Thousands of years old?
Written by AC, 4 September 2009
Young Earth Creationism and Old Earth Creationism are both motivated by the view that the Bible's creation account is to be taken literally (though see the caveat below). Both versions fail, but for different reasons.
Thousands of years old?
Young Earth Creationism fails
Young Earth Creationism takes a literal view of the various genealogies in the Bible, and the "six days of creation" in Genesis. During these six days - about six to ten thousand years ago - Earth, life, the sun, and other stars were created. Thus we have the creation of not just Earth but the entire universe, six to ten thousand years ago.
But there are literally hundreds of ways to prove that the universe is very old. I will save space by giving just one. Astronomers can look up into the heavens and see events that have been going on for millions of years: galactic collisions. On the right is a collision called UGC 8335.
As you can see, two galaxies have been ripped up by this collision, with stars ejected out of both, and the galaxies themselves are severely distorted. UGC 8335 is one of many examples; other nice ones are NGC 4676 and ESO 77-14.
Clearly, this sort of result doesn't come about overnight. The distances involved are enormous: hundreds of thousands of light years. These collisions have been going on for millions of years.
Old Earth Creationism fails
Old Earth Creationism takes a more nuanced view of the "days of creation" mentioned above. Instead of being literal 24 hour periods, the "days" represent much longer periods of time.
While resolving the above difficulty, Old Earth Creationism brings a new one: the Bible places the creation of plants on "the third day" (Genesis 1:11), while the sun itself is only created on "the fourth day" (Genesis 1:16). This is highly problematic if the "days" are actually eons, as it means that plants had to survive for millions of years without the sun, which is absurd.
Conclusion, and one caveat
No simple reading of the Bible's Genesis story works. Hopefully, acceptance of this fact brings with it reduced resistance to evolution, which has an enormous amount of positive evidence in its favour. A good book to get you started would be Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True.
For honesty's sake, I must point out that the two Creationist views given above are not the only ones. For example, some Christians, while rejecting evolution, believe that Genesis is itself a myth that should not be taken as true in any normal sense. It's unclear to me why anyone would come to this position (if Genesis isn't really true, why not just accept science?) but there we go.
I have also ignored Islamic Creationism, for the time being.