Early Earth

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Summary: An Antidote to Dogmatism
Review: As a college professor, I have always tried to memorize important benchmarks in my field. One set of benchmarks that is critical in teaching geology are dates such as the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. I soon discovered that this task was going to be far more difficult then I first expected because for many dates, such as the age of the universe, many different estimates exist (in this case from around 5 to 25 billion years). It soon became apparent the many of the dates in geology are estimates at best and more often gestimates. Whitcomb in this excellent work does a much needed job critiquing many of the modern dating methods used in science today. He shows why many are not as accurate as commonly believed. Now when I teach geology or earth science I always stress that no one in science knows, for example, how old the earth or universe is, and therefore when providing dates one must not say that something is so many years old, but must say "according to carbon 14 or another dating method, some animal is estimated to have died 5730 years ago, and this date is based on the many assumptions of this method." Unfortunately, most texts and sources often dogmatically state that something is so many millions of years old when this cannot be known to be the case. This must read book will go a long way toward reducing the dogmatism now very common in geological dating and will help the dating process to be more scientific and less dogmatic. In short The Early Earth is an antidote to dogmatism