In the mathematical progression of population doubling, starting with two, it takes:

6,000 years to produce 4,000,000,000—approximately the earth’s population today

7,000 years to produce 64,000,000,000

1,000,000 years—unthinkable!

So let’s be reasonable when we consider the years involved in:

“The Generations of Adam”

UNLIKE the fantastic guesses of the scientists, which vary by millions of years, the Bible furnishes definite information concerning the exact date on the stream of time when the first human pair were created. The Bible is the only historical record in the world which begins with the first man, gives his name, the time of his creation and death, and traces his descendants, giving their names and ages in successive links of chronology for nearly four thousand years—or until a point of time at which secular history becomes reliable.

As an example of unreliable guesses, which the thoughtless might consider scientific, we recall an incident of more than fifty years ago. At that time the skeleton of a man was found in a former bed of the Mississippi River. At once some geologists began to calculate how many thousands of years might be indicated by the many feet of silt, slime, etc., covering the skeleton, as they fancied they had discovered a very valuable sample of a prehistoric man. Later, however, several feet below the skeleton, parts of a flatboat such as was used on the Mississippi less than fifty years before this, were found. This naturally completely upset the calculations of the geologists and relieved mankind of another proof that man has been on the earth for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years longer than taught in the Bible.

In no field of true science have there been any discoveries which disprove the age given to man by the Bible. Evolutionists realize, of course, that unless they can show that man has been on this earth for hundreds of thousands of years, then their theory that he has reached his present heights through ‘slow, infinitesimal steps of perpetual progress’ cannot be supported by circumstantial facts. It is therefore quite a habit with evolutionists to make arbitrary statements regarding the age of fossils which they may discover, with the result that a credulous, unsuspecting public takes for granted that they know what they are talking about, that they have established these ages scientifically, hence they should not be questioned.

But when one inquires for the proof, he generally finds that it rests upon little more than that some writers have said so. And the reason they have said so is that they have been trained from infancy in the Darwinian idea that man is a creature of remote antiquity, and they automatically try to confirm it.

But the fact is, as every archaeologist well knows, that all indisputable relics of human history vanish when we push our researches backward much more than 6,000 years. There is not a scrap of authentic human history, from any part of the earth, that dates farther back than about six millennia. Why is this? If it be true that men have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, or fifty thousand, or even for twenty thousand years, we certainly ought to be able to find unquestionable human records which can be shown beyond doubt to be far older than these mere sixty centuries.

Furthermore, if it be true that earliest man had not evolved to the present level of intelligence and culture, when the human record does begin it should give evidence of a very primitive race in a state of semi-barbarism. This is the theoretical picture which has been presented to us ever since our early grammar school days. And naturally we had reason to expect that some day the archaeologists would confirm it.

But what have they actually found along this line? Anthropologists have long known that the evidence points to Mesopotamia as the very ‘cradle of civilization’. It is here that authentic human history first begins; and from that region the human race overflowed into Assyria and the Aral-Caspian basin, thence to Europe, India, China, and elsewhere, while some crossed the Arabian desert into Palestine and Asia Minor, or else traveled around Arabia by water, into Egypt.

For this reason, Mesopotamia is a land of special interest to archaeologists. The explorers have dug through layer after layer of debris, representing the accumulations of long centuries of human habitation, and finally have reached virgin soil, below which no human relics are found. In other words, the basic virgin soil, in this Mesopotamian cradle of civilization, represents the advent of human habitation there.

These earliest records begin quite suddenly, and at a depth that indicates an age of not more than 6,000 years. They also show that man, at that very early time, was possessed of unusual intelligence and skill and was enjoying a high state of civilization, even superior to that of later times. In other words, the excavations reveal that man has fallen, instead of having gradually evolved to ever greater heights of civilization.

The late Professor Palmer Hall Langdon, of the Institute of Metals, London, upon his return from extensive work in Mesopotamia in 1929, described his finding of a great “flood deposit” at a considerable depth, and of the layers below it, which contain relics of the civilization that thrived there before the event. We quote from an article in the London Times:

“Below this Flood layer was another, thirteen feet in thickness. In the lower part of this stratum were found the remains of brick buildings, which had been abandoned and silted up for many feet … in which were brick tombs. … This layer thus represented two periods—the earlier, when, after these buildings had been silted up, these shafts were sunk into it for the great tombs. Both periods had come to an end before the Flood layer was deposited, which is found extending unbroken over the whole site. In this layer (below the Flood layer) were found a number of objects of copper, silver and gold, stone bowls, and a quantity of plain unpainted pottery. At its base was another thin deposit … which Professor Langdon dates tentatively at 4000 B.C.

“Below this thin layer came another, three feet in thickness. In this were foundations of buildings, paved streets, as well as flint implements, stone vessels, and a larger number of beaker-shaped pots, all unpainted. No copper or metal of any kind was found in this layer. At the bottom of this layer, exactly on the present sea level, is a thin layer of mud, which Langdon dates provisionally at 4200 B.C. Even below this thin mud layer were found some pottery of exquisite designs, more beautiful than the pottery of later times, and painted in various colors. After this came the virgin soil, below which there were no remains.”

Professor Ladd, of the British Museum, who made a careful study of the relics and handicraft of earliest man as found in this ancient cradle of civilization, observed in his book on the history of Ur that the farther down the excavators go, the better become the specimens; and that the pottery found in the most ancient layers just above the virgin soil is the neatest and most artistically colored of all, and that the unpainted pottery made in later times is quite crude in comparison.

The foregoing discoveries of archaeologists not only indicate that earliest historical man was a better artisan than man of later times, but they also show that man did not exist in this cradle of civilization prior to about 6,000 years ago. If men had been there for many thousands of years before that time, why is there no record of them? And if they had gradually evolved to the height of civilization which they then enjoyed, where are the relics which show that gradual evolutionary progress?

Another problem which Darwinists have never been able to explain away is this: If man has been on earth for hundreds of thousands of years, or even for twenty thousand years, multiplying as usual during all that time, why is the planet so sparsely populated? At the present rate of increase it would not have taken long to amass a population of five billion—even after making allowances for destructive wars, famines, and pestilences. Why, then, do we not have far more than five billion people now on earth if humanity has been multiplying here for as long a period of time as Darwinists claim?

The average rate of increase of various nations and races during a given period of time is not so very difficult to compute. Some peoples, of course, have had more hardships than others, which has limited their increase; but it should be possible to strike a fair average and thereby approximate what the increase of the entire human family should be during sixty centuries. Dr. Williams, in his “Evolution Disproved,” mentions the example of the Jewish people. Perhaps no race has experienced greater hardships throughout the centuries than they have suffered. Hence their known rate of increase, under such unfavorable circumstances, should furnish a conservative clue as to what the average rate of increase of the world at large should have been during the 6,000 years since the actual dawn of human history.

If Jacob had lived sixty, instead of thirty-eight, centuries ago, could he within that time have propagated a race which now would number 5,000,000,000 souls—approximately the world’s present population? If so, then why could not Adam have done precisely the same thing? If, starting with one human pair, it would be possible in sixty centuries to produce a generation of five billion people, such as exists on this earth today, that would dispose of the necessity of insisting upon an extreme age of the human race, at least on that score. Let us now see what Israel’s average rate of increase has been since Jacob’s day.

Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, was the father of the Jewish nation: his twelve sons were the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob was born about 1900 B.C., or a little over thirty-eight centuries ago. The 1935 Jewish Yearbook estimated the number of Jews throughout the world at that time to be about seventeen millions. It is a simple problem in mathematical progression to determine at what rate the house of Jacob had increased to produce that number.

The number 2, doubled successively for only twenty-four times, i.e., 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., yields a sum of about seventeen million. Evidently, therefore, the Israelites had doubled their population about twenty-four times during the thirty-eight centuries since Jacob’s day. This would be one doubling every 160 years, approximately. If Israel, throughout the centuries of repeated servitudes, dispersions, and pogroms, could double its population every century and a half, it would seem that all other people should have been able to do as well. Certainly the entire world must have been able to double its population at least once every two centuries, if Israel could do it every 160 years.

If, according to Bible records, Adam and Eve were created a little over 6,000 years ago, and the world’s population has doubled once every two centuries (which is even slower than the persecuted Jews had multiplied), then there have been about thirty-one doublings since Adam’s day. And if we take the figure 2, and double it for thirty-one times, it yields the number 2,147,483,808, which, in fact, was approximately the population of the world in the year 1930. By the year 1976 this figure had again doubled, to about 4,000,000,000 people.

Now, if man has been multiplying on this earth even for 50,000 years, or longer, why does not the world have a greater population than five billion today? Even if we take the more conservative estimate of the earth’s population doubling every two centuries, and then add 1,000 years to the length of time the Bible shows that man has been upon this planet, it would allow for five doublings of our population of approximately 5,000, 000,000. This would mean that if man has been upon the earth 7,000 years instead of the 6,000 assigned by the Scriptures, there should now be 64,000,000,000 people living here, instead of a mere 5,000,000,000.

Think, then, of the “living room” problems that would have to be faced if man had been multiplying on the earth for 50,000 or 1,000,000 years! It staggers our imagination even more when we think of the crowded conditions which would have developed long ago on every continent and island of the earth if mankind had been multiplying for 1,000,000,000 years, as some would have us believe! Truly, the Bible stands corroborated by plain statistics and common sense, while the wild guesses of the evolutionists have neither science nor reason to support them.

This facing of population facts is thought-provoking from still another standpoint, because it raises the question of how much longer the human race can continue to have room for its natural expansion. The Bible alone solves this problem. It reveals that the commission God gave to the first human pair to propagate their species was limited to the filling of the earth with their offspring. This means that by a divine overruling the increase of population will cease at exactly the proper time.

As found in an earlier chapter, it is the Creator’s plan to restore the dead to life upon this earth. And it is a singular fact that while in a few more years at the present rate of increase the earth would be overcrowded with human beings, yet, at this present point of time there is still room for the living generation as well as for all who have died in the last 6,000 years. We are now at the threshold of the kingdom of God on earth, when his divine purpose for man is about to be consummated. His timing has been perfect. There is still room for all, the living and the dead, who will obey the laws of his kingdom and thereby be privileged to live forever, while in another thousand years, or less, there would not be room enough on earth even for the living.

Evolutionists, in their anxiety to assign a fabulous age to mankind, have grasped at every straw of evidence to prove their contention. Failing in their efforts to find skeletons of men farther back in geologic times than the Quarternary, or modern era, they have gathered up a few oddly chipped stones (called eoliths) which have been discovered in Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, and other lower strata; and in those very early geologic times—on the assumption that these peculiar stones must have been chipped by human hands.

Now if these ancient eoliths were symmetrical or uniform in shape, like Indian arrowheads, for example, then they would indeed constitute very strong evidence that some intelligent, tool-using creature must have made them back in remote geologic times. But the fact is they are so crude that the scientists themselves are by no means agreed that they represent the handiwork of man, many geologists contending that they are simply pieces of stone which have been broken into peculiar fragments by the forces of nature—by earth strains, pressures, landslides, frost, water, and ice flows, or other natural means—all of which could have happened during the long geologic ages before the advent of man.

Concerning the present-day scientific discussion relative to these eoliths, we quote the following from “Corridors of Time,” Volume 1, page 89, published jointly by Oxford and Yale Universities:

“The best known type of eoliths is that found in considerable numbers by the late Benjamin Harrison on the plateaux near Ightham in Kent. … Since then they have been found on many sites, and in gravels of varying ages; and the students of early man are divided into two camps as to their artificial origin. They have many enthusiastic supporters; but their artificial nature has been vigorously denied by Boule, Macalister, Hazzledine, Warren, and others.”

And, on the same page, mention is made of some eoliths found a few years ago at Thenay, imbedded in Tertiary strata, which Bourgeois loudly heralded as specimens of human handicraft dating back to hundreds of thousands of years ago. But concerning them, this recent, careful, authoritative Oxford and Yale treatise declares that “today few, if any, believe them to be the work of man.”

In the early layers of the Quaternary, or modem era, we do, of course, find many chipped stone implements such as arrows, spearheads, and hammers, which certainly were formed artificially by human hands. But it is doubtful that any of these can be shown to date farther back than 6,000 years, although the evolutionists often try to place them back to ten or twenty thousand years, at least. These modern stone implements are called neoliths; and the period in which they were made has been called the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, to distinguish it from the Eolithic, or Old Stone Age—and each of these ages is variously subdivided in the textbooks.

The well-shaped neoliths of more modem times are indisputably of human origin. The existence of such primitive stone implements, however, by no means indicates that the men who made them were of a very low order of intelligence. Rather, they prove the resourcefulness of those early men. Regardless of their intellectual capacity, it naturally took time for them to learn how to make implements out of smelted metallic ores.

But men actually mastered that art very early also—so early, in fact, that the so-called New Stone Age has now become pretty much of a myth; for bronze and iron were being used by some men almost from the beginning of the actual Neolithic period. In substantiation, we quote again from “Corridors of Time,” Volume IV. On page 1 of this volume we read: “It is known that the finely chipped flint arrowhead, long held to be neolitic, was used by people in the early days of metal. … The Neolithic Age is thus losing its distinctness.”

All this is in harmony with the Genesis account. Although man undoubtedly had to form stone implements at first—just as any man of today would have to do were he suddenly stranded like Robinson Crusoe on an uninhabited isle—yet it was not long after man’s creation until he also learned how to work in metal. Genesis 4:22 tells us that Tubal-cain, who was only the seventh generation from Adam, was “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron.”

Archaeologists are now discovering the metallic handiwork of these early men, and some of it is remarkable. Says Professor Ladd, in “History and Monuments of Ur,” “Those works of art which astonish by their beauty, belong not to the last but to the first ages.” Thus does modem research continue to confirm the Biblical story of creation and to refute the fabulous conjectures of the evolution school, which has long taught the libelous error that our earliest human ancestors were ignorant, apish lowbrows, who lived anywhere from 50,000 to 1,000, 000,000 years ago.

Geologic Strata Not Convincing

Computing the age of fossil remains by the depths or nature of the strata in which they are discovered is by no means accurate. There have been so many local disturbances to the terrain in all parts of the earth throughout the ages that it is impossible to compute geologic time by mere depth, even though the age of the same depth of earth in the immediate locality may be relatively known. For this reason the discovery of an excavator should be checked by a geologist before the earth immediately surrounding it has been disturbed; otherwise the real significance of the find may never be known. And even a trained geologist often makes miscalculations.

Assuming that certain fossils were found lying in strata which geologists would call Pleistocene, still this would not definitely establish the age of those particular fossils, for the reason that the age of the Pleistocene layers is not the same in all parts of the globe—in one region they may be ancient, while in another region, where the local conditions were vastly different, they may have been laid down much more recently.

None of the geologic strata are continuous throughout the earth, nor are they uniform as to age; notwithstanding the fact that some geologists still carelessly speak of the Pleistocene Age, the Devonian Age, the Carboniferous Age, the Silurian Age, etc., as though each universally refers to a definite period of time, and thus lead laymen to suppose that the successive layers which have been given these names bear the same age wherever found. Such descriptive carelessness has caused much confusion among laymen, and has led to a generally popular misunderstanding on the subject of ‘geologic times’.

The fact is, no geologist can determine the age of a given stratum in one part of the earth merely by reference to the estimated age of a corresponding stratum in another part of the globe. Hence, when fossils are found in the same geologic strata in different countries, or even in the same country, that is, in strata bearing the same geologic name—Pleistocene strata, for example—but lying in different regions, it by no means follows that the respective fossils are of the same age; for the different parts of the strata in which they lie may not have been deposited contemporaneously, even though these strata have been given the same relative name or classification. None other than Professor Huxley, Darwin’s leading exponent, warned about this very thing. In his “Geologic Essays” he makes this statement:

“Sir Henry de la Beche adduces conclusive evidence to show that the different parts of one and the same stratum having a similar composition throughout, containing the same organic remains, and having similar beds above and below it, may yet differ to any conceivable extent in age. … For anything that geology and paleontology are able to show to the contrary, a Devonian flora or fauna [vegetable or animal fossil] found in the British Isles may have been contemporaneous with Silurian life in North America and with a Carboniferous fauna and flora in Africa.”

The age of any level at which fossil remains may be found is estimated by a wholly arbitrary geologic scale, based upon the present rate of terrigenous deposits in certain localities. And because under ordinary modern conditions, sedimentation takes place slowly, the prehistorians assume that this rate has been uniform throughout terrestrial history. They seem to disregard the fact that under flood or catastrophic conditions the rate of deposit is vastly accelerated.

Thus in the Somme Valley, where it is now known that the forests disappeared only a few centuries ago, and where peat now grows at the slow rate of less than two inches a century, the investigators at first insisted that the fossil flora and fauna at the bottom of these peat beds must be many thousands of years old since they are now nearly thirty feet below the surface.

These enthusiasts overlooked the now well-known fact that under dense forest and swamp conditions (as once prevailed in the Somme Valley) peat grows so rapidly that within a century it may add two or three feet, not inches, to its depth. This fact was proven when eventually there were found, near the bottom of these same Somme peat beds, relics of Roman pottery, Roman bricks, iron tools, and a boat, which showed that as late as the early Christian era these beds were actually navigable lakes.

The same error in calculation was made by the prehistorians in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Denmark, where the age of the peat bogs was erroneously estimated on the basis of their present growth of an inch or two a century. Yet deep down in these beds have been found Roman roads; and in Ireland, at a depth of twenty feet, was found a relatively modern pair of well-made double soled shoes and a crock of butter! These are, admittedly, only a few centuries old; but according to the scale of estimates adopted by Sir Charles Lyell, father of ‘orthodox’ uniformitarian geology, these relics should be at least 16,000 years old!

Thus it is seen that the more critically one inquires into the actual evidence on which the prehistorians have based their exaggerated estimates of human antiquity, the less convincing it is found to be.

And this is equally true of what some would like us to believe concerning the alleged antiquity of the American Indian. Much has been written and claimed along this line, but without genuine scientific proof. The consensus of opinion among well-informed archaeologists is that the American Indian has inhabited this continent but a few thousand years at the most, and that there is no bona fide evidence of any prehistoric predecessors of them on this hemisphere, but that they are related to the Malays of southeast Asia and probably migrated to North America across the Bering Strait or over the Aleutian chain of islands, which may have formed an uninterrupted land bridge between Asia and North America within historic times.

Certainly every effort to assign to them or to their ancestors an extreme age has failed of proof. The late Dr. Ales Hrdlicka prepared a special bulletin (No. 66) entitled, “Recent Discoveries Attributed to Early Man in America,” in which he discussed these mistaken ‘finds’ aforementioned and admitted they are modern.

Professor Richard S. Lull, Honorable Curator of Peabody Museum, Yale, sums up the situation in similar fashion. After mentioning that numerous human bones and artifacts have been found in North America in association with Pleistocene mastodon and bison antiquus and that these also agree with the said extinct animal bones in their degree of fossilization, he then nevertheless admits that “the anatomical test does not corroborate the other criteria in point of antiquity, for each specimen presents features in no way different from those of existing North American Indians.” The factual tests applied by true science thus refute the wild theories of evolutionary geologists and paleontologists, both as to the antiquity of these extinct mammal species and as to the age of the strata which contain them. These bones belong to modern Indians; and not even the evolutionists believe that Indians have dwelt here for 500,000 years—the age hastily ascribed to some of these North American ‘finds’.

Nevertheless the search for proof of human antiquity continues to be pushed with indefatigable zeal. Mr. Edgar Billings Howard, a Philadelphia archaeologist, reported a ‘find’ in New Mexico of a skillfully chipped spearhead and the remains of a campfire, in association with the bones of elephants and camels; whereupon he conjectured that the man who made the spearhead and the campfire must have lived there at least fifteen thousand years ago.

But if, as asserted by Professor Scott mentioned above, even the now extinct mastodon lived on this continent as late as five or six centuries ago, it should not be surprising if we occasionally should find modem Indian spearheads and arrowheads, and the ashes of campfires, in the same stratum which contains the bones of elephants and camels. A few of these may have roamed the western plains of North America until not so long before the coming of the white man to this new world.

We might continue to examine the claims of evolutionists relative to the age of man, but we feel it is unnecessary to do so. Even they admit that there is no genuine scientific proof to support their fanciful guesses; so why should we accept them instead of the plain teachings of the Scriptures, which do stand up in the light of every actual scientific discovery yet made?

The Scriptures show that we are nearing the end of the present order, or world, which is to be followed by a new world order, wherein dwelleth righteousness, when Christ and his overcoming church shall reign for a thousand years to restore fallen man to his Edenic home. There are many evidences which prove that we are now in the day of preparation for the establishment of that kingdom. The prophecies refer to this period as “the time of the end.” (Dan. 12:4) They predict for this time a great increase of knowledge and much running to and fro. We are witnessing the fulfillment of these predictions. It is not, however, increased brain capacity that has brought about this flood of knowledge, but the providences of God in fulfillment of the prophecies of his Word and in preparation for the blessings of the new days now near.

Yes, the Bible not only presents an accurate time record of the past, but it also looks ahead and tells us what is to be, and when. Without it, as has been well said, history would be “like rivers flowing from unknown sources to unknown seas.” But under the guidance of the Bible we may trace these rivers from their springs and see their glorious endings in the ocean of eternity. We can depend upon the Bible, knowing that He who times the movement of the worlds has just as accurately recorded His timetable of human destiny.

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