In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).

The question of the age of the earth has produced heated discussions on debate boards, classrooms, TV, radio, and in many churches, Christian colleges, and seminaries. The primary sides are:

• Young earth proponents (biblical age of the earth and universe of about 6,000 years)¹
• Old earth proponents (secular age of the earth of about 4.5 billion years and a universe about 14 billion years old)²

The difference is immense! Let’s give a little history of where these two basic calculations came from and which worldview is more reasonable.

Where did a young-earth worldview come from?

Simply put, it came from the Bible. Of course, the Bible doesn’t say explicitly anywhere, “the earth is 6,000 years old.” Good thing it doesn’t; otherwise it would be out of date the following year. But we wouldn’t expect an all-knowing God to make that kind of a mistake.

God gave us something better. In essence, He gave us a “birth certificate.” For example, using my personal birth certificate, I can calculate how old I am at any point. It is similar with the earth. Genesis 1 says that the earth was created on the first day of creation (Genesis 1:1–5). From there, we can begin calculations of the age of the earth.

Let’s do a rough calculation to show how this works. The age of the earth can be estimated by taking the first 5 days of creation (from earth’s creation to Adam), then following the genealogies from Adam to Abraham in Genesis 5 and 11, then adding in the time from Abraham to today.

Adam was created on Day 6, so there were 5 days before him. If we add up the dates from Adam to Abraham, we get about 2,000 years, using the Masoretic Hebrew text of Genesis 5 and 11.³ Whether Christian or secular, most scholars would agree that Abraham lived about 2,000 B.C. (4,000 years ago).

So a simple calculation is:

5 days
+ ~2000 years
+ ~4000 years
______________
~6000 years

At this point, the first 5 days are negligible. Quite a few people have done this calculation using the Masoretic text (which is what most English translations are based on) and, with careful attention to the biblical details, have arrived at the same time-frame of about 6,000 years, or about 4,000 B.C. Two of the most popular, and perhaps the best in my opinion, are a recent work by Dr. Floyd Jones and a much earlier book by Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656):

Table 1 Jones and Ussher

	Who?	Age calculated	Reference and date
1	Archbishop James Ussher	4004 B.C.	The Annals of the World, 1658 A.D.4
2	Dr. Floyd Nolan Jones	4004 B.C.	The Chronology of the Old Testament, 1993 A.D.5

 

Often, there is a misconception that Ussher and Jones were the only ones to do a chronology and arrive a date of about 6,000 years. However this is not the case at all. Jones gives a listing of several chronologists who have undertaken the task of calculating the age of the earth based on the Bible and their calculations range from 5501 to 3836 B.C. A few are listed in Table 2.

Table 2 Chronologists’ calculations according to Dr. Jones⁶

	Chronologist	When calculated?	Date BC
1	Julius Africanus	c. 240	5501
2	George Syncellus	c. 810	5492
3	John Jackson	1752	5426
4	Dr William Hales	c. 1830	5411
5	Eusebius	c. 330	5199
6	Marianus Scotus	c. 1070	4192
7	L. Condomanus	n/a	4141
8	Thomas Lydiat	c. 1600	4103
9	M. Michael Maestlinus	c. 1600	4079
10	J. Ricciolus	n/a	4062
11	Jacob Salianus	c. 1600	4053
12	H. Spondanus	c. 1600	4051
13	Martin Anstey	1913	4042
14	W. Lange	n/a	4041
15	E. Reinholt	n/a	4021
16	J. Cappellus	c. 1600	4005
17	E. Greswell	1830	4004
18	E. Faulstich	1986	4001
19	D. Petavius	c. 1627	3983
20	Frank Klassen	1975	3975
21	Becke	n/a	3974
22	Krentzeim	n/a	3971
23	W. Dolen	2003	3971
24	E. Reusnerus	n/a	3970
25	J. Claverius	n/a	3968
26	C. Longomontanus	c. 1600	3966
27	P. Melanchthon	c. 1550	3964
28	J. Haynlinus	n/a	3963
29	A. Salmeron	d. 1585	3958
30	J. Scaliger	d. 1609	3949
31	M. Beroaldus	c. 1575	3927
32	A. Helwigius	c. 1630	3836

 

As you will likely note from Table 2, the dates are not all 4004 B.C. There are several reasons chronologists have different dates⁷ but the two primary ones are:

1. Some used the Septuagint or another early translation, instead of the Hebrew Masoretic text. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, done about 250 B.C. by about 70 Jewish scholars (hence it is often cited as the LXX). It is good in most places, but appears to have a number of inaccuracies. For example, one relates to the Genesis chronologies where the LXX indicates that Methuselah would have lived past the Flood, without being on the Ark!
2. Several points in the biblical time-line are not straightforward to calculate. They require very careful study of more than one passage. These include exactly how much time the Israelites were in Egypt and what Terah’s age was when Abraham was born. (See Jones’ and Ussher’s books for a detailed discussion of these difficulties.)

The first four in Table 2 (bolded) are calculated from the Septuagint, which gives ages for the patriarchs’ firstborn much higher than the Masoretic text or the Samarian Pentateuch (another version from the Jews in Samaria just before Christ). Because of this, the LXX adds in extra time. Though the Samarian and Masoretic texts are much closer, they still have a couple of differences.

 

Table 3 Septuagint, Masoretic and Samarian early patriarchal ages⁸

Name	Masoretic	Samarian Pentateuch	Septuagint
Adam	130	130	230
Seth	105	105	205
Enosh	90	90	190
Cainan	70	70	170
Mahalaleel	65	65	165
Jared	162	62	162
Enoch	65	65	165
Methuselah	187	67	167
Lamech	182	53	188
Noah	500	500	500

 

Using data from Table 2 (excluding the Septuagint calculations and including Jones and Ussher), the average date of the creation of the earth is 4045 B.C. This still yields an average of about 6,000 years for the age of the earth.

 

 

What about extra-biblical calculations for the age of the earth?

Cultures throughout the world have kept track of history as well. From a biblical perspective, we would expect the dates given for creation of the earth to align much closer to the biblical date than billions of years.

This is expected since everyone was descended from Noah and scattered from the Tower of Babel. Another expectation is that there should be some discrepancies among the age of the earth as people scattered throughout the world, taking their uninspired records or oral history to different parts of the globe.

Under the entry “creation,” Young’s Analytical Concordance of the Bible⁹ lists William Hales’ accumulation of dates of creation from many cultures and in most cases Hales says which authority gave the date.

Table 4 Selected Hales’ dates for the age of the earth by various cultures

	Culture	Age, B.C.	Authority listed by Hales
1	Spain by Alfonso X	6984	Muller
2	Spain by Alfonso X	6484	Strauchius
3	India	6204	Gentil
4	India	6174	Arab Records
5	Babylon	6158	Bailly
6	Chinese	6157	Bailly
7	Greece by Diogenes Laertius	6138	Playfair
8	Egypt	6081	Bailly
9	Persia	5507	Bailly
10	Israel/Judea by Josephus	5555	Playfair
11	Israel/Judea by Josephus	5481	Jackson
12	Israel/Judea by Josephus	5402	Hales
13	Israel/Judea by Josephus	4698	University History
14	India	5369	Megasthenes
15	Babylon (Talmud)	5344	Petrus Alliacens
16	Vatican (Catholic using the Septuagint)	5270	N/A
17	Samaria	4427	Scaliger
18	German, Holy Roman Empire by Johannes Kepler10	3993	Playfair
19	German, reformer by Martin Luther	3961	N/A
20	Israel/Judea by computation	3760	Strauchius
21	Israel/Judea by Rabbi Lipman	3616	University History

 

These were not the only ones. Historian Bill Cooper’s research in After the Flood provides intriguing dates from several ancient cultures.¹¹ The first is that of the Anglo-Saxons, whose history has 5200 years from creation to Christ, according to the Laud and Parker Chronicles. Cooper’s research also indicated that Nennius’ record of the ancient British history has 5228 years from creation to Christ. The Irish chronology has a date of about 4000 B.C. for creation which is surprisingly close to Ussher and Jones! Even the Mayans had a date for the Flood of 3113 B.C.

This meticulous work of many historians should not be ignored. Their dates of only thousands of years are good support for the biblical date of about 6,000 years, but not for billions of years.

Where did the old-earth worldview come from?

Prior to the 1700s, few believed in an old earth. The approximate 6,000-year age for the earth was challenged only rather recently, beginning in the late 18th century. These opponents of the biblical chronology essentially left God out of the picture. Three of the old-earth advocates included Comte de Buffon, who thought the earth was at least 75,000 years old. Pièrre LaPlace imagined an indefinite but very long history. And Jean Lamarck also proposed long ages.¹²

However, the idea of millions of years really took hold in geology when men like Abraham Werner, James Hutton, William Smith, Georges Cuvier, and Charles Lyell used their interpretations of geology as the standard, rather than the Bible. Werner estimated the age of the earth at about one million years. Smith and Cuvier believed untold ages were needed for the formation of rock layers. Hutton said he could see no geological evidence of a beginning of the earth; and building on Hutton’s thinking, Lyell advocated "millions of years".¹³

From these men and others came the consensus view that the geologic layers were laid down slowly over long periods of time based on the rates we see them accumulating today. Hutton said:

The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. ... No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.¹⁴

This viewpoint is called naturalistic uniformitarianism, and would exclude any major catastrophes like Noah’s Flood. Though some, such as Cuvier and Smith, believed in multiple catastrophes separated by long periods of time, the uniformitarian concept became the ruling dogma in geology.

Thinking biblically, we can see that the global Flood in Genesis 6–8 would wipe away the concept of millions of years, for this Flood would explain massive amounts of fossil layers.

Most Christians fail to realize that if there was a global Flood, it would rip up many of the previous rock layers and redeposit them elsewhere, destroying the previous fragile contents. This would destroy any evidence of alleged millions of years anyway. So the rock layers can theoretically represent the evidence of either millions of years or a global Flood, but not both. Sadly, by about 1840 even most of the Church had accepted the dogmatic claims of the secular geologists and rejected the global Flood and the biblical age of the earth.

After Lyell, in 1899, Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) calculated the age of the earth, based on the cooling rate of a molten sphere, at a maximum of about 20–40 million years (this was revised from his earlier calculation of 100 million years in 1862).¹⁵ With the development of radiometric dating in the early 20th century, the age of the earth expanded radically. In 1913 Arthur Holmes’ book, The Age of the Earth, gave an age of 1.6 billion years.¹⁶ Since then, the supposed age of the earth has expanded to its present estimate of about 4.5 billion years (and about 14 billion years for the universe).

Table 5 Summary of the old-earth proponents for long ages

Who?	Age of the earth	When was this?
Comte de Buffon	78 thousand years old	1779
Abraham Werner	1 million years	1786
James Hutton	Perhaps eternal, long Ages	1795
Pièrre LaPlace	Long ages	1796
Jean Lamarck	Long ages	1809
William Smith	Long ages	1835
Georges Cuvier	Long ages	1812
Charles Lyell	Millions of years	1830-1833
Lord Kelvin	20-100 million years	1862-1899
Arthur Holmes	1.6 billion years	1913

 

But there is growing scientific evidence that radiometric dating methods are completely unreliable.¹⁷

Christians who have felt compelled to accept the millions of years as fact and try to fit them in the Bible need to become aware of this evidence. It confirms that the Bible’s history is giving us the true age of the creation.

Today, secular geologists will allow some catastrophic events into their thinking as an explanation for what they see in the rocks. But uniformitarian thinking is still widespread and secular geologists will seemingly never entertain the idea of the global catastrophic Flood of Noah’s day.

The age of the earth debate ultimately comes down to this foundational question. Are we trusting man’s imperfect and changing ideas and assumptions about the past or trusting God’s perfectly accurate eyewitness account of the past, including the creation of the world, Noah’s global Flood and the age of the earth?

What about other uniformitarian methods for dating the age of the earth?

Radiometric dating was the culminating factor that led to the belief in billions of years for earth history. However, radiometric dating methods are not the only uniformitarian methods. Any radiometric dating model or other uniformitarian dating method can and does have problems as referenced before (Reference 16). All uniformitarian dating methods make assumptions. The assumptions related to radiometric dating can be seen in these questions:

1. Initial amounts?
2. Was any parent amount added?
3. Was any daughter amount added?
4. Was any parent amount removed?
5. Was any daughter amount removed?
6. Has the rate changed?

If the assumptions are truly accurate, then uniformitarian dates should agree with radiometric dating across the board for the same event. However, radiometric dates often disagree with dates obtained from other uniformitarian dating methods for the age of the earth, such as the influx of salts into the ocean, the rate of decay of the earth’s magnetic field, the growth rate of human population, etc.¹⁸

Henry Morris accumulated a list of 68 uniformitarian estimates for the age of the earth by Christian and secular sources.¹⁹ The current accepted age of the earth is about 4.54 billion years based on radiometric dating meteorites,²⁰ so keep this in mind when viewing Table 6.

Table 6 Uniformitarian Estimates for earth’s Age accumulated by Dr Henry Morris

	0 – 10,000 years	>10,000 – 100,000 years	>100,000 – 1 million years	>1 million – 500 million years	>500 million – 4 billion years	>4 billion – 5 billion years
Number of uniformitarian methods21	23	10	11	23	0	0

As you can see, uniformitarian maximum ages for the earth obtained from other methods are nowhere near the 4.5 billion years estimated by radiometric dating; of the other methods only two calculated dates were as much as 500 million years.

Some radiometric dating methods completely undermine other radiometric dates too. One such example is carbon-14 (¹⁴C) dating. As long as an organism is alive it takes in ¹⁴C and ¹²C from the atmosphere; however when it dies, it will stop. Since ¹⁴C is radioactive (decays into ¹⁴N), the amount of ¹⁴C in a dead organism gets less and less over time. Carbon-14 dates are determined from the measured ratio of radioactive carbon-14 to normal carbon-12 (¹⁴C/¹²C). Used on samples which were once alive, such as wood or bone, the measured ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio is compared with the ratio in living things today.

Now, ¹⁴C has a derived half-life of less than 6,000 years, so it should all have decayed into nitrogen by 100,000 years, at the maximum.²² Some things, such as wood trapped in lava flows, that are said to be millions of years old by other radiometric dating methods still have ¹⁴C in them.²³ If the items were really millions of years old, then they shouldn’t have any traces of ¹⁴C. Coal and diamonds, which are found in or sandwiched between rock layers allegedly millions of years old, have been shown to have ¹⁴C ages of only tens of thousands of years.²⁴ So which date, if any, is correct? The diamonds or coal can’t be millions of years old if they have any traces of ¹⁴C still in them. So this shows that these dating methods are completely unreliable and indicates that the presumed assumptions in the methods are erroneous.

Similar kinds of problems are seen in the case of potassium-argon dating, which is considered one of the most reliable methods. Dr. Andrew Snelling, a geologist, points out several of these problems with potassium-argon, as seen in Table 7.²⁴

Table 7: Potassium-argon dates in error

Volcanic eruption	When the rock formed	Date by radiometric dating
Mt Etna basalt, Sicily	122 BC	170,000–330,000 years old
Mt Etna basalt, Sicily	AD 1972	210,000–490,000 years old
Mt St. Helens, Washington	AD 1986	300,000–400,000 years old
Hualalai basalt, Hawaii	AD 1800–1801	1.44–1.76 million years old
Mt Ngauruhoe, New Zealand	AD 1954	3.3–3.7 million years old
Kilauea Iki basalt, Hawaii	AD 1959	1.7–15.3 million years old

These and other examples raise a critical question. If radiometric dating fails to get an accurate date on something of which we do know the true age, then how can it be trusted to give us the correct age for rocks that had no human observers to record when they formed? If the methods don’t work on rocks of known age, it is most unreasonable to trust that they work on rocks of unknown age. It is far more rational to trust the Word of the God who created the world, knows its history perfectly, and has revealed sufficient information in the Bible for us to understand that history and the age of the creation.

Conclusion

When we start our thinking with God’s Word, we see that the world is about 6,000 years old. When we rely on man’s fallible (and often demonstrably false) dating methods, we can get a confusing range of ages from a few thousand to billions of years, though the vast majority of methods do not give dates even close to billions.

Cultures around the world give an age of the earth which confirms what the Bible teaches. Radiometric dates, on the other hand, have been shown to be wildly in error.

The age of the earth ultimately comes down to a matter of trust—it’s a worldview issue. Will you trust what an all-knowing God says on the subject or will you trust imperfect man’s assumptions and imaginations about the past that regularly are changing?

Thus says the LORD: “Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me? And where is the place of My rest? For all those things My hand has made, and all those things exist,” says the LORD.
But on this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word (Isaiah 66:1–2).