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Defending young earth is not biblical?
Published: 21 February 2015 (GMT+10)
A New Zealand correspondent who supports our ministry has expressed doubts about whether the Bible teaches a young earth and Dr Carl Wieland responds.
I am an evangelist … and really endorse your ministry. You give me the tools I need to counter the evolutionary arguments I face.
I just wanted to say that I don’t believe the Bible says the earth is young. It may be young, and I have read your many articles on scientific evidences supporting this argument as well as your articles on interpreting scripture as saying it is young.
However, I do not believe scripture says this and am concerned that you are trying to defend a position which is not necessary to defend. All your other work is so wonderful that I would not want you to try to defend a position which is not biblical and then maybe lose that argument or have the whole ministry discredited.
You don’t need to reply to this—it is just a concern of mine that we don’t get tied up trying to defend what the bible doesn’t explicitly say.
Brett W
Dear Mr W/Dear Brett
I have carefully read your email, and note that you are an evangelist, a very significant calling and task at any time. You may wonder why I am responding, considering you have said it is unnecessary. Perhaps it will help you to understand if you put yourself in the position of just having received an email from someone who says, e.g.: “The Bible doesn’t teach that God is a Trinity. I’ve looked and looked but the word ‘trinity’ doesn’t even appear in the Bible.” I’m sure you would find it difficult to resist pointing out to that person at least some of the many ways in which the teaching (as a deduction from combining various threads of separate teaching) is not only a very, very important one, but a blindingly obvious one. I’m sure you would also want that person to have the opportunity to at least consider things they likely have not done to date. Including not just Bible passages, but also [theological] implications from the evidence of the real world.
For example, the implications of having bloodshed, disease and suffering before the Fall, which is what long-agism must imply (since fossils show these things, then if they are millions of years old, it means they predated Adam and hence the Fall/Curse).
And it then also means rejecting the clear teaching of the global nature of the Flood. [There are long-age creation ‘ministries’ that push the idea that the earth is old. Consistently, they all deny the global nature of the Flood—but one only needs to read Genesis to see if that is even remotely possible from the language.] Do you really want to be on the side of the scoffers in 2 Peter 3:3–6, even if only partly? Do you really want to say with your stance that the overwhelming majority of great Christian scholars and thinkers were wrong in deducing from the Bible that the Bible teaches a perfect world before sin, ruined by sin, to be restored in the future to a sinless deathlessness? Do you really want to say that Jesus got it wrong about man’s relative position in the history of creation, as in the article below on Jesus and the age of the earth?
I submit for your careful and prayerful consideration just three articles, below, and invite your followup comments. May I suggest first the one featuring Jesus’ teaching. I know you are not advocating theistic evolution, but the implications of a long-age position are exactly the same when it comes to the particular statement by Jesus.
Kind regards in Christ,
Dr Carl Wieland
Reader’s comments
[Web link deleted as per feedback rules]
The book even discusses the passage you mention, which actually hardly helps those looking for millions and billions of years. And even before that book, we addressed this in an article on our site in 2 Peter 3:8—‘one day is like a thousand years’.
A good rule of thumb: the search button is your friend ;) With about 10,000 articles on the site, there is almost certainly something that addresses just about any relevant query you could have. (As proof, you could check on the bottom of this page and see that its article number is 9988.)
Jason C. United States
‘So long-agers and theistic evolutionists, etc., need to ask themselves: Do I believe that God is incompetent? Do I believe that God is a deceiver? To me, the answer is a clear and emphatic, "No, God is neither," and the implications of that answer are also clear: God is powerful enough to not only create us, but to create us as intelligent beings capable of understanding truth in a straightforward manner, from the very beginning of our existence; and He loves us enough to not deceive us, and to not mislead us and make fools of us.’
Very good,very good indeed Jason. And I would add that: because our God is such an Awesome God, we need to have more respect toward Him and His Word the Bible. And, if by any chance we are missing some ‘evidences’ - His awesome plan of salvation which includes such an atrocious experience of Jesus on the cross, His, beyond any understanding, desperation from feeling ‘abandoned’ by the Father – DEMANDS some FAITH from our sides … and some HUMILITY by our human spirit to accept the ‘fact’ that our ‘logic’ sometimes is no logic at all on the light of some further knowledge. Until late 1800, human flight was considered impossible, if not illogic by the ‘EXPERTS’! We do have nowadays airplanes that can carry hundreds of passengers IN ONE SINGLE FLIGHT! Think about that; God could have created everything in a sec, but, as a Great psychologist as He is, He chose the - six plus one day - unit to teach us the importance of the week’s time span. Thank you Father God and thank you CMI for your great job-mission.
God created... It was good...... War in heaven
Satan cast down. Screwed up everything..... God intervenes. Result is Genesis 1: 2 Darkness and water covered the face of the earth. The Holy Spirit was there and then comes the clean up. It sounded like this. LIGHT BE !
The scriptures are all in there. Get a Dakes Annotated Reference Bible and stop wasting time. We don't have a lot of time left and a lot of people out there that need to hear about Jesus. Let's go get them. Mel
I showed it to a geologist, and he said that it was from the Ordovician period, which was about 350 million years ago.
If one studies geological formations, easy ones in the Grand Canyon, one can see that it took millions of years for these formations to occur.
The scientists study all those things, and are able to draw quite obvious conclusions on how things came about. They are not exactly stupid, you know. The Colorado River took more than a few centuries to cut a mile deep, and through solid rock. Wake up.
Much of the Earth has had huge bodies of water standing independently, such as a monster lake that went from Utah or close, to Southern California. Do you think that something like that could evaporate in a few thousand years?
The glacier that went almost to Oklahoma or so, and then receded, and formed the Great Lakes, took a long time to go down and back. Did you ever hear that things move glacially? There is a reason for that term.
There is the Atlantic Ridge. When you look at the design, it seems quite plain that Africa and South America were one once. How long did it take them to separate? Quite some time, I imagine. Some people just refuse to look at the obvious clues, which are everywhere.
In reply to your using this passage from Romans as evidence that the earth was created not long ago: Is not the Lord also speaking to you and me in this passage. But we were not there at the beginning. But we can see the evidence from the very beginning of creation. Also, what about this scripture: Revelation 13:8
So by the same reasoning you are using, Jesus was crucified the same week that the universe was created.
It is also true that most Christian scholars and thinkers through the centuries affirmed the Scriptural support for a young earth.
Something else, however, that people need to consider but usually don't: What does it say about God if the opening chapters of Genesis are merely symbolic or allegorical but God nonetheless let his people carry on for thousands of years thinking that they were literal? And what does it say about God if He used long ages and evolutionary processes to create, yet let his people believe, for thousands of years, that the opposite was true?
It would mean one of two things: God is incompetent, or He's a deceiver. If God created us using long ages and evolution, but couldn't create us in such a way that we could understand those truths from the very beginning of our existence—straightforwardly and without symbolism—He's not the all-powerful God the Bible says He is. And if God created us using long ages and evolution and WAS able to make us understand those truths from the beginning but simply didn't—instead letting us go on blathering about 6 days and special creation and looking like fools—then He's a deceiver and not very nice.
So long-agers and theistic evolutionists, etc., need to ask themselves: Do I believe that God is incompetent? Do I believe that God is a deceiver? To me, the answer is a clear and emphatic, "No, God is neither," and the implications of that answer are also clear: God is powerful enough to not only create us, but to create us as intelligent beings capable of understanding truth in a straightforward manner, from the very beginning of our existence; and He loves us enough to not deceive us, and to not mislead us and make fools of us.
If Brett still does not think the Bible suggests 6000 years, he can calculate this age by adding up the ages the patriarchs, prophets and others in the Old Testament were when their first son was born and he will most likely come up with the same answer as Bishop Ussher did.
A lot of history has happened in those 60 centuries, just think what's occurred in Australia in the past two centuries alone let alone the rest of the world
See also The earth: how old does it look? which addresses the common idea that the earth 'looks old'.