The Age of the Earth, colorized
Christians hold a lot of beliefs that non-Christians don’t. Many of them are mundane and don’t garner a lot of attention. One of these discrepancies is how differently scientists and Christians estimate the age of the Earth.
Science says the Earth is 4.543 billion years old. Christians say it’s around 7,000 years old.
Someone is wrong, right?
I had this sudden thought occur to me while thinking about just how wrong one camp has to be:
What if the fundamentalist Christians are right?
Maybe all of our answers were right there in Genesis and we’ve been messing about trying to use science and reason this whole time? What a waste.
When you see those numbers side by side it’s kind of hard to visualize how different they are. For science to be wrong, and Christians to be right, it would mean the collective mind of science was off on their calculation by a factor of 649,000.
To put that in perspective, if scientists thought the Earth was 14,000 years old, but really it was only 7,000 years old, they’d be off by a factor of two.
This is the equivalent of if scientists said, “I bet Usain Bolt could run the 100-meter dash in about twelve years, four months, six days, twenty-two hours, and forty minutes” but really it only took him around 10-seconds.
This is the equivalent of if scientists said the Sun was about 93,000,000 miles from the Earth and Christians were like, “Mmm actually it’s 143 miles away.”
Who’s right? Who’s Right? God’s watching. Choose right. (Sorry, been reading a lot of Dr. Seuss lately)
From a secular standpoint, it seems like probably the Christians are wrong since they’re using the translated works of a book written several thousand years ago. Also, the Bible doesn’t even say the age of the Earth, it just lists generations of people.
Side Note: In that same text, it also mentions how many of the earliest Bible characters lived to be well over 900 years old.
Science is using up to the minute technology and they don’t really have a bone to pick…Unless you ask the Christians. Christians are fairly certain scientists are running around all day just scheming ways they can make up data to disprove the Bible.
Uranium decay. Yeah, right. You just don’t want to believe Genesis. Weird flex, science.
But…actually I don’t have a good retort to that. Yeah, it does seem like the smart bet would be on the fallible human scientists.
Here’s kind of what’s happening now…
Man, can you imagine the shock on the faces of all these scientists who did calculations that worked out on paper but at the end of the day none of that matters because the fundamentalist Christians are right?! How fun!
Join me, won’t you? Into the world of wonder where Christians are right about everything and science is nothing more than a series of blundering errors.
Let’s go on an adventure.
So you boastfully believed in modern science your entire life only to die and find yourself here.
That’s what I assume the situation will look like if the Christians are right and the scientists are wrong about the age of the Earth. Both seem equally valid. I guess we’ll just have to wait to find out.
Speaking of finding out things…
There’s a whole bunch of interesting conversations we could have with St. Peter as he’s whisking us off to hell for not placing our faith in Jesus.
It’s kind of unclear if we can elect to not believe most of the semi-out-there stuff that’s in the Bible. The main thing is believing in Jesus and accepting his no-strings-attached gift of eternal life. But do we have to place our faith in Jesus AND believe God signed off on everything that’s in the Bible?
Do we have to believe Adam lived for 930 years? What about that time God stopped the Sun in the sky for about a day so his people could keep killing the bad guys? Do we have to believe everything in Revelation? What about the flood story? Do we have to believe God got all the animals from seven different continents to just appear in the Middle-East in groups of two? That one seems unlikely.
Anyway. It seems like it’s more complicated to believe the Bible than just simply putting your faith in this Jesus character. The age of the Earth is just one example.
But, maybe the Christians are right.
Here are a few more articles you can read since this one was pretty short.
On God Part IX- How many Worlds Did God Create?
On God Part II- God Floods the World
How to Participate in the American Election Without Being a Complete Dick
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