Upvote:0
I'm not sure what you are asking, but I will attempt to clear some doubt here. Most people who take the creation account as historical believe that the Earth is 6000-7000 years old.
From a scientific point of view, you can use half-lives to tell how old things are. However, to have a starting point, assumptions must be made. For example, in physics, you can scientifically tell where a ball is going to land, but you must make some assumptions, about some external factors (that you do not know) that might change the course of the ball, such as air or physical interference. In the same way, assumptions must be made in dating techniques.
Carbon-14 dating, is a technique used to find how old organic material, a living thing, is. For Carbon-14 dating, the assumption that the amount of it has always been constant, which is not necessarily true, must be made. Experiments by Dr. Willard Libby, founder of the Carbon Dating method, found this to be untrue.
What the Bible says stands. The Bible is not there to explain certain scientific experiments that, as revolutionary as they may be, could be based on erroneous assumptions. Time and time again, scientific 'fact' has been proven incorrect, more recently absolute zero. The Bible has never been proved wrong, and it is my firm belief that it never will, for it is the Word of God.
For more information, read these articles:
Upvote:2
Your question is based on a twenty four hour day. The 24 hour day is based on the rotation of the Earth in relation to the sun which did not happen until Genesis 1:5:
Gen 1:3 through 5
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And so verses 1 and 2 even though they may have been 24 hours long since time began at Genesis 1:1. We cannot say with certainty that it was.
What we can say with certainty is that Man was created on the sixth day.
Gen 1:26 through 31
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
It is also worth noting that Genesis 1:5 says that the evening and the morning were the first day, however we do not know if the evening began at verse 1 or verse 4.
No one but God can definitively answer your question.
However if you are interested you might like to watch;
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1KMd-5MVF_E]
Upvote:5
The Catholic Church accepts the scientific understanding that our planet is older than 7,000 years.
Could an omnipotent God create the world according to our 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, Gregorian measured snipets of time? Yes, absolutely!
Did he choose to do it that way? No.
It is ultimately necessary for Catholics and/or like minded Christians, who trust Sacred Scripture to keep in mind that:
The Bible is a collection of different types of literature...none of which are to be considered 100% scientific.
The Bible is not given to humanity to explain how the universe came into existence, but why.
Pope Pius XII warned us,
"What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East" (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35β36).
It should be stated that although "Theistic evolutionism" is the official position of the Catholic church, Catholics are technically not obligated or required to hold this idea.
Concerning the doctrine on creation, Ludwig Ott in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma identifies the following points as essential beliefs of the Catholic faith ("De Fide"):
The Catholic Church makes it clear that salvation is not determined by knowledge, but by love. The bottom line is that the created world was made to glorify God.