Believers, your understanding on how old is the earth. (page 4)

ziddina

"...can anyone name any civilizations that were [known] to exist, pre-'adam'?..." Last Chance, post #8

The temples discovered at Gobekli Tepe are around 11,000 years old....

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html

The cave paintings in the south of France range in age from 12,000 years to around 30,000 years old... Depending on which study you look at...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/spotted-horses-in-cave-art-werent-just-a-figment-dna-shows.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21458-first-neanderthal-cave-paintings-discovered-in-spain.html

The Australian Aboriginal religions are at least 20,000 years old, and may be as old as 80,000 years...

http://www.apex.net.au/~mhumphry/aborigin.html

http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/[email protected]/0/75258e92a5903e75ca2569de0025c188?OpenDocument

The Berekhat Ram figurine found in Israel and the Tan-Tan 'venus' figurine found in Morocco are well over 200,000 years old - and made by Homo erectus, not Homo sapiens, by the way...

http://www.utexas.edu/courses/classicalarch/readings/Berekhat_Ram.pdf

http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/history/timeline/tantan.html

Does that help???

To continue, Ziddinia - the earliest forms of what could be called human writing were "counting sticks" marked upon animal bones approximately 55,000 years ago in ancient Europe. They seem to be evidence of a hunting society who were counting animal kills. The dating is clear because of Carbond 14 - which, regardless of what the WTBTS says, is actually a scientifically accepted method of dating carbon based artifacts.

It should be obvious to anyone beyond a simple third grade education (and a simple pupil at that) that man has been her far longer than six thousand years.

It is very possible to still believe in God after getting beyond that simple fact. It is also possible to see through the entire myth.

sizemik

What about progressive creationism? . . . makes perfect sense really, and can easily be panel-beaten to fit the Bible.

WTWizard

There is no way the earth can be only 50,000 years old. How long does it take for a crust to form that is on average 50 km thick? And even after 4 1/2 billion years, there are volcanoes (Sizemik ought to know a thing or two about those things--New Zealand, especially the North Island, has quite a few). You look at Auckland, it is largely volcanoes. And they exist elsewhere--one went kaboom in Chile in 2010. They have gone off in Hawaii, Italy, and Washington State as well. These are not declining in frequency as much as one might expect if the earth was only some 50,000 years old.

I am with the camp that believes the earth to be around 4 1/2 billion years until credible scientific evidence proves otherwise or I start seeing several independent sources suggesting it is much younger or much older than that (and the LIE-ble is NOT a credible source). Unless someone comes up with plausible evidence that the earth is significantly older or younger than 4 1/2 billion years old, I will continue believing it is around that age regardless of what some idiots in fundamentalist Christi-SCAM-ity claim.

lastchance

Thanks Ziddina and James wood. those were good references? But knowing the jw thinking they will simply say that this does not prove man is that old but rather the raw materials used were that old ( ex:the coal or other earth materials used in the cave paintings were around for eons, but there is no way of saying when these were used to produce these paintings) u see what you want.

cofty

Artifacts left by these civilisations can be accurately dated.

Flat_Accent

Don't forget the dinosaurs, Scenic!!

Really, they think the earth came first - THEN there was light? It's backwards whichever way they try and work it.

My dad still thinks the creative days were 7,000 years. The fact WT no longer specifies keeps the old guard happy with their dated understanding, and the newbies happy thinking they mean 'millions of years'.

SweetBabyCheezits

The earth is as old as it is :) If that is five million years, then it is five million years.

Not trying to start a debate, Tammy, but was that a typo or does this mean you distrust the results of radiometric dating, among other independent lines of evidence that indicate the earth is billions of years old?

Bear in mind I don't think any idea deserves blind faith, either, but that's why I love science - because to be accepted, theories have to survive a gauntlet of scrutiny by top specialists in the field.

From my shallow-PBS-understanding of it, the best estimates are around 4.54 billion years, but we should be able to at least get the minimum age of the earth by dating the oldest rocks/crystals. Both the earth and the moon's oldest rocks come in between 4.3-4.5 billion using multiple dating techniques. While there is room for a small percentage of error, it would seem to me that we should be able to count 4.5b years as a minimum age. (http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html)

Working backwards through evolutionary history would take us far more than 5 million years back as well but that's another subject...

tec

lol... typo...

tec

Just call me Dr. Evil ;)

Believers, your understanding on how old is the earth.