This view is accepted by many people, including many, if not most, Christians. I, too, once believed such a way. My belief wasn't based off having been convinced by the evidence but rather I simply believed the information that was given to me through my public education, television, children's books, and my peers. All I had ever heard of evolution and a billions-year-old earth had been presented to me as fact. I simply didn't question it.
When I did question it, I found that the model presented to me my whole life failed to make sense to me anymore. I couldn't pretend any longer that my acceptance of a proposed old earth could coincide with my theology.
I have become thoroughly convinced of a young earth, one that was supernaturally formed and intelligently designed for purpose by God. I believe that the evidence is clear and that the logic clearly points for this to be true. No other theory, no matter how much it gets treated like fact, makes near as much sense of the data. And, this is not nearly as complicated a subject as we have made it out to be in our minds.
But, that's why I think that an idea of an old earth has become so widely accepted. I think that educated people, professionals in their fields over the course of the last 200 years have decided that this is true and have propagated it. Meanwhile, the church, not being professionally trained in the sciences were not prepared to refute these claims. Neither was the church aware of exactly how incompatible the idea of an old earth was to the Bible's clearly given historical account.
An easy, entertaining, and thought provoking read on this subject can be read online at http://answersingenesis.com/articles/nab. If in reading this blog, you have come to think that I must be gullible, uneducated, unreasonable, religious or any other accusations that are so commonly hurled at young earth creationists, then I challenge you to read the book that I have linked to above. I challenge you to find its illogical arguments, its incorrect findings, its lies, if you will. Regardless of why you read it, you should read it.
The truth of the matter is that it was almost universally understood that the earth was thousands of years old until the late 18th century when a handful of scientists started positing that it was much older. One of these, James Hutton (1726–1797) is known as the father of geology. He was the first to propose that the earth is being created today at the same speed in which it always had. He based this off of his proposed Theory of Uniformitarianism. This is the platform that began a myriad of incorrect science. Uniformitarianism is simply stated as the belief that things are how they have always been and that current rates of spread, growth, erosion, etc. can be used as a basis as a set rate throughout all of history. It's totally stacking the deck no matter how you look at it. And, conveniently for proponents of an old earth, it sets the stage to introduce the gods of time and chance.
Perhaps the most asinine belief is that life was created from nothing. I have seen and heard many proposed models of how this could have happened and they are all ridiculously flawed. It has been aptly demonstrated that these models could not have produced even the most simple building blocks of a living organism much less the organism itself. But, one point that came to mind today while contemplating this was that even if the impossible odds were somehow beaten and the building blocks of a living organism were created AND those somehow perfectly fell into place and just the perfect places AND they somehow fused to become this living organism, how did this living organism replicate itself? Think about it. Even IF everything lined up to create life, what are the chances that this life would somehow also contain the ability and will to reproduce itself. If you can believe that despite no credible evidence pointing to it then you certainly have more faith in nothing than I have in God.
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