What About Origins? (CreationPoints)

by Dr A J Monty White

  Having established that the creation took place a mere few thousand years ago, it is important to realize that God gave everything that he had made a superficial appearance of age. It is important to understand exactly what this means, and even more important to understand its significance. Before embarking on a geochronologist’s excursion into the Garden of Eden, however, it is useful to consider one or two of the miracles that our Lord Jesus Christ performed during his earthly ministry. This will give us a much better understanding of what we mean by ‘superficial appearance of age’.

  The account of Jesus’s first miracle is found in John 2. Jesus was at a wedding in Cana of Galilee and, at the wedding reception, he turned water into wine.8 Now the difference between water and wine is considerable—you only have to taste them both to confirm this! Water is a relatively simple substance, with the chemical formula H2O. Wine, on the other hand, is an exceedingly complex solution containing a great number of complex organic compounds (alcohols, esters, fatty acids, pigments, etc.). One could argue that, in nature, water in soil is changed into wine by the natural processes involved in the formation of grapes and their fermentation to produce wine. The water in the soil is absorbed by the root of the vine and is eventually turned into grape juice in the grape as the fruit ripens. The juice is squeezed out of the grape and is fermented by yeast until all the sugars in it have been converted into alcohol. Acids and esters are also produced. After fermentation has ceased, the wine has to mature for several months before it is palatable. The chemistry of maturation is complex. Hence the natural process of transforming water into wine is complex and takes several months—sometimes years.

  The Lord Jesus Christ, however, accomplished the transformation of water into wine instantaneously and without the use of grapes or the fermentation process. When the wine was only a few minutes old, it had a superficial appearance of age, for it appeared to be several months, if not years, old. We can see this by the reaction of the guests recorded in John 2:10. The master of the wedding feast thought that it was ordinary (although good) wine which the host had kept back until that point. He thought that it was the end product of the natural fermentation and maturation processes of the fruit of the vine—he could not tell the difference between this created wine and ordinary, naturally produced wine.

  The notion of superficial appearance of age is again illustrated in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand that is recorded in Luke 9. Dr John Whitcomb, commenting on this miracle, points out,

  One evening on a mountainside near the Sea of Galilee, five thousand men and their families ate loaves and fishes that were created with an appearance of age. Here were tens of thousands of barley loaves composed of grains that had neither been harvested from fields nor baked in ovens! And here were at least ten thousand fishes that had never hatched from eggs or been caught in nets or been dried in the sun!9

  Other miracles that Jesus Christ performed during his earthly ministry also serve to illustrate and elucidate the concept of superficial appearance of age:

  the healing of the man who had been bedridden for thirty-eight years (John 5:5–9)

  the healing of the woman who had been bent double for eighteen years (Luke 13:11–13)

  the healing of the man who was deaf and dumb (Mark 7:32–35).

  In each case, the person who had been healed had organs (for example, ears that heard and a voice box that spoke, in the case of the man who had been deaf and dumb) that would have appeared to be perfectly normal organs that the person had had all his or her life. No one would have been able to detect that the new organs had been created when the person had been healed. This is because the created organs had a superficial appearance of age.

  Now with this concept firmly established, let us consider the creation as recorded in Genesis 1. This, too, had a superficial appearance of age. When God commanded the earth to bring forth fruit trees, he did not create seeds first and then wait a number of years for them to grow to maturity. Some may object to this, pointing out that this is different from the way in which God produces fruit trees today. However, if we accept their line of argument, we would have to argue that God could not have created the first fruit seeds either, for these can only come from fruit trees. We cannot allow natural observation today to be our guide when we consider the supernatural creative acts of God when he first created. Similarly, all the other plant life that appeared on the third day of creation was created fully mature.

  The fish that swarmed in the seas were also created fully grown on the fifth day of creation. These fish had never hatched from eggs—just like the fish in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand men and their families. The chickens that God created on the fifth day of creation had never hatched from eggs either! The animals that appeared on the sixth day of creation were also created fully adult—so, too, were Adam and Eve.

  Genesis 1 tells us no fewer than ten times that God created plants and animals to reproduce after their own kind. All these plants and animals must have been created with a superficial appearance of age. Scripture tells us that God began the biological life-cycles of these plants and animals with adult organisms. Both Old and New Testaments teach that Adam and Eve were created as adults—they were not created as helpless babes unable to fend for themselves. And this must have been true for the other creatures that God created, as Dr John Whitcomb concludes: ‘And how could infant mammals have survived without a mother’s care? God would have had to intervene directly and continually to care for them. Therefore, unless we appeal to an endless supply of miracles, the direct creation of adult organisms remains the only logical interpretation of the Genesis account of the creation of living things after their kind.’10

  Now let us see how this apparent appearance of age as related to the plant and animal creation can have a significant effect on attempts to arrive at a figure for the age of the earth. Although the earth was created in a moment, it would have had the appearance of being hundreds or even thousands of years old. For example, a soil scientist trying to determine the age of the soil in the Garden of Eden would come to the conclusion that it was at least 1,000 years old, and possibly much older, for soil can take over a thousand years to form naturally.11 Yet the soil was just a few days old!

  Now, with this concept of superficial appearance of age in mind, I want us to imagine Adam in the Garden of Eden on the sixth day of creation—just after God had created Eve as a wife for him. Let us imagine that Adam wakes up and looks at Eve and concludes that she is an adult, possibly in her twenties. Feeling hungry, he takes some fruit off one of the trees, and he observes that he is in a mature garden that must have been cultivated for well over half a century, bearing in mind the mature trees and plants that are growing in it. He and Eve stroll around the Garden and walk to look at the river that flows out of the Garden. Adam observes that it is flowing in a valley which would have taken hundreds of thousands of years to have formed by the river slowly eroding the rocks. Later, Adam and Eve walk along the banks of the river Pishon and visit the land of Havilah, where they discover gold. This element is supposed to have been formed deep in the crust of the earth over a period of many millions of years. So Adam, who had been created just a few hours previously, lived in a world that appeared to be millions of years old—yet it was less than a week old.

  Some may object to this doctrine of apparent age, arguing that it makes God a deceiver. God, however, has not deceived us—he has given us his Word to tell us what he has done. As Christian theologian and apologist Edwin John Carnell so pertinently pointed out, ‘We must cheerfully admit God’s moral right to create things which only appear, but are not actually, old. The limits of how God has employed this privilege must be measured—in the last analysis—not from science, but from Scripture.’12

  Conclusion

  In this chapter, we have looked at the problems of determining the age of the earth from Scripture. We have had to admit that there are difficulties in working out the exact age of the earth
using the Bible because we are not absolutely certain whether or not there are gaps in the genealogies that are recorded in Genesis 5 and 11. We have also considered the problem of trying to determine the age of something when it has a superficial appearance of age—something that would have affected everything when God created it. One thing we do know for certain from the Bible, however, is that the age of the earth should be measured in terms of thousands, not thousands of millions, of years.

  Notes

  1 James Ussher, The Annals of the World (revised and updated by Larry and Marion Pierce; Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2003).

  2 See under ‘Abraham’ in Walter A. Elwell, (ed.), Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible, vol. i (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1997), p. 11.

  3 Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (rev. edn.; Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1994).

  4 Ibid.p. 79.

  5 Jonathan Sarfati, ‘Biblical Chronogenealogies’, at: creation.com; Professor Dr Samuel R. Külling, Are the Genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 Historical and Complete, that is, Without Gaps? (Riehen: Immanuel-Verlag, 1996).

  6 Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood (London: Evangelical Press, 1969), pp. 474–489; A. J. Monty White, How Old is the Earth? (Welwyn: Evangelical Press, 1985), pp. 21–30.

  7 I have deliberately chosen a thousand years because in the New Testament, the Lord Jesus Christ was called ‘the Son of David’, and there were about a thousand years between the time when David lived and the time when Jesus lived.

  8 John tells us that each jar held between twenty and thirty US gallons. Six jars could therefore hold anything between 120 and 180 US gallons. As there are about four litres to a US gallon, 120 to 180 US gallons is equivalent to 480 to 720 litres—that’s about 640 to 960 ordinary 750 ml bottles of wine!

  9 John C. Whitcomb, The Early Earth (rev. edn.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1986), p. 41.

  10 Ibid. pp. 44–45.

  11 See ‘Soils Retrogression and Degradation’ on Wikipedia, at: en.wikipedia.org.

  12 Edwin John Carnell, quoted in Whitcomb, The Early Earth, p. 48.

  Chapter 5

  Scientific dating methods

  As outlined in the previous chapter, evolutionists reject the biblical arguments for the age of the earth. Using the words of Sir Charles Lyell, they argue that geology has indeed been freed from Moses1 and that we do not have to rely on the Bible to determine the age of the earth. But does it actually matter how old the earth really is? Yes it does, for the answer that is given to this question affects our view of origins. It cannot be overemphasized that there are two irreconcilable views regarding origins: creation or evolution. Which one is correct? One thing is certain: if it can be shown that the earth is only a few thousand years old, evolution cannot be correct. This is because evolutionists maintain that evolution requires vast periods of time for it to occur. This factor cannot be exaggerated because it is argued that chance natural processes would have needed to operate over eons in order to bring about the origin and evolution of life on earth. Darwin was fully aware of this time factor when he declared in On the Origin of Species that anyone who ‘does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time may at once close this volume’.2

  If we hear of a frog turning instantaneously into a handsome prince when kissed by a beautiful princess, we can safely assume that we are being told a fairy story. However, evolutionists think that, given enough time (‘incomprehensibly vast’ periods of time, according to Charles Darwin, remember), anything will, can—and even does—happen. For example, evolutionists believe that some kind of amphibian (a frog is an amphibian) has turned into a human being (and a prince is a human being!) over a period of about 350 million years. This is not regarded as a fairy tale, but as scientific fact! It seems that the enormous period of time believed to be involved deadens people’s reasoning so that they believe the unbelievable and the incredible becomes credible!

  What age, then, do evolutionists consider the earth to be? The answer is a staggering 4,600 million years (that’s 4,600,000,000 years). We can hardly imagine such a timescale. However, if the time period were represented by, for example, one year, then one second would be equivalent to 146 years. On such a timescale, Martin Luther, who lived from 1483–1546, would have lived about 3.4 seconds ago; Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry would have occurred a mere 13.6 seconds ago; King David, who lived around 1000 BC, would have lived 20.6 seconds ago. On the same timescale, if you accept Ussher’s date of 4004 BC for Adam and Eve, they would have lived just over forty-one seconds ago!

  How are rocks dated?

  Before we answer this question, we have to consider how we know how old anything is. For example, how do you know how old you are? You know because of a written record—your birth certificate—which informs you of the date of your birth. Generally speaking, we know when certain events occurred in the past because of eyewitness accounts that have left us with written records. In fact, such written records are the only reliable methods of determining when events occurred, and even then we must be sure that their writers were telling the truth. But how can we date an event for which there is no written record? This is the problem that faces us when we try to determine the age of the earth without using the written record contained in the early chapters of Genesis.

  Some of the earliest attempts to determine the age of the earth using only scientific methods were made during the eighteenth century. Such determinations ignored the Bible’s evidence about our living on an earth which is only a few thousand years old. One of these methods was to determine the time it would take for various salts in the ocean to build up to their present concentrations based on present-day rates of accumulation; thus the amount of any given chemical in the ocean was divided by the annual increment, via river flow, of that chemical. Such a simple age determination of the earth assumes that the particular chemical was not present in the ocean to begin with and that its rate of inflow has always been the same. It also assumes that the particular chemical is not being precipitated out anywhere or being recycled in any way.

  Because there are so many different chemicals in the ocean, many different calculations can be made in this way. Interestingly, they all give different answers, as can be seen in Table 3, which lists the times taken for twelve different elements to accumulate to their present concentrations in the ocean via river inflow.3 The reason why different times are obtained is because an unknown amount of each element was present in the ocean to start with. Also, in some cases, some mechanism for recycling may exist to return a proportion of that element back to the continents for transportation to the ocean again.

  Table 3: Times taken for various elements to accumulate to their present concentrations in the ocean via river inflow

  Chemical Years to

  element accumulate

  Sodium 260 million

  Magnesium 45 million

  Silicon 8,000

  Potassium 11 million

  Copper 50,000

  Gold 560,000

  Silver 2.1 million

  Mercury 42,000

  Lead 2,000

  Tin 100,000

  Nickel 18,000

  Uranium 500,000

  As we can see, such a relatively ‘simple’ scientific dating method does not give us the age of the earth. The real problem is, how can we date a rock? For example, when were the rock strata upon which your house is built laid down? How can we really know the answer to such a question if no one was there to observe these rock strata being deposited and to record it for posterity?

  It is particularly interesting to look at the type of information that is not used in order to date a rock. By doing so, we shall remove some popular misconceptions about what data is used to date rocks. Although I have gleaned much of this information from a book that was published in 1974,4 it is as relevant to the study of geochronology (the measurement of the ages of rocks and geological events) today as it was when it was first published. We learn that roc
ks are not dated by their physical appearance, by their petrological character (that is, their overall structure and composition), by their mineralogical content or by their structural features. Furthermore, they are not dated by vertical superposition—that is, the order in which rocks lie on one another—or by the rocks adjacent to them. In other words, they are not dated by any physical characteristics at all. Surprisingly, rocks are not dated using radiometric dating (see below) or by their total fossil content. How, then, are rocks dated?

  The answer to this question is that a rock is dated by its index fossil. Index fossils are the fossilized remains of organisms, usually marine invertebrates, that are assumed to have been widespread geographically but with a rather limited duration chronologically. Hence their presence in any rock is supposed to date that rock unambiguously. But this begs the question: How does the geochronologist (the scientist who determines the ages of rocks) know how old the index fossil is? The answer to this question is ‘Evolution’. But this is circular reasoning:

  Rocks are dated by index fossils, the ages of which are determined by evolution.

  But the proof of evolution is the age of the rocks in which the fossils are found.

  Hence the basis of dating rocks is evolution, and the only proof of evolution is the ages of the rocks in which the fossils are found. The main evidence for evolution is the assumption of evolution! Hence fossils really cannot provide a satisfactory method for dating rocks. There is, therefore, no proof from sedimentary rocks that the vast evolutionary timescale is valid.

  Radiometric dating

  In the next three sections, we shall be considering how rocks are dated using radiometric dating (including radiocarbon dating) and tree-ring dating. Some of the material in these sections is, by its very nature, technical. If you find these sections hard going, skip them and continue reading at the section ‘Scientific evidence for a young earth’.