Apologetics how old is the earth

Can the biblical 6, years be stretched far enough to encompass fossils of modern humans homo sapiens sapiens dating back perhaps to nearly , years?

The last of the four basic assumptions shared by concordists is that they reject Flood Geology and accept the standard geologic column. Hugh Ross and some others believe that the flood was geographically localized , covering part of the ancient Near East but not the whole globe.

Biblical scholar Paul Seely briefly assesses this view in light of current knowledge here, but a full discussion of the issues goes well beyond of the scope of this online course.

Anyone with appropriate expertise is invited to place comments below. Unlike the YECs, OECs do not contest the enormous body of evidence showing that the earth and the universe are billions of years old, and that complex, macroscopic life forms have been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. Quite the opposite. OEC authors often review selected pieces of the evidence, supplemented by arguments about how to read Genesis in light of that evidence, hoping to persuade YEC readers that mainstream scientific conclusions are indeed very well founded and do not contradict the Bible.

Indeed, concordists usually seem to be writing with one eye on YEC readers. Hugh Ross , an outspoken advocate of the day-age view whose views have already been discussed, is probably the most obvious example of such an author today, although many other examples could be given.

Thirty-five years ago, when Scientific Creationism was still relatively new, an influential group of evangelical authors very actively pushed progressive creationist interpretations with both eyes on YEC readers. Perhaps its most useful feature is the detailed account of scientific evidence unrelated to the radioactive processes that are so often criticized by YEC authors, undermining their credibility for many conservative Christian readers.

A revised edition is available here. I recommend that interested parties examine these sources and place comments below. Newman and a scientifically-trained pastor, Herman J. Eckelmann, Jr. The revised edition of this book is also available on the internet. That should not be surprising. Indeed, to some extent the OEC view has been subsumed within ID, though covertly rather than overtly.

I will say more about this in my upcoming columns about ID. Simultaneously with the books by Wonderley and Newman, geologist Davis A. However, his scholarship is impeccable and everything he writes is well worth reading, whether or not it advances a concordist model. Rabbitt History of Geology Award in Reed responds to Young and several other conservative Reformed geologists who accept an old earth here.

Incidentally, I met all three of these men Wonderley, Newman, and Young not too long after their books came out.

We were all involved with the American Scientific Affiliation. Readers who are very serious about Christianity and science should join that excellent organization: there simply is no substitute for the kind of live human interaction they foster. No blog or list-serve can come close to matching it. OECs not only accept the geological evidence for antiquity, they also accept its implications for interpreting Genesis—including its implications for theodicy.

OECs today still talk about death before the fall, partly because the absence of animal suffering prior to the fall is absolutely crucial to the YEC view of God and the Bible. OECs hold similar views about God and the Bible, alongside different views about natural history, so pardon the pun they take great pains to explain pain in a manner consistent with their OEC stance. A nice contemporary example is physicist David Snoke, who is also a licensed preacher in a very conservative denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America.

A recent concordist book about theodicy by William Dembski has drawn substantial attention—partly because the author is a leading advocate of ID, and partly because when he wrote it he was teaching at a seminary owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination in which the YEC view has many influential advocates especially R. Albert Mohler, Jr. Entitled The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World , Dembski states that this particular book, unlike his others, is not about ID, even though the problem of evil is highly relevant to the nature of an intelligent designer.

Hugh Ross apparently thinks that millions of creatures were created separately. Of course, the crucial issue is human origins: whatever a given OEC thinks about how many other creatures were separately created, God created Adam and Eve ex nihilo! Courtesy of Edward B. During the Reformation and the 17th century, the literal view received very strong support.

Allegorical readings that had been viable alternatives in earlier centuries became increasingly unpopular among both Protestant and Catholic scholars. This language was grounded in the interpretation provided almost a century earlier by the greatest theologian of the 16th century, John Calvin. In his Commentary on Genesis , originally published in Latin in , Calvin said concerning Genesis ,. Here the error of those is manifestly refuted, who maintain that the world was made in a moment.

For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction. Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men… [God] distributed the creation of the world into successive portions, that he might fix our attention, and compel us, as if he had laid his hand upon us, to pause and to reflect.

In this pithy paragraph, Calvin juxtaposed the two main alternatives available to pre-modern interpreters of Genesis. The option Calvin defended, the literal creation week, was strongly favored by the early reformers and rooted in the earliest Christian commentaries.

The option he rejected, in which all things were created instantaneously sometimes based on Ecclesiasticus , as Calvin indicated with evident disagreement , fell out of favor in early modern times, but it, too, was rooted in the earliest Christian commentaries—to say nothing of the great Jewish scholar, Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus.

Stromata , Book 6, Chapter The instantaneous view was advanced especially by the most important Western theologian of the first millennium, Augustine of Hippo , who wrote a work in multiple versions called On the Literal Meaning of Genesis ca. Influenced by Ecclesiasticus , he taught that in the beginning God made matter and all material things simultaneously. However, to aid our poor understanding, God told us about it in the pattern of six days.

They indicate logical order, not temporal order, and must be interpreted subtly. How can this be? Were the first three days unlike the next three days in some way? As we will see in my next column, the fourth day is crucial to the Framework view, but the questions addressed by that modern view are not modern at all. Before the late s, it was generally assumed that the entire pre-human world was at most only a few days older than humans.

There was hardly any scientific evidence bearing on the age of humanity, the Earth, or the universe. People interpreted Genesis on its own , without knowledge of modern geology or modern astronomy or Ancient Near East literature.

Peter Enns underscores the significance of this in his splendid book, The Evolution of Adam. Given the pre-modern understanding, the question naturally arises: how old is the Earth, according to the Bible?

Several specific dates have been endorsed, all clustering around years. The traditional Jewish date since the 12th century for the creation of the world is either 29 March or 22 September BC. The Byzantine date, based on the Septuagint in which some of the genealogies are different from the Hebrew version , is 1 September BC. Martin Luther calculated BC. By far the most famous date among English-speaking Protestants, however, is the one given by James Ussher, a truly erudite scholar who did things very carefully.

The literal creation week and the instantaneous creation were the two major alternatives for most of Christian history, but more than a few commentators took intermediate positions that I ignore here. I cannot adequately convey the subtlety and diversity of this grand conversation, stretching nearly 2, years, in 2, words. Those who want to dig deeper are urged to consult the references at the end.

These go back at least to the Middle Ages and were very common by the 17th century, when Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and many others acknowledged multiple sources of truth, using the same terminology.

Concordism in natural history , however, began in the late eighteenth century, in response to the growing sense that the Earth was vastly older than humanity. Concordism in natural history is all about reading Genesis in parallel with geology, in order to get a single, consistent picture. The rest of this column outlines key aspects of concordism in America since the s.

I introduced readers to Benjamin Silliman in the first part of this column. Briefly a Congregational minister, he became professor of geology and natural theology at Amherst College, where he also served nine years as president.

His textbook, Elementary Geology , the first to be written by an American geologist, contained a lengthy section devoted to biblical and theological issues that still makes fascinating reading today. One large class of animals, the carnivores, have organs expressly intended for destroying other classes for food. Indeed, Hitchcock argued, on biblical grounds alone, apart from geology, one might have to allow animal death before the fall.

If God was Creator, evolution could not be true. If evolution was true, then there was no Creator. The two were mutually exclusive. My task was simple: argue and dismantle the theory of evolution, so that the only option left would be that God was Creator. During this time, I took regular trips to Kentucky to volunteer at Answers in Genesis for several weeks at a time. I had access to some of the best minds in the YEC movement.

I recorded several interviews with Ken Ham while I was there and would play them on my radio show. Providing answers is what YEC apologetics is all about. Why do we wear clothes? Genesis Where did Cain get his wife? Why are there so many species in the world? Why did Jesus die on the cross?

The more answers I got, the more I needed. Any challenge to the YEC framework would ultimately undermine the source of all of my answers. Or so I thought. After high school, I attended a public state university and majored in biology and psychology.

My goal as a YEC apologist was to teach biology in a public high school and secretly preach creationism to my students. My parents were concerned that my professors would sway me to deny my faith and disregard the Bible. However, the exact opposite happened to me. I graduated from my secular, public university even more convinced of young-earth creationism than when I entered.

In , I entered seminary. At this point my passion was subsiding, and I realized that my dream of making a living as a YEC apologist was coming to an end. At this point, my wife and I were feeling called to be missionaries, and I wanted more theological training. Once I began to study in seminary, my world began to open up. I took courses on biblical exegesis. I learned how to look at a passage of Scripture and understand what it means. I had no idea that what I was about to learn would radically alter my interpretation of Genesis.

Some of the key principles of sound exegesis include looking at who the author was, why he was writing his book, who he was writing it to, and what he was trying to say. Armed with my new tools for biblical interpretation, I felt compelled to re-examine my views on the opening chapters of Genesis. What I found shocked me. Through the tools of biblical exegesis, I discovered in the opening chapters of Genesis an entire world of meaning I had never seen before. Understanding the literary genre and the historical-cultural context of Genesis dramatically shifted my interpretation of the creation events in Genesis chapters 1 and 2.

I was hoping to find biblical evidence against evolution, but instead I found no evidence that Genesis was concerned with any modern scientific view of origins. The opening chapters of Genesis were offering a story far greater and more majestic than I had ever realized. God was trying to show his people how incredible and powerful he was.

He was giving his people a national identity and identifying himself as their God and King—not even a hint of anything to do with evolution. The fewer answers I had, the more wondrous God became. But there was still one other obstacle that I needed to overcome.

How could God be Creator, and evolution be true? Asher so aptly points out that when we speak of the evolutionary process, we are speaking of the cause by which new species arise. When we speak of God as creator, we are speaking about the agency behind the cause.

In other words, science gives us the mechanism by which life develops, and religion gives us the agency behind the mechanism. Science and religion are not in opposition to each other, but complement each other. Just recently a friend of mine asked me how I could believe in evolution. What about the lack of evidence from genetic mutations?