Age Does Matter

It was the Reverend James Ussher (1581-1656) who calculated the Earth’s age as only 6,000 years old. This would make the Earth a veritable infant, as planets go.

However, science puts Earth’s age as around 4.54 billion years; creationists, however, don’t let anything as trivial as scientific facts get in the way of how they view the world around them.  

That’s why Pat Robertson’s admission that James Ussher was not “inspired” by the Lord when he calculated the Earth’s age—in short, he does not believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old—is surprising. This is contrary to most religious fundamentalist’s views that Earth was created in 4000 BC (around the time urbanization was starting in Mesopotamia).

Pat Robertson also said that Christians should not “cover up” scientific evidence that Earth is, in fact, billions of years old.   

Look, I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop Ussher wasn’t inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years. It just didn’t. You go back in time, you’ve got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you’ve got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas.They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible.

There you go, folks.

The Reverend James Ussher had put the Earth’s creation on October 23, 4004 BC (using the Julian Calendar). His calculations first appeared in 1650, when he published his work,  Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world").

Young Earth Creationists, to this day, cite this as proof that Earth is only thousands of years old, and not billions. They also think that The Flintstones was a documentary (they think humans and dinosaurs co-existed). 

And Mightor was the prehistoric Caped Crusader 

But what effect Pat Robertson’s announcement regarding Earth’s age would be to other fundamentalists? Probably nothing. After all, it's not as if he renounced Biblical Creationism altogether.

In any case, there are a lot of creationists out there, not just the Young Earth Creationists (or the onomatopoeic-sounding YEC). There's the Old Earth Creationists, for one.

In the mean time, here are The Top 10 Claims Made By Creationists to Counter Scientific Theories:

One of the most challenging tasks for the modern day creationist to is reconcile the belief in a 6,000 year old Earth with the ever-growing mountain of scientific evidence pointing to a vastly different conclusion — namely a universe that's 13.5 billion years old and an Earth that formed 4.5 billion years ago. So, given these astoundingly dramatic discrepancies, biblical literalists and 'young Earth creationists' have had no choice but to get pretty darned imaginative when brushing science aside. Here are 10 arguments creationists have made to counter scientific theories.

1.      Humans and dinosaurs co-existed 

Quite obviously, creationists aren't able to gloss over the fact that dinosaurs existed. They are clearly a part of the fossil record. But in accordance with the the Bible, creationists insist that they lived contemporaneously to humans. And in fact, they say this explains why dragons play a prominent role in our mythological record. Moreover, creationists claim that human footprints have been found alongside dinosaur tracks at Paluxy, that a petrified hammer was found in Cretaceous rocks, and that some sandal footprints have been found alongside trilobites. Other theories suggest that the Great Flood shook up and redeposited the fossil record so that it appears that dinosaurs lived millions of years before humans arrived. Real evidence and proper interpretation of the fossil record, however, supports the idea that humans first emerged about 200,000 years ago — long after the demise of dinosaurs who went extinct 65 million years ago.

2.     Biological systems are too complex to have evolved

This is what biochemist Michael Behe refers to as irreducible complexity. He and other creationists complain that a complex biological system, what is comprised of many interacting parts, would cease to function properly in the event of any alteration. Proponents of intelligent design use this argument to claim that anything less than the complete form of a fully functional biological system (or organ) would not work at all — what would be catastrophically detrimental to an organism. In other words, all mutations have to be bad. The only way for an organism to evolve, the ID defenders say, is for God to guide the process every step of the way. This is silly, of course — organisms are not that fragile. And in fact, evolvability is an indelible aspect to life.

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