e, in geology, a variety of techniques are used to argue against a 6,000 years age for the earth. From carbon-14 dating, to other forms of radioisotope dating, to ice core formation, to the rates of erosion, geologists see many lines of evidence inconsistent with the biblical view.
However, in order to make their millions-of-years math work, evolutionists have to assume constant rates of change. In carbon-14 dating, they have to assume that the rate of carbon-14 decay has been largely constant.6 When dating ice cores, they have to assume a roughly constant rate of ice layer formation. Erosion rates must be assumed to be constant with time for the argument against the Scriptures to hold any water.
Yet in the field of genetics, constant rates of change produce the opposite result—a tremendously strong argument for the recent origin of species, which, by implication, argues for a recent origin of the earth. How will the evolutionists deal with this conundrum?
For several reasons, invoking changing rates in genetics will not work. First, in light of the evolutionists’ historical rebuttals to young-earth creation geology, changing rates in genetics would be hypocritical. For years, young-earth creationists have argued for variable rates in geology, especially in light of the global Flood that was recorded in Genesis 6–8.7 In response, evolutionists have simply asserted that a global Flood—that changing rates—must simply not be invoked. It would be inconsistent to now suddenly permit changing rates to be arbitrarily invoked in a different field of science.
Second, under the evolutionary timescale, the required rates of genetic change are so low that they amount to a biological miracle.8 Since evolutionists forbid miracles from biological explanations, variable rates of genetic change are a nonstarter.
Despite the rigorous challenge that these data present to the evolutionary model, these two arguments for the recent origin of species leave an element of the young-earth model dangling—they still do not answer the question of how species originated.
But they do hold a tantalizing clue.