How Old Is the Earth?

When scientifically educated men talk about the great age of the earth and about the conflict of this idea with the teachings of the Bible, they are not referring to the age of the substance, or mass, of the earth but to the length of time that animals and plants have existed on the earth's surface. The very few exceptions to this statement, or the few instances in which they actually mean the age of the materials composing the earth, are not here worth our consideration. This is a point which needs to be understood by our Ad­ventist workers.

Some time before his lamented death Sir James H. Jeans made a very notable admission: "We must conclude that the universe of stars is still quite young, in spite of looking so old; its many appearances of great age must all be deceptive."—Nature, Supplement, Oct. 24, 1931, p. 703.

The astronomical discoveries which were the occasion for this declaration need not detain us, but the principle needs to be applied to the problem here under consideration. If we ad­mit that the many appearances of great age shown by the earth may "all be deceptive"; and cease to be scientifically illiterate about the two great anti-Biblical postulates or pure assump­tions, which are always used as preliminaries to the study of geology; then get into our souls an intelligent knowledge of the grossly un­scientific methods by which for over a hundred years the geologists have built up this idea of a thousand million years as the period during which plants and animals have been living on this earth, we shall not cower and cringe be­fore the noisy claims of the geologists. And especially when we remember that the badge of our order, the Sabbath, is God's official me­morial of His six-day creation only a few thousand years ago, and then in addition re­member that the crisis of the very last days will be brought about by this very point—whether we are to believe God and His Bible or believe the claims of those whom Mrs. E. G. White repeatedly called "infidel geologists."

Let me now state plainly and without quali­fication that there is only one line of geological argument for the great period of time during which we are told that plants and animals have existed on this earth. This is the argument based on the differential dating of the fossils, or the theory that geologists can accurately as­sign certain kinds of fossils to an age either before or after certain other fossils. There is no other method for piling up age on age, and thereby reaching the prodigious total of a thou­sand million years. And because we can in this way narrow down the problem to this one issue, it should not take any intelligent Adventist long to get his bearings in this matter.

I intend to make only a brief statement on this point; but preliminary even to such a brief statement, it may possibly be well for me to say something about the supposed evidence of great age for the earth, furnished by radio­activity.

The phenomena of radioactivity have been known for about a half century, or from just slightly before the beginning of the present cen­tury. Within a few years the geological specu­lators went to work as usual, seeking to use this new technique to help fortify their other speculations. Soon it was being proclaimed that the new methods were confirming the great age of the Archean, or primitive, rocks, and were even assisting in differentiating between the various successive ages of the fossiliferous rocks. As the modern science of geology has never had any high standard for its evidences in such matters, the asserted proofs from radio­activity were not seriously challenged. But even so, these speculations were never regarded by geologists in general as of very much impor­tance, and only a very few men were engaged in this line of work. Consequently, only a very small number of actual observations in this field were carried on or reported.

But the developments in radioactivity during recent years have thrown into utter confusion what was even then only in a speculative stage. The result is that nobody now knows enough solid undisputed facts about the relationship of radioactivity to the problem of the age of the earth to talk intelligently. Hence, there is noth­ing further to say here.

Gauges for Estimating Age

There are several classes of geological phe­nomena which impress one as indicating con­siderable antiquity. The bare, crystalline peaks of all the great mountain ranges tend to im­press the spectator as very, very old, especially when we know in addition that all the major ranges, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, and the Himalayas, are composed of water-formed rocks which have been lifted up and metamor­phosed or made crystalline, and enormous quan­tities of their outer parts eroded away, to leave these peaks sticking up as we now find them. But again the factor about the fossils enters into this picture ; for all the mountain ranges (as distinguished from a few isolated peaks here and there, like Ararat in Armenia) are composed of strata containing fossils; and thus cannot be separated in explanation from what­ever explanation we give for the ancient burial of the plants and animals.

The familiar geological features, which are sometimes supposed to indicate great age, are not the ones upon which the trained geologists depend for this idea. Many gorges serve as nat­ural chronometers, whose age can be estimated roughly but with a fair degree of accuracy. But G. K. Gilbert and the other specialists on Niagara now give an outside limit of six or eight thousand years for its work, and add that even these figures may need substantial reduc­tion. The similar though more gigantic gorge below the Dry Falls on the Columbia River does not indicate any greater age. Both of these, with other similar phenomena in Africa, South America, Asia, or Europe, are probably not much older than the pyramids of Egypt.

Nobody claims any great age for such geo­logical formations as Yosemite or Yellowstone or for the great volcanoes of the world. Though in the matter of the volcanoes the fossil factor is involved, for all volcanoes seem to rest on stratified or fossiliferous rocks, and on this account are sometimes given a fantastic age in accordance with the dating of the fossils.

With reference to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, I once heard an eminent man re­mark about its comparative "youthfulness" in his lecture. After the lecture I sought an in­terview and asked an explanation. He indicated that he did not suppose anybody thought that the river had dug out this "biggest ditch on earth," as Mark Twain termed it. I asked him how he thought the canyon was made. He re­plied that undoubtedly a big fissure formed there, probably while the Great Basin was more or less full of water, and then the river just cleaned it out.

There are a great many old lakes scattered around over all the continents, some of which are either dried up or greatly diminished in size. They all agree substantially in the time in­volved since their period of greatest extent; but this age is not greater than the paltry few thousand years given for Niagara. Indeed, J. Claude Jones, then professor of geology in the University of Nevada, who made a scholarly report on the prehistoric Lake Lahontan of that State, wrote that "the mystery of Lake Lahontan has all taken place within the past few thousand years," stating also that the lake does not date back more than about two thou­sand years.--"Quarternary Climates," Geolog­ical History of Lake Lahontan (Washington; Carnegie Institution, 1925), p. 50.