Why am I a young earther if all science points to billions of years?

[Scarlett O.]

I was asked this in another thread. My answer will get lost there so I am making a separate thread.

I don't believe that one has to be a young earther to be saved. I wish more people were young earthers, but it, most of the times, should not interfere with your salvation.

How "young" is young? I cannot give a definitive answer, but billions of years just defies what is provable.

The short answer is that as a person who taught science for many years [biology, zoology, earth science, physical science, and a smidge of chemistry] - I am a stickler for the scientific method. If it is going to be taught as a fact, then it MUST be observable and testable and provable.

Let me give an example: The first four years that I taught earth science - the classroom textbook taught about where the comets in our solar system come from. It's supposedly a "cloud" of a "shell" enveloping the entire solar system called the "Oort cloud". What is observable, testable, and provable is that there ARE comets. And they follow a certain number of years of a massive revolution through our solar system. Halley's comet passes by the earth every 75-76 years. It's HIGHLY predictable and it's been observed and recorded for well over 2,000 years. The Hale-Bopp comet - it takes MUCH longer for it to revolve through our solar system.

The Oort cloud, taught as fact by my science book back in the day, NASA today, and most all resources you will find is claimed to be between 5,000 and 100,000 AU away. AU is astronomical unit and is the distance between the sun and the earth, 93,000,000 miles. So, in miles, the Oort cloud is 465 Trillion miles away at the closest and 9,300,000,000,000,000,000 or 9.3 sextillion miles away - according to Jan Oort at it's farthest. According to Jan Oort and NASA and scores of other scientific citations, it's made up of leftover pieces of planet material called planetesimals spinning off of planets when they were formed.

In 1950, neither Jan Oort nor anyone else could see that far away. Today, in 2026, even with the James Webb Telescope, we still can't "see" it. Yet, go to images.google.com and type in "Oort Cloud". You will see scores of impressive and creative diagrams. It's taught as an accepted and natural scientific fact.

After 4 years of teaching the Oort cloud as a fact, and then finding out that Jan Oort, according to his own words a few years before he died, "It's just an idea. It sounded good at the time." - I came unglued. If it is a theory, TEACH IT as an unprovable idea. Don't teach theories as facts.

I still LOVE science, but I have to question what I see as unobservable, untestable, and unprovable.

Why do I believe a young earth and a Creationist viewpoint is true? Look at the next post.

 

[Ascetic X]

Let me give an example: The first four years that I taught earth science - the classroom textbook taught about where the comets in our solar system come from. It's supposedly a "cloud" of a "shell" enveloping the entire solar system called the "Oort cloud". What is observable, testable, and provable is that there ARE comets. And they follow a certain number of years of a massive revolution through our solar system. Halley's comet passes by the earth every 75-76 years. It's HIGHLY predictable and it's been observed and recorded for well over 2,000 years. The Hale-Bopp comet - it takes MUCH longer for it to revolve through our solar system.

The Oort cloud, taught as fact by my science book back in the day, NASA today, and most all resources you will find is claimed to be between 5,000 and 100,000 AU away. AU is astronomical unit and is the distance between the sun and the earth, 93,000,000 miles. So, in miles, the Oort cloud is 465 Trillion miles away at the closest and 9,300,000,000,000,000,000 or 9.3 sextillion miles away - according to Jan Oort at it's farthest. According to Jan Oort and NASA and scores of other scientific citations, it's made up of leftover pieces of planet material called planetesimals spinning off of planets when they were formed.

In 1950, neither Jan Oort nor anyone else could see that far away. Today, in 2026, even with the James Webb Telescope, we still can't "see" it. Yet, go to images.google.com and type in "Oort Cloud". You will see scores of impressive and creative diagrams. It's taught as an accepted and natural scientific fact.

After 4 years of teaching the Oort cloud as a fact, and then finding out that Jan Oort, according to his own words a few years before he died, "It's just an idea. It sounded good at the time." - I came unglued. If it is a theory, TEACH IT as an unprovable idea. Don't teach theories as facts.

I checked Google. Here is what Astronomy Magazine has to say:

Mysteries of the Oort cloud at the edge of our solar system

The entirely theoretical cloud of icy space debris marks the frontiers of our solar system.

www.astronomy.com

The Oort cloud represents the very edges of our solar system. The thinly dispersed collection of icy material starts roughly 200 times farther away from the sun than Pluto and stretches halfway to our sun’s nearest starry neighbor, Alpha Centauri. We know so little about it that its very existence is theoretical — the material that makes up this cloud has never been glimpsed by even our most powerful telescopes, except when some of it breaks free.

“For the foreseeable future, the bodies in the Oort cloud are too far away to be directly imaged,” says a spokesperson from NASA. “They are small, faint, and moving slowly.”

 

[Scarlett O.]

I don't believe in billions of years of "evolution" because of the following tenets it asserts.

1]. Life from non-life. Abiogenesis. Even the origin of genetic material. They are obsolete and unobservable and unprovable assertions.

2]. No "missing links" or transitional fossils. If billions of years is true and all life evolved, where are the 10's of thousands of fossils that have characteristics of multiple creatures? There are none.

3]. Take the strata of earth in the Grand Canyon for example. Evolutionists believe and teach that it took billions of years of wet earth being deposited in layers of eventually hardened strata with each strata containing fossils of animals of different ages of millions of years each. It if took billions and millions of years for the rock to become layered strata - that's impossible. Rock hardens more quickly than that. And why are the fossilized clams at the bottom of the strata, the same as the fossilized clams at the top of the strata is billions of years apart?

Here is how I think the strata became to be. It took a MUCH shorter time of Noah's Flood destroying the earth and sediments layering over each other and yes, containing more and more "advanced" animals in each layer? Why would that be? Clams and other barely moving animals didn't move and the more advanced the animals were - running to escape destruction - escaped into higher ground, ergo perishing at higher ground and buried and fossilized at higher ground. Is that a theory? Yes. But it makes much more sense than life from non-life and supposed, but non-existent missing links.

4]. And here's the nail in the coffin for me. Fossils found with soft tissue. Clams found with soft tissue fossilized with the bones and shells. Soft tissue of dead material decays quickly. There have been clams and dinosaur bones - T. Rex - with red blood cells, blood vessels, skin, and collagen intact but fossilized. And clams and such with the soft tissue of the inside intake but fossilized.

It is taught as fact that it take millions of years to make a fossil. Soft tissue cannot last that long. Fact. The only way soft tissue could be fossilized would be for a quick, quick burial. Such as a global flood.

There's more, but I will stop here.

 

[Charlie24]

I don't believe in billions of years of "evolution" because of the following tenets it asserts.

1]. Life from non-life. Abiogenesis. Even the origin of genetic material. They are obsolete and unobservable and unprovable assertions.

2]. No "missing links" or transitional fossils. If billions of years is true and all life evolved, where are the 10's of thousands of fossils that have characteristics of multiple creatures? There are none.

3]. Take the strata of earth in the Grand Canyon for example. Evolutionists believe and teach that it took billions of years of wet earth being deposited in layers of eventually hardened strata with each strata containing fossils of animals of different ages of millions of years each. It if took billions and millions of years for the rock to become layered strata - that's impossible. Rock hardens more quickly than that. And why are the fossilized clams at the bottom of the strata, the same as the fossilized clams at the top of the strata is billions of years apart?

Here is how I think the strata became to be. It took a MUCH shorter time of Noah's Flood destroying the earth and sediments layering over each other and yes, containing more and more "advanced" animals in each layer? Why would that be? Clams and other barely moving animals didn't move and the more advanced the animals were - running to escape destruction - escaped into higher ground, ergo perishing at higher ground and buried and fossilized at higher ground. Is that a theory? Yes. But it makes much more sense than life from non-life and supposed, but non-existent missing links.

4]. And here's the nail in the coffin for me. Fossils found with soft tissue. Clams found with soft tissue fossilized with the bones and shells. Soft tissue of dead material decays quickly. There have been clams and dinosaur bones - T. Rex - with red blood cells, blood vessels, skin, and collagen intact but fossilized. And clams and such with the soft tissue of the inside intake but fossilized.

It is taught as fact that it take millions of years to make a fossil. Soft tissue cannot last that long. Fact. The only way soft tissue could be fossilized would be for a quick, quick burial. Such as a global flood.

There's more, but I will stop here.

I'm not trying to be contrary to your thread, or start and argument because the fact is I simply can't say but only raising the obvious questions.

There is a unanimous consensus among scientists that around 6000 human fossils have been discovered that predate the 6000 year timeline of Biblical creation. There are some that claim there are flaws in the dating, but can't actually prove this.

So there is division among the scientists, with the majority saying the predate is accurate.

So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, with different opinions but it seems no one can prove anything.

 

[Ben1445]

I'm not trying to be contrary to your thread, or start and argument because the fact is I simply can't say but only raising the obvious questions.

There is a unanimous consensus among scientists that around 6000 human fossils have been discovered that predate the 6000 year timeline of Biblical creation. There are some that claim there are flaws in the dating, but can't actually prove this.

So there is division among the scientists, with the majority saying the predate is accurate.

So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, with different opinions but it seems no one can prove anything.

I would only remind you that broad is the way to destruction and it is no surprise to me that a bunch of scientists who don’t recognize God want to have a completely different view.
If God created a fully mature functioning universe, why would everything be different from say Adam and Eve? How old was Adam when God created him? If you could carbon date Adam in a young earth, what results could you expect?

 

[Charlie24]

I would only remind you that broad is the way to destruction and it is no surprise to me that a bunch of scientists who don’t recognize God want to have a completely different view.
If God created a fully mature functioning universe, why would everything be different from say Adam and Eve? How old was Adam when God created him? If you could carbon date Adam in a young earth, what results could you expect?

In the Gap Theory we have some evidence of a creation before Adam, and that domain was given to Lucifer by the Almighty Himself.

Of course this is a theory and all hinges on the facts of predated scientific discovery of a former creation.

 

[Jerome]

Dr. Mark Dever:

"Many people have wondered if these days are the kind of 24-hour days that we know now."

"The fact that the word for day is used to refer to things other than 24-hour days....If you look in chapter 2, verse 4 [ESV "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."]...'In the day'...that makes the point that the very same word is used, in that case, to refer to six days, the six days that just happened."

"In the first three days, there's no sun and moon yet, so why would we assume that they would be the kind of 24-hour solar days that we know?"

"All of this suggests to me an indeterminate period of time may have been intended".

capitolhillbaptist.org/sermon/the-beginning

 

[Jerome]

More from 9Mark Dever and his mentor Roy Clements:

The seven 'days' of Genesis is a time-compressed description of the evolution that took place over millions of years, according their lecture to the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union.

(right click, save link as, for direct download of audio file) CICCU • Dever and Clements on Christians and Science

38:30-39:55
CLEMENTS: "In fact if you think about it, Genesis chapter One does portray an evolutionary model. It would have been very easy for the ancient author, knowing nothing at all about evolution, to have simply said the whole of the universe suddenly sprang into being by a single divine fiat, with no progress, no development at all, but no, he spreads it out over seven days, and he says that material things emerged first: light, and the earth, and the heavens, and then plants before animals, and marine animals come before land animals, and the human race comes only at the very end.
In an astonishing way, he anticipates the general sort of evolutionary scheme, without any of the evolutionary details. So I don't have any great difficulty in accepting that if evolution was the way it happened, that God might have used such a mechanism for the production of the variety of species that we see, and I don't find any great difficulty harmonising that with Genesis One. But there are some Christians who feel that the seven days have to be taken with a greater degree of literalness than I feel is necessary, and they must look for another solution to the problem."

1:12:00-1:13:20
DEVER "The word Yom there in the Hebrew is used very similarly to the way we use the word Day, and it means many different things. I'm not sure I want to say exactly what Roy said on that, but I think, as a Christian who certainly believes in the truth of scripture there's nothing he's said that's inconsistent with that."
CLEMENTS: "If it were a twenty four hour day, I favour the view that it was a twenty four hours of revelation, maybe the prophet saw the vision over the space of seven days, but I don't think the prophet could possibly have been given an actual time scale to set against the things he was seeing happen. They had to have taken place in a time-collapsed way. He couldn't possibly have seen them, in my view, across the spectrum of the time the took, if they took millions of years, as science would say. He would have to have seen it in a time-collapsed way."
DEVER - "And I would say of course He could have done it in that way, and of course the prophet could have seen it that way, but the point is the word doesn't necessitate, the word Yom, doesn't necessitate you or me or Roy looking at it any one of those —"
CLEMENTS - "There are a whole host of ways of harmonising Genesis One with scientific accounts of origins. Some are seven-day Creationists, Young Earth view, I respect that view, but I don't hold it myself."

 

[Scarlett O.]

Oh, I get it everyone. There are a vast amount of Christians who don't believe in a literal Genesis 1 - 4. They are all over the internet.

Especially since they believe science PROVES it all non- truth and just sad little religious story.

I just gave proofs for my beliefs why there is no billions and millions of years.

That's all I can do.

I did that with the Gap Theory in the other thread. To no avail. I've researched and read for many years. Both the science world and the Bible.

It's the only conclusion I can come to.

 

[Silverhair]

I just go with the word of God.

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. BSB

Gen 2:2 And by the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on that day He rested from all His work. BSB

It says He completed His creation in six days so I believe it. Who am I to question God?

We have seen examples of fossilized cowboy boots or fossilized trees still upright. So why He created it the way He did and in the timeline He did I do not know but what I know is He did.

The bible says it, that settles it, I believe it.

 

[Charlie24]

I just go with the word of God.

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. BSB

Gen 2:2 And by the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on that day He rested from all His work. BSB

It says He completed His creation in six days so I believe it. Who am I to question God?

We have seen examples of fossilized cowboy boots or fossilized trees still upright. So why He created it the way He did and in the timeline He did I do not know but what I know is He did.

The bible says it, that settles it, I believe it.

If technology reaches the point and I say if it reaches the point of identifying absolute proof of life before Adam existed, the Gap theory will not be so ridiculous to anyone anymore. But it's just a theory with some clear evidence and possibilities as of now, of which I was explaining in a previous thread.

It may never happen and all of it is just a theory stuffed away for now, but stranger things have happened in this world.

 

[Charlie24]

If technology reaches the point and I say if it reaches the point of identifying absolute proof of life before Adam existed, the Gap theory will not be so ridiculous to anyone anymore. But it's just a theory with some clear evidence and possibilities as of now, of which I was explaining in a previous thread.

It may never happen and all of it is just a theory stuffed away for now, but stranger things have happened in this world.

If you're a Dispensationalist as I am, and can see in the Scripture that God is progressively increasing the knowledge of Himself as time passes, there is evidence that God may reveal some hard things to us in the future that has been kept from us as we approach the end.

But until that time comes we should do a SH has suggested, believe what His Word says. When the time comes for God to reveal He will do just that, as He has done throughout history.

 

[Salty]

Science is my worse subject - but my view:

I do leave open the possibility of the Gap theory. Some will think it could be millions - even billions of years or maybe just 25,000.
Tell you what - when every person on Earth has been evangelized - then I will worry about the Gap Theory
(Scarlett - are you going to check that out? )

Check out Answers in Genesis

 

[easternstar]

I would only remind you that broad is the way to destruction and it is no surprise to me that a bunch of scientists who don’t recognize God want to have a completely different view.
If God created a fully mature functioning universe, why would everything be different from say Adam and Eve? How old was Adam when God created him? If you could carbon date Adam in a young earth, what results could you expect?

Hugh Ross is a scientist, Christian, and Old Earth-progressive creationist.

 

[easternstar]

In this area, I don't know what's true, and I don't think anyone else does, either.
One thing I do strongly believe: Life can't come from non-life.

 

[easternstar]

Scarlett, thanks for starting the thread. This is very much worth discussing.

 

[Salty]

Hugh Ross is a scientist, Christian, and Old Earth-progressive creationist.

Thanks East (can I call you East?)
I had never heard of Hugh Ross
He founded: Reasons to Believe

​

 

[easternstar]

Thanks East (can I call you East?)
I had never heard of Hugh Ross
He founded: Reasons to Believe

​

Sure, you can call me that, no problem.

I find Hugh Ross fascinating. I don't think I agree with all his conclusions, but if I had to choose, I would prefer his beliefs to theistic evolution.

 

[Ben1445]

Hugh Ross is a scientist, Christian, and Old Earth-progressive creationist.

From what I read about him, he believes in Noah’s flood to be a local phenomenon.
I find it more difficult to believe that all the animals and people in the world gathered to a local area to be destroyed by a local flood.

His “science” seems to be that of casting doubt on the accuracy of the Bible.

 

[Ben1445]

From what I read about him, he believes in Noah’s flood to be a local phenomenon.
I find it more difficult to believe that all the animals and people in the world gathered to a local area to be destroyed by a local flood.

His “science” seems to be that of casting doubt on the accuracy of the Bible.

Also, if days are longer or shorter than 24 hours, you are killing the plants. Part of the reason why the earth is such a great place for life is the length of our days. To switch that around on a whim makes no sense at all. We might as well be as long as Venus or as short as Jupiter.

Mercury	1,408 hours
Venus	5,832 hours
Earth	24 hours
Mars	25 hours
Jupiter	10 hours
Saturn	11 hours
Uranus	17 hours
Neptune	16 hours

If days were not uniform as they are now, we would end up with a hot side and a cold side of the planet and dead plants before we even had a sun to cook them.
None of this makes any sense without literal days.
One thing I saw that is supposed to be a difference is that he says that creation points to Jesus while Intelligent Design points to an unnamed God. I’ve never heard an ID scientist who doesn’t know Who and say who the Designer is.