Young Earth

I believe that the Earth is young, in fact I think that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old and here is why:
The Creation week was exactly that: a week. The original Hebrew word for day that was used in Genesis 1 (yowm) is used 2301 times throughout the Old Testament with verying meanings. It is used to mean (among other things) an epoch in time, a 24-hour period, and the daylight portion of a day. However, when used with a qualifying number (such as the first day of creation, second day of creation, etc) it is seen 410 times in the OT and always meaning a 24-hour period; when used with the qualifier "evening and morning", it is seen 38 times always meaning a 24-hour period; and when used with the qualifiers "evening" and "morning" seperately, 23 times each always meaining a 24-hour period. I think that the Hebrew writers and God Himself was trying to say something with the words of Genesis.
The myriad of available dating methods are not reliable, and they become less reliable the older the object that you are trying to date. Carbon dating (calibrated or non-calibrated) can give different dates when dating two objects from the same time period. And carbon dating can only date objects a few thousand years old. In order to get dates of 4.5 billion years (the supposed age of the earth) you need to use a compound with a longer half-life, the most common being potasium-argon and it has been shown that you can use potasium-argon dating to date a recent lava flow as happening millions of years ago. And there are hundreds of other dating methods that are equally un-reliable. Consider this: if one were to look at Adam the day after his creation, he would appear by all signs to be 35 years old (or whatever age God created Adam to be) when in fact he would be only one day old. The point is, if God created Adam to be fully mature the day after creation, wouldn't it follow that the rest of creation would also start out mature? That would explain how dating methods (however unreliable they may be) can show a 4.5 billion year old Earth and how we can see light from stars billions of light years away.
Now here is why I think that this is important. If when we witness to people and explain to them that we are all sinners needing forgiveness, we need to start at the beginning of the story: we cannot tell people the good news of the gospel without first understanding the bad news ourselves. In Romans, Paul tells us that sin entered the world through one man (Adam) and that death is the punishment for sin. If someone thinks that the earth is millions or billions of years old, then they would have to add those years before Adam and Eve because they will not fit in the geneologies spoken of in the Bible. If there were millions of years before Adam, then there were millions of years of death (represented in the fossil record) before Adam's first sin. I do not in any way think that this is an essential of the Christian faith (i.e. an issue that effects salvation) but I do think that it is a very important issue that involves the inerrancy of Scripture. What do you think?