Sarah Palin reportedly said that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Most modern-day scientists and public-school textbooks say the Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. Is Palin’s claim crazy? 

As with many of life’s important questions, I’d like to first look to Saturday Night Live for answers. 

There is an unsettling yet hilarious SNL skit where comedian Will Ferrell, a 37-year-old hairy-chested, mustachioed man is born to an unsuspecting, freaked-out couple in a hospital room. He comes out glazed in sweat, holding his own umbilical cord, stands upright and bellows, “Ah man, it was hot in there.” He then proceeds to thank the doctor (Charlie Sheen) for doing him “a solid” and offers a business handshake to his appalled new guardians, introducing himself as Ted Brogan. Astonishingly, Ted even managed to place a couple of bets in the womb and asks the doctor how his team is doing. 

Ted Brogan, not yet five minutes old, would appear to the average observer as having lived on Earth for nearly forty years. He walked and talked like an adult, and in many ways was already wise to his environment. (He and some other newborn adults end up taking off for Atlantic City. How’d he know about Atlantic City?)

Now imagine meeting Adam in the Bible a minute after his birth. By all appearances, wouldn’t one presume that he was in his mid- to late twenties? Should someone have asked him how old he was right then, wouldn’t he have said, to everyone’s amazement, something like, “Oh, actually, I was just born”?

By Genesis’ account, man wasn’t the only adult-looking newborn at Creation. Plants, fish, birds and land animals, too, fast-forwarded through their infancy years to adulthood. “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on land that bear fruit with seed in it.’” (Gen. 1:11) In other words, the very first apple trees appeared wearing apples, ready to go.

Here’s another: ”And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.’” (Gen. 1:20) There’s no mention of eggs or gestation periods or learning to walk. Rather, God made a special exception with the first creatures, to get the ball rolling. All of creation was born mature and already knew how to fly, swim, walk, or, in Ted Brogan’s case, place bets.

I often think about how it’d be to bump into Adam directly after his birth. All our tools of modern Science would reveal that Adam was much older than he actually was. And Science would arrive at this conclusion because, well, the idea of the birth of an adult baby is absurd, which is why the SNL skit works for gaining laughs. Creatures don’t just appear as adults. They need time to develop. They grow in progressive stages, beginning, naturally, as a seed or a cell, as every good elementary-school student knows, and go from there.

But God is good at shortcuts. He doesn’t need to fuss with planting seeds and waiting for them to grow up. God doesn’t even need parents for babies to be born. How’s that for skipping steps? In the beginning, God simply spoke and, poof, the world was filled with adult babies, or ”Ted Brogans,” everywhere: Ted Brogan trees, Ted Brogan livestock, Ted Brogan birds. It would appear to anyone just arriving on the scene that it has been business as usual for billions of years, when in reality the Earth was just born.

Jesus demonstrates with his miracles his knack for cutting out the middleman. For example, when he feeds the five thousand, the fish and bread he multiplies skips the necessary stages of labor that make them fit for human consumption. Rather than wait for Peter to catch and clean the fish or for someone to harvest the wheat and bake it, Jesus delivers the world’s first fast food. Baskets of fish and loaves miraculously appear, fully edible, oven-baked and showing all the signs of time having elapsed in their preparation. Jesus does this with healing diseases too; he bypasses the doctor or the prescription and patches up the person on the spot. No waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.

Since God is a master at creating new things that look old, it isn’t too far-fetched then for a Christian to propose that the age of the Earth itself may be an illusion. It could be only thousands of years old, instead of the billions of years purported by many scientists.

So maybe Palin does know what she’s talking about. Or maybe she’s just a Will Ferrell fan.

So you can imagine the let down once I discovered that, in this special case, it turned out to be nothing more than a rock formation that just so happened to look like a man. Yes, this lame fact had been confirmed by ”scientists.” As the imaginations of my Martian-crazed mind lay dashed to pieces on the rigid red rocks of Science, a new, and perhaps more mysterious set of questions presented themselves: who are these so-called “scientists” referred to in nearly every serious news article?

In order to get to the bottom of this, I decided, on the spot, to conduct a make-believe study involving billions of imaginary tax dollars. I lounged back in my desk chair, threw ball with my very persistant 9lb dog, and turned my brain loose on getting the inside scoop on this slippery tribe of brainiacs. This of course required little to zero research on my part, seeing I really hate research.

Scientists – the term sounds so vague, yet so profound. At the thought, I am immediately wisked away to the picture of lab-coated men in spectacles and clipboards, huddled around a tall cylinder glass casing. Inside is Einstein’s brain, suspended in a preserving liquid of sorts, kept alive through, you guessed it, Science. A network of tubes hooked to the famous brain feeds directly into a massive mainframe that burps out only the purest forms of intelligence in regular intervals, such as the devastating ripple effect that would certainly transpire if Burger King really did stop selling the Whopper.    

The weird thing is, any latest news article about the discovery of an unusual back molar found in a remote field somewhere overseas that further proves -”according to scientists” -that man evolved from kangaroos, or the like, sends me nodding hypnotically along, powerless against the scientists’ rule of my mind. Unusual teeth equals evidence of evolution – check. Well then, I thought, if that’s the case, I know how the scientists could cut travel costs. If it’s unusual teeth they’re after, they need look no further than the closest county fair.  

Anyway, in my head, I decided to do a little experiment of my own, to see if these scientific claims wielded the same power on the minds of others. I went around making outlandish claims to all sorts of people. For example, I’d confidently state something like,”Bananas are really cocunuts in disguise.” If challenged, I’d simply say, “according to scientists.” 

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Case closed. “I mean, if ’scientists’ said it…”

I tried the same experiment using God, who made the scientists, in place of ”scientists”. “You know, according to God, the first man was fashioned from dirt,” I’d say. Surprisingly, this didn’t convince anyone. Instead, I was met with a fusillade of questions.

“Which god? you’re god? how do you know your god is the right god? And you can’t tell me the words of the Bible have remained unchanged, untampered with all these years, what with human error, not to mention corruption.”

“I’m just kidding,” I’d respond, “I meant to say, ‘according to scientists’.”

“Well, in that case…”      

On another occasion, I noticed that the scientists can be real pranksters.  Why, just the other morning, I checked the news and was briefly paralyzed with horror as the headlines read something to the effect of ASTROID HEADS FOR EARTH, and below that, “scientists say”. It will arrive next Tuesday, and, if you’ve seen the movies Deep Impact and Armaggedon, you know what that means. The fact that the death asteroid would miss earth by millions of miles (which, apparantly, is quite close when you’re dealing with space), was cleverly hidden in the middle of the story - after I’d called off work and put in several calls to Ben Afleck about what to do. “False alarm,” I called to my wife. 

Billions of asteroids fire through space everyday. Why bring it up, unless to frighten the pajama pants off the reader? Practically speaking, if you’re going to talk killer, earthbound astroids, the least the scientists could do is rattle off the vastly unlikey odds that it might nip a polar ice cap or something. And start by saying, “Earth’s okay. Everyone will live.” No, the scientists have a different agenda: devilish pranks.    

And which scientists? All scientists? Every single one? It seems they always all agree. This is amazing. We should pattern world peace after these guys. You’d think there’d be at least one renegade, lounged in back, cooly blowing smoke rings, who’d occasionally object to a theory or something. (ex. “I don’t believe Barium is an element.”) 

Anyway, after all the hard thinking about scientists, my head started to ache. I’d learned some very interesting things about scientists today. And they are very smart, indeed. There’s no arguing that. But I thought of something the scientists probably never even considered: what if the Martians are made of rock?