Curt Sewell is the author of God at Ground Zero
CREATION BITS No 17.
Growth Rates of Populations
| Author: Curt Sewell Subject: Creation Overviews Date: 11/8/1999 |
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Evolutionists say that humans have inhabited this planet for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. Creationists, on the other hand, point to the Bible’s record of six to eight thousand years since we were created. Which of these ages is more realistic, according to known records of population and its growth rate?
At right are shown two sets of such numbers, one for the United States and one for the entire world. Except for the one involving world population in the year 1 A.D., which is only a rough guess, they all fall into the range from about 1/4 to 3 percent per year.
There’s one growing population mentioned in the Bible. When Jacob’s family moved to Egypt it had 70 members; then when the Israelites left Egypt 430 years later (in about 1450 B.C.) they had grown to between one and two million people, which greatly worried the Egyptians. If we calculate that growth rate, we find it’s between 2.25 % and 2.41% per year. This is within the range of the two charts shown at right, and is thus completely reasonable.
The Bible also describes Noah’s family as consisting of eight people who survived the Great Flood (which many believe to have been in about 2350 B.C.). These were the only people left to repopulate the earth. Some 4340 years later, we now have a world population of some five billion people. This is a growth rate of about 0.47 % per year, about the same as is known to have been true a few hundred years ago. Thus we see that the two growth rates from the Bible are consistent with known facts today.
On the other hand, if we consider any sort of evolutionary growth over a period of a few million years, we arrive at ridiculously low growth rates. For example, if an original pair of “pre-humans” had begun a million years ago, and increased to five billion humans today, the growth rate would have been an average of only 0.00217 % per year. At that rate, the time required for the group to double its size would be 32,000 years! At such low growth rates, these “people” would quickly have become extinct, considering that a lifespan was probably less than a hundred years or so. In the early millennia, an accidental death of a single adult of child-bearing age would have been devastating.
We can see that population factors seem to make the evolutionist position almost impossible for a reasonable person to even consider, whereas growth rates according to the creationist time scale are well within the limits of actual numbers that we see today.
For those who are mathematically inclined, population growth rates can be calculated by one of the equations shown at right.