As a christian, I find the “survival of the fittest” doctrine of evolution—that might makes right—to be the very opposite of the teachings of Christ. As a scientist, I find the evolutionary position to be unsound and self-contradictory.
The presumed evolutionary process requires extremely long ages. But it takes only one proof of a young age to refute completely the evolutionary hypothesis. Based on reasonable postulates, a great scope of observable data, and the fundamental laws of physics, there are several factors proving the earth, the moon, and the sun are too young for the presumed evolution to have taken place.
1. Receding moon. There is an easily understood physical proof that the moon is too young for its presumed evolutionary age. According to the laws of physics, the moon should be receding from the earth. These same laws show that the moon could never survive a nearness to the earth of less than 11,500 miles, a distance known as the Roche limit. Inside that limit, the tidal forces of our planet would break up a satellite of the moon’s dimensions into smaller pieces, resulting in something similar to the rings of Saturn. Therefore, the receding moon could never have been that close to the earth.
The physical reason for the moon’s recession from the earth relates to the friction of earth’s oceanic tides generated by the gravitational pull of the moon. The net result is that the earth’s spin rate is gradually slowing, and the days are getting slightly longer. Angular momentum is transferred from the earth to the moon, causing the moon to move slowly away from the earth.
If one multiplies the present recession speed of the moon by the presumed evolutionary age, the result would place the moon farther away from the earth than it presently is, even if one assumes that it started from within the Roche limit. Theoretically, the recession rate of the moon would be much faster if the moon were nearer the earth, and this “nonlinear effect” upon the recession rate would make the moon even farther away than the above prediction. Thus, the moon could not have been receding for the entire age demanded by the doctrine of evolution. There is as yet no tenable explanation that will yield the evolutionary age of four billion years or more for the moon. This is as simple a proof as science can provide that the moon is not as old as some claim.
This known dynamic limit in the earth-moon system is a great problem to knowledgeable evolutionists. How can they reconcile this proof of the moon’s young age to the theory of evolution? In his Introduction to Space Science (John Wiley, 1971), Robert C. Haymes acknowledges the problem and states that “the whole subject of the origin of the moon must be regarded as highly speculative.” Louis B. Slichter, professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, treated this problem extensively in the Journal of Geophysical Research (1964, Vol. 8, No. 14). He concluded that “the time scale of the earth-moon system still presents a major problem.”
2. Shape of the earth. Lord Kelvin used the earth’s slowing spin rate to prove that the earth could not be a billion years old. His proof: a billion years ago the earth would have been spinning twice as fast. If the earth were initially molten, the centrifugal force of such a high spin rate would have caused an extremely large bulge around the equator. Slow spin reduction and fast surface cooling would then have solidified that bulge into a high continent that encircled the equator. There is, of course, no trace of such a bulge.
3. Lunar dust depth. One prelunar landing prediction made by evolutionary scientists caused the astronauts great concern. Due to a presumed 4.5-billion-year age of the moon, the rate of influx of dust, and the lunar physical processes of rock break-up, scientists thought the astronauts might sink into a great depth of dust on the moon. Fortunately, the astronauts were not lost in the lunar “quicksand” of age-accumulated dust predicted by evolution. Instead, the creationists’ predictions of only a thin layer of dust—based on a young age for the moon—were correct.
The false prediction from evolutionary scientists lends support to the contention that the doctrine of evolution is a barrier to progress in science.
4. Radiometric evidence of rapid creation. Robert V. Gentry has discovered radiometric evidence that the basement rock of the earth was formed originally in a cool, not a molten, state, giving support to a young age for the earth (see Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Vol. 23). His research, done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, involves the study of the pleochroic halos (colored spheres) produced by the radioactive decay of Polonium-218. He analyzed over 100,000 of these halos in granitic rocks taken from all parts of the world at considerable depths below land surface.
Two important conclusions were drawn from this research: (1) the Polonium-218 was primordial—that is, this radioactive element was in the original granite; (2) because the halos can only be formed in the crystals of the granite, and the Polonium-218 half-life is only three minutes, the granite had to be cool and crystallized originally. The Polonium-218 would have decayed long before molten granite could cool.
Gentry concluded: “The simple evidence of the halos is that the basement rocks of the earth were formed solid.… Halos in other minerals can be shown to give equally startling evidence of a young earth.” This presents problems to conventional radiometric dating that would not agree with this initial state identified by Gentry.
5. Magnetic evidence of a young earth. Perhaps the best evidence for a very young age for the earth is the surprisingly fast rate of decay of the earth’s main magnetic field. According to Sidney Chapman in The Earth’s Magnetism (London, John Wiley), “When the great scale of the phenomenon is considered, this must seem a remarkably large and rapid secular change, not paralleled for any other worldwide geophysical property. If one extrapolates the decay rate backwards in time, it becomes clear that the process of decay could not have been going on for more than a few thousand years, otherwise the original magnetic field would have been implausibly large.
This decay of the magnetic field has been documented by an immense amount of data and data reduction ever since Karl Gauss made the first evaluation in 1835. The state of the earth’s magnet (its strength and direction) is scientifically specified by a single vector quantity called the magnetic moment. It was that quantity that Gauss and subsequent scientists evaluated. A Department of Commerce publication (McDonald & Gunst, “An Analysis of the Earth’s Magnetic Field,” 1967) lists the evaluations from 1835 to 1965, and calculates the rate of decrease to be about 5 percent per hundred years. It then states that if that rate of decay continues, the magnetic field will “vanish in A.D. 3991.”
This decay has some harmful environmental effects. The earth’s magnetic field extends into the space around the earth and forms a protective shield against cosmic rays and solar winds. The half-life of this decaying magnetic field is 1,400 years (meaning that every 1,400 years its strength is cut in half), and at present is only about one-third as strong as it was at the time of Christ. More harmful radiation is penetrating this shield as it becomes diminished.
This decay was predicted by Sir Horace Lamb in 1883. He developed, with the aid of James Clerk Maxwell’s powerful equations, a theoretically sound explanation of the source of the earth’s magnetic field. According to his theory, the earth’s magnet is an electromagnet charged by enormous electric current flowing in a circular path in the core of the earth. There is no source of energy other than that original magnetic energy. Since its beginning at creation, it has been decaying and will gradually run out of energy.
One technical article, “The Earth’s Magnetic Field,” by J. A. Jacobs (Mining Geophysics, 2:426), acknowledged the soundness of Lamb’s physics but rejected his theory solely because it gave an age of only a few thousand years. The article stated that the earth is “known” to be at least 4.5 billion years old. However, the article did not mention the decay that confirms Lamb’s prediction. It did acknowledge that there were real problems with the “dynamo” theories held by some evolutionary geologists.
This dynamo mechanism, which has been proposed to generate and sustain the earth’s magnet, is based on a reversal theory. The theory assumes that the magnet has not been decaying continuously, but for some unknown reason has oscillated back and forth for billions of years. To concede that this decaying magnet has not been reversing would sound the death knell for the whole theory of evolution. Evolutionists’ only hope is to “read” reversal phenomena into the magnetization of accessible rocks in the crust of the earth. There is, however, ample evidence in scientific literature to show real problems and some self-contradictions in those interpretations.
At present there is no known reversal mechanism, nor is there any known source of energy to reenergize the magnet when its energy gets down to zero. One can safely say there is no theoretical reason at present to consider anything other than a single continuing decay process that started in the not-too-distant past—a creation only thousands of years ago. The age limit of the earth’s magnet would be something on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 years, depending on the postulated initial strength of the magnet.
6. Shrinking sun. A recent development in astrophysics has restored to importance an old theory of the source of the sun’s energy—almost as if it were a reminder from Ecclesiastes: “There is no new thing under the sun.” In the 1850s, Hermann von Helmholtz proposed that the cause of the sun’s shrinking was its strong gravitational force (i.e., its own weight acting on itself). Evolutionists rejected this theory because it would mean the maximum possible age of the sun would be 10 million years.
In this nuclear age, the dominant theory concerning the source of the sun’s energy has been an internal nuclear fusion process somewhat like a hydrogen bomb. That theory has had some severe reverses in recent years. Very elaborate experiments have failed to detect the number of particles (neutrinos) predicted to be emitted by the sun, leaving theoreticians scrambling at a hectic pace to repair the theory.
In 1979, astronomer John A. Eddy and mathematician Aram A. Boomazian shocked the world of science with the following scientific conclusions: “The sun has been shrinking for a hundred years and perhaps as long as 400 years.… The implication is that the sun, and presumably other stars, could now be deriving a significant part of their energy from gravitational contraction” (Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, “Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter,” 1979, 11:437).
The rate at which the sun shrinks is five feet per hour, and some have interpreted this to account for most of the sun’s energy output (see Russell Abridge, The Sun is Shrinking, Impact No. 82, ICR, 1980). This puts an upper limit on the age of the sun at approximately 10 million years. Of course, there is nothing to refute even an age of a few thousand years. In any event, this shrinking sun appears to give strong evidence that the sun is much too young for the presumed evolution to have taken place.
It also casts equal doubt on the theory of nuclear fusion as the energy source for stars, which would reduce the age limit for stars to much below the requirements of the evolutionary hypothesis.
One must conclude that the presumed evolutionary processes would require extremely long ages for the emergence of the world as we see it today. As pointed out at the outset, it requires only one proof of a younger age to refute completely the evolutionary hypothesis. The age is too young when the laws of physics are applied to observed, large-scale phenomena.
Thomas G. Barnes is dean of the graduate school, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, California. He is the author of Origin and Destiny of the Earth’s Magnetic Field (Inst. for Creation Research, 1973).
