I was reading an article this afternoon about how some scientists now think that the earth and moon may be as much as 60 million years older than we thought. This would mean that Earth in its current form occurred just 40 million years after the solar system formed around 4.5 billion years ago.
Researchers from the University of Lorraine came to these new estimates from analysing xenon gas found in quartz from South Africa and Australia. These gases had been trapped within the rocks for billions of years.
The results aren’t conclusive of course, it all happened so long ago and other researchers will have something to say about the findings I’m sure. That’s what science is good for, self-calibrating. Someone has a punt and finds some stuff out and all the other guys and gals run about trying to prove or disprove it so that science becomes ever more accurate.
The reason why I mention the age of the earth and scientific methodology in general is that these new findings brought to my mind some children’s books I saw a while ago. The books are published by a ‘new world creationist’ by the name of Ken Ham (pictured above). Ken isn’t just disliked by atheists and scientists, he’s also unpopular with other Christians and the majority of home school teachers in America.
Born in Australia, he now resides in Kentucky (textbook). He believes with some firm conviction that the Universe is 6,000 years old, rather than 13.8 billion years old which is science’s current best guess). Now, this is a pretty normal thing for young earth creationists to believe, but it does seem a bit far fetched considering the wealth of evidence to the contrary.
In March 2011, the Board of Great Homeschool Conventions, Inc. voted to “disinvite” Ham and Answers in Genesis (Ham’s company) from “all future conventions,” saying that Ham’s words about other Christians were:
unnecessary, ungodly, and mean-spirited statements that are divisive at best and defamatory at worst.
He also got in a bit of trouble for making quite a lot of cash out of his “good work” which he lavished on his board of execs.
Either way, I’m not here to bash the already well bashed, I just absolutely love the illustrations in his books, to me they are like a wonderful imaginary fairy land that I would love to inhabit. The fact that they’re given to children as “facts” is more than a little worrying though.
Ken Ham also runs something called the “Creation Museum” where you can see things like this:
Humans chilling out with dinosaurs.
MORE DINOSAURS:
