Do The Maths!

I have always enjoyed playing with figures. In fact Maths was my favourite subject at school. When I was grounded from flying in 1991 I took a Careers Test to help me determine what alternative career I could perhaps pursue. At the completion of the testing process there were no surprises for me when Accountancy came up at the top of the list.

But God had other plans for me and now any ambitions of being a “bean counter” are a long distant memory.

I still enjoy a good mathematical challenge though, and when I came across a magazine article some time back titled Where have all the people gone? I was hooked. The article begged the question that if Homo sapiens walked this earth a million years or so ago (according to the now-prevailing view), then where are all the trillions of people (or their remains) who should have evolved since then?

As Christians we know that God created Adam from the dust of the ground and then created Eve from his rib. There are enough clues in the Bible, based on the genealogies of Adam’s descendants etc, for us to determine with reasonable accuracy that this event occurred around 4,000BC, or around 6,000 year ago.

The Bible also tells us of the Great Flood when all but Noah and his family perished. This occurred around 1,700 years after Creation, or around 2,300BC or 4,300 years ago.

Knowing that Noah’s family consisted of eight people, and our current world population is around 6.7 billion we can determine that the world population has doubled roughly 30 times (this is easy enough to work out on a calculator).

If we know that 4,300 years have passed since the Great Flood then simple Maths will tell us that the average time taken for the population to double is 143 years (4,300 divided by 30). This seems to be a reasonably realistic figure given that according to the World Book Encyclopaedia the current population is increasing at a rate of approximately 1.8%, or doubling every 39 years.

If Homo sapiens were walking the earth around a million years ago, as evolutionists would have us believe, then based on the same calculation of time frame divided by 30 (ie.1,000,000 years divided by 30) it took an average time for the population to double of 33,333 years, to reach what it is today.

I hear people saying, “But that’s a ridiculously high figure!”

So let’s pick another figure like say 1,000 years as being a more acceptable time frame for the population to double. The Maths tell us that under these circumstances it would have only taken 30,000 years (1,000 years x 30) instead of 1 million years for the population to reach today’s level of 6.7 billion.

We can look at this result in one of two ways.

First, is there any way that humans could have been around one million years ago based on today’s population?

Second, if the population was 6.7 billion after the first 30,000 years, then whatever happened to the population over the next 970,000 years? Where are all the remains of literally trillions and trillions of people?

The question could also be asked as to whether the earth could have actually sustained such a large population?

I accept that these figures don’t take into account many factors of which I am probably totally ignorant, but the conclusions still represent maybe a ball-park outcome which can’t be denied.

Just on the Maths alone, which is the more feasible scenario to arrive at today’s population of 6.7 billion? The choices are a world population based on a 33,333 year doubling rate, or the more realistic doubling rate of 143 years deduced from the Bible?

Wings As Eagles

Updated 27Nov10