and 40 million years.[4] 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.[4]
The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica discussed dates up to 500 million years.[5]
By about 1930, J. H. Jeans was arguing for an age of the Earth of around 2,000 million years.[6]
The currently-proposed age is 4,500 million years, based in part on rocks dated by Potassium-argon (K:Ar) dating at about 4,400 millions years.[7]
Bibliography
- Burnet, Thomas, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, chapter V, 1691.
- Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911). On-line page facsimiles.
- Hammerton, J.A. (Ed.), "Universal History of the World" (8 volumes) The Educational Book Co., London, c1930.
- Batten, Don, Old-earth or young-earth belief: Which belief is the recent aberration?, Creation 24(1):24â27, December 2001.
- 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
- â Burnet, p. 258.
- â Burnet, p. 259.
- â Batten 2002 quotes from "Youngâs Analytical Concordance of the Holy Bible", 1879 8th Edition, 1939, which relates this, and reproduces the selection of the dates from Young.
- â 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 INGV
- â Encyclopædia Britannica, pp 650-651.
- â Universal History of the World, p.76.
- â Peck, 2000, p.376.