Earth's Age
On December 14, 2016, Anthony Scaramucci was on Trump's transition team. In an interview on CNN, Scaramucci revealed his anti-science credentials by stating that scientists “have gotten things wrong throughout the 5,500-year history of our planet.” Here's the audio:
Many of Trump's base liked this attack against science; they prefer the age preached by the Christian religion.
Archbishop James Ussher estimated the Earth to be 5,654 years old in the year 1650—6,027 years in 2023. Today, scientists estimate the age of the Earth to be 4.54 billion years. Usher's estimate is off by a factor of 753,277.
People who still believe Ussher's estimate despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary are called Young Earth Creationists.
So, how do we really know the age of the Earth? How can we be sure the Young Earth Creationists are wrong?
It took more than a century to arrive at the accurate age of the Earth. In the mid-1800s, Charles Darwin knew that it was far older than Ussher's estimate based on his knowledge of natural selection and the evolution of life. As far as I can tell, he never quoted numbers, but he described the Earth as evolving over “great expanses of time.”
Lord Kelvin, whose common name was William Thomson, and other scientists in the 1800s estimated Earth's age by determining how long it would take a molten Earth to cool to its present temperature. During Kelvin's time, the scientific community understood that the Earth first existed in a molten state, then cooled to the firmament that's mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis. This was in striking contrast to other parts of the Bible that said, “The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”
Kelvin put the age of the Earth at between 20 and 400 million years. Nobody could accuse Kelvin of precision, but he did advance the estimate of Earth's age to many thousands of times greater than Ussher.
In the 1890s, Marie Curie and others discovered radioactivity and radioactive elements. Radiometric dating was then used to determine the age of things. In 1911, a rock was determined to be more than one billion years old. In 1956, rocks from Diablo Canyon in Arizona were found to be about 4.5 billion years old.
Today, state-of-the-art dating techniques ensure a better than 1 percent accuracy. So, the Earth is 4.54 billion years old—precisely.
Sources
Video: Anthony Scaramucci says Earth is 5,500 years old
Forbes: Trump's New White House Communications Director Believes The Earth Is 5,500 Years Old
Forbes: A Young Earth Creationist Sued The Grand Canyon Over Religious Discrimination And Won