Chapter 5:
The Problem of Time
Why Long Ages cannot Produce Evolutionary Change
This chapter is based on pp. 181-183 and 210 of Origin of the Universe (Volume One of our three-volume Evolution Disproved Series). You will find additional information on our website: evolutionfacts.com.
In the next chapter, we will discuss the inaccuracy of many current methods for dating ancient materials and objects. Although an understanding of dating technology is important, we should keep in mind that the accuracy of modern dating techniques really have no direct relation to whether evolution has ever occurred or could occur.
Long ages are not evolution; long ages cannot produce evolution! Evolution can only occur by a sequence of production of matter from nothing (chapter 2), generation of living organisms from non-living matter (chapters 7-8), and evolution of living organisms into more advanced life forms by natural selection or mutations (chapters 9-10, 12-13). —And, even given trillions of years in which to do it, evolution cannot do any of that.
MAGICAL TIME—It is thought that time can somehow produce evolution, if there is enough time in which to do it! The evolutionist tells us that, given enough time, all the insurmountable obstacles to spontaneous generation will somehow vanish and life can suddenly appear, grow, and flourish.
"The origin of life can be viewed properly only in the perspective of an almost inconceivable extent of time."— *Harold Blum, Time’s Arrow and Evolution, p. 151.
In later chapters, we will learn that even split-second, continuous, multiple chemical activity (going on for ages) and using all time and all space in the universe to carry on that activity could not accomplish what is needed. It could not produce life out of nothing.
"It is no secret that evolutionists worship at the shrine of time. There is little difference between the evolutionist saying ‘time did it’ and the Creationist saying ‘God did it.’ Time and chance is a two-headed deity. Much scientific effort has been expended in an attempt to show that eons of time are available for evolution."—Randy Wysong, The Creation-Evolution Controversy (1976), p. 137.
Just what is time? It is not some magical substance. Time is merely a lot of past moments just like the present moment. Imagine yourself staring at a dirt pile or at some seawater, at a time when there was nothing alive in the world but you. Continue carefully watching the pile or puddle for a thousand years and more. Would life appear in that dirt or seawater? It would not happen. Millions of years beyond that would be the same. Nothing would be particularly different. Just piled sand or sloshing seawater, and that is all there would be to it.
You and I know it would not happen in a full year of watching; then why think it might happen in a million years? Since a living creature would have to come into existence all at once—suddenly, in all its parts—in order to survive, it matters not how many ages we pile onto the watching; nothing is going to happen!
To say that life originated in that seawater in some yesteryear—"because the sand and seawater was there long enough"—is just wishful thinking and nothing more. It surely is not scientific to imagine that perhaps it came true when no one was looking. There is no evidence that self-originating life or evolving life is happening now, has ever happened, or could ever happen.
THE MORE TIME, THE LESS LIKELIHOOD—*G. Wald, in "The Origin of Life," in the book, Physics and Chemistry of Life, says "Does time perform miracles?" He then explains something that you and I will want to remember: If the probability of a certain event occurring is only 1/1000 (one chance in a thousand), and we have sufficient time to repeat the attempts many times, the probability that it could happen would continue to remain only one in a thousand. This is because probabilities have no memory!
But *Wald goes further. He explains that if the event is attempted often enough,—the total probability of obtaining it would keep reducing! If it is tried a thousand times and does not even occur once, and then it is tried thousands of more times and never occurs,—then the chance of it occurring keeps reducing. If it is tried a million times—and still has not occurred,—then the possibility of it occurring has reduced to less than one chance in a million! The point here is that time never works in favor of an event that cannot happen!
Can time change rocks into raccoons, seawater into turkeys, or sand into fish? Can time invent human hormones, the telescopic eye of an eagle, or cause the moon to orbit the earth? Can it increase complexity and invent organisms?
The truth is that the longer the time, the greater the decay, and the less possibility that evolution could occur.
*Bernal, of McGill University, explains the evolutionists’ theory of how the origin and evolution of life took place:
"Life can be thought of as water kept at the right temperature in the right atmosphere in the right light for a long period of time."—*J.O. Bernal, quoted in *N.J. Bernal, You and the Universe (1958), p. 117.
In contrast, two of England’s leading evolutionist scientists, *Hoyle and *Wickramasinghe, working independently of each other, came to a different conclusion than *Bernal’s: The chance of life appearing spontaneously from non-life in the universe is effectively zero! (*Fred Hoyle and *C. Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space). One of these researchers is an agnostic and the other a Buddhist; yet both decided from their analyses that the origin of life demands the existence of God to have created it.
The London Daily Express (August 14, 1981) put the conclusion of these two scientists into headlines: "Two skeptical scientists put their heads together and reached an amazing conclusion: There must be a God." *Hoyle and *Wickramasinghe concluded in their book that the probability of producing life, anywhere in the universe from evolutionary processes, was as reasonable as getting a fully operational Boeing 747 jumbo jet from a tornado going through a junkyard (*Fred Hoyle, Science, November 12, 1981, p. 105). The co-discoverer of the DNA molecule said this:
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."—*Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981), p. 88.
REAL TIME VS. THEORY TIME—A lot of this "millions of years" talk does not agree with the facts. Evolutionist scientists tell us that the past stretches into over a billion years of life on the earth. Man, we are informed, has been here over a million years. That is the theory, yet the facts speak far differently. When we look at those facts, as available from ancient studies of all types, we find that recorded history goes back only several thousand years. Before that time, we have absolutely no verification for any supposed dating method of science. (More evidence on this will be found in chapters 4 and 13, Age of the Earth and Ancient Man.)
If human beings have been on this planet for over a million years, as theorized by evolutionists, then we should have a large amount of structures and written records extending back at least 500,000 years.
FLAWED DATING METHODS—Evolutionists try to prove long ages of time by certain theoretical dating methods. Yet as we analyze those dating methods, we find each of them to be highly flawed and extremely unreliable.
Aside from the known inherent weaknesses in assumption and methodology (which we shall begin discussing shortly),—we cannot even verify those dates objectively. Not even uranium dating can be confirmed.
Apart from recorded history, which goes back no further than a few thousand years, we have no way of verifying the supposed accuracy of theoretical dating methods. In fact, not even the dating methods confirm the dating methods! They all give different dates! With but very rare exception, they always disagree with one another!
There are a number of very definite problems in those dating methods. In the next chapter, we are going to learn that there are so many sources of possible error or misinterpretation in radiometric dating that most of the dates are discarded and never used at all! Only those are used which bear some similarity to one another—and, more important, to the 19th-century theory.
Some people think that the various dating methods (uranium, carbon 14, etc.) can be verified by rock strata and fossils, or vice versa. But this is not true either. The geologic column and approximate ages of all the fossil-bearing strata were decided on long before anyone ever heard or thought about radioactive dating. There is no relation between the two theories or between the dates they produce. More information on this will be given in chapter 12, Fossils and strata.
LONG AGES NEEDED—For nearly two centuries, evolutionists have known that, since there was no proof that evolution had occurred in the past and there was no evidence of it occurring today, they would need to postulate long ages as the means by which it somehow happened!
*Weisz in his book, The Science of Biology (p. 636), tells us that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, evolutionists "recognized that any concept of evolution demanded an earth of sufficiently great age; and they set out to estimate this age." The long ages were the result of wishful thinking.
*Darwin himself recognized the problem.
"The belief that species are immutable [unchangeable] productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration."—*Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species (conclusion to second edition).
That is a meaningful statement. *Darwin said it, because there is no evidence of evolution occurring at any time in recorded history. Evolution could not occur in the past unless the earth had been here for long ages. Yet there is clear-cut evidence that our planet is not over 6000-10,000 years old (see chapter 4, Age of the Earth). And when all the facts are studied, the age of the earth leans more toward the 6000 mark than the 10,000 mark.
Scientific dating evidence is needed to prove long ages. But no such evidence exists. All the non-historical dating methods are unreliable. That is what we will learn in the chapters on Inaccurate Dating Methods and Fossils and Strata.
Darwinists claim that our planet is 5 billion years old. Long ages of time are desperately needed by evolutionist theorists; for, whenever confronted with the facts disproving the possibility of evolutionary processes, they can reply, "Well, given enough time, maybe it could occur." Ironically, even if the earth were trillions upon trillions of years old, evolution still could not have taken place.
The chapters, DNA and Protein, Mutations, and Laws of Nature will clearly show that life origins and species evolution could not occur in a billion trillion trillion years!
First, long ages of time cannot PROVE evolution; and, second, long ages of time cannot PRODUCE evolution. Evolutionary processes—across basic types of life forms—is impossible both in the short run and in the long run.
CHAPTER 5 - STUDY AND REVIEW QUESTIONS
THE PROBLEM OF TIME
GRADES 5 TO 12 ON A GRADUATED SCALE
1 - Evolutionists consider time to have miraculous qualities. Can long ages of time produce an event which cannot happen? This is a good topic for class discussion.
2 - Hoyle said that evolution of life is as probable as a tornado in a junkyard producing a fully operational Boeing 747. Estimate the number of ages of time it would require for a continual succession of tornadoes to put that plane together into working condition.
3 - What does *Wald mean, when he says that the more time, the less likely that evolution could take place?
4 - If an impossible event (like dirty water changing into an animal, or a fish crawling out of water and changing into a frog) cannot happen in a year, why should we expect it to be able to happen at some time in the past million years? Would not such an event still have to happen in the lifetime of a single creature? During that creature’s lifetime, could he make all his organs, find a mate like himself, and produce offspring?
5 - In your opinion, is evolutionary theory based on scientific facts or on a fairy tale?