I have a question or two

13.75 billion, give or take several hundred thousand years. Settled science we are told. This is taught in every public school in the United States. The universe is 13.75 billion years old, well not exactly it might be 13.73 or 13.77 but somewhere around that age.

Fair enough, I wasn’t around nor was my dad or his dad. These guys seem a lot smarter than me, so fine. The

universe is 13.75 billion years old, but how old is the earth, at least the earth as we know it? Naturally, science

has an exact answer for that question, too. This week the answer is 4.54 billion year plus or minus 1%. I say

this week because the answer changes constantly and has for more than 300 years. The history of our history

is an interesting study, more of a comedy, really. Each new scientist uses their own pet theories to come up

with a date. Several estimates place it at 20 million, others at 400 million, 600 million, anyone? 2 to 3 billion

was very popular number for a time, now we conclusively stand at 4.54 billion. Each expert has his or her own reasons for finding a date. The only common thread is each is easily disprovable by other science, and is soon abandoned. Will the 4.54 billon hold? For a while, no doubt, but I would expect it too will fall by the way side, as someone looks into another area of science.

20 million, 4.54 billion, I don’t know, but I do have a few simple questions. I have been told the sun burns .1% of its mass every hundred years, and sometime far past when I need to worry, it will burn out. So if 1,000 years ago the sun was 1% larger than it is now, would that be a problem? How about 10,000 years ago, it would have been 10% larger, certainly a problem, no living thing could survive. 100,000 years ago the sun would have been twice the size it is now. OK, OK, you see my point. I have always heard comets have tails because they lose debris as they travel against the solar winds and bump into other smaller things in space. I was told as an impressionable high school kid, that comets lose 1/20,000th of their mass every year and it becomes part of the tail. Why then, if the universe is 13.75 billion years old do we still have comets? Shouldn’t they be gone in 20,000 years? I was then told science thinks there must be a comet factory somewhere in the universe. There is just no other possibility, because for comets to appear the size they are now, meant they would have been so large 13.75 billion years ago, comets would have been the entire universe contained, so they must be made somewhere else in a union plant we have yet to find. Have I stumbled into creative writing class, this can’t be science.

The Big Bang, we are taught, was not so much an explosion as an expansion, think of a balloon filling very rapidly, casting everything in the universe into motion. Don’t ask the obvious, where did all the material of the universe come from? Or who blew up the balloon? It seems odd that some stars are heading towards us (blue stars) and others headed away (red stars). All planets and galaxies travel in a curvilinear pattern. That is to say, they travel in an elliptical path around a larger object with a bigger gravitational pull. Unfortunately, the math prof down the hall claims there exists no mathematical formula to convert the radiating pattern of the rapid expansion into these curvilinear paths. How is it that some stars rotate to the left and some to the right? Many of us just this week saw angular momentum in action. It is shown very well when an Olympic ice skater starts spinning faster and faster by drawing their arms closer to their body. Angular momentum then is the measure of speed, mass, and shape of an object, and is another mathematical formula we can use in space. When we look at many of the planets and stars we find that the angular momentum is all wrong. It is almost as if each has been set in place by itself, so random is the angular momentum. They could certainly not have all been placed by the same rapid expansion forces at one time, the math is not there.

Ok, let's move out of space for a moment and back home to earth. We know the Sahara desert is growing by a predictable amount every year. If we back up the math it might seem like the desert is only about 4,300 years old, odd on a planet that is 4.54 billion year old. Or look at it his way, it should only take the Sahara 100,000 years to cover all of Africa, why hasn’t it? If the earth as we know it is 4.54 billion years old, am I the only one who finds it odd that the oldest living thing on earth, the Bristle Cone pine in the California desert, is only about 4,300 year old. Don’t you think something might be older? In WWII the Great Barrier Reef in Australia was bombed and torpedoed to make way for war ships to access the coast. We have since been watching the re-growth of the reef and can now calculate how fast the reef grows. Would you believe it’s about 4,300 years old? Let me ask this another way, we now understand how fast the reef grows and if the earth is 4.54 billon years old why aren’t the oceans filled with reefs?

We have all seen the movie depictions of an oil well gusher. We are all too familiar with the blow out in the Gulf a few years ago. I lived in Santa Barbara for 40 years and it is just a part of life to have to clean the tar off your feet and board every time you enter the water or walk on the beach. That is because oil is under pressure, and once tapped it comes flying out of the ground. Natural seepage out of the oil fields becomes the tar that washes up on beaches. Oil is always finding its way to the surface, with or without man, and the pressure in the oil beds is constantly getting lower. Most scientists agree that it will only take 25,000 years for the all the pressure to escape, which will require that we pump the oil out rather than rely on the natural pressure to push it out. If the earth is 4.54 billon years old, why is there still pressure in the oil fields?

All mountains on earth are being eroded away by water, wind, and weather. We see it particularly well up here in the Rockies. The well defined layers of material give way to rocks, gravel, and dirt that forms a slope at the bottom of each of these shear faces. That is all material that has eroded off the face of the mountain and now forms the sloping faces we ski and hike on. All this material eventually winds up in a river and is carried to the sea. Using the calculations of this erosion we see today, we would expect to see that in several million years the earth wouldl be flat. Does that mean the mountains originally pierced the stratosphere, or they are not really billions of years old? You have heard the alarmists crying about how the oceans are becoming more and more salty every year and how aquatic critters will all be killed if we don’t do something. Using their figures of how much saltier the oceans are becoming and extrapolate that backwards to, yep about 4,000 years. Extrapolate that forward and the oceans would be a caustic pool of deadly crap in several hundred thousand years.

Let’s look at this a different way. Man, or at least modern man as defined in school, has been around for 200,000 to 400,000 years. Man, in the sense we know him - working, farming, fighting, thinking - has been around for 15,000 to 50,000 years, depending on who you talk to. We have about 7 billion people on earth right now. If each couple is expected to sire 2.2 children that live to adulthood to reproduce and they also have 2.2 children (and a dog) it would take less than 4000 years to reach our current population. We know that for most of history, couples had far more than 2.2 children - more like 12 was the norm. We guess that more than a third of the population was lost to war, accident, and disease. The deeper one looks, the more difficult the calculations become as to why we only have 7 billion people on earth. If mankind has been here 100,000 years there should be so many people that this planet and all of our nearest planets, and stars, and asteroids, and comets should be covered with humans standing side by side. It is virtually impossible to explain, even in thought experiments, how it is that there are only 7 billion people, and to explain why the entire earth is not covered 20 bodies deep in graves of the trillions of people who certainly must have gone before us.

Figuring answers to these questions and the hundreds more I have just like them, are a full time job for Godless scientists, because there is no answer in their worldly wisdom. Without God, without a Creator, life is both meaningless and impossible, For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 2 Peter 1:16