The problem is sin. God's curse was on Adam's whole dominion, even the very elements. If that were the case, the bitterly cruel physical suffering and death of Christ on the cross for our sins becomes a travesty. Unbelievers seem to have a better understanding of this obvious truth then old-earth creationists do. Thus the wonderful saving gospel of Christ is essentially subverted and destroyed if we must accept the vast ages of the evolutionary cosmologists and geologists, with their eons-long spectacle of suffering and death as recorded in the global fossil graveyard.
Fossils speak of death, and death results only from sin and judgment.
Sin . . . The oldest written records we have, apart from the Bible, are in Egypt and Sumeria, and these only go back a few thousand years. Nowhere in the fossil record are there any genuine evolutionary transitional forms between kinds, and certainly no one has ever observed true evolution taking place in all recorded history. Furthermore, many geologists now recognize that all formations were laid down very rapidly. Uniformitarian speculation applied to a few radiometric decay systems may suggest great ages, but other more reasonable assumptions applied to scores of other global processes indicate much younger ages.