The age of the world: is it really just 6,000 years old?

Do you know there are still some people who believe the world is just 6,000 years old? I expect they live in the same road as the people who insist the world is flat, though I’d guess their numbers are going down fairly quickly since man took a camera into space!

But 6,000 years old? That’s within historical time, almost yesterday in chronological terms – the Egyptians were flourishing at around that time, building their pyramids; the ancient Greeks were developing their theories of philosophy, and the Xia Dynasty was in full flow in China. And all of these events are recorded in chronological order in subsequent records, leading right up to the present time. So there is no possibility history has been cheating us, with everything having happened much more recently than the written record states!

In fact, compared to the actual age of the world, 6,000 years ago is very much in modern times. Coal, which even the most diehard creationist would have to agree comes from fossilised living plants, is dug out of the ground as much as 800 feet or more below the present ground level. Did all the solid rock above the coal seams miraculously come along and cover them up in the past 6,000 years? I don’t think so.

Seashells and the skeletons of numerous other sea creatures can be found embedded in mountain strata’s 1000s of feet above sea level – how did they get there? Giant footsteps of animals long extinct have been found in solid rock, which at some time in the far distant past must have been mud. The open faces of many cliffs bear obvious stratified layers of deposited and fossilised sand, shells and vegetation, which it would be reasonable to suppose were laid down flat, just as the sediment at the bottom of a pond would be today. But more often than not, these sedimentary layers are at a steep angle, nearer to the vertical than the horizontal, and many of them are bent and folded, showing that the area has been subjected to immense forces at some time. All within the past 6,000 years?

Early people painted, carved and drew images of pretty well all the creatures who lived amongst them on the walls of caves and on the sides of cliffs. Do you think they would miss including the occasional Tyrannosaurus Rex portrait, if there had been any about? And yet the fossilised skeletons of these animals are being dug up all over the world. We know there have been no such creatures populating the world since the advent of early man, so those bones must belong to an earlier period. In fact, using what the creationists call “an inaccurate process”, which we know as carbon dating, it has been proven that the dinosaurs plodded about the place, and had themselves become extinct, many aeons before man appeared on the scene. So now, we’re travelling back in time millions of years, not a mere 6,000!

But even that isn’t the beginning of the story. The world had to cool down enough for even the simplest life form to be able to exist on it, let alone man and the myriad of other mammals, fish, reptiles and plants we have around us today. That little problem took several billions of years to be solved, and even when Earth had cooled down, it still took a few billion more for the most vital ingredient of all to arrive – water!

That was when life eventually got started here on Earth and it is still, I believe, not yet in full bloom. We humans, and all the other present inhabitants of this place, will eventually give way to something or someone much more advanced than us. And hopefully by then they may even have learned to live together without spending most of their time and money on killing each other!

What do you think? How old do you believe the Earth is? What are some other conspiracies theories you’ve heard? Share them below!