Is the earth younger than 10000 years?

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I watched a video by Ken Ham. And he brought an interesting idea from secular that basically attributed that you have to interpret past into the present, and the idea of slow changes which is what Darwin got his idea from someone else it seems.

I am just curious to your view on this?
youtube.com/watch?v=7IYLYbRH89s
 
For me the more interesting question is whether the human race is older than 10,000 years.
 
“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What advantage does man have in all his work which he does under the sun? That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one might say, ‘See this, it is new’? Already it has existed for ages which were before us. There is no remembrance of earlier things, and also of the later things which will occur; there will be for them no remembrance among those who will come later still.”
–Ecclesiastes 1:2-3, 7-11
 
Vesbu said:
I watched a video by Ken Ham. And he brought an interesting idea from secular that basically attributed that you have to interpret past into the present, and the idea of slow changes which is what Darwin got his idea from someone else it seems.

I am just curious to your view on this?
youtube.com/watch?v=7IYLYbRH89s
Click to expand...
Ham is an Australian. And to use some Australian vernacular, he has a couple of sheep loose in the top paddock.
 
From Catholic Answers:

"The Time Question

“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared. The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age—that it has not existed from all eternity—but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.”

Ed
 
The Church has an ancient tradition in reading scripture in multiple senses, and not holding to a fundamrntally literal interpretation of some things if they appeae to blatantly contradict reason. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas . . . I don’t think I’m in bad company.

So I hold with the current overwhelming scientific consensus on such things, from geology to astronomy to the fossil record.
 
Charlemagne_III said:
For me the more interesting question is whether the human race is older than 10,000 years.
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The human genus (homo) has been around for about 2.6 million years. Our particular species (homo sapien sapien) has been around for about 200,000 years.
 
Charlemagne_III said:
For me the more interesting question is whether the human race is older than 10,000 years.
Click to expand...
I have a book on the history of pottery that puts the first human use of fire to be about 10,000 years ago, which would mark the beginnings of human civilization.

According to the book, fire was used for religious or artistic / cultural reasons before it was used for cooking - it seems that we had priests and artists before we had chefs. 🙂
 
thephilosopher6 said:
The human genus (homo) has been around for about 2.6 million years. Our particular species (homo sapien sapien) has been around for about 200,000 years.
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Which, if any, of these two and perhaps other scientific categories would you say describes the reality of mankind?
 
Here we are, perceiving, thinking, understanding, feeling and searching to deepen our relationship with God. Persons have not always been here. I have a vague idea of how it all came about and it involves God being God. I think the fossil record and the genetic variations found around the world conform to a different story than that proposed by modern science. A big, probably insurmountable problem is that scientific designations of “homo” are morphologically driven with no consideration of the spiritual soul which actually defines mankind.

I was interested if you had an opinion as to whether we’ve been around for two million or two hundred thousand years. I’m not going to jump down your throat. I’ve got some pretty odd ways of putting it together, myself.

Perhaps mankind was constructed at the beginning of life on earth. Like a child in the womb who stems from one cell that goes on to also create the placenta, we were shaped over millions of years until we were finally created as a body-spirit unity. All nature would be a necessary byproduct of our formation, a worldly “placenta”. Male and female, higher animals were created that we might exist and relate to each other as such. A flowering of genetic diversity guided by God would explain the variations we see among different people. Anyway, that’s a rough description of some musings on who and what we are.

TLDNR - No one knows; what’s your educated guess as to when we first appeared?
 
We don’t even need to venture into The Topic That Shall Not Be Named to show that Earth is over 10,000 years old.

One example is geomagnetic reversal. That’s when the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field essentially switches. We can see the history of these switches, which often go hundreds of thousands of years between switches.
 
Aloysium said:
Here we are, perceiving, thinking, understanding, feeling and searching to deepen our relationship with God. Persons have not always been here. I have a vague idea of how it all came about and it involves God being God. I think the fossil record and the genetic variations found around the world conform to a different story than that proposed by modern science. A big, probably insurmountable problem is that scientific designations of “homo” are morphologically driven with no consideration of the spiritual soul which actually defines mankind.

I was interested if you had an opinion as to whether we’ve been around for two million or two hundred thousand years. I’m not going to jump down your throat. I’ve got some pretty odd ways of putting it together, myself.

Perhaps mankind was constructed at the beginning of life on earth. Like a child in the womb who stems from one cell that goes on to also create the placenta, we were shaped over millions of years until we were finally created as a body-spirit unity. All nature would be a necessary byproduct of our formation, a worldly “placenta”. Male and female, higher animals were created that we might exist and relate to each other as such. A flowering of genetic diversity guided by God would explain the variations we see among different people. Anyway, that’s a rough description of some musings on who and what we are.

TLDNR - No one knows; what’s your educated guess as to when we first appeared?
Click to expand...
The Church has no official position on the origin of life (besides that God did have something to do with it). However, she does seem to lean towards the theory of evolution as the best explanation of how life came to be on earth.

You don’t seem to understand the distinction between genus and species. The genus homo has been around for about 2.6 million years. There have been many species within the genus. Our particular species is homo sapiens. In a way, there have been many species of humans. The last living but most successful species is our species

Evolution is a fact. Though, the details of it are subject to change. But usually it’s minor details. The big details like how and why evolution occurs will probably almost never change. They are grounded in decades of scientific research and virtually everyone in the scientific community accepts them. Science, especially this kind, has rarely been wrong before. No matter what you believe about evolution, it is a reality that we have to accept. Of course you don’t have to believe in things like evolution. Just like you don’t have to believe in gravity. Heck, there have even been people in the past who refused to believe in gravity. But that doesn’t mean if you jump off from a 1000 foot building you’ll start floating.
 
Mike_from_NJ said:
We don’t even need to venture into The Topic That Shall Not Be Named to show that Earth is over 10,000 years old.

One example is geomagnetic reversal. That’s when the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field essentially switches. We can see the history of these switches, which often go hundreds of thousands of years between switches.
Click to expand...
There is also radiometric dating which suggests the earth is about 4-4.6 billion years old, found by measuring radioactive decay of Uranium in zircon crystals. I really have no idea how old the earth truly is, but I like to think that the seven days of creation was over the course of billions of years, as it would also somewhat explain evolution.
 
The vast majority of living cells need (1) food and (2) oxygen to convert that food into energy and protoplasm. Did God invent this chemistry?

In the early days of earth, there was no free oxygen. As the earth cooled, vast amounts of water and methane were ejected and formed an atmosphere. Also, the earth gradually became covered by liquid water. But there still was no molecular oxygen, either in the atmosphere or dissolved in water. All earthly forms of oxygen were combined within minerals, many of which were dissolved in water.

Then, along came the cyanobacteria, which were the first life forms to use the sun’s energy. As a byproduct of this process (photosynthesis), molecular oxygen was excreted. At last, the plentiful availability of oxygen enabled life as we know it. We might give credit to God for creating cyanobacteria without which there would be no plants.
 
IMO, it depends on the perspective. From a human perspective, no it is not younger than 10,000 yrs. But if the universe is finite in space and time (i.e., it was created) and God exists outside of this realm that we know as our physical universe, perhaps from that perspective time is irrelevant. More and more, I take the view that trying to line up or align everything from what we have gained through modern science and knowledge (including evolution) with what is written in Scripture is an exercise in failure. Not because either of them are wrong, but they are coming from different perspectives (i.e., physical vs. divine). It’s why it is very dangerous to read Genesis as a historical or scientific text IMO.
 
AlphaFoxtrotNW said:
There is also radiometric dating which suggests the earth is about 4-4.6 billion years old, found by measuring radioactive decay of Uranium in zircon crystals. I really have no idea how old the earth truly is, but I like to think that the seven days of creation was over the course of billions of years, as it would also somewhat explain evolution.
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That’s an excellent point. Radiometric dating is one of several fields of science which, even if you take biology out of the equation, shows the Earth has been around many, many, many times longer than the 6,000-10,000 years Ken Ham proposes.

And not only does he propose a young Earth but also a young universe. This becomes a problem since we can determine the ages of stars in different ways. Even more damning is that we have seen starlight that is from billions of light years away, meaning that the universe is billions of years old. Ken Ham has what he likes to think is a scientific journal called Answers Research Journal (despite no answers and no research). In it there is a paper which claimed that some light moving toward Earth goes at infinite speed, while light from the same object going in different directions goes half the normal speed of light. It’s ludicrously bad thinking and bad science.

Ken Ham and his ilk need to understand that an Earth or universe that is billions of years old doesn’t rule out a creator whatsoever. It does rule out a completely literal reading of scripture, but the facts are facts. If there was a creation it’s not a young earth creation.

Ken Ham knows as much about science as Caligula knew about Super Mario Bros.
 
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