The Population Problem
Let’s be honest; the number of people presently on earth means simply that evolution can’t be true. No, we’re not talking about the crowds. We’re talking about how few people we have as neighbors! Everyone agrees that evolution demands vast amounts of time, the more the better. If life developed from simple to complex by a series of random accidents, then lots of time was needed for these accidents to occur. Evolutionists themselves concede that the chance of just a medium sized protein molecule (300 amino acids in order) coming together by accident is one in 10600! And that is far from being life. Further, since these processes haven’t yet been duplicated in a laboratory under ideal conditions, how much more time do they need for them to take place randomly under less than ideal conditions! The present estimate for the age of the earth is about 4.6 billion years (or more), but, evolutionists say, man has only been around for 4-6 million years, or .1% of the total time. Let’s be generous and say that 46 chromosome people like us have only been here for a million years in various forms of development starting with the first couple. Fortunately, the two evolved at the same time and were able to reproduce at least a male and female offspring who did the same. Under these conditions, how many people would be on planet earth today at predictable population growth rates? The answer is astounding!
The average family world-wide today has 3.6 children. (An average 2.1 children per couple is needed for zero growth.) This is a growth rate world-wide of 2%.
If we extrapolate the present population backwards, starting with one couple, we can account for the present population in just 4000 years, using only a .5% population growth, or 2.46 children per family, much less than the present rate. That is far short of the 4 to 6 million years demanded for man’s existence by evolution. Further, if man has been around for a mere million years, that would be 28,600 generations as we know them today. Even with this tiny population growth rate average of .5%, in that amount of time we would have 102100 people on the earth! (That’s 1 with 2100 zeros after it.) Well, not only on the earth because this is more people than could be crammed into the known universe! If evolutionists protest, explaining plagues, and wars that have kept the population from growing, they must answer this: Even if the growth rate for a million years was so small that it accounts for the present world population, that would mean that at least 3000 billion people have lived on earth so far. What happened to all the fossils and skeletons? The day I wrote this the world population was estimated at 6,860,757,000 (Nov. 2008). Exactly thirty years before today (less than a generation), it was estimated to be 4,436,782,000, or 2,423,975,000 less. That is a 35% increase in thirty years! That is reality, not guesswork. The simple fact is, the present population is best explained by the young earth theory, yet the theory that man has only been around a few thousand years obliterates a basic requirement for evolution, lots of time. Again, we are forced by the facts to acknowledge that the creation story as outlined in the Bible is the most reasonable. And since only one Person was there to see it all, and He is very reliable, we can trust His account of what happened to be true.
Scientific Creationism, (ICR) pp. 167-169