Has the world been in existance for thousands or millions of years?

universe - 15 billion plus minus a half a billion earth - 4.5 billion, plus minus a few hundred million years

The earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, i.e. 4500 million years. The universe has been around 13.7 billion years. Notice that the universe is about three times as old as the earth. The dating of the age of the earth is done through radioactive dating; usually Uranium series, Rubidium-Strontium, or Potassium-Argon dating. Carbon-14 dating is *not* used for dating the earth or anything else over about 50,000 years old. Beware of anyone who mentions carbon dating in the same context as dating dinosaurs or the earth.

4 billion years

Yup, 4.6 billion years is the best estimate for the age of the earth, based on the scientific evidence. However whoever said that C14 is used to date the earth is completely wrong. C14 only works on things that were alive no more than 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Created in the big bang, its been around for 4.5 Billion years they say these days. Its based on fossils c14 dating and geology.

this world (earth) has been around for 4500 million years or maybe 5000 million. the universe has been around for 15800 million years. all that happened before I was born.

You could fill a library with the books on geology and biology that track the history of the Earth. So well do these ideas fit that people can tell the age of many rocks and fossils just by looking at them. Sedimentary layers are an obvious fact. The Grand Canyon in the USA tells an incredible story going back (down!) over a billion years.

Billions of years. It is a coalesed (spelling?) entity made from billions of particles of dust and rock left over from the formation of the sun.

No one "knows" if it was created or coalesced or what, but it's a popularly held belief that earth is 4.9 billion years old. Large Cop, are you being incredibly sarcastic or are you a freaking nutcase? And Chase, String Theory explains where the matter came from, and even if it's not true the universe just exploded from a single super-dense point of matter.