old as is currently accepted by the mainstream
It's a difficult question to ask, not only because of the massive amount of information one can consider, but even more so because of the intense emotional baggage that invariably enters the debate from both sides of the isle. My guess is that most readers of this blog have already had an emotional response and are steeling themselves behind their firmly established opinions. But if I may presume to offer a suggestion here, set aside your emotions and firmly held beliefs and really try to view the question from a different angle. I can honestly say that the greatest leaps in my own understanding have come when I start with the attitude, "I might be wrong". It's the shallow mind that assumes all who disagree with them are idiots.
The 4.54 billion answer is based on scientific and rational arguments such as radiometric dating, observations of geologic formations such as the grand canyon and so forth. The young earth camp would point out that the "old earth" arguments are based on historical assumptions and that there is an abundance of evidence that supports the idea of a young earth which is mostly ignored by mainstream science (click here) for an example. The 6,000 year answer comes from a literal interpretation of the Bible based on the creation account in Genesis and the fairly detailed genealogy recorded throughout the old and new testaments.
If you wade into this debate you find that you are quickly inundated with data and heated arguments, but for the sake of simplicity I'm just going to consider one piece of data, the distances between stars and galaxies. This measure of the age of the universe is troubling for Biblical creationists as there is little debate that distant galaxies are billions of light years away, so considering a constant speed of light it's rational to assume that the light from those galaxies has been traveling for billions of years, far more than the 6,000 years a creationist would expect.
One solution advocated by some creationist is the "Day Age" theory, meaning that the 7 days of creation are not to be taken literally, but are rather symbolic of extremely long eons of time in which the universe unfolded. This is a tempting solution except that the Biblical account seems to go out of it's way to emphasize that the creation days were literal 24 hour days. For each creation day it says "And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.", "And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day." and so on. Why would the creator of the universe spend billions of years creating a universe then record for humanity that he did it in 6 days?
I think an exercise that can help solve this dilemma is to assume for the moment that the heavens and earth were all created in 6 literal 24 hour days and put yourself in the creation story at day 7. You encounter the first man, Adam, and strike up a conversation. In observing him you might estimate his age to be, say 28 years old, but if you were to ask him his age he'd reply, "I'm one day old". Now if you try to scientifically verify his answer you would quickly contradict his claim since every measure of Adam's age, (height, weight, intelligence, speech), would give you an age that far exceeds 24 hours. So we see here that, in this instance, scientific analysis is of no use in determining Adam's age as his creation was a miraculous event, turning dust into man, and not a natural and scientific event which the rest of us experience.
So we see then, that God created Adam and Eve as complete adult beings, that appear by every measure to be much older than they are and with the ability to propagate their species in a natural manner. In effect, God created a 28 year old man in one day. Using pure scientific analysis leads you to the wrong conclusion by a factor of 10,220. In this instance faith and divine revelation are the tools that will lead you to the correct answer. There's nothing wrong with the scientific analysis you did, it's just that it doesn't apply to Adam as a rare miraculous event occurred that science cannot account for.
By extension we could then observe other plants and animals to determine their age. We could cut down a tree and count it's rings to determine it's age. How many rings would you expect to find in a tree that was miraculously created 1 day ago? If we hold to the notion that God would create species fully mature and complete and able to reproduce we could say that here's a 75 year old tree that God created 4 days ago. Further we could analyze the soil and estimate how old the soil is by it's depth, composition, chemical analysis and determine that the soil would have taken 200 years to form at this depth, but once again we've reached the wrong conclusion since it was created miraculously a short time ago, though it will continue to form and accumulate at a scientific rate.
We could dig further and examine the rock layers, travel abroad and study the mountains and canyons, the sediments at the bottom of the sea and estimate the earth to be billions of years old, but once again we'd have reached the wrong conclusion.
Now, using the same line of thinking, if we take out our telescope and turn out attention to the stars, we could measure star distance and, observing that we can detect galaxies that are 12.6 billion light years away, thus the universe is at least 12.6 billion years old by scientific measure. But by revelation we understand that the universe was created in a day and light from distant galaxies has been created "in flight". It may seem like cheating for God to create light mid flight, but if if you were an omnipotent deity would you wait the 12.6 billion years, to avoid cheating, or would you speed things along a bit? Also, if you look closely at the biblical text you'll see that the light was actually created on day one, the sun and stars were added on day 4.
So, we can see that no amount of scientific research is going to lead us to the correct conclusion since all of creation came about as a miraculous historical event that can't be directly confirmed scientifically. To learn the truth you would need to rely in faith on the historical account from the eyewitness creator of the universe.
So, back to our original question, is the earth billions of years old or 6,000? I think the best answer is, seemingly contradictory, that it is a 4.5 billion year old planet that was created about 6,000 years ago. But, then again, "I might be wrong."
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