Q. How old is the Earth?
A. The Earth is about 4 thousand million years old and the universe is about 13.7 thousand million years old. The earliest life on Earth in the form of bacteria is over 3.5 thousand million years old; while multicellular life dates from 620 million years, with the Cambrian Explosion of trilobites living in the seas dated to 570 million years.
The Fossil Record
The fossil record of life on Earth shows a progression from simple forms towards ever increasing complexity in forms over the course of millions of years.
Innovative new types suddenly appear in the fossil record, and then remain unchanged for many millions of years. Stephen Gould coined the term ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’ as a description of this general observation. He was upset when Creationists ‘shook his hand and patted him on the back’. He spent the rest of his life writing over a hundred articles for popular publications talking up science and his own theories, and putting Creationists down – this plan sold a lot of books and articles!
New creatures with innovative body plans do not form over millions of years, they pop up. The new type of creature is suddenly there, but almost always in primitive form – that is to say – it shows features of previous types of creatures, the ones preceding it.
As far as the creation of life is concerned, you could say it was designed to last. Every single singular type has survived for millions of years, or hundreds of millions of years, not only survived, but thrived – all basic types are found in a whole array of diverse species linked to the common basic type. Diverse species with common descent have conquered the Earth time and again. There has been an age of fishes, an age of amphibians, an age of dinosaurs and age of mammals and birds.
Life was created to live and thrive, and to fill the Earth. This was the plan of the Creator – survival is achieved through processes of evolution, natural selection and adaptation. These processes are natural secondary processes, unguided and free.
KEY WORDS
- Fossil record / Geological record
- Sedimentary rock strata
- Radiometric dating / Carbon dating / decay of radioactive elements
- Second Law of Thermodynamics / Entropy / Arrow of time
- Molecular clocks / mutation in non-coding parts of DNA
Book of Job
Job is a book of discourses written when writing was first invented. The final discourse is given by the Lord to Job in chapters 38-41. The discourse is about God’s wisdom in how he created things. It is a long discourse, but here are some of the high lights that imply that creation took place a very long time ago:
- Where were you when I laid earth’s foundation? Who stretched a measuring line across it? …… while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? (Job 38:4,5,7)
- Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? (Job 38:16,18)
- Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? (Job 38:31-33)
ARTICLES
Deep Time and Theories of Evolution
Article written by Clare Merry in 2017, edited in December 2022
- Introduction
Deep time as a concept only became known during the 19th century. The perspective of deep time was the condition allowing theories of evolution to take root and be considered and discussed. The idea of evolution transformed the way science is done. Not every idea nor every theory is a true representation of reality, but they were all attempts at understanding.
What is certainly true is that not only do the laws of physics lead to the conclusion that there is deep time, but elements themselves carry clocks measuring deep time often counted in millions of years. This is radiometric dating. Furthermore, cells themselves carry clocks that show relative measures of time that can be represented as a branching tree of life. These are molecular clocks that arise from mutation in DNA.
Most members of the churches have adopted belief in Theistic Evolution. This belief takes in more than one concept, and has changed over time. There is still much to be discussed concerning this belief and its link to deep time.
2. Physics and the Arrow of Time
Clanking Steam Engines
It was the march of new technology that brought a new awareness of time. A new awareness of the existence of time led to the dawn of the new scientific age of the 18th century. The steam engine played a key role in this. It was invented by improvements in 1712, 1733, and 1781.
Steam engines were used on farms for ploughing. This was done using a cable to pull a plough between two engines placed on either side of a field using winding machinery. They were also used as steam rollers in the making of roads due to their weight of about 10 tons. Steam ships and steam trains provided locomotion, while there were also steam engines for road haulage, though they never made it as carriages for people (due to a lot of smoke and blowing up).
A steam engine moving forward has large amounts of lateral movement, producing noisy clanking and a bone-shaking experience for the driver, steersman and passengers. How ever well a steam engine was designed, this clanking loss of energy for useful work or forward motion always occurred. This observation was raised to the level of a law of physics named the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics and Entropy
In classical thermodynamics, the inevitable loss of heat in any transformation of energy involved in work is called entropy. In a closed system entropy always increases over time. Overall, entropy can never decrease once the heat loss has occurred. There are several very important scientific conclusions to be drawn from this regarding the universe considered as a whole closed system. The first conclusion was that there is an arrow of time. Time moves in one direction only; there is no cyclical time or reversals in time.
The arrow of time is broken by Dr Who, the ‘Time lord’ who can travel back to the past in his time-travelling police box, the Tardis. But this is science fiction. In science fiction people visit past eras and change things, but reality totally forbids this.
Heat Death ends the Universe
The second conclusion was the rather cheerless idea that the universe will eventually end in the Heat Death. Heat Death occurs when the heat in the universe becomes homogenous, neither hot nor cold. When the energy in the universe runs down in this way, nothing more can happen in the universe – its processes stop.
This assumed fate of our universe, an idea said to have come from Lord Kelvin sometime between the 1850s and 1860s, was applied to a universe thought to be small and static. At this time the universe was thought to consist only of stars and extend only as far as the outer reaches of our own galaxy. It was not known that there are thousands of millions of galaxies beyond our galaxy. The universe in the 19th century was thought to be fixed. As far as its age is concerned, Lord Kelvin calculated in 1862, by measuring the heat loss of the Earth that it must be up to 400 million years old. Previous to this the Earth was thought to be infinitely old. We now know the universe to be 13.7 billion years old.
The Universe had a Beginning
The more cheerful conclusion that arose from the notion of entropy is that the universe had a beginning. A beginning is deduced from the fact that nothing can run down forever, and the universe we live in has not yet run down. It is still very much in a state of disequilibrium, and very far from any final state. These 19th century reflections arising from investigations in thermodynamics would lead to ground-breaking 20th century scientific discoveries in physics.
3. Palaeontology, Rock Strata and Deep Time
The Dusts of Time
It is only with modern science that deep time was discovered. Deep time requires a flight of imagination using the evidence of artifacts or fossils buried deep beneath the surface of the Earth in the dusts of time. (The Earth continues to sweep clean its orbit around the Sun from debris and this dust falls to Earth at a rate of an estimated 100 tons a day, burying everything eventually).
Palaeontology
Deep time is the domain of investigatoins by the archaeologist and palaeontologist who like detectives piece together the past, making reconstructions and proposing scenarios of past eras to present to the museum-going public.
Palaeontology presented strange creatures sometimes of giant size to an astounded world. Scientific descriptions of dinosaurs, previously thought to be dragons, were first attempted in the 19th century.
Archaeology
Archaeology, the uncovering of human history by unearthing the artifacts of ancient civilizations at sites around the world became a 19th century European past time. Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt brought Egyptology to France especially, as well as to the rest of Europe.
Geology
The geology of layers of sedimentary rocks laid down on ancient sea beds now folded or up-ended, and forming land, gave glimpses into the past of a planet very different from the one we see around us now.
The geological record of life on Earth is now known to go back 3.5 thousand million years to a time when Earth was inhabited only by bacteria. Formations called stromatolites represent mineralized communities of photosynthetic cyanobacteria living in warm shallow seas. The geological record of multicellular life dates from just before the Cambrian period of the Palaeozoic era 570 million years ago.
Billions of years
3.5 thousand million years is the same as 3.5 American billion years. An English billion used to be a million million, not a thousand million. People who went to school in the 1950s may still be confused about how many zeros there are in a billion. It is for this reason that I prefer to use the term ‘a thousand million’ instead of ‘a billion.’
There are people who think the universe is much older than it actually is due to a confusing number of zeros. What is certain is that, although the universe is vast, it is still finite both in size and age; for this reason it is measurable. Without measurement there is no science.
4. The Radiometric Dating of Rocks, Fossils and Artifacts
Igneous Rock Strata
The Earth’s crust is composed of layers of sedimentary rocks that sometimes contain fossils of prehistoric plants and animals, interspersed by igneous rocks of volcanic origin. These rock strata have been subjected to the geological processes of erosion, faulting, folding and mountain-building. Confirmation of deep time has come from the radiometric dating of volcanic rocks of the Earth’s crust.
Decay of Radioactive Elements: Uranium and Lead
In the early 20th century the men of science were joined by one woman: Marie Curie. She successfully isolated the first known radioactive elements, polonium and radium.
Radiometric dating is now used to determine the absolute age of rocks and hence of the fossils contained within them or in between them. This method for measuring time was first invented by Ernest Rutherford in 1905.
Time measurement is based on the fact that unstable radioactive elements decay into other more stable elements at a known, constant rate of decay. This means that if you measure the abundance of a radioactive isotope in a material and compare it with the abundance of its decay product elements, then you can estimate the age of the material.
The geological table with a timescale of hundreds of millions of years has been reconstructed using elements such as uranium and lead since the decay of uranium-235 into lead-207 has a half-life of 700 million years. The half life is when half of the uranium atoms have decayed into lead atoms.
Radiocarbon Dating
Ancient archaeological artifacts have been dated since the 1940s using radiocarbon dating since carbon-14 has a half life of 5730 years, as it converts itself into carbon-12.
The exploration of deep time through the clues provided by archaeology, palaeontology and geology became a new frontier in the 19th century. Private collections of curious specimens allowed a flight of imagination to ancient landscapes inhabited by primitive creatures for the aspiring naturalist and palaeontologist.
5. The Evolution of Ideas About Change
Change and Progress
The very possibility that there could be an evolution was only envisioned in the 19th century based on the concept of deep time. It is a notion of change, development and progress towards increasing diversity over time.
The vision of evolutionary progress may have arisen due to European engagement in empire building during the 19th century. It was certainly conceived within a society engaged in bringing about what was hoped to become a new global civilization. The British Empire under the reign of Queen Victoria became the largest empire in history, and it seems to have been the model of progress that gave rise to this new way of thinking in Britain.
The belief existed that the heights of development in society, technology and civilization could be reached by each person playing their role in service to the realm. The end point of the whole was greater than the individual contribution.
Collective History and Democracy
Ideas concerning democracy were also developing with a new industrial class of entrepreneurs overthrowing the aristocratic class of land-owners. In Britain voting rights for men were extended in 1884 and universal suffrage came in 1918. Voting rights for women came in 1918, expanded to all women over 21 in 1928. Democracy changed the whole way that history was written.
In past ages, the deeds and renown of the heroes of old were recounted as ‘once upon a time’ stories that did not have a time dimension. With democracy, history became the history of social development, liberation and nation-building. A collective history through time started to take shape, in which the whole became the story rather than the famous individual limited to their own lifetime.
Theories of Evolution
The new way of thinking about society brought a new perception of time. Various thinkers during the 19th century had a shot at explaining the differences and similarities between organisms in terms of an on-going evolution. These included Erasmus Darwin with Zoonomia (1794), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck with his Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (1801), and Robert Chambers in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). But it was Charles Darwin who formulated the concept of natural selection and described it in On the Origin of Species published in 1859. It was this concept – natural selection – that was taken up in academic circles, becoming the explanation for biological evolution, and this concept that ‘rocked the world’.
Hard-headed Debate not Conflict
In 1860 Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce confronted Thomas H. Huxley in a debate on evolution and Darwin’s book published seven months earlier. This debate gave rise to the notion today that the entire church opposed the new idea of evolution, an idea taken up by the first secular scientists led by Huxley. This is not the case.
It was not that Christians rejected the idea of evolution in the 19th century, and more that no one had heard of the idea before. It took some time for the public – the ones who actually care about intellectual things – to grasp the idea, and debate its meaning. (There is nothing unhealthy about putting forward different points of view). The church, apart from its religious ‘raison d’être’ has always been a debating forum throughout the ages, as it is today.
Theistic Evolution
Darwin died in 1882 and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey by the Anglican Church which by this time had embraced Theistic Evolution. They viewed evolution as an instrument used by God to bring about the diversity of life on Earth and the progressive perfection of human beings as the pinnacle of evolution. They saw God as actively guiding evolution towards his own purposes. This allows the theological questions concerning meaning to be held in conjunction with a new means of how it happened.
It is to be noted that for many 19th century evolutionists the starting points were basic archetype forms that represented the main body plans found among animals and plants. This was the view of Richard Owen. In the 20th century mention of archetypes was totally done away with.
Variations in Christian Belief
Christians of all the different churches adopted a number of different beliefs concerning creation and evolution ranging from literal belief in the Bible and Genesis to various ways of explaining things scientifically, to just ignoring the question.
Catholic Church priests and laity embraced the notion of biological evolution by the end of the 19th century without notable argument. The Vatican published an encyclical on evolution in 1950 entitled Humani generis with cautious acceptance of evolution as an explanation for the biological origins of human life, but with the caveat that Catholic faith obliges Catholics to believe that human souls are individually created by God at the moment of conception.
Goal-Driven Cosmic Evolution
A French Catholic priest, Pierre Teillard de Chardin (1881-1955) embodied the Catholic acceptance of evolution. He worked as a palaeontologist taking part in the discovery of the bones of Peking Man. He is known for a philosophical-theological work entitled Le Phenomene Humain (1941) in which he speculates that the whole of humanity will be drawn upwards to a higher level. Teillard describes a goal-driven evolution towards the emergence of complexity and consciousness that culminates in the point of supreme consciousness – the Omega point. It was banned by Rome, but is widely cited by lay Catholics. This work gave impetus to the New Age Movement of the 1960s onwards away from Christianity.
A concept that explains everything, in fact, explains nothing
Increasingly through the 20th century and now 21st century evolution has become the watch-word of our age. Maybe we are approaching our ‘omega point’ with regard to this concept. Everything that exists is said to have evolved into being the way it is. In fact, living things are said to have evolved themselves into existence.
When asked why things are the way they are, it sounds scientific to say ‘because they evolved that way.’ Even people who want to sell things add the word ‘evolution’ to their publicity. The big idea is used for everything. I won’t labour the point. I only wish to say that something that explains absolutely everything is usually found, in the end, to explain nothing. Use of the term must be defined.
6. Biological Evolution and the History of Life on Earth
Biological evolution consists of a slow, imperceptible change in living organisms over time lasting more than one individual’s lifetime. It is measured over the course of many generations in a biological lineage.
Adaptation and Speciation
It is driven by adaptation to a changing environment by the mechanism of natural selection. This involves selection of genes that have genetic variations produced by mutation in DNA. Some genes become more prevalent in a population over many generations because they confer traits that lead to adaptation. These genes are then said to be fixed in a population. Over time the accumulation of genetic differences between populations living in different regions or in different ecological niches within the same region amounts to speciation: new species arise in the course of evolutionary time.
Five Mass Extinctions on Earth
So what of the story of the Earth and life on Earth?
The fossil record gives testimony to a series of catastrophes that have occurred in the past. There have been five major catastrophes bringing about mass extinctions of life on Earth. At least one catastrophe was caused by something from space hitting the Earth. I believe that the other catastrophes also had causes linked to events in the solar system beyond the Earth itself.
The succession of ecosystems on Earth allowed increasingly complex organisms to inhabit planet Earth. New classes of plants and animals could only find a suitable habitat when the eco-conditions allowed for this. New types of organisms appear suddenly in the fossil record with new anatomical body plans and higher levels of complexity.
Adaptive Radiation
Once a new type has appeared, it is seen to diversify into a range of different but related species. This is called adaptive radiation. The driving force for this diversification of species is adaptation to different ecological niches within an environment, and migration to new environments. The adaptive radiation of classes of organisms has occurred over periods of time counted in hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
Human Evolution
The different types of mankind have also undergone adaptive radiation as they migrated into new environments around the world. The different prehistoric species of mankind show physical adaptation to the environment as animal species do. However, in the case of mankind, a succession of prehistoric cultures have also moulded the physique of humans. This demonstrates a human level of intelligence.
Fossil remains provide a geological record that shows the succession of the different types of organisms that have inhabited the Earth. They often demonstrate increasing complexity and diversity through time.
7. Molecular Clocks, Mutations and DNA
Living cells also carry the evolutionary history of their lineages written in their DNA sequences. DNA is changed by mutation. Through the 1990s scientists working in genetics or molecular biology started to map the genomes of humans, and certain animals and plants.
Mutation
Mutation in DNA occurs both in the coding parts of DNA such as in genes, and in the noncoding parts of DNA at a constant statistical rate. Genes themselves also contain noncoding parts called introns. Changes to the noncoding parts of DNA simply accumulate over time since they do not influence gene expression, nor do they affect the survival of the organism. These mutations are not eliminated by purifying selection so they accumulate over time.
A Branching Tree of Life
Neutral mutations to the noncoding parts of DNA allow the construction of phylogenetic trees and molecular clocks. It suffices to count the number of differences in DNA sequences between species belonging to different, but related genera, families, and classes in a lineage to construct a branching tree of accumulated differences. The branching of the tree represents the evolutionary relationship between species. The molecular clock gives a relative measure of time. Molecular clocks are calibrated by fossils of known date using radiometric dating.
Thus, biology provides its own clock due to the statistical occurrence of mutation in DNA over time. The construction of phylogenetic trees based on neutral mutation shows the evolutionary pathways of life on Earth; there are biological lineages of related organisms that can be represented as branches of a tree.
Conclusion
From technology sprang science, and science discovered the clues to deep time. Steam engines led to laws of thermodynamics and this expanded the vision of the universe. Geologists brought awareness of the record of time displayed in rock strata. Palaeontologists unearthed the expanse of prehistory counted in fossils millions of years old.
Evolution takes place through time. It requires deep time. Change happens slowly, but achieves much; it is only seen when you look back in time.
Isn’t it astounding that radioactive elements embody their own clock? Time is written into the Earth’s crust. Isn’t it even more astounding that living cells also contain their own clock? Molecular clocks recount the pathways of the evolution of life on Earth. ‘It’s part of our DNA.’ We carry our history in the cells of our bodies.
Time becomes something when you can measure it, and this is what science is about.
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Science Makes Sense Creationism 