Evidence against a recent creation

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Contents by minimum age
Evidence by minimum age:	>10,000 years	>100,000 years	>1,000,000 years		>1,000,000,000 years
The Earth: Yes, it really is 4.5 billion years old.	Atmosphere of the Moon Dendrochronology Human Y-chromosomal ancestry Oxidizable carbon ratio dating Rock varnish Thermoluminescence dating	Coral Fission track dating Ice layering Lack of DNA in fossils Permafrost Weathering rinds	Amino acid racemization Baptistina asteroid family Continental drift Cosmogenic nuclide dating Erosion Geomagnetic reversals Impact craters Iron-manganese nodules Rotation of the Earth	Milankovitch astronomical cycles Naica megacrystals Nitrogen in diamonds Petrified wood Relativistic jets Sedimentary varves Stalactites Space weathering	Distant starlight Globular clusters Helioseismology Recession of the Moon Radioactive decay Miscellaneous: See also External links Footnotes

There is perhaps no greater attack upon science and rational thought than the doctrine of a recent creation. Young earth creationists deny much of astronomy, geology, biology, paleontology, chemistry, linguistics, geomorphology and physics in favor of pseudoscience and their biblically based view that the world is more or less only 6,000 years old. This article presents some of the reasons why we know that the world is not "young".

Amino acid racemization

Amino acid racemization dating is a technique that is used to date fossilized objects up to several millions of years in age. Amino acid molecules usually possess an assymetric carbon atom which will occupy one of two configurations; D (right), or L (left). Because the ratio of the two positions start unequal and will decay to a balanced state in a process called racemization, measuring the degree of racemization can give you an estimated age. By measuring the racemization of the amino acid isoleucine, objects can be dated up to several million years old. While it is true that there can be great variability on the rate at which amino acids undergo racemization, the changes in humidity, temperature, and acidity required to make this technique conform to a young earth view are unreasonable.

Coral

Coral formations take a long time to grow. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority estimates that the great barrier reef began over 600,000 years ago and that the current growths of coral to be found at that location began around 20,000 years ago.

Continental drift

Fossil areas across landmasses.

Based on the continuity of fossil deposits and other geological formations between the South American and African tectonic plates, there is evidence that at some point in history the two continents were part of the same landmass. Because tectonic drift is an incredibly slow process, the separation of the two landmasses would have taken millions of years. Satellite data has shown that the continents are diverging at a rate of roughly 2 cm per year, which means that for the two continents to have been together at some point in history, as all the evidence shows, the drift must have been going on for at least 200 million years.

Cosmogenic nuclide dating

The influx of cosmic rays onto the earth continually produces a stream of cosmogenic nuclides in the atmosphere that will fall to the ground. By measuring the build-up of these nuclides on terrestrial surfaces the length of time for which the surface has been exposed can be inferred. This technique can be used to date objects over millions of years old.

Dendrochronology

Clearly defined tree rings.

Dendrochronology is a method of scientific dating based on annual tree growth patterns called tree rings. The rings are the result of changes in growth speed over the year, faster in the summer and slower in the winter. By counting the number of rings it can be easily be shown how old a tree is.

Now, any date derived from this method is not in itself contradictory to the recent creation doctrine, trees just do not live longer than 5,000 years or so, but it is possible to extend the chronology back over many different trees. Because the tree ring thickness will vary with the climate, if a sequence of thick ring, thin ring, thin ring, thick ring, thick ring, thick ring, thin ring, thick ring were observed in two different trees it is strong evidence that the corresponding places formed at the same time. By doing this over many different trees, including fossil trees, the tree ring chronology can be pushed back in some cases as far as 11,000 years.

Distant starlight

Part of the Hubble ultra deep field

The fact that distant starlight can be seen on earth has always been a major problem for the young earth idea. Because the speed of light is finite, when you look at an object, what you are actually seeing is how the object was in the past. On Earth the delay is incredibly minor — when you look at an object hundreds of miles away, you are seeing it as it was a few nanoseconds ago.

But on the cosmic scale of things the delay is far from minor. When astronomers look at the closest star to earth (Alpha Centauri), which is roughly four light years away, they are seeing the star as it was four years ago. When astronomers look at objects in the region of space known as the 'Hubble ultra deep field' they are seeing the stars there as they were over ten billion years ago.

Therein lies the problem for young earth creationism; if the universe is only 6,000 years old how can objects billions of light years away — and therefore billions of years old — be seen?

An answer for this comes from the Big Bang, which postulates that all matter was created in one moment, at one point in space and time. Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter had found that general relativity required the universe to be expanding. Edwin Hubble discovered a “red shift” in the light from every observable galaxy, which meant galaxies were moving away from earth, confirming Sitter’s conclusion of Einstein’s theory. Since all matter had been in the same place at the same time and radiated outwards from the Big Bang, the light from those bodies was also at that same position, the same position as earth. If the bodies moved out — even at the speed of light — the light from those bodies would still be visible from earth. So even if objects are many light years away, the light from those objects would be visible from earth no matter how far they traveled and continue to travel.

Erosion

Many places on earth show evidence of erosion taking place over very long time periods. The Grand Canyon, for instance, would have taken millions of years to form using the normal rate of erosion seen in water.^{[citation needed]} Nevertheless, Young Earthers insist it was cut in a few years following the Great Flood - but in order for this to happen the rocks of the Kaibab Plateau would have needed to have the solubility of something like granulated sugar.

Fission track dating

Fission track dating is a radiometric dating technique that can be used to determine the age of uranium containing crystalline minerals. As uranium decays it sends out atomic fragments which will leave a scar or "fission track" in the crystalline structure. Because decaying uranium emits fragments at a constant rate the number of fission tracks correlates with the age of the object. This method is generally held to be accurate as it shows a high degree of concordance with other methods such as potassium-argon dating.

Geomagnetic reversals

A geomagnetic reversal is a change in the polarity of the earth's magnetic field. The strength of the earth's magnetic field will decay until such an event occurs, where the polarity of the field flips and is then replenished in strength. The frequency at which these reversals occur varies greatly, but they usually come about once every 50,000-800,000 years and it takes thousands of years for the process that drives the reversal to execute. This fact is obviously inconsistent with the young earth idea; around 171 reversals are geologically documented, which would make the earth at least several millions of years old.

Helioseismology

The composition of the sun changes as it ages. The differing composition changes the way sound waves behave inside the sun. Using helioseismic methods (models of preasure waves in the sun) the age of the sun can be inferred. With this method, an Italian team came up with an age of 4.57 +/- 0.11 billion years.

Human Y-chromosomal ancestry

The Y-chromsome, unlike most DNA, is inherited only from the father, which means that all DNA on the human Y chromosome comes from a single person. This does not mean that there was only one person alive at that time but that a single man's Y-chromosomal DNA has outcompeted the other strains and is now the only one left. Because the only factor affecting the makeup of the DNA on the chromosome is mutation, measuring mutation rates and extropolating them backwards can tell you when this man lived. Calculations by the geneticist Spencer Wells have shown that this man lived around 60,000 years ago.

Ice layering

A section of an ice core with clearly defined annual layers.

Ice layering is a phenomenon that is almost universally observed in ice sheets and glaciers where the average temperature does not rise above freezing.

As the ice is being laid down, annual differences in temperature and irradiance cause the ice to form differently, and this generates alternating layers of light and dark ice. This method is considered a relatively accurate way to measure the age of an ice sheet, as only one layer will form per year. While there have been a few cases where several layers have formed per year, these incidents do not challenge the ability of ice layering to provide a minimum age, as these false layers can be discerned from the real thing after close inspection.

Currently the greatest number of layers found in a single ice sheet is over 700,000, which clearly contradicts the idea of an earth less than 10,000 years old. Even if one were to assume an error rate of over 1000%, the age demonstrated by this method would still be far greater than that suggested by young earth creationists.

Nevertheless, the minimum age of the earth identified by these means is 160,000 years. (+/- 15,000 years.)

Impact craters

A crater 1,200 meters in diameter.

The number of impact craters can provide an extremely probable lower limit on the age of the Earth. Asteroid strikes that can produce craters on an order of kilometers across are extremely infrequent occurrences; the chance of an asteroid with an Earth-crossing orbit actually striking the planet has been estimated at 2.5 x 10^-9 yr^-1, and when multiplied by the estimated number of earth crossing asteroids this approximates about one collision for every 3.2 million years. If this frequency is correct, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, the number of impact craters on Earth were it only a few thousand years old should be very few. The most logical number of observable one km+ impact craters for a young earth would in fact be a something like zero — a number that is completely at odds with the observable evidence, since over one hundred such craters have been discovered .

Even if creationists were to present some way that many dozens of large asteroids could hit the earth in less then 6000 years, there are still tremendous problems with this idea. The largest of the asteroid impacts are some of the most catastrophic events the world has ever seen. In Antarctica there is a crater 500 km in diameter which is believed to have been caused by an asteroid 48 km in diameter roughly 250 million years ago. How the life we see today could have survived such an incident (if it had occurred in the last 6000 years) is a serious problem for YEC's — an asteroid impact that big would have led to the extinction of all medium to large size species (an event that is seen in the fossil record).

This is answered from science. During the time of the Big Bang, there was an exponentially higher number of asteroids and other objects near earth, which easily accounts for the number of craters on earth.

Lack of DNA in fossils

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the universal carrier of genetic information, is present in all organisms while they are alive. When they die, the DNA will begin to decay under the influence of hydrolysis and oxidation. The speed of this decay varies on a number of factors, sometimes the DNA will be gone within one century and in other conditions it will persist for as many as one million years. The average amount of time detectable DNA will persist though is somewhere in the middle; given physiological salt concentrations, neutral pH and a temperature of 15 °C, it would take around 100,000 years for all the DNA in a sample to decay to un-detectable levels.

If fossils of the dinosaurs were less then 6,000 years old, detectable fragments of DNA should be present in a sizable percent of dinosaur fossils, especially in the arctic and antarctic regions where the decay of DNA can be slowed down 10-25 fold. This is not the case though —dinosaur DNA has never yet been been found in any dinosaur fossil— which suggests that they are extremely old.

Dinosaur DNA has recently been found in the fossil of a T-Rex, stumping scientists and throwing into chaos the methodology of using DNA as a time marker for paleontology.

Length of the prehistoric day

Work by John W. Wells of Cornell University, New York has shown that certain pieces of extremely old coral evidence a growth rate reflecting a time when a year had 400 days of 22 hours each. Because the rate of change of the rotation of the earth is relatively predictable—about 0.005 seconds per year—one can calculate the last time a year had 400 days, which was about 370 million years ago (which is also about the same as radiometric dating of the coral).

Lunar retreat

South African rocks studied by geologist Ken Eriksson indicate that at some point in time the moon orbited "25-percent closer to Earth than it is today." The distance between the earth and the moon is 384,403 kilometers so for Ken Eriksson's work to fit with a YEC timescale the earth would have to have been receding at a speed greater than 15 kilometers per year. This is not anywhere near correct however; the moon is currently receding from the earth at a speed of 3.8 centimeters per year.

Many objects during the big bang had orbits markedly variant compared to the largely stabilized orbits of objects in our solar system today. One cannot compare the receding space between the earth and the moon, or the rate of the receding today (or even thousands of years ago) to the time of the Big Bang.

Naica megacrystals

The Naica Mine of Chihuahua, Mexico is home of some of the largest gypsum crystals on earth. Specimens in the area have been found to exceeded 11 meters in length and 1 meter in width. Based on classical crystal growth theory these crystals are older than one million years.

Oxidizable Carbon Ratio dating

Oxidizable Carbon Ratio dating is a method for determining the absolute age of charcoal samples with relative accuracy. This dating method works by measuring the ratio of oxidizable carbon to organic carbon. When the sample is freshly burned there will be no oxidizable carbon because it would have all been removed by the combustion process. Over time this will change and the amount of organic carbon will decrease to be replaced by oxidizable carbon at a linear rate. By measuring the ratio of these two isotopes, one can determine ages of over 20,000 years ago with a standard error under 3%.

Permafrost

The formation of permafrost (frozen ground) is a slow process. The permafrost under the Prudhoe Bay oil fields in Alaska are believed to have taken over 225,000 years to reach their present depth of over 600 meters.

Radiometric decay

Radiometric decay is the constant predictable decay of unstable atoms into more stable isotopes or elements. Measurements of atomic decay are generally considered to be one of the most accurate ways of measuring the age of an object, and these measurements form the basis for the scientifically accepted age of the earth. There are many different variations of the radiometric dating technique such as radiocarbon, argon-argon, iodine-xenon, lanthanum-barium, lead-lead, lutetium-hafnium, neon-neon, potassium-argon, rhenium-osmium, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium, uranium-lead, uranium-lead-helium, uranium-thorium, and uranium-uranium, of which every single one will date objects far older than 10,000 years.

Being the most commonly used method to determine age, radiometric dating techniques are under constant attack from young earth supporters. The most frequently used method of attack is to give examples of objects of known ages that were dated incorrectly. However, these instances are the exception rather then the rule - there are far more examples of objects of a known age being dated correctly. Just because something has failed once does not automatically mean it fails all the time.

Relativistic jets

A drawing of quasar GB1508 and its relativistic jet

A relativistic jet is a jet of plasma that gets ejected from some quasars and galaxy centers that have powerful magnetic fields. It is conjectured that the jets are driven by the twisting of magnetic fields in an accretion disk (the plate like cloud of matter) found encircling many celestial objects. In super-massive bodies, immensely strong magnetic fields force plasma from the accretion disk into a jet that shoots away perpendicular to the face of the disk. These columns of plasma have, in some cases, been found to extend far enough to refute the idea of a young universe.

For example, the quasar PKS 1127-145 has a relativistic jet exceeding one million light years in length. Because the speed of light cannot be exceeded by any known form of matter, this column must be at least one million years old. QED

Rock varnish

Rock varnish is a coating that will form on exposed surface rocks. The varnish is formed as airborn dust acumulates on rock surfaces. This process is extremely slow; between 4 μm and 40 μm of material will be created on the rock every thousand years, with 40 μm of accumulation being very rare. Because the rate of accumulation is generally constant, measuring the depth of the varnish can provide dates for objects up to 250,000 years old.

Space weathering

Space weathering is an effect that is observed on most asteroids. Extraterrestrial objects tend to develop a red tint as they age due to the effects of cosmic radiation and micrometer impacts on their surfaces. Because this process proceeds at a constant rate, observing the color of an object can provide basis for a generally reliable estimate. The ages provided by this dating technique exceed millions of years.

Sedimentary varves

Varves are laminated layers of sedimentary rock that are most commonly laid down in glacial lakes. In the summer, light colored coarse sediment is laid down, while in the winter as the water freezes and calms fine dark silt is laid down. This cycle produces alternating bands of dark and light which are clearly discernible and represent, as a pair, one full year. As is consistent with the old earth view many millions of varves have been found in some places, the Green River formation in easter Utah is home to an estimated twenty million years worth of sedimentary layers.

The creationist response is obviously that these varves formed much faster, instead of once per year they claim that they formed many hundreds of times per year. There is however much evidence against accelerated formation of varves.

• Pollen in varves is much more concentrated in the upper part of the dark layer which is thought to represent spring, this is what would be expected if varves formed only once per year because pollen is much more common at this time.
• In Lake Suigetsu, Japan, there is a seasonal die-off of diatoms (calcerous algae) that will form layers in the bottom of the lake along with the sedimentary varves. If the 29 thousand varves in the lake formed more then once per year there should be several sediment layers for every layer of deceased algae. This is not the case though; for every one white layer of algae in Lake Suigetsu, there is only one varve.
• The varve thickness correlates with both the 11 year sunspot cycle and the 21 thousand year orbital cycle of the earth.

Stalactites

A stalactite

A stalactite is a mineral deposit that is usually - though not exclusively - found in limestone caves. They are formed on the ceilings of caverns by the slow deposition of calcium carbonate and other minerals as they drip, in solution, over the stalactite. These formations take extremely lengthy periods to form; the average growth rate is not much more than 0.1 mm per year (10 centimeters (4 inches!) per thousand years). With such a slow rate of formation, if the earth was less then ten thousand years old we should expect to see the largest stalactites being not much longer than one meter. In fact stalactites frequently reach from the floor to the ceiling of large caverns.

It is true that cases of accelerated growth have been observed in some stalactites but rapid growths are only temporary as the limestone around them is quickly depleted.

Thermoluminescence dating

Thermoluminescence dating is a method for determining the age of objects containing crystalline minerals such as ceramics or lava. Although this techniques can approximately date objects up to 230,000 years ago, is only accurate on objects 300 to 10,000 years in age. This is however still over 4,000 years older than the creationist figure for the age of the earth.

Weathering rinds

Weathering rinds are layers of weathered material that develop on glacial rocks. The weathering is caused by the oxidation of magnesium and iron rich minerals and the thickness of this layer correlates with the age of a sample. Certain weathering rinds on basalt and andesite rocks in the eastern United States are believed to have taken over 300,000 years to form.

See also

• Lower limit on the age of the universe
• Radioactive decay
• The incontrovertible evidence for common descent
• Branches of science you have to ignore to believe in Young Earth Creationism
• Expelled:Leader's Guide

External links

• Chris Stassen (1996). "The Age of the Earth".