The Young Earth Myth

This is one of those topics that is important to me. Primarily, I imagine, because I used to accept it quiet readily.

This is the issue of Young Earth Creationism.

The other night I was watching an episode of NOVA, they were addressing the issue of the Sphinx and its origins. One of the most interesting elements to me was that the great sphinx was not made of bricks carted in like they imagine was the case for the nearby pyramids. It had a much cooler sculpting process...

The ground is in the area is made up of many, many layers of limestone. This limestone was formed when the land of Egypt was completely underwater and the decaying animal carcasses formed the separate limestone layers over a tremendous amount of time. The water over Egypt eventually went away, these layers dried out, the Egyptians built some stuff and eventually the sphinx, which they carved directly out of the limestone. That's right. In an age with no advanced tools, just rocks and sticks basically, they were able to pound, chisel and scrape out an amazing work of art. It likely took thousands of man hours just pounding away at this big piece of rock while some arrogant Egyptian, most likely with a French accent, looked out over his outstretched thumb and muttered something about how lime made for an unruly canvas.

That gate doesn't keep anyone out.

Even now if you look at pictures of the Sphinx you can see these layers of limestone. Even more interesting is that if you follow the layers imaginary line into the adjacent walls, then you can see that the layers line up exactly. A feat that would be incredible difficult to manufacture and something that the even the notoriously, extravagant Egyptian architects couldn't be bothered to do.

Now, this is a Young Earth/Old Earth issue because Egypt hasn't been underwater in the last 10,000 years, (a figure often designated as the age of the Earth by the YEC crowd) At least not that they were aware of and that's the kind of thing that's hard to miss even if you see the world in strange picture form.

Proof.

In fact, that particular part of Giza hasn't been under the ocean for millions of years. The lime sediments date back to the Eocene period which was anywhere from 56 to 34 million years ago. It takes many more than ten thousand years to create solid layers like this, they have to be wet, house life, let the life die and compress on the ocean floor, then have all the ocean water go away and then wait all those millions of years for the fossil record to catch up and then have some people build the sphinx some 4,000 years ago.

Not Egypt. (Present Day)

The evidence is clear, the idea of an Earth created with age has no basis in fact, but it just a wild guess to explain why the facts don't match the faith. Perhaps the most annoying thing about such a theory is that there is no reason a belief in God must contradict the theory of evolution. The only thing that gets in the way is the assumption that this really old book must be literally true in every respect, and thus nature must be wrong. Sorry Sphinxy, you're younger than you thought.