My Journey from Young-Earth Creationism, Part 3

Click here to read Part 1, and here to read Part 2.

My confusion was deeper than ever. I knew that the universe was nearly 14 billion years old, so young-earth creationism was out. I also knew that the six days of creation were normal 24-hour days (there goes the Day–Age view) and that there was no gap between the first and second verses of Genesis 1 (there goes the Gap view), therefore old-earth creationism was out. What was left? I had no idea. I couldn't even imagine an interpretation of Genesis 1 that accounted for all these things being true—at least not one with an evangelical commitment to the authority of Scripture as the infallible word of God. And to put tighter constraints on my search, it was my opinion that for any view to be credible it had to take Adam seriously as a historical figure with an integral role in redemptive history. There was never the slightest inclination to regard either Adam or the creation account as an epic myth (in the sense of "this is not history").

How could all these things be true within a uniform and coherent biblical world-view? I didn't know, to be perfectly honest. The challenge was too intimidating for me at that point so I put the whole thing on the back burner (as the idiom goes). I had other issues to deal with at the time anyhow, far more interesting and edifying issues. It was roughly during this same period that I was beginning to embrace the Protestant theology of the early Reformers, so I was intensely preoccupied with studying the five solas of the Reformation, [1] the doctrines of grace, and covenant theology, as well as certain confessional documents such as the Canons of Dort and the Westminster Confession of Faith. These studies would consume most of the next five years or so, up until about 2010. (My personal library also expanded enormously during this period.)

But there were times when the pace of my studies would slow down and I was able to divert some attention to other matters, and invariably those matters would pertain to origins in one way or another. For a very brief period I was exploring a view known as the Framework Hypothesis, under which the days of Genesis 1 are not a chronological sequence of events but a literary framework for God's creative activity. [2] Yet I was barely introduced to this view when my studies were sidelined by a book recommended to me by Amazon. The author was a gentleman named John H. Walton and the book was called The Lost World of Genesis One (2009). [3] This professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and Wheaton Graduate School presented an interpretation which was genuinely unique, fascinating, and richly rewarding theologically.

According to the extensive historical and grammatical exegesis he presented—which was far more careful and detailed than anything I had ever read before—it appeared that Genesis 1 had nothing to do with the dawn of natural history. [4] We quite naturally think that to create is to bring something into existence, which is understood in material terms, but that is precisely the problem: it is "we" who think that way, and it's so intuitive and ingrained that we've never thought to question it. And we simply imposed our modern categories on this ancient text without a second thought, taking it for granted that people over three thousand years ago thought in the same terms. But maybe there are some important questions we need to ask related to responsible and meaningful exegesis, important historical and grammatical questions. The ancient Israelites didn't view the world, as we do, in terms of its material structure and properties, as if it was a vastly complex machine engineered by a transcendent designer. They viewed it in terms of its order and function, as if it was a sacred kingdom with a sovereign ruler. [5]

Consistent with the larger context of Genesis and the rest of Scripture, the creation account was concerned with the dawn of redemptive history, as distinct from natural history, describing creation in terms of a cosmic temple inauguration over seven 24-hour days, which was to function as sacred space for God's image-bearers with whom he would dwell. This cosmic temple inauguration view Walton proposed was exegetically sound and theologically robust, and I was especially struck by how well it dove-tailed with what I had learned from Gregory K. Beale and his book, The Temple and the Church's Mission (2004). [6]

So if this was about the dawn of redemptive history roughly 6,000 years ago, the question of natural history going back several billion years is left unfettered. In other words, the days of creation are normal 24-hour periods and the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. Both are true. First was the dawn of natural history (during which the cosmic temple was constructed), which was followed by the dawn of redemptive history (when the cosmic temple was inaugurated over seven days). This, therefore, is how I understand the relationship between revelation (Scripture and nature) and interpretation (theology and science): Natural history disclosed through general revelation has its meaning and purpose unveiled in redemptive history disclosed through special revelation.

My confusion was gone, my faith was invigorated.

John M. Bauer
@JohnMBauer1
Approx. 900 words

Footnotes:

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[1] The five solas are: (1) sola Scriptura, (2) sola gratia, (3) sola fide, (4) solus Christus, and (5) soli Deo gloria. I would recommend the 1996 Cambridge Declaration for more information.

[2] See for example Henri Blocher, In the Beginning (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984), 39–59.

[3] John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009). I have a fourth printing from 2009, which ended up becoming very worn and battered, thus I also have a 12th printing from 2013. For whatever reason, the page numbers are not the same. So the page numbers cited refer to the 2013 printing.

[4] Ibid., 95. "Viewing Genesis 1 as an account of functional origins of the cosmos as temple does not in any way suggest or imply that God was uninvolved in material origins—it only contends that Genesis 1 is not that story."

[5] The differences between our modern cognitive context and that of the ancient Israelites are remarkable. Even regarding something as mundane as the earth being a planet, they didn't have that understanding. "The Hebrew word for 'earth' was the word for 'land' or 'soil,' not 'planet'." Karl W. Giberson and Francis S. Collins, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2011), 233n10. There is good reason to think that they didn’t even have a concept of planets.

[6] Gregory K. Beale, The Temple and the Church's Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

My Journey from Young-Earth Creationism, Part 2

Click here to read Part 1.

So it was through the public scrutiny of open debate that I had discovered two things about the scientific creationism I had chosen to believe. First, I didn’t understand evolutionary theory or the science at all. What I thought I knew routinely turned out to be a crude caricature of evolution that scarcely resembled the theory. Furthermore, I was taught nothing of science or scientific principles; the creationist authors I had been reading merely used science-sounding language in their promotion of a young-earth view—and it was not always coherent, although to these untrained ears it sounded impressive. Second, I learned that science does not support a young earth, much less a young universe. Very simple and easy-to-understand observations and measurements make it clear that the universe simply has to be several billion years old. For religious reasons I was unable to accept evolution, and for scientific reasons I could not accept young-earth creationism, so I found myself a bit confused and struggling. The enormous wealth of evidence for creation being orders of magnitude older than what I was told had to be taken seriously.

The science is unambiguous that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, so why were young-earth creationists telling me that the heavens and the earth are less than 10,000 years old? How were they arriving at that calculation, since the science wasn't producing it? Evidently it was Adam. [1] First, according to the genealogical records in the Bible—the lists of who was the father of whom—Adam lived somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago (taking into account known and suspected gaps in the genealogies). And second, it is assumed that Adam was created on the sixth day of creation week, which effectively situates us in the text of Genesis 1. If we take the days of creation as being constituted by normal rotations of the earth's axis (e.g., "there was evening and there was morning, the first day") then the heavens and the earth could not be more than a few days older than Adam himself. This all seemed straight-forward and obvious. If there is an error in this reckoning, where is it?

Well, at first I thought that the error might be located in how the term "day" was being interpreted. Another friend of mine, upon hearing about my experiences, was able to sympathize because he had similar experiences and he gave me two books by Hugh Ross. [2] As most Christians know, Ross is a proponent of a traditional interpretation of Genesis 1 known as the Day–Age view, which holds that each and every day of creation was an indefinitely long age, perhaps millions of years. In this way one may hold an old-earth view of creation, accepting what reality is telling us about the age of the universe, without rejecting Genesis 1 or the authority of Scripture. While the science which Ross explained was definitely sound and tremendously informative, his interpretation of Genesis 1 never really sat right with me. It was too difficult for me to accept that the six days of creation were anything other than normal 24-hour days. There was (and is) no getting around this. So my confusion persisted and I had to keep looking for answers.

An alternative was something called the Gap view, which is also a traditional view of Genesis 1 within the church. This view suggests inserting a massive, indefinite gap of time between Genesis 1:1, when God created the heavens and the earth, and 1:2, where the earth was described as "without form and void." It was suggested that something happened to render the earth in this condition. Also, the entire scope of natural history up to the end of the Neolithic Age was said to have occurred within this gap—early life, the dinosaurs, cave men and so forth—with God sort of starting over, as it were, with the creation account from the second verse onward. Theologically this view was satisfying, although it was troublesome exegetically because isolating the first verse from the second was ad hoc and strained at best. Some of the best scholarship I had read argued strongly (and convinced me) for the integrity of these two verses. Inserting a gap between them struck me as weak, and my conscience kept bothering me until I abandoned that view.

So I could not accept either the Day–Age view or the Gap view, which left me struggling with how to interpret and understand Genesis 1 in a universe that is billions of years old. Some kind of mistake was being made in the interpretation of this account of creation, but it was not to be found in the days being 24-hour periods. That was not a mistake. There was also no way to insert nearly 14 billion years of natural history between the first and second verses. Nothing within the text of Genesis 1 so much as hints of a gap. So how could it be true that (1) the universe is 13.8 billion years old, (2) the days of Genesis 1 are normal 24-hour periods, and (3) there are no enormous gaps of time within the account? Somehow all of these things are true, but I was utterly mystified as to how that could be. There was no ready solution that affirmed all three as true, so it would be years before I would revisit this question.

Click here to read Part 3.

John M. Bauer
@JohnMBauer1
Approx. 900 words

Footnotes:

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[1] The Irish bishop James Ussher is most famous for calculating the age of creation using Adam and biblical genealogies. According to him, the world began at 6:00 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BC. But he was certainly not the first to reason this way. "The first person known to propose an actual date for the beginning of the world was the second-century bishop Theophilus of Antioch" (the city in Turkey, not Syria). "Working through the Old Testament, he added up the dates of the patriarchs (the male descendants of Adam) and those of the judges and kings (who ruled Israel later)" in order to show that the number of years that had elapsed since the creation of the world was 5,698 (give or take a few weeks). He was followed by others over the next fifteen hundred years, from the Venerable Bede to Martin Luther and others, including Ussher in the seventeenth century. Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 14–16.

[2] Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos (1993; repr. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2001); Beyond the Cosmos, rev. ed. (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1999).

My Journey from Young-Earth Creationism, Part 1

I was first introduced to the gospel of Jesus Christ by a close friend of mine roughly twenty years ago. It was after a series of in-depth Bible studies within his home exploring the nature and meaning of the gospel that he and his wife prayed over me and I gave my life to Christ. (I'm sorry, I realize that this is extremely abbreviated. The whole thing was truly a much more involved and emotional series of events but the point of this story, here, regards something that happened many years later.) He and his family belonged to a Baptist church and I joined them for corporate worship on Sunday mornings, followed by further Bible studies in the afternoons. This was not something imposed on me as a kind of obligation; my spiritual appetite was voracious—and still is—so I enjoyed these studies with tremendous enthusiasm. Since he was not only a very close friend but also my spiritual mentor, I placed a great deal of trust in him and his counsel. Obviously, then, most of my beliefs were reproductions of his own convictions, which among other things included a young-earth view of creation. [1]

Almost from the very start I was drawn into the scientific creationism version of the young-earth view, reading books by such men as Henry Morris and others. [2] (There was an alternative version that I would not discover until much later, biblical creationism, which was taught by the likes of Ken Ham and others. The former presented supposedly scientific arguments for a young earth with select appeals to Scripture, while the latter focused more on biblical arguments with select appeals to science.) At any rate, I was passionate and super energized, utterly convinced that my new faith was absolutely true and unassailable. That conviction was emboldened by a notion that practically all relevant scientific data supported a young earth and a world-wide flood—or so I was told by these books, the details of which I all but memorized over several years.

Also around this time I had discovered the internet, which back then was still a relatively new thing accessible using a dial-up connection. Does anyone remember how someone picking up the phone would kick you off the internet? (Back then these were land-line telephones, these things which were left in the home plugged into the wall.) Back then, if you wanted a search engine you would have to choose between Webcrawler, Dogpile, Excite, Alta Vista, or Ask Jeeves, depending on the sort of results you wanted. Back then, you could chat with your friends online in real time using the ICQ platform. (Get it? I -seek-you.) And back then, there were these other high traffic areas on the internet besides the world-wide web, such as newsgroups, places which may not even exist anymore. But that was the era when I discovered the Talk Origins newsgroup, which was sort of like a large collective email discussion group. This is where energized creationist soldiers went for combat training against the godless forces of Darwinian evolution. And I was armed and ready.

Or at least ready. As it turns out, I was not armed. Nearly all of the arguments against evolution which I had carefully learned failed to hit their mark because they attacked caricatures of the theory. I had not realized this because I never actually understood evolution. Like any good young-earth creationist, everything I knew about Darwin and evolution was derived from creationist resources, but it seemed not even they understood the theory. I had not myself read any primary source material, books written by scientists or evolutionists, because honestly I was scared of them. I had been told they were godless men bent on corrupting the faith of God’s children. Clearly it would be unwise to read their poison, so I stayed within the safe confines of creationist resources which I assumed were accurate, fair, and honest, as they professed to be Christians who I expected would treat others with spiritual, moral, and intellectual integrity.

But it didn't end there. Even the arguments for a young-earth creation failed. One confrontation after another made it unmistakably clear that science does not actually support a young earth. Never mind a world-wide flood 4,000 years ago, I couldn't establish that the heavens and the earth were less than 10,000 years old. My arguments were defeated in the heavens before getting to the earth. From cosmology to physics, the scope of the universe and the realities of space-time made it abundantly clear to me that the universe could not possibly be as young as I had been told. When you look at the moon you are not seeing it as it is, but as it was nearly one and a half seconds ago. What you see happening on the surface of the sun actually happened about eight minutes ago. It takes time for light to reach us. Makes sense to me. All right, now look at that galaxy over there. That is not what it looks like now, but what it looked like two and a half million years ago—that's how long it took the light to reach us. Interesting. Err, no. Wait, what? So the universe has to be at least a few million years old? Yes, and the farther away the objects in our telescopes are, the older the universe has to be. [3] According to our best observations and measurements from multiple independent lines of evidence—using some of the most expensive technology in the world—the universe is 13.819 billion years old. Although my faith was intact and unshakable, it was evident that there was some kind of mistake being made with Genesis 1. It seemed that I was going to have to think about this.

Click here to read Part 2.

John M. Bauer
@JohnMBauer1
Approx. 950 words

Footnotes:

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[1] Interestingly, this friend was also strongly opposed to Reformed theology. He thought the only thing worse than the foolish error of Darwinism was the diabolical heresy of Calvinism. It makes me wonder, then, what kind of connection lies between my beliefs and his, given that many years later (the middle of my thirties somewhere) I would become (i) a Calvinist (ii) defending evolutionary creationism.

[2] The very first book I read on the subject of origins was Henry M. Morris, ed., Scientific Creationism (San Diego, CA: Creation-Life Publishers, 1974). This was the sixth printing from 1980. I have no idea if there was any material difference between this and the first printing. There was no indication that this was a different edition.

[3] Some have tried to argue that the speed of light has dramatically slowed down over time, but observational science rules that out conclusively.

What is the Norman D. Jones Science Award?

In the two volumes of his book, Evolution: The Grand Experiment (2009), and many other places online, Dr. Carl Werner has been given credit for being "the recipient of the Norman D. Jones Science Award," among other accolades. In the second volume it is said that he won this award "for his experiment dealing with the food preservative EDTA" and a photograph of a 1977 front-page story about this in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper is included. However, there have been no descriptions or any indications of what this award was, who awarded it, nor any kind of information about it.

Just as others had done before, I tried in vain to pester Google about it, coming up empty as they had. I saw that one gentleman had attempted writing to the publisher, New Leaf Press, with his inquiry but he said that he never heard back from them.

So, what is the Norman D. Jones Science Award?

First of all, according to Linda Lockhart Jones, who wrote that front-page story for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it was actually called the Norman R. D. Jones Award. A trivial correction, to be sure, but we do want to be as accurate as possible. Nevertheless, this was a regional science fair award given to high school students in Missouri. It was more than 40 years ago that Werner received this award (April 21, 1977), back when he was still a senior at St. John Vianney High School. According to Wikipedia, that is a private, all-male Catholic college preparatory school in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis. The newspaper ran that front-page story the following day about Werner receiving this "top award of the Greater St. Louis Monsanto/Post-Dispatch Science Fair," which Norman R. D. Jones himself co-founded.

Werner explained that he won this regional high school award for his two-year research project on ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) which, Wikipedia tells me, is a food preservative intended to "prevent catalytic oxidative decoloration." The newspaper reported that he began this project in his parent's basement but the bulk of the research "was carried out in the laboratories of the University of Missouri at St. Louis under the direction of biology Prof. Albert Derby." He also received a four-year renewable scholarship to the University of Missouri Medical School at Kansas City, in addition to a monetary prize from the St. Louis Medical Society. He would also go on to represent St. Louis the following month (May 1977) at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Cleveland.

Impressive, I think, for a high school kid. Nicely done.

References:

Carl Werner, Evolution: The Grand Experiment, 2 vols. (2007; Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Press, 2009).

Linda Lockhart Jones, "Top Award for Study of Additive," St. Louis Post-Dispatch (newspaper), vol. 99, no. 111, April 22, 1977 (pp. 1 and 6A).