How Old Is the Universe? Hambo Knows!

How many nights have you tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep because you keep wondering about the age the universe? If you’re like most secularists, you’re going mad because those silly astronomers keep announcing new answers.

Today, dear reader, we have good news for you. Your intellectual anguish is over because there is someone who can — at last — give you the correct answer. Yes, you guessed it. We’re talking about Ken Ham (ol’ Hambo) — the ayatollah of Appalachia, the world’s holiest man who knows more about religion and science than everyone else.

At the website of Answers in Genesis (AIG), Hambo’s creationist ministry, he just posted The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old—No Wait, It’s 12.6 Billion Years Old. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:

How old is the universe? Well, we can know for sure, but I’ll get to that in a moment. [Hurry!] But from a secular standpoint, the answer to that question depends on which study you read — because they can’t agree! [The fools!] Here’s what I mean.

Then he explains:

One study, of which the popular summary was published July 15, 2020, claims the universe is 13.8 billion years old. They based this age on “the best image of the infant universe.” So they used what they call the “oldest light” to determine the age of the universe — and they’re confident it’s 13.8 billion years old.

The “popular summary” to which Hambo refers is in Science Daily: New research of oldest light confirms age of the universe. However, the article forthrightly says that new data may suggest a new answer to the question: Here’s a small excerpt:

Just how old is the universe? Astrophysicists have been debating this question for decades. In recent years, new scientific measurements have suggested the universe may be hundreds of millions of years younger than its previously estimated age of approximately 13.8 billions of years.

13.8 billion years is pretty much what’s been the standard estimate in recent years. Hambo then informs us:

But two weeks later, the popular summary of another study was published. It claims the universe is 1.2 billion years younger than that — “only” 12.6 billion years old. [Gasp!] This younger age that the popular summary published was based on what the paper said about the expansion rate of the universe and light from distant galaxies.

This new “popular summary” is from Fox News. Their story is titled Universe might be 1.2B years younger than previously believed, experts say. This estimate was the result of a different method, which you can read about if you wish. PhysOrg has a good article: New approach refines the Hubble’s constant and age of universe.

These are interesting times, and that’s an exciting field in which to work, because researchers haven’t yet settled the matter. Hambo does his best to make this seem like a knife fight among godless scientists. He tells us:

So which is it? 13.8 billion years or 12.6 billion years? That’s just a difference of a “mere” 1.2 billion years, after all, but why such conflicting results? Well, it’s because both have the wrong starting point — man’s ideas of naturalism and billions of years.

Egad — man’s ideas! How horrible! But then, what is the correct starting point? Here it comes:

The correct starting point for our thinking isn’t billions of years. [Did anyone ever start with billions of years?] That’s a belief imposed on the observable evidence, such as the cosmic microwave background and light from distant galaxies. Because the models of these researchers have the wrong starting point (i.e., wrong assumptions), they’re drawing wrong interpretations and conclusions from the evidence.

Hambo gives us the correct starting point:

But we can know the age of the earth and universe because Scripture gives us the information we need to determine how old earth and the universe are. Genesis chapter 1 tells us God created everything in six days (Exodus 20:11 reaffirms this), so we know earth and the universe are roughly the same age.

Ooooooooooooh! At last, we have a reliable source of information. Hambo continues:

Then Genesis chapters 5 and 11 give us detailed chronologies that, when added together, give us approximately 2,000 years from Adam to Abraham. We know Abraham lived about 2,000 years before Christ, and Christ is 2,000 years before us — that’s approximately 6,000 years for the earth and universe.

Aha! Six thousand years. That’s the answer! Hambo concludes with this:

God’s Word gives us the eyewitness account of history. [An eyewitness account!] He never lies (Titus 1:2) so we can trust his Word to give us the true history of earth, the universe, and life itself.

Now you can sleep at night, dear reader. Thanks to ol’ Hambo at last you have the answer.

Copyright © 2020. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.


. AddThis Social Bookmark Button . Permalink for this article

34 responses to “How Old Is the Universe? Hambo Knows!

  1. Jim Roberts

    I wish I could find this funny, I really do, however by mocking science for changing its assumptions based on new data, creationism and its cohorts are literally killing people.

  2. Day 4: ” … He made the stars also …”
    Which makes sense if you see a few hundred little lights blinking on the “firmament”. Today we know that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. The distance between stars is in the order of light years. I assume that Ham accepts this as fact. How does that all fit into a bubble 6,000 light years across?

  3. Jim Roberts

    The world is made with the appearance of age, unless it’s inconvenient to say that it’s made with the appearance of age, in which case it’s not.

  4. On Day 4 the Sun, Moon and stars are put into the firmament in order to make the days and nights and to mark the passage of days and seasons etc.
    So how were there Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3?

  5. Only a dimwit like hambone would think a disagreement of 1billion years means 6000yrs is correct.

  6. Mike Elzinga

    Oh the horror; two measurements that differ by about 9 or10 percent!

    How likely is it that Ham knows the tire pressures in the tires on his car to that precision? Such whining he does!

  7. Michael Fugate

    I am wondering why OT enthusiasts haven’t embraced Jubilee years. Secular power more important than God?

  8. OT But I’m asking for help. I’m looking for links between all or any of evolution denial, climate change denial, anti-VAXX, playing down of Covid, anti-mask. Not psychological links so much as organisational links and of course links to the money.

  9. Paul Braterman, I never looked, so I’m not aware of any links, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are indeed common interests.

  10. @SC, DI are big on climatechange denial and deploy all their anti-consensus rhetoric against it.

    One thing you can, I’m sure, help with; the $$$ behind creationism. You’ve certainly posted about this

  11. A Google of ‘conservative evangelicals and conspiracy theories’ lists some interesting analyses

  12. One might go back a bit and consider the denial of the AIDS – HIV connection.
    If my memory serves, Phillip Johnson was a denier. Is that denial still popular?

  13. Charles Deetz ;)

    (13.8B-12.6B)/13.8B*100=8.7% off
    (13.8B-6000)/13.8*100=99.9999565217% off

  14. The singularity exists. Its right here in the neighborhood so the light existed from the moment of creation. Carbon in D bones and helium in rocks. Its young, but I’m only a mechanical engineer.

  15. You’ll have to take that up with God.

  16. Dave Luckett

    Actually, he’s onto something. The “something” is a propaganda point, but it’s effective for this audience. Ham and his following are authoritarians. To them, fact is something that is pronounced by authority. Once stated, it cannot change. Changing it would deny the authority. That’s a contradiction in terms.

    That’s why complaining that “science changes its mind” is so effective for them. Authority is the underpinning of their reality. To remove it is to remove meaning itself.

    Authority is one reason that they’re stasists, not merely conservatives. Change is fundamentally opposed to their perception of reality. Ham lives in the world he was born into, sixty years ago, the world of his childhood. It was changing, but that was hardly perceptible in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia, where he was born and raised – at least then. But this is now, and the world is different.

    And yet, he is successful in that changed world. There’s no denying it. Ken Ham is wealthy and well-known, the director of a major enterprise that can wield the power of millions of people and hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s on to something. He must be.

    What do you know? The post-modernists are right. Them of all people. Perceptions of reality are reality itself. Your perceptions are as valid as my perceptions, or anyone’s perceptions. There is no objective “truth”. The proof of it is Ken Ham. He exists. He succeeds. It must follow that his reality is as valid as mine, for all practical values of “valid”.

    As Lionel Bart’s Fagin remarked in the song: “I think I better think it out again.”

  17. There is no man made climate change.

  18. @Paul Braterman You are thinking about it backwards. There are no links between those things. Think instead about what sort of person is attracted to those ideas. You need a strong patriarchal upbringing where a man is the head and protector of his house. This type of person has a filter that protects them from all that science stuff, but lets in Christianity, guns, anti-abortion, Trump, Fox News etc. Unfortunately 36% of Americans fall into this group. These people are ripe for any organisation that understands their mindset and can deliver a targeted message that pushes the right buttons.

  19. “Well, it’s because both have the wrong starting point — man’s ideas of naturalism and billions of years.”
    I’m eagerly waiting for Ol’Hambo demonstrating how exactly his ideas of supernaturalism helped to build his Gay Wooden Box – and of course the internet, which he uses so eagerly to promote his crap. But I won’t hold my breath.

    “wrong assumptions”
    Which suddenly are not wrong at all when building a Gay Wooden Box or using internet. Never mind that Ol’Hambo doesn’t even try to interpret background radiation and “light from distant galaxies” (I assume he refers to redshift) starting with a 6 000 years old universe.

    Evidence that totally belongs to repeatable and operational science, which according to Ol’Hambo is the only acceptable one. Except when not.

  20. Peter (Oz) Jones

    Paul Braterman
    There may be some info here for your search?

  21. “Light from distant galaxies” makes a problem just by its existence, let alone details like the red shift of the spectrum. How long does it take for light to get to Earth on a path that is tens of thousands of lightyears long (from The Magellanic Clouds), let alone billions? A lot more time than 6000 years.
    Unless one assumes, without any scriptural warrant, that we are being deceived about the events going on in the distant heavens, and that the laws of nature are not finely tuned (the important value of the speed of light would have to change pointlessly).

  22. SC very sensibly stopped us wasting time on a drive-by troll, who claimed that the age question is meaningless because we are in a singularity because carbon in dinosaurs and helium (I don’t know if he mean helium in the atmosphere, or in zircons). But he’s worth mentioning, because he followed up with a post saying “There is no man-made climate change”, thus serving as a prime example of what I’m talking about

  23. A small change: the Megallanic Clouds are better described as hundreds of thousands (rather than only tens of thousands) of lightyears away. (BTW, the Gaia space project is measuring stars in our galaxy, by geometric parallaxes, to tens of thousands of lightyears).

  24. Michael Fugate

    I assume there wasn’t photosynthetic prokaryote caused climate change either or which day was oxygen created again?

    Why bother with science when magic always gets you the answer you want?

  25. @Notsogenuine: “The singularity exists. Its right here in the neighborhood”
    Even closer, but rather the opposite. Your brain is like a reverse singularity – nothing goes in, only garbage gets out.

    @PaulB is generous as always: “wasting time on a drive-by troll”
    Trolling requires intelligence (not in the formal, psychological meaning of the word). I never caught that drive by engineer (if he is one indeed – we shouldn’t take his word for it; for all we know his most important task might be sorting screwdrivers) on writing anything intelligent.

  26. Personally, I prefer the amazing splendor of a huge ancient universe full of new things to discover to the tiny short lived bubble Hambone thinks his favorite mythological creature created by some unknown mechanism.

  27. @abeastwood
    Not static, capable of handling vast variety over space and time. Beyond any concept of mere design.

  28. @ABeastwood: “Personally, I prefer …..”
    Not only that. Just compare:
    A couple of times “and God said” vs. the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies, our Solar System etc.
    A Global Flood vs. five mass extinctions (apparently one time almost the entire planet was frozen over).
    Moses wandering the Sinai vs. Homo Sapiens leaving Africa and roaming the entire planet.

    Even as a story Ol’Hambo’s favourite Holy Book pales.

  29. It is limited to topics which might occur to people in the Ancient Near East. Nothing wrong with that. There is a lot about disfunctional families, something which great novels have treated.
    But there is next to nothing about mathematics and l can’t imagine that someone would insist that it be used as a mathematics textbook. Ditto painting, music, humor, grammar.

  30. @TomS, credit where due. There’s a value of pi, good to better than 5%. As for the rest, you underestimate the ingenuity of Bob Jones University’s textbook writers

  31. Michael Fugate

    Plus the day theme falls apart unless the earth is flat.

  32. If you take away the influence the Bible has had on music, then you get rid of the works of Johnny Cash and that, sir, shall not stand.

  33. Retired Prof

    TomS notes that the heavenly bodies were not installed in the firmament till the fourth day of creation and asks the nitpicky question: “So how were there Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3?”

    Simple. Just fill in the details the Biblical account leaves out, the way it left out baramins, the Grand Canyon, how kangaroos and koalas made it from the ark to Australia after the Flood, and other miracles unknown to humankind until modern creationists came along.

    The firmament is a globe rotating daily around the disk of the earth. One half is dark, the other light. That’s how we can tell day from night even when clouds hide the heavenly bodies. It’s also why Joshua’s tribal god could delay nightfall without wrecking the earth with a massive inertia-related cataclysm. All he had to do was hold the firmament bright-side-up long enough for Joshua’s trained trackers to hunt down the survivors of his ruthless attack and lop off their heads. The result was a noble victory.

  34. @Retired Prof
    Genesis 1 tells us that the firmament was created on day 2, and that it was created to separate the waters.
    The lights (and everybody agrees that the lights are the Sun, Moon and stars) were put in the firmament “to divide the day from the night” and “for days” and “to give light upon th earth” and “to divide the light from the darkness”.