Evidence for a Young Earth

Measurements that, taken at face value, fit a young earth better than they fit deep time.

I want to lay out, in this section, evidence I find compelling for the position that the earth is young. Not 4.5 billion years old. Closer, in fact, to what a straightforward reading of the Bible’s genealogies suggests — thousands of years rather than billions.

This is a minority position in contemporary academic science, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The mainstream consensus is deep time — by a wide margin, in every textbook, in every journal, in every museum. I take the consensus seriously. I have looked at the evidence the consensus rests on, and I have looked at the evidence that does not fit the consensus, and on the balance of the data that is empirically measurable today — not the data that depends on unwitnessed assumptions about initial conditions or rate uniformity across deep time — I find the young-earth reading the better one.

I am also a Christian, and the Christian story as told in Genesis is a story of a young earth. I am aware that this matters to my priors. I am also aware that the converse position is in the same boat: the conviction that the earth must be ancient — strong enough to drive virtually every interpretive choice in every dating method — is itself a prior. The interesting question is which prior is borne out by the data we can actually measure now. That is the question this section is asking.

The shape of the argument

There is a class of physical processes that act as natural clocks: they accumulate or decay at measurable rates, and the present state of the system, divided by the rate, gives an upper bound on how long the process has been running. Most of these clocks, when read honestly, give an upper bound much shorter than 4.5 billion years.

The standard response from mainstream science is to argue that the rate must have been different in the past — slower for accumulation processes, faster for decay processes — so that the present state is compatible with the assumed timescale. This is a coherent move, but it is ad hoc. There is, in most cases, no independent evidence that the rate was different. The variable-rate hypothesis is invoked specifically to preserve the timescale.

The young-earth reading is simpler: the rates we measure now are roughly the rates that have always applied, and the present state of the system is the result of a much shorter elapsed time. Occam’s razor — applied at the level of number of unsupported assumptions rather than number of years — favors the simpler reading.

The five evidences

The pieces in this section take five of these clocks one at a time:

• The receding moon — tidal friction is pushing the moon away from earth at a measurable rate; reversing the rate gives an upper bound roughly a third the required age.
• The salty oceans — sodium accumulates in the oceans much faster than it leaves; the net flux gives an upper bound on ocean age that falls far short of deep time.
• Soft tissue in dinosaur bones — intact collagen, blood vessels, and even cell-like structures in bones supposed to be 65–200 million years old, when the biochemistry says collagen cannot survive that long under any plausible burial condition.
• Carbon-14 where it shouldn’t be — measurable C-14 in coal, diamonds, and dinosaur bones, when anything older than ~100,000 years should have no detectable C-14 at all.
• The persistence of comets — comets lose mass on every pass and die off in tens of thousands of years; the solar system should be empty of them after 4.6 billion, and yet we see hundreds, with the proposed source reservoir for long-period comets still unobserved seventy-five years after it was hypothesized.

I think any one of these would be enough to give a thoughtful person pause. The cumulative force of all five is, in my reading, substantial.

What this is not

It is not the claim that the science is wrong. It is the claim that the science, properly read, points in a different direction than the textbook summary. Mary Schweitzer’s discovery of soft tissue in T. rex bones is real, published in the highest-impact journals, and independently confirmed. The lunar recession rate is a number from Apollo lunar laser ranging, measured to four decimal places. The carbon-14 in diamonds is from AMS measurements at major university labs. These are data. The disputed step is the interpretation.

It is also not the claim that the young-earth reading has answers to everything. There are real questions on the young-earth side too — the distribution of fossils in the geological column, the mechanism of rapid burial, the stratigraphy of certain formations. A serious young-earth case has to engage these honestly, and the serious young-earth literature does. I am not trying to wave those away. I am trying to point out that the deep-time reading has its own list of severe, unresolved problems, and that list does not get talked about as often.

A note on the rest of this site

Some of the older pieces in the origins section and in honest questions were written assuming a more old-earth-friendly stance; they have been or will be revised to reflect this section’s position consistently. The fine-tuning argument is independent of the age question — the constants would be just as finely tuned in a 6,000-year-old universe as in a 14-billion- year-old one — so that piece stands as-is.