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Questions for evolutionists. Can anyone here state simply why evolutionists believe the earth is as old as they say? Becuae of the light from distant planets? Or carbon dating? My understanding is that carbon dating has a MUCH shorter lenght of accuracy than scientists lead us to believe, (something like 4000 years, tops). Thanks!

Can anyone here state simply why evolutionists believe the earth is as old as they say?

Well, that's actually more of an issue with cosmology, but I'll bite (I'm not even an evolutionary biologist).

Becuae of the light from distant planets?

The light from distant objects attests to nothing other than the age of those objects. Light from a star that is thousands of light-years from earth only means that the star was around thousands of years ago, it says nothing of the age of this planet.

Or carbon dating? My understanding is that carbon dating has a MUCH shorter lenght of accuracy than scientists lead us to believe, (something like 4000 years, tops).

I thought that carbon dating was viable up to around 16,000 years -- but I could be wrong. In any case, carbon dating is only useful for determining the approxmiate age from remains of organic material (that is, living things) and even then only under specific circumstances (they would need to be buried in such a way as to not be contaminated later on). There are other dating methods that are reliable for a far greater time range used for non-organic minerals and these are one of the common tools used for determining the earth's age. Offhand I can only think of radiometric isotope dating, but there are others, and age is determined by a multitude of tests, not just a single test from a single rock sample.

Number one, carbon dating is accurate to about 50,000 years (there is a dead spot at about 4,000 years, but I don't know enough to explain it). Number two, carbon dating does not work on rocks as they are not organic. Number three, there are numerous radiological dating methods that are used to date rocks and they consistently give an age for the Earth of about four billion years.

There are basically one of two conclusions you can draw:

1) Scientists are correct about the ancient age of the earth.

2) Young-earth creationists are correct about the young age of the earth, but God went out of his way to falsify literally millions of pieces of evidence that any sane, logical observer would interpret as evidence of an ancient earth, either as some sort of weird test of faith or as a simple practical joke. Is that a God worth worshipping? I think not.