Old Earth View Requires Storytelling

If geologists relied on empirical observation,
they would not get billions of years out of rocks

 

Why are most rocks on Earth much younger than the planet itself? (Phys.org, 22 Dec 2022).

The link above is to Phys.org’s copy of an article from the European Commission CORDIS, which is titled, “Are all rocks on Earth the same age?” The latter includes the same wording in its subtitle, “Meteorites aside, Earth started out with as much material as it has today. So why are most rocks much younger than the planet itself? Our expert Maud Boyet says the answer is written in stone.”

This is a clear admission pitting what science says versus what they observe: rocks appear “much younger than the planet itself.”

What then, exactly, is written in stone? Does a rock come with a date stamped on it? Or does it require an indirect calculation based on assumptions? Let the article state the conundrum in stark terms:

The rocks on Earth are not all the same age. In fact, most are significantly younger than the planet itself. The oldest sections of the oceanic crust are thought to be 200 million years old – a blink of an eye in the planet’s billion-year lifespan. What is going on here?

For this analysis, let us restrict our thinking to the question of “millions not billions.” Granting materialists 200 million years of time seems generous, but a look at a previously-posted graphic for young objects in the solar system illustrates the problem:

Doubling that red bar at the right labeled “100 Million Years” leaves a huge section of the timeline unobserved. This is the challenge faced by the article: defend the billions of years without evidence. Unfortunately for the materialists, our dastardly “active planet” has erased or scrambled the evidence they need.

What this means in practice is that our planet’s ever-moving plate tectonics are constantly recycling rocks. When an oceanic plate meets a continental plate, it slides beneath it into the mantle – a process called subduction – where old rock is destroyed. Newer rocks are then formed from melted mantle.

A few seams of very old rock have been discovered, such as the billions of years old Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in Hudson Bay, Canada, as well as similarly ancient outcrops in Australia, China, Greenland and South Africa. But even this very old rock has had a complex history. “Exposure to high temperatures during past collision can change the chemistry,” notes Boyet. “This disturbs the isotopic system we use for dating rock.”

And so, “The original rocks that existed at the very earliest stages of its creation are simply not there anymore.” This response, however, commits the fallacy of begging the question. One cannot allege that rocks billions of years old existed in the absence of evidence without assuming what needs to be proved.

To the Rescue!

Help comes from moon rocks and meteorites, they say. These have not been disturbed by plate tectonics, and so they should give the ground truth about the age of the solar system.

“Our moon does not have plate tectonics,” explains Boyet. “We can say for certain that about 80 % of the moon’s surface is very old – at least 3 billion years old.”

Radiometric dating is used to confirm the age of rocks, by looking at the proportion of two different isotopes. Radioactive isotopes break down in a predictable amount of time, enabling geologists to determine the age of a sample.

Dating moonrock has therefore given us a clearer idea of the age of our solar system. Another key element has been the radiometric dating of meteorites, which were formed in the first tens of millions of years of the solar system forming. All this data – from Earth and beyond – has enabled scientists to put the age of Earth at around 4.5 billion years.

These claims, however, also beg the question. One has to assume the uniformity of radioisotope decay to use it. Look at the timeline again. We’ve only been measuring decay rates for a little over a century. On the timeline, that would be represented by an infinitesimal sliver. Is that enough observation on which to base claims about what happened over stretches of imaginary time 7 orders of magnitude longer than what we have observed? Is such wild extrapolation justifiable?

Still, the lack of 4.5-billion-year-old rocks means that scientists still do not know for sure what Earth was really like, when those clouds of gas and dust condensed to form our planet. This is important, as in order to accurately chart Earth’s evolution, we need to know what was happening during the first few million years.

Ah, yes, evolution. The Stuff Happens Law serves as the skeleton key for materialist science. Evolutionary biologists require those billions of years, because 200 million is far too little time. Most of the assumed evolution of life had already occurred by then. Planetary scientists (who are also materialists) need to rise up and supply the time that evolutionary biologists demand.

Darwinian Divination

At this point in the article, the heroine, Maud Boyet, enters to provide “understanding” or at least to show she is trying to get it. Her method is to use divination on a chemical element. It serves as her talisman or spirit guide:

Boyet sought to address this challenge through the recent ERC-funded ISOREE project. In particular, she analysed the composition of the chemical element neodymium in primitive meteorites. “Our conclusion is that Earth was enriched by neodymium through repeated collisions in the first million years of the solar system, which destroyed up to 20 % of Earth’s mass,” she adds. “We were able to highlight the role of collisions in shaping planets and affecting their composition.”

Silent neodymium spoke to her and promised her understanding—a bit of it. But Ms Boyet still wanted more understanding.

This research has helped to increase our understanding of how Earth and the solar system were formed. Moving forward, Boyet is interested in the possibility of sampling rock deep within Earth, below big volcanoes such as in Hawaii.

Understanding feels good. It’s satisfying, like speaking to a long lost dead one at a science séance. But it’s also addicting. In evolution, one never gets to the point of having enough understanding. One can gain the illusion of understanding, though, by ramping up the perhapsimaybecouldness index and promising futureware:

“Maybe we can find reservoirs of rock here that were formed early on, and have not been mixed during all this time,” she says. “Measuring small isotopic variations from these spots could give us more information about the early evolution of Earth.”

Don’t ask how Maud can say that rocks “were formed early on” or meteorites are “primitive” without begging the question. Just keep the funding coming, and CORDIS will promise more of that elusive drug: understanding. In your imagination, it’s almost like being there.

As we have explained before, it’s more scientifically legitimate to set upper limits than lower limits: i.e., it’s justifiable to say “this rock cannot be older than xx years old” but not to say “this rock cannot be younger than yy years old.” Why is that? Because the upper limit has a better observation-to-assumption ratio. If scientists observe a present process in operation, they might reasonably extend it back into the unobservable past a short way (high observation-to assumption ratio), but not to the point where it becomes reckless or absurd. That’s the upper limit method. But to take an observable process and stretch it back in time orders of magnitude beyond the observations has a very bad (low) observation-to-assumption ratio: assumptions must be multiplied to make the claim. When dating an artifact that way to satisfy a prior philosophical commitment, it commits “reckless drafts on the bank of time” which Lord Kelvin warned about. Epistemic modesty demands not exceeding the observations beyond reasonable limits.

Many physical processes we have reported on have, being generous, upper limits of a few hundred million years, a few tens of millions of years, or even a few thousands of years. Here’s the show stopper this creates for Darwinists and materialists: none of those upper limits give them enough time for evolution. And without evolution, the show has stopped. It’s time to leave the Evolution Theater and go see a documentary: Creation.

CMI announced a new book you might want to examine for evidence of a young earth: Biblical Geology 101. I have not yet obtained a copy to review, but the description sounds good.

Another recent book worth looking into is by Monte Fleming, PhD geologist, titled Stories About Earth’s History: A Geologist’s Dissent from Deep Time.* Though self-published, Fleming’s attractive short paperback (100 pages), illustrated with diagrams and color photos, presents nearly a dozen cases against deep time from geological observations, using his own calculations from published mainstream data. For example, on page 42 after showing multiple examples of flat layers of strata over vast regions with alleged time gaps between them, he says,

When it comes to those supposed gaps with immense quantities of missing time between rock layers, however, popular scientific interpretations dictate that we accept that time stood still for millions or tens of millions of years over areas that often cover several U.S. states. In reality, interpretations that favor deep time demand that geological processes, normally governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, be suspended or dramatically slowed over these vast areas for inconceivable amounts of time. There’s a word for this: popular science is asking for nothing short of a miracle.

Dr Fleming’s book written in a winsome style accessible to laymen. The conclusion from his evidence is strong: deep time is a problem, not a solution.

*Although we cannot endorse one of the theological conclusions at the end of the book, Fleming makes convincing scientific arguments that can help one defend the Biblical young-earth position.