Many religious people are told to believe it came into existence around 6000 years ago.
But science and a humanist would take time to understand the science and evidence that it is a natural place formed over billions of years.
Radiometric Dating is done using carbon dating for more recent samples and other isotopes (like uranium – lead) for older samples / rocks. It measures the decay of radioactive elements over time. Using these methods the age of the Earth has been estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old.
Evolutionary Biology using the fossil record shows evidence of life forms having evolved over billions of years. Starting with simple micro-organisms to complex animals. The evolution of these organisms takes vast amounts of time. The oldest known fossils of single-celled organisms date back about 3.5 billion years. More complex organisms, such as plants and animals, evolved over hundreds of millions of years, reflecting the long history of life on Earth.
Ice Cores taken from Antarctica and Greenland contain annual layers that can be counted back in time. Some of these ice layers have been dated to over 800,000 years.
What's Humanism? 