Young Earth vs Old Earth Debate; There is No Middle Ground

In the time that I have publicly discussed with friend and foe the debate of Young Earth vs. Old Earth dogma I have become more and more convinced of one incontrovertible fact; the evidence doesn’t matter.

Taken all by itself, a rock is a rock is a rock. It tells no story in and of itself. Through rigorous investigation we can determine its composition. We can weight it, measure it, and drop it in water to determine its specific gravity. Electrocute it, smash it, grind it, smell it, magnify it, burn it, and boil it in acid. All that can be done to it (and more) yet it will reveal no secret. It will divulge no clue of its origin, age, or what it has seen over the course of the centuries. All of our tortures yield no revelations of life, the universe or anything.

We can magnify it to the subatomic particle level or we can map it across continental divides. The rock can be studied in situ or in the lab, with relation to strata above and below. All the information we gather will lead us to no conclusions whatsoever until we apply a worldview to that evidence.

And that is the hidden fact of the debate between YE and OE; it is a debate of WORLDVIEWS, not of the evidence. We can take any particular aspect of the debate, say Cyclothems, and view the evidence through the lens of YE and that of OE and find that the conclusions agree wonderfully within each system of thought. We need not discard observations to make cyclothems fit into a Young Earth model, nor do we need to add spurious suppositions to the data to make the cyclothem harmonize in an Old Earth framework.

Let’s looks a bit closer at our example, the cyclothem. The following is part of a discussion I had online recently and presented the idea that the debate is not of evidence for or against YE or OE but a debate for or against the worlodview.

“Cyclothems (rock layers that have a definite repeating pattern). A cyclothem can be used to present adequate support for each worldview since the time scales involved need not be known. Especially here in PA cyclothems are rather common in larger outcrops and road cuts. In a nutshell a cyclothem is a pattern of say, a sandstone layer on top, then a siltstone layer, then beneath that a shale layer and finally a limestone layer. In each layer the size of the sediment is getting finer and finer. This signifies an encroaching sea or flooding. But as you continue to follow the layers there is a layer of shale beneath the limestone, then siltstone and then sandstone. The cycle reversed itself. A retreating sea level for our inland sea. As these cycles repeat we can see repeated increasing water depth followed by decreasing water depth.

But all by themselves they are just repeating layers of rock. In an O.E. worldview the cyclothem is understood to be a long term feature where many thousands or millions of years of periodic flooding and retreating of an inland sea left cyclic layers of sediment to then be slowly buried and lithified over another set of millions of years.

In a Y.E. worldview the cyclic nature of the sediment is not questioned, (it is there), but the mechanism of the flooding and the timeframe involved is different. A cyclothem observed in a road cut can just as easily have been formed from the large tidal influences of a globalized flood event. The mass amounts of sediment being moved by the water would be laid down instead of by increasing or decreasing water depth but by increased and decreased energy of the passing gigantic waves. The more energy the water has the larger the particles it can carry. When the water slows and the energy decreases it drops it load of sediment, heaviest first, then next heavies and so on and so on. So, the ebb and flow of the massive ocean currents allows sediments to precipitate out in recognizable patterns over short periods of time and over great distances.

Lithification would take considerably less time since the mass quantities of surface water (and the sediment it contained) would provide ample enough downward pressure to lithify the sediments in a fraction of the time considered needed by O.E.

As you can see, the O.E. and the Y.E. exclude co-existence since one denies the existence of the flooding mechanism of the other. O.E. denies a global catastrophe and requires enormous amounts of time to allow smaller forces to build the cyclothems. The Y.E. denies the existence of millions of years necessitating the need of a mass quantity of water to produce the rock layers.

Both worldviews of cyclothems require sediment, flooding, and time. Neither quibble over the sediment because that is what is measurable and observable. But that which is unobservable, the water and the time, each stakes out different territory using the same rock layers. Each worldview can support it’s own conclusions using the same observable evidence within that worldview. Now, neither worldview may be correct. There may be a third that has not been proposed yet. But one thing is certain, both worldviews of cyclothems can not exist at the same time and both be true. Both may be false, but both can not be true at the same time.”

The worldview, sometimes called the “preconceived notion” is minimized by OE supporters (and many YE supporters as well) because they believe the “scientific method” controls all aspects of learning and investigation throughout out the education and professional lives of scientists and would-be scientists. This assumption is incorrect.

Just remember back to your education. Did the teacher bring out an igneous rock of the pre-Cambrian era and demonstrate via stratigraphic principals and radiometric measurement that this sample was billions of years old?

No, my teacher did not, your teacher did not, and as a student of Secondary Education in Earth Science in college for 5 years, I was not taught to do that. When presenting new concepts we teach the “truth of the concept” first by simply presenting it as fact. “The earth is millions and millions of years old,” goes the mantra even in cartoons made for children who can’t even pronounce the word ‘millions’ yet (“Land Before Time”, 1988). The WORLDVIEW is taught as fact first, and then the details are slowly filled in over time.

In the real debate, the Christian must first realize that Evolution and Creation are not compatible in any way whatsoever. They are at direct odds against each other because at the very core of each worldview is the difference between life and death.

Creation embraces life, the very act of bringing life to the world. Evolution, at its core, requires death. The death of untold billions of life forms before “Adam and Eve” could evolve. And until this basic understanding can be reached the debate between YE and OE will never get beyond endless and pointless arguments about individual observations of nature.