Rubio's ruin?

The online world has been all a-Twitter about Marco Rubio's comments regarding the age of the Earth in a recent GC article. Some are defending him--after all, he wisely did not answer the question. Others are ridiculing him--after all, this is a rather basic piece of knowledge about the physical universe.  Paul Krugman has presented one of the more interesting and intelligent analyses I've seen so far (except for his last conclusion, which is a hasty generalization and should have been omitted). Rubio, in his response to the question, claimed, "the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow." Krugman astutely points out that the growth of the economy (certainly in the long term) is connected to education. Rubio's silence on the issue seems to imply that there are two good answers to the question: a) the Bible says the world (not merely the earth) is around 6000 years old; b) physics and geology say that the Earth (and, indeed, the whole solar system) is around five billion years old.  I think it is important to teach the Bible in our schools (and, in fact, I do)--we are speaking of one of the most influential books in the Western Canon. Nevertheless, the Bible should not be taught as if it were physics (I resent having to make this point). Physics should be taught as physics. There is room for disagreement as to the age of the universe, even among physicists.  However, the options are somewhere between 13.5 billion and 15 billion years--6000 is not on the list. The future of all economies is in technology (energy, sustainability, personal computing, etc.). If the US economy is to advance in the long term, science must be a central and strong feature of our education system. By the way, this does not change the status nor the importance of the Bible (virtually none of the church fathers, for example, believed that Genesis should be interpreted literally--nevertheless, none of them are thought to have betrayed the faith). Indeed, it opens up the beauty of what its authors were trying to convey.