Im not talking about science blah blah, im talking about biblically, how old is our world. I believe it states in the bible that (?giants, monsters, beats, dragons?) once roamed the earth. A guy told me that he thought that biblically the world was 6000 years old. What do you guys think.

Depending on how you interpret the Bible and do the calculations, the age of the Earth is usually taken to be between 6000 and 12000 years old. However, thats only according to the Bible, using a literal interpretation. The actual age of the Earth is considered to be about 4.5 billion years.

The bible never says, and most likely dragons and mosters were symbolic or poetic.

As dan said, you can attempt to calculate an age by using geneologies. That gets quite hairy but gets you 6000-12000 years.

^They might represent something sometimes, Beta, but imagine when people were digging up dinosaur bones and they had thought nothing ever goes extinct. They'd translate the bones of the ancients to the bones of the present and lo and behold: monsters...

Yea, Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher was the first to date it using genealogies. Didn't he date creation at 4004 BC.

I agree. Hell, if I found a Blue whale skeleton and had never seen one before I might call it a demon sea monster

But when it comes to the bible, it takes effort to turn some of those monster descriptions into dinosaurs.

i know that supposedly carbon-14 dating is used to tell how old the bones and stuff are, but is it possible that carbon-14's emission of particles at an exactly half at a certain amount of time could be flawed?

C-14 isn't used to date the earth.

Not sure what you are asking but if you are asking if C-14's halflife could change over time the short answer is no. isotopic half lifes are a pretty solid thing.

Carbon 14 is only good for a certain time, and is not the most accurate of dating techniques - it can only go up to 50,000 years or so. However there are techniques such as potassium-argon and argon-argon dating which can date materials better.

so is chemistry disproving the whole 6000 year thing?

quote:Originally posted by lacrimachemist:

so is chemistry disproving the whole 6000 year thing?

i hope you aren't serious

it's well-established scientific fact that the earth is somewhere near 4.5 million years old, not 6000, it's just that radical christians don't believe in carbon dating...or science...or logic...

It's not exactly chemistry. More like nuclear physics.

And yes, geology, radiometric dating, astronomy, etc. All have ruled out the earth being 6000 years old. Matter of fact the idea the earth is 6000 years old has been falsified by science for over 100 years now.

quote:Originally posted by crazygoatemonky:

i hope you aren't serious

it's well-established scientific fact that the earth is somewhere near 4.5 million years old, not 6000, it's just that radical christians don't believe in carbon dating...or science...or logic...

you meant 4.5 billion years old.

there are geological records of earthquakes and basalt floods (a low viscosity, low explosive, extremely high volume eruption of basalt, dumps tons of material which spread out and get into the air, causes massive atmospheric changes) that happened 265 (somewhere around there) million years ago, and one around 65 million years ago. the earth is very, very old in human terms.

the bible is a book, and it can't be taken literally. depending on which translation you read, you'll get a different message. so please, don't take it as a method to date how old the earth is. like another poster said, the 6000 year thing has been disproven for over 100 years.

About what someone said above...

Ancient people often found fossils

of then-extinct animals, and then

thought they were monsters, etc.

In medievil times, people found

20-foot cavebear (extinct for 10,000

years)skeletons in caves, and thought

they were dragons. They marked them

on their maps "here be dragons".

People still stumble across fossils

that have been uncovered by floods

or landslides. In bible times they

had no knowledge of natural history,

so they thought such things still lived.