No scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe, and
that includes the ones we have
listed here. Although age indicators are called ‘clocks’
they aren’t, because all ages result from calculations that necessarily involve
making assumptions about the past. Always the starting time of the ‘clock’
has to be assumed as well as the way in which the speed of the clock has varied
over time. Further, it has to be assumed that the clock was never disturbed.
There is no independent natural clock against which those assumptions can be tested.
For example, the amount of cratering on the moon, based on currently observed cratering
rates, would suggest that the moon is quite old. However, to draw this conclusion
we have to assume that the rate of cratering has been the same in the past as it
is now. And there are now good reasons for thinking that it might have been quite
intense in the past, in which case the craters do not indicate an old age at all
(see below).
Ages of millions of years are all calculated by assuming the rates of change of
processes in the past were the same as we observe today—called the principle
of uniformitarianism. If the age calculated from such assumptions disagrees with
what they think the age should be, they conclude that their assumptions did not
apply in this case, and adjust them accordingly. If the calculated result gives
an acceptable age, the investigators publish it.
Examples of young ages listed here are also obtained by applying the same
principle of uniformitarianism. Long-age proponents will dismiss this sort of evidence
for a young age of the earth by arguing that the assumptions about the past do not
apply in these cases. In other words, age is not really a matter of scientific observation
but an argument about our assumptions about the unobserved past.
The assumptions behind the evidences presented here cannot be proved, but the fact
that such a wide range of different phenomena all suggest
much younger
ages than are currently generally accepted, provides a strong case
for questioning those accepted ages (13.77 billion years for the
universe and 4.54 billion years for the solar system).
Also, a number of the evidences, rather than giving any estimate of age, challenge
the assumption of slow-and-gradual uniformitarianism, upon which all deep-time dating
methods depend.
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