The earth is about 3.5 billion years old, based on a convergence of scientific data, including the strontium-rubidium ratios in rocks and the presence or absence of the known radioactive nuclides in our solar system.
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Truth is an intercalated whole. The revealed truths of Orthodox Christianity are entirely consistent with the truths of science. Unfortunately, some Christians--including Fundamentalist Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Christians-- have made scientific claims about the physical universe, based upon inaccurate interpretations of scripture, which are false. St. Augustine noted that it is important for people in the Church to refrain from making false asertions about matters of science, which could, ultimately, scandalize the faithful if shown to be false. Such was the case with Copernicus, Galileo, and the Papacy. A similar phenomenon is occurring today, involving people who argue that traditional Christian beliefs and modern science--astrophysics and Darwinian evolutionary theory-- are in conflict.
The most profound solution to some of this apparent conflict comes from the theory of relativity, which posits that time passes as different rates as a function of the velocity and acceleration of a matter. The MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder has shown that, when time is measured from the point at which the Big Bang occurred, approximately six 24 hour "days" have lapsed during the 15 billion year history of the universe, when time is measured from the perspective of the planet earth. Hence, the six "days" of Biblical creation from "God's" perspective have actually lasted 15 billion years, consistent with modern scientific data on the subject.
Unfortunately, the implications of Schroeder's findings have not been fully understood or appreciated by many modern Christian authors and clerics in the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Churches, who continue to insist that their "Fundamentalist," earth-time interpretations of the mystical text of [i]Genesis[/i] are correct. Much of this misguided thinking has been fostered by the pseudo-scientific "New Earth Creationist" Institute of the Protestant Fundamentalist Henry Morris. This is the same group that argues that the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era of earth's history perished in the neolithic Flood a few thousand years ago!
