There are many scientific measurements demonstrating that the universe, planet Earth, and living systems are relatively young. According to Dr. Russell Humphreys and many other creation science researchers, galaxies wind themselves up too quickly. The comets disintegrate too quickly. There is not enough mud on the ocean floor. There is not enough sodium in the ocean. The planet Earth’s magnetic field is decaying too quickly. Many strata are too tightly bent. Injected sandstone shortens geologic ages. Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic ‘ages’ to a few years. Helium is located in the wrong places. There is not enough Stone Age skeletons found in the Earth. Agriculture is too recent. And human history is too short.
GALAXIES
The Milky Way galaxy stars rotate around the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if the Milky Way galaxy stars were older than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless star disc rather than its present spiral shape. However, the Milky Way galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma,’ which they have known about for 50 years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief popularity period. The same ‘winding-up’ dilemma also applies to other galaxies. For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the dilemma has been a complex theory called ‘density waves.’ The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and lately has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, M51.
COMETS
According to the evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about 5 billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of 10,000 years, according to astronomer P.F. Steidl. Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical ‘Oort cloud’ well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed, according to astronomer F.L. Whipple. Thus far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated, either by observations or realistic calculations. Lately, there has been much talk of the ‘Kuiper Belt,’ a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Even if some bodies of ice exist in that location, they would not really solve the evolutionists’ problem, since according to evolutionary theory the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it.
OCEAN FLOOR
Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean. This material accumulates as loose sediment on the hard basaltic rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 meters. The main way known to remove the mud from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year. As far as anyone knows, the other 24 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present amount of sediment in less than 12 million years. Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged 3 billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometers deep. An alternative explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of mud within a short time about 5000 years ago.
OCEAN SODIUM
Every year, rivers and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year. As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today’s input and output rates. This time is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, 3 billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations which are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years. Calculations for many other sea water elements give much younger ages for the ocean.
EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD
The total energy stored in the earth’s magnetic field has steadily decreased by a factor of 2.7 over the past 1000 years. Evolutionary theories explaining this rapid decrease, as well as how the earth could have maintained its magnetic field for billions of years, are very complex and inadequate. A much better creationist theory exists. It is straightforward, based on sound physics, and explains many features of the field: its creation, rapid reversals during the Genesis flood, surface intensity decreases and increases until the time of Christ, and a steady decay since then. This theory matches paleo-magnetic, historic, and present data. The main result is that the field’s total energy (not surface intensity) has always decayed at least as fast as now. At that rate the field could not be more than 10,000 years old.
EARTH’S STRATA
In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.
INJECTED SANDSTONE
Strong geologic evidence16 exists that the Cambrian Sawatch sandstone—formed an alleged 500 million years ago—of the Ute Pass fault, west of Colorado Springs, was still unsolidifi ed when it was extruded up to the surface during the uplift of the Rocky Mountains, allegedly 70 million years ago. It is very unlikely that the sandstone would not solidify during the supposed 430 million years it was underground. Instead, it is likely that the two geologic events were less than hundreds of years apart, thus greatly shortening the geologic time scale.
FOSSIL RADIOACTIVITY
Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay.17 ‘Squashed’ Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the conventional time scale. ‘Orphan’ Polonium-218 radiohalos, having no evidence of their mother elements, imply either instant creation or drastic changes in radioactivity decay rates.
HELIUM
All naturally occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the earth’s atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in 5 billion years. This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape. Though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old, their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years.
STONE AGE SKELETONS
Evolutionary anthropologists say that the Stone Age lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Neanderthal and Cro-magnon men was roughly constant, between 1 and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artifacts. By this scenario, they would have buried at least 4 billion bodies. If the evolutionary time scale is correct, buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 100,000 years, so many of the supposed 4 billion Stone Age skeletons should still be around (and certainly the buried artifacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the Stone Age was much shorter than evolutionists think, a few hundred years in many areas.
HUMAN AGRICULTURE
The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years during the Stone Age before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years ago. Yet the archaeological evidence shows that Stone Age men were as intelligent as we are. It is more likely that men were without agriculture less than a few hundred years after the global flood. After the great flood, agriculture was independently developed in many places, including the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, and the Americas. The earliest evidence for agriculture has been found in the Middle East. Early cultivars include wild barley (Middle East), millet (China), and squash (the Americas). The domestication of many animals now considered to be livestock occurred during roughly the same period, although dogs were domesticated considerably earlier. Slash-and-burn land-clearing methods and crop rotation were early agricultural techniques.
HUMAN HISTORY
According to evolutionists,
RELATED SOURCES
Most of the information contained in this article originated from the work of Dr. Russell Humphreys. Evidence for a Young world by Dr. Russell Humphreys. The King James Version; The New King James Version; The English Version of the Greek Septuagint; The New International Version; Creation Revealed in Six Days by Air Commodore P.J. Wiseman; The Revell Bible Dictionary; Rethinking Genesis by Duane Garrett; The Holy Bible; The Collapse of Evolution” by Scott M Huse; Three Views on Creation and Evolution by J.P. Moreland & John Mark Reynolds; The New Answers Book 2 by Ken Ham; Creation and Time by Dr. Hugh Ross; GENESIS and the BIG BANG by Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder; The Science of God by DR. Gerald Schroeder; Starlight and time by Dr. Russell Humphreys.