How old do the Witnesses say the earth is?

JH

We all know that the witnesses say that Adam would be a little over 6000 years old. They use the bible to back that up.

How old do they say the earth is, and what would they use to back that up?

If they say that the earth is billions of years old, and that Adam is only 6000 years old, doesn't this seem odd that God started a creation a few billion years ago, took a break for a couple of billion years, and then started creating again...

jeanniebeanz

Last I heard, they didn't know. They just said that there was a pre-history period for the earth, and kinda sidestepped that whole issue. I've been out for 11 years though, things may have changed.

Jean

JustTickledPink

I always heard "6,000 years of recorded history" and something that a creation day was a thousand years long, not a 24 hour period. But I can't really remember, that just pops into my head.

Leolaia

The old versions of the NWT used to say that the earth was created something like 46,000 BCE but in the '80s this was replaced by "in the beginning". The Creation book is also agnostic about the length of each creative day whereas the old Paradise Lost book ascribed 7,000 years to each. I guess they abandoned this concept after the embarrasment of 1975 as a date of Armageddon. Anyway, I think now they are noncommital about the age of the earth, and leave open the possibility that it is as old as the geologists say. I was able to believe this when I was a Witness and never felt that I was out of harmony with the F&DS.

AlmostAtheist

There was another thread on this yesterday with a quote from a relatively recent magazine calling the length of the creative process an unknown length of time. Other than clinging to the 6,000 year time-table for mankind, I think they've pretty much accepted that everything else has been here for as long as anybody would care to claim.

It kinda makes sense. God needed to create the dinosaurs to kinda hash out the whole land-creature thing. Then, when he got his notes together and such, drop a comet on the whole thing, and start fresh. Of course, the first batch didn't really work out so well, but a little flood water washed it all clean again. Now that you mention it, though, it hasn't been working out much better since then. Hmmm....

Dave

kwintestal

Duh! Less then 7 days!

Kwin

AlanF

They allow that the earth itself might be 4.5 billion years old, but they have no dogmatic teaching on this.

They've traditionally taught that plant life is no more than 34,000 years old and animal life no more than 20,000, based on the 7,000-year creative day tradition. Since a fuzzy time in the mid-1980s, they use the word "millennia" rather than 7,000 years to describe the length of the creative days of Genesis.

The entire notion of such a short time span for life is ludicrous, of course. As has been brought out, it raises the problem of what God was doing for 4.5 billion years. And of course, extremely solid geological evidence proves that microscopic life has been around for some 3.5 billion years, and macroscopic life for about 1 billion years.

But such long time scales for "creation" again raise the extremely difficult problem of what God was doing for so long. During that time, untold suffering of the animal creation occurred. That certainly doesn't speak of the loving Creator envisioned by Christians. Christians ignore this problem.

AlanF

blondie

This conversation made me think of this political cartoon in the paper today.

FairMind

I don’t think they have a problem any longer with the earth being Four Billion or so years old. Science has pretty much answered this question in a way that is impossible to argue. I guess the real question is how long has life been on earth?

FairMind

How old do the Witnesses say the earth is?

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