Explore
The Creation Answers Book

The Creation Answers Book

Lessons & Chapters

Lesson 1 Does God exist? (Chapter 1)

Lesson 2: Six days? Really? (Chapter 2)

Lesson 3 What about gap theories? (Chapter 3)

Lesson 4 What about carbon dating? (Chapter 4)

Lesson 5 How can we see distant stars in a young universe? (Chapter 5)

Lesson 6 How did bad things come about? (Chapter 6)

Lesson 7 What about arguments for evolution? (Chapter 7)

Lesson 8 Who was Cain’s wife? (Chapter 8)

Lesson 9 Were the ‘sons of God’ and/or the Nephilim extraterrestrials? (Chapter 9)

Lesson 10 Was the Flood global? (Chapter 10)

Lesson 11 What about continental drift? (Chapter 11)

Lesson 12 Noah’s Flood-what about all that water? (Chapter 12)

Lessons 13 & 14 How did all the animals fit on Noah’s Ark? and How did freshwater and saltwater fish survive the Flood? (Chapters 13 & 14)

Lesson 15 Where are all the human fossils? (Chapter 15)

Lesson 16 What about ice ages? (Chapter 16)

Lesson 17 How did animals get to Australia? (Chapter 17)

Lesson 18 How did all the different ‘races’ arise (from Noah’s family)? (Chapter 18)

Lesson 19 What about dinosaurs? (Chapter 19)

The Creation Answers Book Study Guide

by Dr Don Batten, Dr David Catchpoole, Dr Jonathan Sarfati, and Dr Carl Wieland

Lesson 2: Six days? Really?

Text: The Creation Answers Book, chapter 2

Section: Why is it important?

Discussion questions

  1. How does an acceptance of ‘millions of years’ of Earth history affect the message of the Gospel? (See also Conclusion)

  2. If one believes that human death came into the world through sin sometime after the first identifiable humans evolved, but that animal death is normal, natural and God’s way of doing things, how does such a view undermine the Gospel?

Section: Why not believe they are ordinary days?

Discussion questions

  1. What is the main reason some people say that Genesis 1 speaks of long ages?

  2. What is meant by the term ‘special revelation’?

  3. What is ‘general revelation’?

  4. Why is it inappropriate to refer to ‘general revelation’ as the ‘67th book of the Bible’? (See also General and special revelation and The canonisation of ‘nature’)

  5. Why is it improper and unwise to use the findings of secular ‘origins’ science to interpret Scripture? See

Section: How has Genesis been understood in the past?

Discussion

  1. List two reasons for looking at the history of how Genesis has been interpreted.

  2. It has been claimed that, before long-age beliefs became main-stream, there was a minority view that God may have created instantly, and so that a day did not really mean a 24-hour day
    1. How did the various ‘church fathers’ view Genesis? (See also Genesis Q&A: How has Genesis 1–11 been understood throughout history?)
    2. Do the ‘church fathers’ give any support to adding billions of years to the Bible?

  3. What are some of the problems of tracing the ‘young-earth creationist’ movement back to the invention of George McCready Price in the 1920s?

Research Report

Section: Why must they be ‘ordinary’ days?

Discussion questions

  1. Look up the word ‘day’ in a Hebrew lexicon.
    1. Which Hebrew word refers to normal-length (approximately 24 hours) days?
    2. Which Hebrew words refer to long periods of time?
    3. What other Hebrew words are translated ‘day’?
    4. Which Hebrew word for ‘day’ is used in Genesis 1? (See also How long were the days of Genesis 1?)
  2. Why is it important to consider the context when determining the meaning of a word?

  3. How do we know the ‘days’ referred to in Genesis 1 were normal-length and not long periods of time?

  4. What is the basis for our month? Our year? The seasons? The seven day week?

Section: Other arguments against six days

Discussion questions

  1. What is significant about God creating the Sun on Day 4 rather than on Day 1?

  2. Why should 2 Peter 3:8 not be used to justify the idea that the creation days were long periods of time? (See also 2 Peter 3:8—‘One day is like a thousand years’.)

  3. How would you respond to someone who claimed that you were limiting God by believing that He created in six earth-rotation days?

  4. Why should Genesis 2 be considered complementary to Genesis 1, and not contradictory? (See also Do Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other?)

  5. What kinds of animals did Adam name on the Sixth Day? (See also Naming the animals: all in a day’s work for Adam.)

  6. In your own words, explain why the first three days of Creation should be considered ordinary days, even though the Sun was not created until Day 4. (See also How could the days of Genesis 1 be literal if the sun wasn’t created until the fourth day?)

Section: Is Genesis poetry/figurative, a theological argument (polemic) and thus not history? (Critique of the Framework Hypothesis)

Discussion questions

  1. It is widely held that there are literary devices within the text of Genesis 1 that preclude the genre being taken as straight prose; for instance, a lot of key words appearing multiples of seven times, and various other patterns within the text.
    1. Examine some of these alleged literary devices and comment on their significance.
    2. Explain why the presence of literary devices does not imply that Genesis (or any text) might not be history. (See also Should Genesis be taken literally?)
  2. What is the ‘triads of days’ idea?

  3. Name three ‘out of sequence’ events in Genesis 1 that argue against the ‘triads of days’ idea.

  4. List some of the problems with the framework hypothesis reading of Genesis 2:5. (See also An understanding of Genesis 2:5 (pdf))

  5. Is there any evidence that Genesis 1 was written for a specific audience at a specific time in history, and that as such it does not have anything to say about the mechanism of creation?

Research Report

  1. It is claimed that the structure of Genesis 1 deliberately mirrors the structure found in ancient pagan origins accounts (which, it is claimed, pre-dated Genesis 1), and stands as a polemic against these pagan accounts. Research one of these accounts. (See Genesis and the lost tablets or A comparative study of the flood accounts in the Gilgamesh Epic and Genesis)

    1. What are some of the corresponding features of the text?

    2. How strong is the correspondence?

    3. Is there any evidence that it pre-dates or post-dates Genesis?

    4. What are the problems with assigning a late date for Genesis? (See also Archaeologist confirms creation and the Bible.)

Section: Other problems with long days and similar interpretations

Discussion questions

  1. List three reasons (apart from the words of Scripture, itself) for why the days of creation could not have been long periods of time.

  2. How does the evolutionary order differ from the biblical order of Creation?

Section: Long-age Compromises

Discussion questions

  1. What is ‘theistic evolution’? What are some theological and scientific problems with accepting this idea? (See also Creation Compromises—Theistic Evolution: Why is it dangerous for Christians to believe?)

  2. What is ‘progressive creation’? List some theological and scientific problems with this view. (See also Creation Compromises—Progressive Creationism.)

  3. Why do those who do not take Genesis straightforwardly tend towards a local—rather than global—Flood?

Additional resource:

Sections: Why is it important? and Conclusion

Discussion questions

  1. Why is it important to accept that the days mentioned in Genesis 1 are regular in length?

  2. What should be our attitude toward Scripture?

Additional resource: