"Interestingly, they all seem to indicate a Young Earth, or certainly, not one that is millions or billions of years old. "
In other words, they don’t even try to prove that the earth is 6,000 years old. They just try to prove that it’s younger than millions of years old.
Can you prove that it’s actually 6,000 years old?
For example, how do you explain the radioisotope data? The half-life of thorium-234 is only a couple of weeks or so. If the earth were really as old as 6,000 years, all the thorium-234 should have burned itself out long ago. And yet, there’s still plenty of it around!
Well, since the river flowing out of the Garden of Eden branched into four rivers, one of which was the Euphrates and another of which flowed west to Syria (see Genesis 2:10-14), I think we have to assume that it was at 9 a.m., BT - Baghdad time!
Minor nitpick: According to Jewish tradition, it is 5763 years since Adam, not since Creation. One could posit billions of years between Creation and Adam.
Just a question…for ben…curiosity is getting to me
Isn’t thorium-234 actually being created within uranium deposits constantly. So that, even though it’s half-life is constantly causing it to degrade into something else, something else is constantly degrading/combining in the same structure to create it.
caveat: I am not a geologist, physicist, chemist, radioligist, or any other ‘ist’. I am an engineer, the fact that you asked this question multiple times got me thinking about it, and I was just curious if my assumption is correct.
I don’t know the answer to your Thorium question, stick monkey, but that may be the point to which Ben was alluding; creationists are quite adept at picking a process (say coastal erosion) and extrapolating to bizarre but convenient conclusions, by completely ignoring other processes that work in (general) opposition to the first one (in the case of this example, these would be deposition, upthrust, volcanic activity etc).
I figured that’s the kind of question it was, after reading his tract that had the dust piling up under his bed and the population of rabits exploding (or whatever the rest was).
That was just the only one that I didn’t have an explanation for off hand and was curious if I determined the correct answer (or close) using logic or not.
I’d be very cautious about that Wikipedia entry. The article it relies on does at least quote at length from a translation of part of Ussher’s Annales, but, in summarising it, the entry slightly misses the point. The most crucial part of Ussher’s text is:
So Ussher was actually dating Creation from the evening of the 22nd. This is a common confusion, partly deriving from the fact that he was careful to distinguish between the creation of the earth “without form and void” and the act of “let there be light”. It’s the latter he dates to “in the middle of the first day”, meaning the 23rd.
The information about Lightfoot’s estimate is more badly out. In 1647 he published an estimate of 3928 B.C. (see the reproduction of his table in Fig.2.2 of The Age of the Earth, Stanford, 1991 by G. Brent Dalrymple). This is the dating he adopted in his New Testament commentaries. There seems no great consensus amongst secondary works as to what his exact suggested date was, but everybody seems to think it was in September. It is true that he’d suggested in an earlier work of 1642 that man was created at 9 o’clock in the morning (Dalrymple, p21).
For Lightfoot’s date, the article cited by Wikipedia is relying on Andrew D. White’s famous 1897 book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a Victorian polemical work now regarded by historians of science as notoriously unreliable.
Stephen Jay Gould’s essay on Ussher (in Eight Little Piggies) is recommended, as is James Barr’s detailed 1985 discussion of his chronology (Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 67, 575).
I figured that was the case, Zev - and I’m aware (and happy) that Jews generally don’t have the problem of fundamentalist interpretation. Although I’ll confess to getting hopping mad when my youngest brother came home from Hebrew School one day with a ditto that said the world was 5,763 years old.
Well, hold on. Not so quick. Maintaining that the six days of creation were six literal, 24-hour days and that the universe is only 5763 years (plus six days, plus however long since last Rosh HaShannah) years old is a valid POV WRT Jewish tradition. I was merely pointing out that there are schools of thought within Jewish tradition that the SDoC weren’t literal 24-hour days and that one can posit billions of years between Creation and Adam.
IOW, both old-earth and young-earth creationism can fit within the framework of Orthodox Judaism.
Having gone to Mr. Blue Sky’s ‘relevant’ website and found this little tidbit interesting. I did some other searches but couldnt find anything that refuted the proposed problem below.
