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Determining the Earths Age
What is the Age of the Earth? How Old is the Universe?
Did everything come into existence in a relatively recent past or an incomprehensibly ancient time frame? Did everything come into existence at the same time?
Depending on your Worldview, the answers to these questions will be radically different, however, does the scientific data really point to just one possibility?
Old Earth Theorists insist the universe is over 13 billion years old, a number that is debated and slightly changed based on different calculations; and that the Earth is approx. 4. 6 billion years old.
Young Earth Theorists believe that the Earth is typically less then 10,000 years old.
Is there enough information to definitively prove just how old the Earth is, or are each of these viewpoints simply based on how the information is interpreted?
Upper Age Limits
When studying the age of something, it is very important to determine its upper age limit, or limits, to properly determine how old it is. This is how we determine the age of the earth, and answer the question, how old is the earth.
For Examine, let say you were examining a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean, how would you be able to determine when the shipwreck happened? Well, if you were able to discover some printed coin on board, you could easily determine the upper age limit of the ship. i.e, if you found 3 coins on the shipwreck dating: 1651, 1653, & 1658 you would know that the shipwreck would had to have happened after 1658. Why? because how could a coin with this date have been printed before the ship was wrecked? This is one of the methods Archaeologists use when dating historic artifacts.
In the same way, we can look at determining factors about the Earth or the Universe and determine their ‘upper age limit.’ If we find evidence showing the earth could not be more then 10,000 years old, this become the Earths oldest possible age date until additional evidence emerges showing it to be ‘younger.’
For Information on Intelligent Design go to:
References
Institute for Creation Research – Nuclear Decay: Evidence for a Young Earth