Where did the idea of “millions of years” come from?

AiG ^ | Terry Mortenson

[GodGunsGuts]

Where did the idea of “millions of years” come from?

All of our media outlets push evolution and “millions of years” ideas on the public. Even children’s cartoons reflect evolutionary philosophy! In an episode of the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, entitled “SpongeBob B.C.,” the narrator begins: “Ah, dawn breaks over the primordial sea. It is here that millions of years ago, life began taking its first clumsy steps out of the darkness, opening its newly formed eyeballs to stare into the blinding light of intelligence.” Unfortunately, large segments of the church have swallowed the millions-of-years evolutionary history hook, line, and sinker. But it was not always this way. In this chapter, we will discover where the idea of millions of years came from and why the church went along with it. We will see that science does not require it, but rather it is a necessity of uniformitarian geology and evolutionary theory...

[PBRSTREETGANG]

Carl Sagan

[Notwithstanding]

Is the photo a close up of Helen’s grand canyon?

[knarf]

No one seems to pick up that the author uses the same reasoning to come to HIS conclusion.

"Unfortunately,

large segments of the church have

swallowed the millions-of-years evolutionary history hook, line, and sinker. But it was not always this way. In this chapter, we will discover where the idea of millions of years came from and why

the church went along with it."

Words mean something.

[dirtboy]

Actually, the evidence from the Grand Canyon is far more supportive of YEC.

Absolute, utter horsehockey. In case you didn't notice, there is an angular unconformity below the horizontal formations. And above that is a Cambrian limestone. Followed by sequences of shales, sandstones and limestones from many different depositional environments. Explain how a single Flood event can cause all that.

[GodGunsGuts]

The article is tracing the history of the uniformitarian/old age movement (and the Church’s compromise with it), not the science. But don’t worry, I will be posting articles and papers demonstrating the powerful evidence for a young earth (and the flimsy evidence for an old earth) in fairly short order.

[agere_contra]

The idea that the Earth was BILLIONS of years old comes from checking the Pb-206 / Pb-207 ratios in rock samples. These isotopes are decay end-products of uranium decay.

God made the Universe and everything that’s in it. And He did it/is doing it in a magnificent God-like manner, over what seem to us vast aeons of time and vast gulfs of space.

[bert]

To visualise time, go to the top of the roughly 11,000 foot summit near Zion National Park just out of Georgetown Utah.

Then travel south through Bryce Canyon, the Grand Staircase Escalante, perhaps Canyon Lands as well, down to the Grand Canyon. You can look down to the bottom of the canyon from the North Rim and don’t have to really descend to see.

You can see all along this journey the striations in the rock. These are the layers of sediments laid down over millions of years. The distance from the top to the bottom is I believe roughly 5000 feet.

[Ditto]

M74 belongs to the "Sc" galaxy type, meaning that it is a loose spiral galaxy. It lies approximately 35 million light years away. It was discovered in 1780 and recently two supernovae have been observed within it. Image credit: NASA.

Then again, some folks don't believe in the speed of light.

[GodGunsGuts]

Tell me dirtboy, how long did it take to form the following sedimenary layers?

[Spirochete]

Job 38

4 Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
5 Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
6 Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
7 When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 40

15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.
17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.
18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.
20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

Job 41

14 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.
15 His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.
16 One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.
17 They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.

[GodGunsGuts]

The distant starlight problem is no problem for Creation Cosmology. May I suggest you google Dr. Russell Humphreys along with the words “starlight and time.” As you will see, it is quite possible for the Earth to be thousands of years old, and distant galaxies to be billions of years old, and yet owe their existence to the SAME creation event.

[GodGunsGuts]

PS Come to think of it...it is the Big Bang that has a distant starlight problem, not YEC cosmology.

[chuckles]

The draining of an inland sea could have formed the Grand Canyon in a week. Many old earth myths were destroyed with Mt St Helens. Many earth structures were destroyed in days and recovered in months or years.

As usual, it just proves evolution is a matter of faith in a religion, not real science. It is a theory, and a shaky one at that. Just as global warming is falling apart, so is evolution. there is a bunch of money invested in it, so it may take a total embarrassment to finally kill it, but it won't stand under scientific scrutiny. Whenever things get too shaky, you just evolve the theory to some other fantasy and call it science.

[GodGunsGuts]

Excellent reply, Spirochete! Hope to see you on these threads more often. All the best—GGG

[chuckles]

I believe the speed of light is slowing down,..... how’s that?

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

Hate to break it to you, but it takes far more than a few thousand years to produce fossils...

And then there's the matter of carbon dating in determining the age of the Earth.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

[woollyone]

As science actually sat around and thought about it, they realized that their...
...”hopeful monster” and beneficial mutations theories
...life popping out of nonliving matter
...disorganized matter morphing into highly complex interrelated systems of change (contradicting the law of entropy...called a LAW for good reason)
...the origin of the superdense “basketball sized ball of mass”
...much less the prime mover that caused it to explode....

...required more and more years to happen than they thought the year before.

Now were up to what?
4 billion years, according to their theories?
Wonder how many years they'll be telling us about in the next publications.
silly.

And some churches actually bought into their theoretical nonsense. Luke warm.

[dirtboy]

Here is the geological column from the Grand Canyon:

Please explain the following aspects from a Young Earth perspective:

1) The basement rocks - Vishnu Schist and granite - Vishnu is in and of itsself a metamorphized rock, so it came from a previously deposited formation.

2) The angular formations atop the Vishnu - how did the Flood deposit them and then tilt them?.

3) The erosion at the top of the angular unconformity - how was that eroded as part of the Flood if the Flood laid down the sediments in the angular unconformity?

4) The alternating formations of limestone, shale and sandstone, indicating very different depositional environments. The Flood would have clastics followed by finer deepwater sediments. What explains the other progressions?

5) How does the Flood account for the reef limestones which are formed by shallow-water corals?

[mysterio]

Where did the idea of "millions of years" come from?"

[Signalman]

The Earth, along with the rest of the solar system, is about 4 1/2 billion years old. The scientific evidence confirming this is overwhelming and irrefutable.

Conservatives who believe the Earth is “thousands” of years old give the rest of us a bad reputation for ignorance.