@OmSigDAVID,
Quote:1. How old is the Earth ?
2. How did Man begin to inhabit the Earth ?
3. Where did Man come from ?
4. How old is Man ?
1. First off, all of the dating schemes which blowhards like F-man believe in are bullshit. Recently, lava samples from Mount St. Helens, i.e. which were known to be no more than 30 years old, were sent to laboratories which do the sort of stuff F-man believes in for dating; they were dated as between about 300,000 and a few million years of age.
Second, we actually do have one planet in our system, Venus, which appears to actually be ballpark for the sort of 6K - 10K year age which scholars used to derive from Bible chronologies. Venus LOOKS like a new planet: 900F surface temperature, 90-bar CO2 atmosphere in which a 5 mph wind would bowl you over the same way waves do at the beach, statistically random cratering, total lack of regolith, massive thermal imbalance etc. etc.
Since Earth and Mars do not look like that, you have to assume they are significantly older, but how much older is basically just guessing. My own version of such a guess would be between 200,000 and about 200M of our years, based on Robert Bass' thermal equations.
2 and 3. You have three choices:
- Man was created here, recently, and from scratch.
- Man was genetically re-engineered from one of the hominids, most likely the neanderthal.
- Man was brought here from elsewhere in the cosmos, most likely Mars if that were the case.
The idea of man evolving is not tenable. Aside from the fact that evolution has been proven to be a bunch of bullshit generally, there is the further problem that there is nothing on our planet from which modern man could have evolved. The neanderthal has been ruled out as a possible ancestor since the genetic gap is simply too wide, and all other hominids were further removed from us THAN the neanderthal. Neanderthal DNA is generally described as about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee. Hominids were glorified apes. Even the neanderthal's body was barrel-shaped like those of apes rather than having the general lines of modern humans.
4. As far as times goes, Gunnar Heinsohn puts the neanderthal dieout at a couple of thousand years prior to the flood, and I would not date modern man any further back than that. In that sense, the Bible is pretty close to being accurate.
What Heinsohn means is that the stratigraphy of the main European cave systems in which neanderthal remains are found has been totally misinterpreted, and that there is no actual physical evidence which can be properly interpreted as suggesting an earlier dieout time for neanderthals than a few thousand years.
