We have abundant scientific evidence indicating an Earth much older than 10,000 years. Deposits of wind-blown silt in China give a continuous climate record for a few million years. The record is consistent with habitat type inferred from fossils. Sediment layers are seasonal because we see the same sorts of layers occurring today. Some formations have millions of layers. They must have taken many thousands of years to form.
Dates obtained by counting annual layers match dates obtained from radiometric dating. Radiometric dating shows the Earth to be 4.5 billion years old. Assuming the Earth is old, radioactive isotopes with short half-lives should have all decayed already. That is what we find. Isotopes with half-lives longer than 80 million years are found on Earth; isotopes with shorter half-lives are not.
The abundance and distribution of helium change predictably as the sun ages, converting hydrogen to helium in its core. These also affect how sound waves travel through the sun. We can estimate the sun's age from seismic solar data. This analysis places the sun's age at 4.66 billion years. This is taken from some good references regarding the age of the Earth:
G. Brent Dalrymple, "The Age of the Earth."
Arthur N. Strahler, "Science and Earth History."
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Davis A. Young, "Christianity and the Age of the Earth."
It was Augustine's position on Scripture not to take every passage literally, particularly when the Scripture in question is a book of poetry and songs.
To read Scripture and interpret it figuratively, or to take it in the context of the time in which the writers worked should not be taken as a rejection of the content. We were given the intelligence and the inquisitiveness to ask these questions, not to sit in the dark. We shouldn't be hurt when we learn the answers.
Paul A. Vossen
Spicer
