Age of the Earth

I've been encouraged to contribute more to the Temple, so I thought I'd bring up a topic that a lot of people disagree on.

So, in your opinion, without quoting someone else, how old is the Earth? I'll provide my answer later.

I am glad you're making this decision to take a step in a new direction, Streen.

Personally, I believe in "old earth, young life". So due to this, I think life on this planet is <7000 years, but the planet itself is much, much older.

The disagreement is between the three religious extremist science deniers (and arguably their fellow religious extremist science deniers from places where being openly not that is punishable by death) and the rest of the world. It's not exactly a controversial issue these days, not by my estimates anyway...

But, without quoting someone else, I must admit I do not know. I have neither the tools nor the expertise to determine that, and if I had, it could still not be conclusively proven that the earth was not in fact made to be last thursday at 5:19 in the morning, complete with all our individual beings and memories and the appearance of age. Can you tell me how old you are without quoting someone else?

Arisaig wrote: ... I think life on this planet is <7000 years...

Do you want a list of currently living organisms that are older than that? Here are a few samples:

• Pando, a colony of genetically identical quaking aspens in Utah at ~ 80 000 years
• The Jurupa Oak, a colony of genetically identical palmer's oaks in California at upwards of 13 000 years
• Old Tjikko, a norway spruce in Dalarna, Sweden with a root system dated to be 9558 years old
• King lomatia, another clone colony like the other examples, except this entire species only exists now in a single clone colony that has been surviving in Tasmania for no less than 43 600 years with highest estimates going as far as 135 000
• King Clone, a colony of the creosote bush in California with a humble 11 700 years of age

Gisteron wrote:

Arisaig wrote: ... I think life on this planet is <7000 years...

Do you want a list of currently living organisms that are older than that? Here are a few samples:

• Pando, a colony of genetically identical quaking aspens in Utah at ~ 80 000 years
• The Jurupa Oak, a colony of genetically identical palmer's oaks in California at upwards of 13 000 years
• Old Tjikko, a norway spruce in Dalarna, Sweden with a root system dated to be 9558 years old
• King lomatia, another clone colony like the other examples, except this entire species only exists now in a single clone colony that has been surviving in Tasmania for no less than 43 600 years with highest estimates going as far as 135 000
• King Clone, a colony of the creosote bush in California with a humble 11 700 years of age

Learning more every day. Its mostly my opinion that its that young, but perhaps I am wrong. Fun facts though.

I'd guess, it's in the billions. Circa 3.5?

without quoting anyone, all i can tell you is that its a lot older than any of us lol

im curious, does it only count as "quoting someone else" if i tell you what my biology professor told me?

what if i repeat what my preacher told me? is that still quoting someone else?

since i didnt make the earth myself i have to either make up a number from my own imagination or i have to accept a number proposed by someone else.
so i accept the numbers proposed by the people who i believe have the most likely methods for determining such things, namely, scientists, with the understanding that im not educated or trained in the sciences that are used and wouldnt know if they got it right or not

as i recall, its somewhere in the billions of years

It is not required to "quote someone else" in order to arrive at an estimate of the age of the earth. In fact people do not give us the age, evidence does. People, experts in their fields, are simply the facilitators of that evidence. There are a multitude of these scientific experts in a vast array of fields, including astronomy, geology, biology, paleontology, chemistry, geomorphology and physics that have collected this evidence and across all scientific fields the evidence converges on the same answer, that the earth is around 4.54 billion years old and the entire universe is around 13.77 billion years old.

I, personally, believe that the age of the Earth is as useless an endeavor to contemplate as the time the Earth has left to live.

But I have gone back and forth to look at the Creation Story, and what I've found was some intriguing stories. Primarily that the Creation Story and much of earlier history to Moses was written with the intent to give something at the beginning rather than tell the truth. The stories are actually derived from earlier creation stories, which is why they are so similiar. I say stories, because the theory goes- Genesis 1 and 2 are in fact two different creation stories, built from two different traditions.

"The writer believed that his story would not be complete without an explanation of how things--the sun, the earth, the seas—and life--plants, animals, and humans--came to be. For good measure, the writer decided to include two such explanations. He did so even though the two stories contradicted each other on several points."
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/gen1st.htm

This was believed because of the time that the author put it all together. According to the article, the stories were all written down long after Moses, before that they were oral tradition. Which goes directly to my point about the Earth's age. If the stories were orally given, there is a great line of time that is easily forgotten. While they may have had a lineage built, there is no telling whether or not something was a chunk of lineage not recorded between ancestors. They had a general idea that these people existed but could not put down anything hard and fast to keep it altogether.

Knowing the passage of time is wonderful, but there are certainly stories of life and even people that follow God which we will never keep in written record. They could be great names, but in time they will be lost because they were not canonized. As such, the Bible is not the only history man has with God, it's simply the one that is recorded.

Alethea Thompson wrote: I, personally, believe that the age of the Earth is as useless an endeavor to contemplate as the time the Earth has left to live.

Would you build a puzzle and then leave out a piece? Searching for the age of the earth is one more piece of corroborating evidence that provides the basic foundation for all the scientific disciplines i mentioned above. Its one of the most important things we have done as a species. Most of your post is biased towards a christian mindset and thats fine, but I have never been able to understand why anyone would just accept that the universe began when man first obtained the ability to write just because a collection of religious mythology says so.

"The Bible", or any other combination of ancient religious texts you can think of, are not an infallible mechanism that "records" mans history. In fact I would say its subjective nature leaves us only one conclusion, its not recorded there at all. None of these so called "recordings" agree with each other on a multitude of issues and even the individual "recordings" themselves are self contradictory, thus rendering them useless.

This leaves us with only one source to determine truth - the universe itself. Our true history is recorded in the stars and in the ground and inside us in our DNA. All of these things converge toward a singular set of facts that most accurately define our reality, not some musty old book written through the lense of subjective superstition.

There's overwhelming scientific evidence as to how old this planet is and when life first developed. I don't blindly believe everything science throws at us but this has been proven and peer-reviewed over and over and over again that there's extremely little doubt in my mind about it.

The world is a collection of puzzles.

I said the age doesn't matter. I didn't say scientific endeavors like learning about evolution was useless. Actually, evolution is a great thing to study, and we can see it at rapid progression without knowing the age of the earth.

The age of earth is fun, it's not useful though. Evolution is useful, but it doesn't need the age of earth to prove it exists. We can document evolution of plants with some fair ease within the time frame of what creationists believe the earth's age is. We can even observe traces of it in animals in that time frame.

The age isn't important anymore. But it's fun.

Alethea Thompson wrote: The world is a collection of puzzles.

I said the age doesn't matter. I didn't say scientific endeavors like learning about evolution was useless. Actually, evolution is a great thing to study, and we can see it at rapid progression without knowing the age of the earth.

The age of earth is fun, it's not useful though. Evolution is useful, but it doesn't need the age of earth to prove it exists. We can document evolution of plants with some fair ease within the time frame of what creationists believe the earth's age is. We can even observe traces of it in animals in that time frame.

The age isn't important anymore. But it's fun.

On the contrary, it is absolutely important and the study of evolution is one of the things that makes it so important. This is the very basis of the scientific method. A hypothesis is formed and then its tested through experiment, observation and corroborating evidence to compile a set of facts surrounding the hypothesis that is strong enough to graduate the hypothesis to a scientific theory. In the case of evolution one of those pieces of corroborating evidence is the age of the earth. If we had a theory of evolution but we determined the age of the earth was only 10k years old then that would disprove the theory. This is why its so important! Its this method of deductive reasoning that science is based on - the fact that any theory is falsifiable through this process or by other means including other disciplines of science. Its also the reason concepts like God or creationism or intelligent design cant be included in the scientific realm, its an falsifiable claim.

I don't know the exact age of the Earth, but I do agree with the science that tells us it is over four billion years.

Being on the West Coast of the United States, I am more interested in how much time has passed between major volcanic and tectonic events. I live about five miles from the largest earthquake fault on my continent (San Andreas), and it has been 160 years since the last time this fault unleashed a major earthquake in Southern California. When it did, it ruptured along 185 miles of fault line and registered in the high eights on the Richter scale. Not much in the way of civilization existed around here back then, so the effect on human life was minimal, but the next one could leave Los Angeles in a heap of rubble. The average length of time between these major events on the San Andreas Fault throughout history is a hundred years, so we're overdue for a big one.

I also hear all about the super volcano under Yellowstone National Park that is set to erupt someday and utterly destroy the entire western half of the U.S. and throw the rest of the world into a volcanic winter that could wipe out most species on Earth.

And then there's the innumerable asteroids and meteors tumbling around us at any given moment that could someday hit Earth and kill us all.

The Earth may be 4.5 billion years old, but I'm more concerned about what might happen next month or next year that will start the timeline all over.

When one says "age of the Earth" the only possible answers are:
A: what science says (through observational evidence)
B: what religions teach (based on tradition and belief)

Now if the question is asking for a fact then one should seek answers based in factual reality. If the question is asking for a belief then one should answer as they believe (even if it's wrong).

To me, the question is mostly a reflection of self and how we go about "knowing" things. One cannot truly know the age of the earth. One can only believe what we are told, whether from science or religion. What's disturbing about religion is that it says "what happened" as if present as a witness. The evidence is therefore it's own word. Believing science is still a belief but it is one that we can have more faith in because the same evidence they used to come up with the approx age is the same evidence we can look at, decipher, and understand.

I like what Alethea said about the writer of Genesis needing an explanation. Most people believe the bible based on a tradition of belief. In other words, if you believe, you are believing that each bible writer is telling the truth. The quiet assumption is that because you believe in God and they also believe in God, that they wouldn't lie or that lies would not be captured and communicated through their traditions which later became the biblical canon. We use an extraordinary amount of trust in these people on the sole basis that the God who decided to speak to them has elected not to speak to us; not to communicate the answers we seek to us directly. This indirect mode of communication forces us to believe in people in order to believe in their God. But because humans believe in their God they believe the people. It's circular logic.

The idea the planet is young is based on this type of logic. One looks for answers to questions no human can answer because none of us were there at the beginning. The only entity who could answer that question is one, not born of natural law, but only a mythological magical creator who conveniently has all this power and is eternal. This means that in order to believe the Earth is young you must also believe in magic. I think magic exists mainly as a construct of our human psyche. We want magic to exist; therefore we create the concept. We want to have been "Fearfully and wonderfully made" so we create the concept of a divine Creator who could make us in his image which means we are closer to God than any other being in the universe who was not created in this manner.

It is human ego that seeks to be elevated and to come from such elevated heights. So afraid to have been born from lowly means... that we will believe anyone who says otherwise. Meanwhile, everything else in the bible is a such an obvious product of human thinking and morality relative to the relatively miniscule time span of the writer. Had the writer of Genesis been born 1,000 years later the book would say something different. If the writer had been born 10,000 years later or today... Someone writing Genesis today would have to keep up with the knowledge of 2017 and the wealth of our science. It wouldn't be enough to even explain the creation of the Earth. You'd have to explain the Sun... the Solar system... the Galaxy... and the Universe. Because they do not display intelligence beyond their period of time it seems highly unlikely that they could provide insight on the genesis of our planet.

If one is to believe God told them then is God so limited in time as to give an explanation only suitable for people living in ancient times? Why not give an explanation that proves "he/she/it" actually knows more than we do? Because every culture seems to have created mythology around the creation of the Earth. Each culture seems to have generated ideas on how it must have happened based on the logical flow of life (such as how animals eat plants so plants must have come first). But the fact that each culture has this only proves that it was a human need for us to answer this question even if the answer itself was in need of explanation. So explanations supplied the demand but that doesn't make the explanations true. People explain the inexplicable with "God" all the time. But these same people don't care where their explanation (God) came from. There's no Genesis explaining how the creator appeared; only how we appeared. The only means I can think of for a Creator to appear without creating a never ending chain of more powerful Gods... is evolution. And if evolution is the only sensible explanation for how a Creator could have came to be, it is also the more likely explanation for how we came to be. And that means science should use evidence to determine the age of the earth and "it's story" and then we construct explanations to match that timeline; rather than creating a timeline for "God's salvation" and forcing the age of the planet to fit "our story".

Without quoting someone else, I can safely say the earth was formed sometime in the 1980s.

If I'm allowed to use other sources, Grandpa (also named James, we're creative like that) assures me it was around in the 1920s.

After that I'd be making some very big assumptions and taking the "word" of people I've never met and have no reason to trust.

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: It is not required to "quote someone else" in order to arrive at an estimate of the age of the earth. In fact people do not give us the age, evidence does. People, experts in their fields, are simply the facilitators of that evidence. There are a multitude of these scientific experts in a vast array of fields, including astronomy, geology, biology, paleontology, chemistry, geomorphology and physics that have collected this evidence and across all scientific fields the evidence converges on the same answer, that the earth is around 4.54 billion years old and the entire universe is around 13.77 billion years old.

This. Thank you.

However I would point out that 13.77 billion years is only how far back into the universe we have been able to "see" because the most distant objects we have been able to detect are 13.77 billion light years away. This is not an inherent "end" of the universe nor does it imply the time frame of the "beginning" of the universe, it is merely the extent of our ability to record or measure with our current technology. So we can say the universe is at least 13.77 billion years old, but not that this is the in fact the beginning.

Ya, and it is fun to think it all popped into existence at my birth, for me, as the centre of my universe, and you all are fragments of my consciousness........ but that is getting a bit wooly and errr, disorentated? Detached from reality might be most accurate but as an exercise in imagination it can tear some walls down in a persons closed mind to think outside the box, briefly. But they say its not good to reinforce delusion, in case it becomes entrenched as quite literally a real belief and undermines effective decision making going forward in ones life. Questioning things to some extent would seem to be a good skill though!!

So to the OP, I've observed the nature of many physical laws and the action of causality to a decent extent, and I've experienced aging and know older people - so together with an observation about the cycle of life and death I feel its an accurate claim to make that its much older then I. I don't have the tools to know, but am curious as to what other people who might be making an effort to find out think, just like I think its fun to imagine alternate and less likely models.

I'd go with the scientific answer, which is evidence-based. My memory may not be clear on this, but without looking anything up I believe the age of the Earth is around three or four billion years.

I am not sure how long life has been on Earth, especially considering that the original one-celled amoeba qualifies as "life". I'd guess many millions of years, but again, unless I can cheat and look it up, that's a guess.

Then there is the more poetic answer (this from John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads"):

"Life is older,
Older than the trees,
Younger than the mountains,
Flowin' like a breeze."

so, am i the only one thats really curious what (and if) streen is going to come back and say?

I, personally, believe that the age of the Earth is as useless an endeavor to contemplate as the time the Earth has left to live.

well but you have to admit that knowing how much time the earth has left to live would be pretty important if the answer turned out to be like "two weeks" or something

two weeks is pretty fast but what if it were 2 months or 2 years?
2 decades? 2 centuries? it would be good for humanity to know. i bet they would be th emost productive 2 centuries in history but obvi thats not something i could prove lol

as for the age of the earth, its only a debate for the creationists - the actual science scientists are just following the overwhelming evidence

if the evidence were ever to lead in a convincing way to intelligent design then thats where science eventually would go

but the creationists arent following evidence, they are following a predetermined, bible-based conclusion, and attempting to amass evidence (contrary to the main body of evidence amassed by the overall scientific community) in order to justify that conclusion.

there are non christian creationists but in the long run theyd be even worse for christianity than science- what if it were proven that the earth was in fact created - by brahma lol
that vishnu and shiva were the real deities keeping things going, and god and jesus were just myths!

so, the creationist movement in the usa wants to prove the bible story as scientific fact, but at this point its fairly clear that theyre not likely to ever do this. and from that frame of reference it seems that saying "its not important to know how old the earth is" is something that a creationist would do once they understand that their preferred narrative is not going to win the overall cultural debate. rather than admitting the debate is over or admitting at least that it really looks like the debate is over and saying "well thats what faith is for" an intelligent creationist might choose instead to say "look its not that important anyway"

my personal opinion is that it is important, because the creationist movement wants to be in control of the education system - they really want creationism to be taught at schools instead of evolution, but since they cant achieve that they say to teach it along side of evolution-- which in my opinion it doesnt deserve to be taught at schools at all except in "world religion" courses where students can learn the creation stories of all the major religions and compare them to each other