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I love Articles like this. I always point out two simple facts

1. Go out to the country on a clear night and look up. What do you see, lots of stars. If you know where to look and it's relatively dark enough, you can easily see The Andromeda galaxy. Andromeda is the closest large galaxy(like the Milky Way). The photons of light that register on your retina have been traveling for roughly 2.3 million years. And this is the closest large galaxy. The most distant galaxy/object spotted so far is roughly 15 Billion light years away(Granted, with constantly moving away, the exact distance will vary but even with an order of magnitude, that's 1.5 billion light years). So what does that mean? We are dealing with vast periods of time. Not the six thousand years the Wacko Creationists believe.

2. Go out the front door and stand on the closest peice of dirt/grass you can find. Not start digging to look for fossils. I'd bet that 99.999999% would find nothing after a very long time searching. What does this mean? Well, I'd bet that in that very spot, there has been some form of life living in/on/over it for at least one billion years. So in all that time, you can find no fossil evidence of past life(I'm not talking about candy wrappers or other garbage, pure simple fossils like in the museums). What does that tell you? Simple, fossils are very, very rare. Sure you can go some places and find them all over the place, but the total of what you find is from millions of years of growth on that land. Do you think you could find enough fossils to reconstruct a garden bed at one time, let alone millionsof square miles of constant growth for hundreds of millions of years? Little know fact for you people - Before 1990 there were only ever 6 incomplete T-Rex's found in the entire world. I wonder how many actually existed through out history?

All of this boils down to refute the simplist of Creationist theories. You can't get from animal A to animal Z by evolution. The only reason they are able to say this is because we havn't found the very rarest evidence(fossils). Ahh but what happens when there is an animal(M) found that is between A and Z? Well, in the creationist argument you get the following. You can't get from animal A to animal M, nor from M to Z. Wash, Rinse, Repeat

Believe me, I'm a devout Christian, but that doesn't mean I have to check my brain at the door when it comes to Where/When/How/Why it all began. Unless God is playing a trick on us by craeting the Universe six thousand years ago and making it appear that it is > 13 Billion years old, I'll believe in an old Universe with a constant, omnipotent, loving caretaker making sure things work the way they do.

Add to you observation how little of the earth's surface we have actually mined for fossils. Not much. Not much at all.

C'mon! What do you want to go ruining a perfectly good nonsense thread with that sort of logic for?

Please stick to the program, like me.

C3!

So what does that mean? We are dealing with vast periods of time. Not the six thousand years the Wacko Creationists believe.

OH yeah I guess God forgot to create light FIRST... and to create it already arriving here for our benefit.

in addition, if you look the closest star and figure out how we measure its distance away, you realize that we are trying to measure with our hugely (relatively speaking) inaccurate instruments, angles which are infinitesimally small. Making for astronomically sized errors.

I'll believe in an old Universe with a constant, omnipotent, loving caretaker making sure things work the way they do.

But evolution denies God as a caretaker, it denies that God has anything to do with how living things, and especially man, his greatest creation came about. So how can you reconcile evolution with the idea of a benevolent caretaker?

Believe me, I'm a devout Christian, but that doesn't mean I have to check my brain at the door when it comes to Where/When/How/Why it all began. Unless God is playing a trick on us by craeting the Universe six thousand years ago and making it appear that it is > 13 Billion years old, I'll believe in an old Universe with a constant, omnipotent, loving caretaker making sure things work the way they do.

Bingo! Just thought that bears repeating...

view>source> Which is the recent aberration? Old-Earth or Young-Earth Belief?

Which is the recent aberration?
Old-Earth or Young-Earth Belief?
by Don Batten

Subsequently published in:
Creation 24(1):24–27
December 2001 – February 2002

AiG takes the stand that the creation is thousands of years old, based on straight-forward acceptance of the chronology in Genesis.

Churchian critics accept the billions of years touted today and claim that the ‘young-Earth’ view is a recent invention of Protestant ‘fundamentalist’ churches. They claim that various Church Fathers or other ancient authorities wrote things that suggested they did not hold a ‘young-Earth’ view.

A point-by-point rebuttal to the erroneous long age, local flood, soul-less pre-human hominid compromises of Hugh Ross!

Creation and Time: A Report on the Progressive Creationist Book by Hugh RossMark Van Bebber &
Paul Taylor

This exhaustively researched book on the theological ramifications of Hugh Ross’s ‘progressive creationist’ teaching is a wake-up call to all Christians concerned about Biblical inerrancy and the terrible divisiveness that erroneous theological beliefs can cause! 127 pages.

(High School–Adult)

See some online chapters

More info/Purchase online

However, the claims about the church fathers and Reformers have been shown to be wrong, as shown in the rebuttal to the long-ager Hugh Ross by Mark Van Bebber and Paul Taylor (right). It’s also vital to analyse what they actually say instead of what people claim they say — see Did early Church leaders and reformers believe the literal creation account given in Genesis?

One problem is that sometimes a non-specific statement about creation is misinterpreted as claiming that they didn’t have a position on the days and time frame, obviously the fallacy of arguing from silence. It’s worse when clear statements about the Creation days and time frame are ignored in favor of non-specific ones. The correct practice is to interpret the nonspecific passages by the specific ones. Note that, by the same methodology, someone hundreds of years in the future could find articles by every AiG writer that are not specific on days or the time frame and, by ignoring their clear statements elsewhere, claim that we don’t have any position on the issues!

Even Augustine cannot remotely be used in support of old-Earth beliefs, even though he allegorized the days of creation (and lots of other passages — he was no Hebrew scholar). The problem is, he tried to compress the days into an instant, which is diametrically opposite to what long-agers claim!

Furthermore, when ancient chronologies are researched, we find that many cultures, not just those based directly on the Bible, attest to an age of the Creation of thousands of years. It seems that no serious scholar believed in the old Earth fashion of today. It is very much a modernist invention.

The following comes from Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible, first published in 1879. Under ‘Creation’, Young listed dates of Creation compiled by a Dr William Hales in 1830, who was an expert in chronology, from varied sources. None of them give a date of Creation of more than 9,000 years ago. Note that dates of Creation from various non-Christian / non-Jewish sources (India, Egypt, China, pre-Christian Greece, Babylonia, etc.) all testify to an age of thousands of years. Furthermore, both Catholic and Protestant scholars agreed on this issue. It seems that no serious chronologist believed in an old Earth.

Many of the scholars listed in this table made the chronology of the world a life-long study involving meticulous cross-matching of ancient records (many of which are not available to us today). These scholars did not obtain these dates by throwing dice! It is only the arrogance of modern man that dismisses this tradition of careful scholarship.

We must underline again the importance of this issue. The old earth advocates accept the recent claim that the Earth is billions of years old. This ‘age’ is based on radioactive dating. The same ‘dating’ puts the age of fossilized dead animals at up to hundreds of millions of years before people appeared on the scene. These fossils show evidence of violence and suffering (cancer and arthritis can be seen in the fossils, for example) — see Genesis: the Curse. So in the old earth schemes, all this death and suffering was going on when God created Adam and Eve and pronounced everything as ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). Hardly!

The Bible clearly teaches that the bad things came into being when Adam and Eve rejected the rule of the Creator over His creatures and the curse of death came into effect (Genesis 3:17–19, Romans 8:20–22, etc.). And because of this true history of the world, Jesus, the ‘last Adam’, came into the world to die for the sinful descendants of the first Adam (Romans 5:12 ff., 1 Cor. 15:21–22,45).

No, all attempts to marry the Bible with the old earth view actually undermine the Gospel.

Date of Creation

(from Young’s Analytical Concordance of the Holy Bible, 1879
8^th Edition, 1939 — entry under ‘Creation’)

‘Dr Hales, in his work entitled, “A New Analysis of Chronology and Geography, History and Prophecy,” (vol. 1, p. 210 [published in 1830]), remarks: “In every system of chronology, sacred and profane, the two grand eras — of the Creation of the World, and of the Nativity of Christ — have been usually adopted as standards, by reference to which all subordinate epochs, eras and periods have been adjusted.” He gives a list of 120 dates, commencing B.C. 6984, and terminating BC 3616, to which this event has been assigned by different authorities, and he admits that it might be swelled to 300. He places it at BC 5411. The date commonly adopted is BC 4004; being that of Ussher, Spanheim, Calmet, Blair, etc., and the one used in the English Bible [KJV].’

‘The following are some of the principal variations:’ (notations regarding dates of compilation or publication, extra information on sources, etc., have been added by AiG).

Source of Creation Date	Authority	Date BC
Alfonso X (Spain, 1200s)	Muller	6984
Alfonso X (Spain, 1200s)	Strauchius, Gyles¹ 1632–1682	6484
India	Gentil, French astronomer c.1760	6204
India	Arab records	6174
Babylonia	Bailly, John Silvain (French astronomer, 1736–1793)	6158
China	Bailly	6157
Diogenes Laertius (Greece 3^rd Cent.)	Playfair	6138
Egypt	Bailly	6081
Septuagint (LXX)²	Albufaragi	5586
Josephus (1^st Century Jew)	Playfair	5555
Septuagint, Alexandrine	Scaliger, Joseph (French classical scholar,1540–1609)	5508
Persia	Bailly	5507
Chronicle of Axum, Abyssinian	Bruce (1700s)	5500
Josephus	Jackson	5481
Jackson		5426
Hales		5411
Josephus	Hales	5402
India	Megasthenes,³Greek historian (c. 340–282 bc)	5369
Talmudists	Petrus Alliacens	5344
Septuagint, Vatican		5270
Bede (673–735)	Strauchius	5199
Josephus	Univ. Hist.	4698
Samaritan computation	Scaliger	4427
Samaritan text	Univ. Hist.	4305
Hebrew (Masoretic) text		4161
Playfair and Walker		4008
Ussher, Spanheim, Calmet, Blair, etc.		4004
Kepler (Astronomer, 1571–1630)	Playfair	3993
Petavius (France, 1583–1652)		3984
Melanchthon (Reformer, 1500s)	Playfair	3964
Luther (Reformer, 1500s)		3961
Lightfoot		3960
Cornelius a Lapide	Univ. Hist.	3951
Scaliger, Isaacson		3950
Strauchius		3949
Vulgar Jewish computation	Strauchius	3760
Rabbi Lipman (1579–1654)	Univ. Hist.	3616

Notes

Brevarium Chronologicum Book IV, 3^rd edition, 1699 in English. Return to text.
The Greek translation of the Old Testament originally published in Egypt BC. Return to text.
A Greek historian from Iona, he was Ambassador to India for King Seleucus I. He published Indika in four books. Return to text.

- Before 1990 there were only ever 6 incomplete T-Rex's found in the entire world. I wonder how many actually existed through out history?

9, there where 9 but 1 was burned up in a valcano and we can't find the other.