As far as the age of the Earth, I am familiar with Ussher's Chronology and how he determined it but that is not Scripture itself. It is his calculations based on some assumptions he made. If the Bible itself clearly gave a specific date for the moment and week of creation, then I would accept that but it doesn't. There are many other reputable Christians and Biblical scholars that have different views on the age of the earth for several different reasons. This is one:
The Age of the Universe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576941/posts
As far as one of the issues with the age of the earth is the assumption that everything has always been as it is now. When man sinned, Scripture says that corruption entered the world. That indicates a change of condition in the physical world. In Genesis, there are descriptions of the world before the Flood and the conditions that existed then and they are different than they are now, another change. Those could throw a huge monkey wrench into the calculations of the age of the earth by radiometric dating and other geologic processes that could have proceeded at different rates. There have even been some cases where these processes aren't proceeding as expected even today. The Lost Squadron is one such example; the planes from WWII were found buried under 250 feet if ice in Greenland which doesn't fit at all with currently accepted ice built up time frames.
When the Bible states that something happened, there is no reason to interpret it in any other way. When poetry, allegories, parables are being used, it's pretty clear what they are and anyone with any working knowledge of grammar would know that those are not literal, especially when it is said *He told them this parable*. How can one be reasonably expected to take a clearly stated parable literally?
So I accept that God created things in the manner He did because it states it so clearly. The age of the earth and universe is more indeterminate, IMO.
However, not accepting the current scientific interpretation of the fossil record does not equate with a blanket rejection of science as a whole. Science does not rest on the ToE; the ToE rests on science. It's science as it stands today that is being used to support the ToE but the ToE cannot be used to support science. Also, there is the automatic assumption that if there's a discrepancy between science and Scripture, the Bible is automatically the document that is wrong because it doesn't agree with current scientific findings. But current scientific findings are just that- current, and are subject to change as new data comes in. Once new findings come in, the older scientific findings were shown to be incomplete of outright wrong. So how can something that subject to change be used to *disprove* something else? In order to do that it would have to be established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the science is right, true, and infallible and I don't think it's arrived there yet.
When one picks and chooses, for religious reasons, which parts of science to accept and which parts to reject, one is not doing science; one is engaging in apologetics (defense of religion).
The methods used to derive the theory of evolution are the same as for the theories explaining gravitation and germs, and all other scientific theories.
That some deny these theories for religious reasons does not detract from the accuracy of the theories in any way. (See tagline for the conclusion.)
-- God saw that all He created was good and then decided to make man.--
The bible says that God found Adam lonely so he created thea animals for his company.