Here I am, back from the chasm of silence...
Here is one source on my reason for thinking the earth may only be thousands of years old:
www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/could-god-have-created-in-six-daysLook at the section titled 'The "Days" of Genesis 1'. It explores the possibility of the six days of creation being, literally, six 24-hour periods due to the original meaning of the Hebrew word 'day' used in Genesis. If that pans out and you start following Adam's/Eve's and Cain's lineages throughout the Bible, I think the possibility of thousands makes sense (as they would have been created days after the start of creation).
How, then, do you explain fossils, radiometric dating, and all the other methods that are commonly used that show the earth as much, much older?
Well... let's start here, shall we?
First of all... fossils don't tell us crap-all. Fossils basically identify what layer we are in. For example, if you find a velociraptor, you're in the triassic period of the cenezoic era, but if you find a primitive trilobite fossil, you're in Cambrian sediment or even late pre-Cambrian. Other than that... fossils really don't do much for us.
Radiometric dating is the key issue, but I do have a few issues with it, myself, and the main reason has been mentioned repeatedly in this thread, although in relation to something else: circular reasoning.
Do you (and by "you" I'm not aiming at just Ferd) know how they determine
which radioisotope to use when performing a radioactive dating? Someone mentioned Carbon 14 earlier, but it is only
one radioisotope, which some recent research shows is actually pretty unreliable as a dating method beyond it's own half-life of some 5730 years, although I don't think anyone would stretch it too far beyond 60,000 years, anyways.
To date different ages you must use different radioisotopes... zircon if you need to measure billions of years, but c14 if you need to measure only a few thousand.
The strange thing is this: you can take the
same rock and date it using a few different methods, and, as one would expect, you would get a few different answers. Say a Uranium-Thorium method, radiocarbon method and a Samarium-neodymium method are all used on a piece of rock I dig up in my backyard. I will actually get three results that are within the parameters of each different method... my rock turns out to be 200,000 years old according to the Uranium-Thorium method, 37,000 years old according to the Smarium-Neodymium method, and 9400 years old according to the radiocarbon dating method. We are then left with three drastically different ages: how do we know which one is the most accurate?
Because, we have presupposed the approxiamate age of the sample. If there was a volcano in my backyard 10,000 years ago, we guess the rock came from it, so we use the radiocarbon method. However... upon further consideration, my rock I found probably was formed closer to the formation of the earth, so we should have actually used a better comparison, say zircon using the uranium-lead method.
In order to get an accurate age, you must already know the approximate age of your sample. And how do you know it's approximate age? You look at what is
in it! Does it have trilobites? Carbon 14 will tell you it's 60,000 years old. I mean... trilobytes were supposed to live, what, 500,000,000 years ago?
It seems like circular reasoning, to me. You need the layer of rock to tell you how old your fossil is, but you need your fossil to tell you what layer of rock you are in. Obviously, the composition of rock layers comes into primary consideration, as well... but the geologic column doesn't actualy exist anywhere but in textbooks. When you have hundreds of millions of years missing, mixed, or even reversed in order all over the earth... I don't think it holds much salt.
Eh, I know there are other related dating methods... but they suffer the same fate, it seems.
Did Satan put them there to tempt us to not believe in God? Or was God just being deliberately deceitful when He orchestrated the universe so that we can look at the stars that are millions of light years away, or perhaps the cosmic microwave background radiation that is 14 billion light years away, and say "Hey, this is only a few thousand years old!"
Could it be the fact that as we look further away from the Earth in distance, we also see a regression in development in the universe that extends for billions of light years?
If God created the universe, if all the evidence points to the universe being billions of years old (and the world itself being billions of years old), and God expects us to just deny everything that we see and say "Nope, it's all just a lie", doesn't that sound somewhat malevolent of Him?
Ahh, but who says it's a lie?
I mean... think about it. Men have always known the earth is round, and yet, for quite a while, there, some believed and staked (literally) the life of others based on the belief that it was flat. We see what we want to see. We look at the universe and think "man, that took billions of years for that galaxy's black-hole nucleus to reshape it as it collided with that other galaxy" or we can think "oh man, God knew I would see that today and stuck it there a few thousand years ago just for me." It doesn't matter tha much how old the earth is.
Anyways... I don't think it can be proven the age of the earth, and our "estimates" are little more than elaborate hypothesis that aren't worthy of escalation to theory (as they have not been proved, cannot be a theory). As such, I find that I align my beliefs here with the rest of my beliefs: we can estimate the age of the earth pretty closely with a literal approach to interpretation of the Scriptures, which is around 6,000 years, and I would not belittle God so as to say that He didn't make His own impartation to man inaccurate.
That is one reason why I am a believer in young-earth.
Another is that I believe a provable age of the earth in this present age would defeat a major purpose in humanity, and that is faith. Proving the age of the earth one way or the other either validates or negates the Genesis creation account. If it is proven to be merely allegorical, we have some huge issues to tackle throughout the rest of Scripture, as it is inseparably tied to the Genesis account as the origin. Also, if that were the case (that the Genesis account were allegorical) it would cause some major theological issues: such as why was God so ineffective in communicating the creation account for thousands (wait, MILLIONS) of years?
So I find it much more reasonable, personally, to believe in a young earth. There is also much evidence to the benefit of a young earth... catastropic tectonics, plutonium rings, rapid fossilizaion, rapid formation of coal & oil (only takes a few years, many real examples of this), the second law of thermodynamics... that's all I can think of off the top of my head.