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).