2012 A.D.: Does Average Annual Human Population Growth Prove We Live On A Young Earth?
According to some in Science, humankind developed about 450,000 years ago (Let's make it 495,000 years ago, since Science's estimates vary widely) If one human couple, some hypothesized Adam and Eve, began our species 450,000 years ago, and you take into account our present population being around the 7 billion mark, each 'doubling' of the human population would have occurred after a ludicrously long wait of about 15,000 years. That would allow for 33 doublings. It would have taken an average of 15,000 years for humanity to reach a population of 4 people, total. How is it possible that we are feeding children such unrealistic thoughts. Earth's population seems to double every 100 - 150 years. Not every 15,000 years.
Here's a problem: Some sites say that the various nations of the Earth grow by birth vs. death (not counting immigration) from .1% up to 3% a year in population. So, let's say it's 1.5% on the average. It's probably not, but let's say it is. In 100 years at that 1.5 % growth rate, world population more than doubles (around 3 times the original, actually, but let's just say it doubles.) So, how could our species, Mankind, have been in existence 1 million years ago? That is 10,000 centuries (doublings) ago.
If we would have been around as a species for 1 million years, we would have been reproducing for 10,000 centuries, doubling our numbers every one of those centuries. (100 years x 10,000 = 1,000,000 years). That would have led to trillions upon trillions of humans. But, there are certainly not many trillions upon trillions of humans. There are about 7 billion. 7 billion is a large number, but it is not even 1% of even a single 'trillion'. 10 billlion is 1% of a single trillion.
Naturally the Earth has finite space and would eventually over ride and limit the equation, but if in actual history that limit had previously ever been approached, would there be very many animal types left on the planet now, in our day? Starving ancient people would have eaten nearly all of them, right? So I highly doubt that some ancient population explosion caused the numbers of almost all living things to crash as the environment was crushed by the demand for food resources. I think that the Earth is just not very old.
If you start with 2 people and double their number 30 times at the 'one doubling a century' rate you have over 1 million people, and that only took 3,000 years (30 centuries x 100 years per century = 3,000 years.) You could do that 330 more times before you have used up your 1 million years. That would be 1 million times 1 million at the end of the second 3,000 years, at the 6,000 year point. And this takes into account that people die of old age...disease, old age death, etc., that's already factored in when you say that the net increase in human population is about 1.5% a year.
So, how could the human species, a species which increases like this, be ancient. After only 6,000 years you would have trilions of people....but we only have 7 billion. What's wrong? It's scientists again!
The population makes sense if the Bible is accurate, but it's spectacularly off if the Earth (and humans) are millions of years old. The actual formulas used to predict population increase take into account many factors, but you simply cannot torture the data enough to have this present Earth hold only 7 billion people if humans....even living primitively....have been around for millions of years. Yet, merely trust that the Great Flood was about 4,400 years ago, and suddenly the present human population becomes very rational and easy to explain.
According to the Bible's chronologies, which in some few spots are vague but which in nearly all spots provide at least a pretty close reference of the passage of the years, we live on an Earth that was made in about 4,000 B.C. It couldn't be too much older than that if we believe the Bible's given ages for various prominent persons and events. Noah's flood ought to be about 4400 years ago.
And, if you look at the average growth that has been seen in world wide human population, this Earth simply cannot be too old.......... or else 1) humans were once very poor at reproducing new humans, but have recently improved........or else 2) the human creature we are today is a recently arrived creature, and hasn't had enough time to build up to large numbers yet.............or else 3) humans were born in numerous enough quantities, but once born were very poor at surviving long enough to reproduce the next generation.....or else 4) our population gets crushed back down to almost zero on a regular basis.
As for number 1, I think that there will be very few who guess that in ancient times we didn't very well know how to reproduce, but now we have gotten the hang of it.
As for number 2, I think that we are indeed a recently arrived creature, arriving at the same time as all other created things, give or take a few days.
As for number 3 ....saying that many babies were born, but few survived.... I find that highly unlikely. Mothers have always been fiercely protective of their children, fathers have always devised ways to protect their children from natural dangers, God has always watched over those He loves, and mothers, quite frankly, used to have a lot of babies! Families of 6 to 12 have always been common enough. We know from the Bible that, among the Israelites at least, it was seen as a sign of disfavor to be barren, and a blessing to be fruitful. Earlier societies tended to be farmers, and farmers like to have many helpers! Farm families were often large families. Though the infant and child mortality rate was somewhat higher in past centuries, the birth rate could more than offset that difference.
As for surviving, I believe mothers - human mothers - have always loved their children and cared for them tenderly and closely, even thousands of years back. And I believe fathers always tried to protect their children from external threats. Even beasts of the field do quite well protecting their young, and creatures from buffalo to passenger pigeons to locusts to wildebeast, salmon, and rats, rabbits and many others were able to swell their populations to epic numbers when they were not beset upon too fiercely by drought, disease, or predators. Humans have great advantages that these creatures do not have: we can eat either plant or animal, we can transport water with us, we can build shelters difficult for any predator to get into, we can use fire, we fashion such weapons, even in the simplest societies, that predators can scarcely compete against. We even have cures and treatments which are affective against many diseases much of the time.
If any creature is going to survive a hard time, it's likely to be mankind.
4) Local populations get crushed down sometimes by one thing or another, but few disasters have affected the whole Earth. As for natural disasters, I know they have always existed, but they are somewhat sporadic, usually isolated in scope geographically, and often displace more people than they kill. I think that most of them were honestly only a small factor in the increase in global human population growth. Wars and political cleansings, diseases like the Black Plague or Spanish flu were bigger hitters, but again, weren't usually a match for the human birth rate.
We simply seem to be a creation, we humans, that can fill the Earth in a pretty short time! Without even trying, our population can spread to all corners of the planet and begin swelling in only a few thousand years despite wars and ethnic cleansings, plagues, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, famines, or anything else but the adverse will of God.
Again, the Bible says we haven't been around millions, but rather thousands of years. About 6,000 years. In many places it will say that some man was such and such an age ... let's say 40 years old ... when his son So and So was born, and that his son So and So was 50 years old when his son such and such was then born. And it will also give a descendency line of father to son to son to son using specific same names. One place in Genesis chapter 5 gives a line of descendency from Adam to Noah of 10 long lived people, including Adam the 1st man, and Noah, the 9th generations after Adam. So, the length of time from Adam to the Great Flood seems to have been about 1,650 years.
When the great flood happened, only Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives survived it, protected within the large boat called the Ark. Whatever Earth's population had built up to before the flood (and I've never seen sources that have given pretty large estimates for that pre-flood population) it was reduced to only 8 people by the time the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. Everyone else on the face of the Earth was drowned, the Bible says.
From the Great Flood to the birth of Jesus was around 2,350 years. Or, we could say that the Great Flood occurred about 2,350 B.C., after about 1650 years of time had passed since the creation. If the Bible's figures are accurate then that is about right. And, it goes without saying that from 1 A.D. to 2012 A.D. is around 2,011 years. To make a long story short, the Bible puts the Earth's age at about 6,000 years right now, and it seems to have been 4,350 years since Noah's flood.
So, let's be generous to the scientific world and round up a little. Let's say that there have been 4,500 years that have passed by since Noah's flood. That is 45 centuries in which to raise the Earth's human population from only 8 persons to about 7 billion persons. Here is the question: based on current models describing human population growth, how long should it take to raise the Earth's population from 8 persons to 7 billion persons?
Before the Great Flood the average life span of the ten descendent generations from Adam through Noah was about 857 years, if you count Enoch as having 'died' at 365 years old, though really he went to walk with God. That also includes Noah having 350 years of life after the flood. Their average age when having their son (the son in that particular list of 10 people) was 155 years. It would have been a lot lower if Noah hadn't been 500 years old when he had his three sons! So, what does that say or mean? Just that peope were producing their kids at about the 150 years old mark before the flood, based on the only list I know of that discribes that (Genesis 5).
Well, let's say that today Earth's population doubles every 100 years. There are births, let's say, and deaths. And all together, taking into account war and famine, birth and deaths due to old age, etc., let's pick a figure of 100 years and say that it takes that long for population to double. So, since the post flood Earth is about 45 centuries old (according to scripture) those 8 people have doubled every century for 45 centuries in a row. How many people is that? Let's assume that Noah and his wife were done having children, so only 6 human breeders survived the flood.
6 (people) x 2 exp 45 (45 doublings in a row) = ? The answer is that over 211 trillion people would now live on the Earth. Remember, we're already taking into account that people died of old age all along the way when we say that the population doubles every 100 years. We're saying that in the real case, all things taken into account, population doubles every 100 years.
Well, we only have about 7 billion people on the Earth. 211 trillion is about 30,000 times that many! So, that rate of growth would give us about 30,000 times more people than what we actually have. Yet oddly, doubling your population every 100 years doesn't sound too far fetched, does it?
Well, let's back off some. Let's imagine that we humans double our numbers every 150 years. So, let's again say that 4,500 years have passed since the flood, divided by 150 years for the population to double, equals 30 doublings of the population since 4,500 years ago. So, that formula would look like this:
6 (people) x 2 exp 30 (30 doublings in a row) = ? There would be over 6.4 billion people on the Earth right now. That's pretty close to the actual!
So, what does this say? Well, it says that if you assume the Bible is right, and the flood was around 4,350 years ago, the population of the Earth is very much what you would expect if population had doubled every 150 years. And it also says that in order for the scientific community to be right, in order for us to have 'evolved' and become 'homo sapiens' about let's say 450,000 years ago (scientific estimates for the age of the 'Homo Sapien species' aren't necessarily in agreement with each other, but 450,000 is a pretty low figure I think), we would need to have been very very inadequate in either the mating department, or the survival department. The 'doubling every 150 years' assumption is very conservative. Even scientists know that it doesn't take nearly that long in the modern day for our planetary population to double.
One table I looked at said the population in 1800 was 1 billion, but in 1960 (160 years later) it had become 3 billion. That's a little more than 150 years, but it's also quite a lot more than just doubling.
But, in even more modern times, from 1927 (2 billion) to 2011 (7 billion) only 84 years passed, yet there were more than 1 doubling, in fact almost 2 doublings, in only that 84 years. Population growth had ramped up!
But, let's say you are a scientist, and you want to imagine that human beings have been repopulating on the Earth for 450,000 years. Well, the growth we just talked about (when we tried to estimate population growth if the Bible timeline is correct) all happened in less than 4,500 years, and it produced quite reasonable results if you believe that Noah and his family landed on the mountains of Ararat 4,500 years ago with 6 fertile people. But, again, the scientist has to account for 100 times that many centuries of reproduction. He has to convince us that the Homo Sapien population doubled only every 15,000 years (periods about 100 times longer than we just used to do our Biblical estimates!), if the scientist had imagined that there were only 6 homo sapiens at the beginning. Good gosh!!!
That's ridiculous! Can you imagine a species so inept at reproducing itself that it took a couple of human newlyweds and then all of their descendents after them 15,000 years to finally have 4 descendents that survived to fertile adult age?
I can see them saying it in their white lab coats, a man and a woman standing together, just married scientists with an arm around each other: "Right now there are just the two of us, but in 15,000 years we're expecting twice that many!!!"
That's the kind of terribly ludicrous ideas that some scientists asks us to swallow! In order for their broken God hating paradigms to stand tottering on their wobbly cartoonish legs, in order for humans to be even 450,000 years old, we need to have an effective net reprodution rate that causes us to double about 15,000 years! Just think of it. How can they not burst into tears and start apologizing at the mere thought that they publicly supported such a comedic assertion?
What a fragile and tenuous growth rate that would be. It would require every factor that allows for human life and population growth to be in almost exactly matching magnitude with every factor that causes human population decline, and it would need for that nearly perfect match between the two to continue - in near perfect balance and harmony - for 15,000 years, until finally the human population had doubled.
The Bible's explanation of human history can stand calm and steady even while under extreme assault by highly impassioned lefty liberal God haters - or honest minded enquirerers. That's because no matter how much you contest a thing which happens to be true, when you're finally worn out by railing against it, when your out of breath and too tired to think of even one more lying criticism or slandering slur, there the thing stands, still true.
But, when you make up an explanation that supports some poppy cock theory that you happen to hold, you have to prop it up over and over, repeatedly and yet again, using one device after another and any means that will forestall its inevitable collapse until finally your creation is so embalmed with bandages and crutches and props and rewrites that even the humblest intellect that happens by, stopping to consider your claim, has to shake their head and just keep walking, saddened at the desperation of the thing they have just seen.
Scientists studying human population growth statistics are at that point. In order to support an old Earth, you have to build a population growth formula for humans that manages to very quickly kill off almost every human that is ever born, at a young age, before the poor soul can reproduce. You have to have a combined non-reproduction factor of around 100 times greater than that which has been observed in long term, steady state, real life situations.
Let's face it....they, the scientific community that holds to Darwinism and the ancient Earth idea, have no hope but to lie and lie and lie. Otherwise, if the Earth is ever admitted to be young, then the walls come crumbling down for science in oh so many fields of study. It would require a re-write so massive that no sensible government would want to give them grant money again for ages! We would feel so betrayed at the massive chronological dating farce that has been perpetrated against humanity.....against Jesus! Only a truly repentant scientific community could ever be taken seriously after an admission of fraud on so large a scale.
Human population growth is just one more testimony to the Bible's chronology, and therefore a testimony to the Bible's authenticity in other areas. God's word really is awesome and trustworthy, as are God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Let the Christian stand firm! We may not be all that smart on the whole (maybe we are, maybe not), but we happen to be on very, very firm footing as luck would have it. Others far smarter than many of us have the poor fortune of having been taught and brought up in the wrong religion - perhaps one called 'Science'. It takes a truth seeking heart and an open mind to overcome such a start, but many honest seekers have done it.
After mankind failed to keep our part of all the previous covenants God offered us, we now have only one last covenant - but, fortunately it's the best one ever! We have the covenant offered through Christ. Salvation is through faith in Jesus' sacrifice for us, and in nothing else. For His sake, the Holy Father offers us a way to everlasting life. But though we can earn not the smallest portion of so precious a price as was paid, that doesn't mean we don't owe Him everything. We do owe all to Jesus, through Whom we are saved, though Jesus freely and happily acknowledged the Father as greatest of all, as do we also. But God gave Jesus, His Son, as the instrument through which men might, with the help of the Holy Spirit of God, return home. That's a gift that could never be earned, but received as an undeserved gift only. We should be grateful in our hearts and minds for it. We ought to and should want to be sharing what we know!
For all of mankind, it's Heaven or Hell. Heaven comes only through a covenant relationship with Jesus, under His terms. That means that you are His servant, His way. And He is your Lord, His way. But, we were designed from the very beginning for that very purpose, and it is going to be a very satisfying life for those of us who can give up being their own petty god, and give our life to the real One.
As for Hell, there are many paths to it, and all those who avoid Jesus, or play games, keeping one foot solidly in Satan's world and a toe or two on Jesus' path just for insurance, all of us who play games and think God will let us slide.....I think there's only Hell for us if we do that. And Hell never, never, never ends, never gets better, doesn't have its own pleasures.....it is the torment deserved by those who spurn their Maker and His plans for them. Hell has no compensations, Hell has no rewards. Are you a pretty good fellow? Does everyone at work like you fine and say you're a stand up person, yet you don't know and belong to Jesus? Then enjoy this world, because you won't enjoy the next. You don't get voted into Heaven by your fellow man. You are allowed into Heaven by Yahweh, maker of it all, through the blood of Christ Jesus, through whom it all was made, according to the first chapter of the Gospel of John.