Does a 4.5 Billion Year Old Earth Prove Evolution is True?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

No, even though I often hear Christians talk as if it does.  Many believe that if you interpret the “days” in Genesis to be long periods of time and you accept the current scientific consensus that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, then you are “siding” with evolution.

The ironic thing is that when scientific evidence started showing that the universe is only billions of years old and not infinite, some bemoaned the fact that there just wasn’t enough time for the Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection to work.  They had been assuming a practically infinite amount of time.  Billions of years was not a boon to evolution; it was a serious problem!

In fact, one of the greatest challenges for Darwinian evolution in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion, where over 95% of known animal phyla suddenly appeared over a period of 5 to 10 million years.   According to the fossil record, evolution had to work in an extremely short period of time for these animal phyla to appear, so the situation is even worse than billions of years – they have to deal with only millions of years!

Bottom line: whether it is thousands of years, millions of years, or billions of years, it doesn’t matter.  The random process of Darwinian evolution needs far more time to manufacture the biological complexity and diversity we see on earth.  Whether evolution is true or not has little to do with the age of the earth being 4.5 billion years.

When thinking about creation, learn to decouple evolution from the age of the earth.  They are two completely separate issues that need not be considered together.  It absolutely does not follow that a 4.5 billion year old earth or 13.8 billion year old universe lead inexorably to the truth of Darwinian evolution.