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How Old are Rocks |
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How Old….
 For several months, our adult class has been studying the age of the earth and why it matters to us as Christians. It has been my privilege to teach this class. Those in my class know that I don’t give out study notes – that would require being organized. Toward the end of the study, someone commented that it would be nice to have the subject matter in written form for future reference. So, this is the short version of four months of Sunday school.
Now, I am neither a scholar nor a scientist. The only real qualification I have for writing this is that I fervently believe the Bible is God’s Word and is therefore absolutely reliable and true. However, since most Christians would also claim to believe this, further qualification is necessary. I also believe that the Bible was written to be understood, and the clear, concise statements of scripture are intended to be easily comprehended and believed at face value. This belief will have focus primarily on the early chapters of Genesis, but is true throughout the Word of God.
Virtually the entire secular world and a vast majority of those within organized Christianity believe the earth is billions of years old. This idea is presented as proven fact in all levels of education, the scientific community, the media, and all other related influence-producing organizations. There are exceptions of course. There are organizations such as Answers in Genesis that are doing an excellent job in defending the biblical viewpoint of our beginnings. There are many scientists and teachers who accept the biblical account of origins, and skillfully defend it. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of influential organizations support the idea of billions of years and its many ramifications.
This is a problem because it is contrary to the clear teaching of the Word of God. One cannot believe the earth is billions of years old and at the same time accept the direct statements of the first eight chapters of Genesis. They are mutually exclusive - they cannot both be true.
The secular mind has no problem with this. It does not believe the Bible anyway, so it is simply ignored. No problem. The Christian, or at least the one who claims to believe the Bible is true, has a real dilemma. His task is to create a scenario in which both sides can exist at the same time. There are some very smart people who devote their careers to doing this. Alas, it is an impossibility without modifying and twisting what the Bible clearly teaches. Why? Because in the end, they cannot both be true.
Our purpose then is to attempt to show - from arguments both outside of Scripture and within scripture - that such twisting is unnecessary and that the methods used to “prove” the billions of years idea contain flaws that render the conclusions untrustworthy. We believe God’s Word, without the awkward mechanism of “reinterpreting” and modifying that which God has told us in simple clarity.
It is vitally important before progressing into the actual content of the work that we examine our “starting point” or initial bias, as it were. You, as an individual, will embrace one of the following two viewpoints and it will determine how you view all which will follow:
1.I believe the early chapters of Genesis are true, clear and present the accurate, historical account of the beginning of the earth and the universe itself. All other information must be interpreted and evaluated in the light of this reliable foundational truth. John 17:17  gives me the direct statement that “… Thy Word is truth”. It is therefore the scriptures which set the standard by which all other information must be evaluated.
2.Scientific research has discovered information that is impossible to ignore and folly to disbelieve. Some of this information seems to be directly contradictory to what is written in the early chapters of Genesis. When this happens, it becomes necessary to reevaluate my interpretation of the Bible because I accept the findings of the scientific world as true and reliable. Everything else, including the historical portions of the scriptures, must be interpreted in light of this truth.
All of us will go into a study of this topic with a starting point. We will have varying degrees of passion and education on the subject, but we will all have a bias, an opinion, which will color the way we evaluate the information which will follow. We believe option #1 has a more solid foundation than option #2 and this brief work will attempt to show this.
Most of the ideas I will present are not my own. Many come from Ken Ham and the folks who write for his organization. The late Henry Morris also had some good insights. A few other sources were added to the thought process and once in a while, I had an idea of my own.
I believe in credit where credit is due, but I won’t be doing the footnote thing here. This work is primarily for my Sunday school class and a limited number of other interested or semi-interested individuals. Publication is highly unlikely.
Our focal point in the class was a tennis ball-size rock we found outside the church. We put it up on a little stand and asked the question, “How old am I?” We did this for two reasons. First, it’s a worthless little rock. Why would anybody with a brain care how old it is? Indeed - that is precisely the attitude of most Christians. It is a non-issue to most people. However, it is a non-issue to these people not because it is unimportant or irrelevant but because they have not thought it through. If the rock is a billion years old, then so is the Earth and the universe the Earth spins in. If this is true, the ramifications shake even the foundations of our theology in other areas, as we shall discuss later in this work.
Second: Okay then, how old is it? We believe the Bible provides the answer to this question. Is there a single verse that declares the actual day or year or week of creation? No. It is not needed. The early chapters of Genesis, if allowed to stand on their own simple clarity, will take us from creation to Abraham, in very round numbers, in about 2,000 years. We know from both secular and biblical sources that Abraham lived around 2,000 B.C. Therefore, creation cannot be placed much further back than 6,000+ years without beginning to stress the credibility of the biblical account. And of course, when we add millions of years to this, a major renovation of the doctrine of creation has to take place. We all know that a major renovation requires heavy duty equipment. In this case, the heavy duty equipment is the theories. Warning: do not attempt to add millions of years to the creation account without a theory. We will address this issue in more detail as the work progresses. The point here is that the age of a worthless, little rock really does matter.
It is a curious phenomenon that so many Christians - who would never think of tampering with doctrine such as sin, redemption, the work and person of Christ, and others - will think nothing of ignoring or modifying various aspects of the doctrine of Origins, to force it to conform to the latest scientific “fact” (discovery). The irony of this is that all of these doctrines are interrelated. None of them stand alone – all are affected by the others.
So it is time to begin. We will proceed first by looking at information from outside of scripture that will hopefully cast doubt on the claims of the scientific community that the earth is billions of years old. This information is pronounced as proven fact. We will examine the methods used, looking for flaws that can lead to inaccurate conclusions. After that, we will look within the scriptures, noting what is said about origins and the far-reaching ramifications that come with disbelieving what God tells us. The previously mentioned theories will be discussed during this last section.
Science is a wonderful thing. We believe Genesis 1:28 is a directive from God for man to practice science. His creation has order, symmetry, and predictability, and is marvelous in its beauty, complexity and discover-ability. God has given it a reflection of His own glory ( Psalm 19 ). Man, the high point of God’s creation ( Hebrews 2:6-7 ), was created with the ability to observe, appreciate, analyze and profit from God’s creation. Science is done with God’s blessing. Indeed, science is His idea and He commanded it. Science has given us marvelous things. Virtually everything we touch, from seedless grapes to GPS, is there because some scientist figured something out.
True science, however, is not without limits. The scientific method, which most of us learned about in grade school, is based on gathering observable, repeatable and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. It consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation. In short, true science exists only in the here and now - the present. Only the present can be observed, experimented on and tested. While it is certainly true that much scientific research attempts to discover things about the past, it is obvious that all evidence, whether fossils, rocks or light beams from outer space, exists only in the present. Therefore, in order to draw conclusions about the past, evidence has to be studied in the present, and an interpretation of what has been studied must be applied in order to declare things about the past to be fact.
Now, both sides of “The Age of the Earth” issue have access to the same evidence, yet their conclusions about the past are vastly different. How can this be? Simple. One side’s interpretation of evidence is influenced by their starting point (mentioned before), and also by the methods used to evaluate the same evidence. Whereas the scientific method deals with direct observation and repeatable experiments, placing interpretation into the formula adds a subjective element that is susceptible to a wide range of diversity. We will deal with this issue in greater detail in the pages to follow.
Before moving on to the main body of our arguments, it is important to establish what is at stake here. Why are we doing this and why do we care about how old our little rock is? There are a number of reasons, but we will list what are probably the two primary ones:
1.The reliability of Scripture. This is a gigantic issue. Can we trust the Bible? Is God willing and able to say what He means? If it can be demonstrated that the early chapters of Genesis are incorrect, we have to answer “No” to both questions. Following that, all of Scripture must logically be viewed with suspicion. If the text must be altered to fit ideas outside of Scripture, then the whole Bible becomes eligible for having its meaning dependent upon agreeing with whatever ideas are prevalent and accepted at the time. This takes the absolute character of scripture and renders it relative and subservient to the prevailing academic wind. There are many scientists who claim to be Christians and believe the Bible, yet ply their trade in an absolutely secular manner, with no regard for factoring in the teaching of God’s Word. The message this sends is that the Bible is irrelevant, wrong, unimportant or all of these. There are a lot more things in the Bible besides creation and the flood that have the potential to invoke the skepticism of “science”. When the door is opened in early Genesis, the reliability of all of scripture comes into question. And make no mistake: The world, which is no friend to the Word of God, is watching with delight as professing Christians do their dirty work for them – attacking the accuracy of Scripture.
2.The age of our rock carries far-reaching theological ramifications. We will go into detail later on. Here we will simply state that if the Earth is billions of years old, much of what we are taught about sin, death and redemption is simply not accurate. These great doctrines, including the doctrine of creation, are interrelated – none of them stand alone, none of them can be altered or omitted without affecting the others.
So we can conclude from this that it all really does matter. The side we choose in dealing with this question will affect how we view other parts of the Word of God. In some cases, in an uncomfortable way. So this brings up the big issue of “What then do we do with science?” Are we called to ignore it, put on blinders and look like idiots to the rest of the world, including much of the Christian world – or is there another option? There is. I Timothy 6:20 speaks of science falsely so called. This tells us that not everything that is declared to be science is correct and accurate. Some of it is false. So how do we tell the good, beneficial stuff from the false stuff? Two ways. First, study the Word of God, and believe what it says (II Tim 2:15). And yes, this applies to historical portions as well as theological. Second, study science itself as to method, philosophy and bias. You will find that it is not all cut and dried, set-in-concrete truth. Much has no conclusion, even in the secular world. Much of what is marketed as “proven fact” is, in truth, very much open to debate. We will see how this can happen as we explore a few of the principles and methods used by the scientific community in their quest for determining the age of the Earth.
The first is what we will call “lack of falsifiability”. Stated briefly, anything that belongs to the unobserved past cannot be proven. Sir Francis Bacon defined the scientific method in 1620. Remember, it is based on observation and testing. It involves an initial idea about how something works or functions. A repeatable test is devised that will show that the idea works or doesn’t work. If it works, the original hypothesis becomes a theory. The point is, to confirm a hypothesis, there must be a here and now test, that is repeatable and observable, that will show it to be true or prove it false, hence the term “falsifiable”. It is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or physical experiment. Conclusions drawn about the past have no way to be observed or tested in any way. Therefore, there is no way they can be proven true or false by observable experiment.
Let me give a simple illustration of this. I believe water boils at 212 degrees. I get out my pan, water and thermometer and upon heating it, I find out that, sure enough, when my thermometer reaches 212 degrees, the water starts to boil. I can repeat my experiment many times, all with the same result, confirming my initial statement. However, if I make the statement that water boiled at 212 degrees in 300 AD, what test could I devise that would prove it? Unless I found historical records of a competent person who did the test in 300 AD, no test could be devised that would prove my statement right or wrong. I may have solid reasons to believe the statement and based on these reasons, declare it true, but the fact remains, it is ultimately unprovable and beyond the reach of the scientific method. This, predictably, is not acceptable to the scientific mind that declares everything to be eligible for their discovery. They understand the principle of falsification and don’t appreciate it, arguing it cannot be the sole criterion in determining the accuracy of a theory, or whether it is successful. Evolution, for example, is a successful theory because it is believed by a significant majority of people who pay attention to such things. As such, it is declared to be true. Nevertheless, it is and shall continue to be unprovable because it fails the simple test of falsifiability.
But back to my statement that water boiled at 212 degrees in 300 AD. There is a mechanism I can use to finally declare it true. It is a device that is used by scientists on a regular basis in determining information about the past and more specifically, about how old things are. This device is called “The Assumption”. An assumption is something we believe without proof. We can base our assumptions on very solid things and a great many of them are doubtless true, but the assumption itself is not a proven statement. In the case of water boiling at 212 degrees in 300 AD, I need to make two of them (assumptions):
1.Water has always boiled at 212 degrees
2.Conditions that could affect this have not changed since 300 AD
Okay, the assumptions are in place. But I still need one more component to make my original statement true and that is, I have to bestow upon my assumptions the full weight of fact. They are very reasonable assumptions and I have no reason to believe they are not true, so we’ll just call them facts. Once this is done, we can draw the conclusions that water did indeed boil at 212 degrees in 300 AD.
Scientists, in determining the age of the Earth, do pretty much the same thing. They use assumptions and declare them to be facts. They have no choice. In dealing with the past, a scenario has to be in place that will give meaning to what is legitimately discovered in the present. Since the past is beyond our sight, assumptions must be used to fill in the gaps. But we must remember that assumptions are not facts. They are in reality subject to bias and a number of factors that are potentially inaccurate.
There are a number of assumptions that are used. Some are general in scope, others are more specific. There are two primary general assumptions which are held by most scientists, and we will mention them here and make a few comments.
1.Naturalism. Nature is all that exists. Nature is all there is or has ever been. All things can and must be explained by purely natural processes. There is no room for the supernatural or miraculous in this mindset.
2.Uniformitarianism. The present is the key to the past. The laws of nature as seen today have always applied. All processes which can be observed today have always operated at the same rates and can be applied even to the origin of life and the universe itself.
These assumptions seem logical and safe except that both are unbiblical. However, it gets interesting when we realize there is also truth in both of them. Let me explain.
God is the ultimate lawgiver. Not just the Law of Moses, but natural laws as well. God’s directive in Genesis 1:28 to subdue the earth implies a world of consistent order. I Corinthians 14:33 tells us God is not the author of confusion. His creation demonstrates order and consistency. The universe is logical and orderly and obeys natural laws. Uniformity and predictability are consistent with His nature. His personal, ongoing involvement with His world would bear this out ( Colossians 1:17 ; Hebrews 1:3 ). Isn’t it tragic that the secular scientist embraces and depends upon the order and symmetry of the universe, yet denies the basis for them ( Romans 1:19-21 ). He or she can document the wonderful precision of the universe, but can only put forth ridiculous theories as to how it came to be. Sad.
Yes, there is some truth in their assumptions. However, other things we believe about the Bible render them false. We have a supernatural world view. We allow for miracles; indeed we insist on them. They happen outside of natural law at God’s pleasure. They can’t be measured, tested or observed, yet they are capable of altering the “uniform flow” of things. To refuse to factor them in to any study of origins is to ignore truth. We believe God created the universe supernaturally and this creation event is not subject to the disciplines of science. We also believe Noah’s flood, an event of enormous importance to the entire earth in regard to changes, was a supernatural act which is for the most part, completely ignored by those who employ the general assumptions.
The processes, dynamics and influences involved in creation and the flood were staggering beyond comprehension. II Peter 3:6 tells us the world that existed before the flood perished. It was destroyed; that which was is no more. But both events are gone, never to be repeated and far beyond the reach of any scientific research. Yet, if they are true, they render both general assumptions meaningless.
All attempts to declare the earth to be millions of years old have no choice but to apply the two general assumptions, for without them, there is no logic connecting anything discovered in the present to the past. The obvious problem this creates is, to employ the two general assumptions, one must also disallow the accounts of creation and the flood recorded in Genesis. Something has to give, and for far too many so-called Bible believing scientists and laymen alike, it is scripture that does the giving.
There are other assumptions that must be used to date our little rock, or any rock for that matter. The dating of rocks receives the most attention in the general topic of dating the earth and universe. Others, like astronomy, have input as well, but it is in geology where the most research is done, and the most conclusions drawn. So the specific assumptions we will discuss will be related to the study of rocks.
There is more than one kind of rock, of course. There are sedimentary rocks, such as limestone, shale and sandstone, which were made by sediments laid down by water. These rocks contain the fossils, and are not used for dating, except when evolutionists assign dates to the fossils, and the rock gets dated because of the fossil it contains.
Then there are the igneous rocks. These are rocks that were once melted and then solidified. Granite, basalt and lava are examples of igneous rocks. With igneous rocks, the idea is, in its melted, liquid form, the age clock is set at zero, but when the rock solidifies, the clock begins to tick.
The process of examining and dating this type of rock is called radioisotope dating and has been around for roughly 100 years. Some 30 to 40 different elements are tested. In nature, many elements are stable, which means they do not change over time. There are others that decay at various rates of speed and turn into other things. Since this decay is happening in the present, it is able to be observed, tested and measured with great accuracy. The original element is called the parent; what it turns into is called the daughter element. This measurable, consistent rate of decay is known as half-life. By finding out how much of the two elements are in a rock, simple math will reveal how long the process took, thereby yielding the age of the rock. Okay – the last step in this formula requires leaving the present and going into the past. In order to do that, we must use our two general assumptions, and then add three specific ones:
1.The decay rate has always remained constant. The rates have only been measured for 100 or so years, and the tested ages are in the millions and even billions of years. How can they know the rates have always been constant? Tests have been made using heat, cold, pressure, vacuum and various strong chemicals; in the words of one scientist, “far beyond anything experienced by rocks”, with no significant change in the decay rate. How can he know what that rock has experienced? The assumption is reasonable, most of them are, yet it is utterly unprovable. Many young-earth creationists accept this assumption, while others challenge it with studies that seem to indicate greatly accelerated rates in the past. Furthermore, this assumption makes no provision for unknowable variations brought about by creation itself, the curse and/or the flood.
2.The system is closed. Since the rock solidified, nothing has happened to the rock to alter the concentrations of the parent or daughter elements, both in loss and gain. Great care is taken to insure that a sample rock has not been contaminated. I’m a bit fuzzy as to how this is done, since contamination is not always visible. However, samples that do not yield the expected results are rejected as being impure, while rocks that do yield the desired age are considered pure, pristine and accurate. Notice how bias and preconceived ideas at this point become part of the “scientific method”! The point is, it cannot be known where the rock has been or what its history is, and since that cannot be known, it can never be stated with certainty that nothing has ever influenced the balance of the elements inside the rock.
3.There was no daughter element present when the rock came off the assembly line. If there was, the rock would test old when it was brand new. Many young rocks – rocks formed in the observable past and therefore of known age – should test at near zero. But many examples can be cited, where ages from hundreds of thousand to millions of years are assigned to rocks that are really very young. Why? Because that is what happens when the daughter element is present at the beginning. So, if the tests do not work on rocks of known age, why would we expect them to work on rocks of unknown age? Testing methods are admitted to not work on really young rocks, but we have to ask: How do we tell a young rock from an old one? And why do we accept one test and reject another? Rocks are not under contract to start out with no daughter element, neither are they forbidden to take in or give out crucial amounts of elements during their history. These issues lie in the realm of the unknowable and the knowledge gap has to be filled with assumptions – which are given the status of fact, but in reality are very much unprovable.
There are other disciplines of science that work to produce evidence of great age for the Earth. Leaving our discussion of rocks for a few minutes, I will mention a few, but will resist the temptation to go into detail.
Tree rings are studied. It is believed that trees add a ring per year. The bristle-cone pine tree lives up to 6,000 years, and once dead, decays very slowly. By comparing rings in various samples, scientists claim the ability to go back 11,800 years.
Ice cores are studied. Ice, it is said, also accumulates in observable annual layers. Ice cores bored in the massive ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, as much as 9,000 feet thick, yield layers going back 100,000 years, though it is admitted that the deep ice is compressed and hard to read.
Sediments are deposited annually in bodies of water. Winter and summer produce fine and coarse layers respectively, with some going back 35,000 years, others much more.
Coral reefs grow at assumed, specific rates. Count the layers and we have, depending on which reef, many thousands of years.
These four examples have two things in common – they all assume an old earth and use our two general assumptions. But they also do not factor in a worldwide flood. That matters here, because unlike rocks, which would endure the flood because they are rocks, these things are fragile. A flood the magnitude of the biblical flood would simply wash them away and they would cease to exist. So, to accept these examples as evidence is to flatly deny the reality of the flood as described in Genesis. Also, notice our examples do not give us millions of years – only enough thousands to “prove” the Bible wrong!
There is one more area that demands our attention and that is the sticky area of astronomy. More specifically, how did light get to earth so quickly from galaxies that are billions of light years away? Genesis 1:14-19 records day four – the creation of the sun, moon and stars. Verse 14 gives us their purpose and every indication is, the light was here from the start. There are a couple of things about this that are hard to explain.
1.The vast distances are real. They exist in the present and can be measured. Don’t ask me how, but they can.
2.There is a problem with light being created “already here” because events happen in outer space. Stars explode, things pulsate, etc. If the light were created already here, that would make these things illusions. We believe this to be inconsistent with God’s nature and purpose. We can trust what we see in God’s creation. It is not His purpose to fool us. So, unless the stars were in place for billions of years before creation week, how did the light get here? Some question the speed of light over time. Maybe it used to be faster. Well, scientists, even the good guys on our side, say the speed of light is linked to too many other constants in physics and changing it would create major problems in other areas.
So what do we do? I am comfortable in admitting there are some things I can’t figure out. This is one of them, but Einstein proved that time itself is relative. It is affected by speed and gravity. The closer to the speed of light, time slows down. At the speed of light, it stops. It is called time dilation. What does this mean? Simply, it is conceivable that a beam of light that is a billion light years away could reach earth in a very short time as measured by our clocks. Can I prove this? Certainly not. We simply don’t know enough about time and the weird things that effect it to prove it. However, to assume that nothing affects the time–light–speed relationship in measuring distant starlight is a bit naive as well, given what Einstein has already discovered.
We have looked at assumptions and explained why an assumption has less value then a fact. Now let us look at a third reason why we reject an age of millions of years for our rock – and that is, the difference between objective and historical science. Much of the data that goes into explaining this reason has already been covered, so we will be brief. Nevertheless, it is distinct from the others and needs to be singled out.
Objective or observational science is the real thing. It is the one that exists in the present, involves observation, experimentation, repeatability and passes the test of being falsifiable. Physics, chemistry and biology are examples of this type of science.
Historical science has a few components that are not quite the same as objective science. All events in the past are history. Historical, sometimes called origins science, is an attempt to answer a history question using science. By applying what we can observe and test in the present, an estimation is made about the age or origin of a specific object like our rock. The fields of geology and astronomy are examples of those that employ both types of science. Historical science has two primary weaknesses:
1.For reasons already covered, its conclusions can never be proven or disproven. It is certainly not a bad or worthless thing to attempt to discover what happened in the past to make the world what it is today, but absolute proof for any conclusions are simply not possible, and should be thus acknowledged.
2.When it comes to the unobserved past, all facts have to be interpreted. To have any meaning at all, they must be placed within an existing world view. Most data from the unobserved past can be interpreted more than one way. An example: Here is a clam fossil; it evolved from a single celled organism and lived 320 million years ago. Or – Here is a clam fossil; according to Genesis 1:20-23 , it was created on day five and in all likelihood, perished and was buried by Noah’s flood. We all have the same data, yet our vastly different conclusions about the clam arise primarily from our worldview. This is a sliding scale depending on who is doing the studying, making it a weakness. Any view of the unobserved past must ultimately be held by faith.
The problem is, secular science does not, for the most part, acknowledge the inherent weakness in historical science. Rather, their unprovable conclusions about the past are assigned the same value as observable, testable data obtained in the present.
No one is doubting the ability of a scientist to tell us what is in our rock. He is able to break it down, identify its components, and measure the decay rates of certain of its elements with ever increasing complexity and brilliance. His methods are sophisticated and rightfully impress most of us. He is a good scientist. However, as soon as the tests are done and the rock is confidently declared to be 100 million years old, he leaves true science and enters the weakness riddled world of the historical. This is done in a smooth, seamless way, giving the impression that both the actual facts and the conclusions were obtained in the same way. Not true. We are not trying to say that every pronouncement about the past is automatically wrong. The future is predicted in certain disciplines based on what we know about the present and the past. We know when the next eclipse will be, and the next time Halley’s Comet will come. We know where to dig for oil and natural gas, due in part to good information about the past. The point is, the present can indeed shed light on the future and the past, but limitations do exist, and the historical side of science employs a limited, less accurate methodology.
There is a fourth reason why we do not feel compelled to believe our rock is millions of years old. The usual line is that all evidence points to an ancient earth and universe. Not so. Many examples point to the opposite. We will identify and explain a few of the simple ones. There are others which require lengthy explanations and are too bulky to attempt in a work of this sort.
First, some background comments. We read a newspaper article calling evolution the best substantiated theory science has ever seen. A statement like that would indicate the presence of lots of hard evidence. Yet the fossil record (evolution’s best so-called evidence) yields no transitional forms. The lack of which, Darwin himself stated, would destroy his theory. As a process, it is readily admitted to be too slow to observe, and impossible to test or repeat in a laboratory. So where is the substantiation? Primarily in the rock-solid biases of the believer! The evolutionist claim that all evidence points to evolution and since evolution requires vast amounts of time, then all indicators, from our rock to the earth to the universe, must yield evidence of great age. This is not the case.
Now for a disclaimer. In several of the examples to follow, we will play the game by the rules of the other side. We will use the two general assumptions and not factor in a worldwide flood. Why? Because if we can demonstrate that even when using their methods, the results favor a young earth, the weaknesses in their old-earth arguments become clear. So, here we go.
There is too much helium found in granite. Granite contains tiny zircon crystals, which contain radioactive uranium (238U), which decays into lead. In this process, eight helium atoms are formed for each atom of lead. Helium is light and migrates out of the rock rapidly – at least, rapidly to rocks – within a few thousand years. Yet large amounts of helium have been found trapped inside the rocks. If this rock were more than 7,000 to 8,000 years old, there is no known reason why the helium would not have long since leaked out.
There is not enough salt in the sea. Rivers pick up salt and carry it to the oceans at measurable rates of 450 million tons per year. Only 27% of this leaves (via salt sprays and other minor processes). So, assuming there was no salt in the ocean at the beginning, it would yield an age of 38 million years. We’re not saying it is that old, just that with today’s rates, it can’t be older. This is a problem for evolutionists who claim life began in a salty sea 3 – 4 billion years ago.
Present human population growth rates are around 2% a year. Man has supposedly been around for roughly a million years. This would result in a world population today of 108,600 - an absurd, incomprehensible number. Even cutting the growth rate to .002% - very different from known rates, the amount of people who have lived and died would be so vast as to be meaningless. The remains would literally fill the earth, yet where is the evidence of this? There is none.
The earth’s magnetic field is weakening. The field is important for life on earth because it protects us from much of the harmful radiation from space. Yet, it has a measurable half-life of 1,400 years, and has seen a 7% reduction since 1829. This means, as we go back in time, it gains strength. At some point, this would become harmful, and by 20,000 years in the past, the earth would be too hot to live on. It is more complex than this of course, but you get the idea.
Erosion rates favor a young earth. Rocks, mountains wear down when exposed to the elements. They are carried away by streams, arriving at the ocean at the rate of 27.5 million tons per year. The volume of the continents above sea level is 383 million billion tons. Do the math. In fourteen million years, all would erode to sea level. While we’re on this subject, there is not enough sediment in the oceans for an evolution – friendly old-earth either. If our two general assumptions are the only factors involved, why do we still have high mountains with sharp rocks on them?
A couple of minor things. Why does coal that is supposedly millions of years old have carbon 14 in it, when it is known to disappear in 50,000 years? Or better yet, why is it found in diamonds that are said to be billions of years old? Dinosaur bones have been cut open to reveal the distinct smell of – bone! How can bone still be bone after a few hundred million years?
The bible tells us in Hebrews 1:10-12 that the earth is wearing down. The second law of thermodynamics tells us the same thing. For evolution and its need for vast time, to be true, then the energy systems like the sun and the magnetic field have to be self-perpetuating and essentially eternal. A perpetual motion machine is not possible no matter how big it is. These systems are measurably shrinking, and projected into the distant past, their energy would have been too great for life to be possible.
In this section, we have said some, but not much, about geology and astronomy. It is from these two areas that old-earth folks gather most of their evidence, so we will look at them as a separate category.
Over the past years, most secular geologists were uniformitarians – the belief that rock layers and the fossils they contain took eons, all without severe disturbances along the way. Now, most are called neo-catastrophists – they see a series of catastrophes with lots of water, accounting for most of what we see in the fossil record. In between these catastrophes, none of which by the way is the Biblical flood, there are eons of time. But does the “rock record” bear this out?
The creationist who believes the Genesis account, in defending against these secular ideas, has had to modify his argument. When mainstream geology was uniformitarian, he countered that the fossil record shows evidence of catastrophe. Now that most geologists now accept multiple catastrophes with vast time gaps in between, it becomes necessary to show that this model, too, is incorrect, favoring only one such event, that being the Biblical flood. If we are to accept one catastrophe rather than several, it would be nice to see some indicators in the rock record to support our point of view. There are several:
1.There are fossilized surface features between layers that are supposedly the result of different catastrophes separated by millions of years. Surface features are things like animal tracks, raindrop impressions and ripple marks that we see in water where there is a gentle current. They are formed in most sediment and are very fragile. If these features are exposed to air or water, they will rapidly erode. The only way they can be protected is to be quickly buried by other materials before they have time to erode. This would have been the case with Noah’s flood, but the secular model leaves these things exposed to the elements until the next flood comes with its layer of protection. It is difficult to imagine how they could endure such exposure, yet fossils of this sort exist in abundance all over the earth.
2.On or below any surface, on land or sea, life is present that leaves a mark. It is known as bioturbation. In the sea, there are worms, clams, plants and any number of other curious little creatures that live in the muck and leave a mark. On land, there are roots, worms, grubs, moles, and an assortment of other tiny things that live and leave tracks and trails in the soil. This layer typically goes down several feet, and destroys or greatly alters the sedimentary structures, and leaves an easy to identify disturbed layer. In most cases, the sediments do not show this. It seems the layers were laid down rapidly – before the creatures had any chance to do their burrowing thing. If long periods of time had elapsed between layers, the critters would have found them and left their mark.
3.Plants need soil and the fossil record shows lots of plants. Yet soil layers – or rocks that used to be soil – called paleosols – are seldom found. The record is rock – not soil. If most of the time periods are between the rock layers, why is no soil built up between layers? The best explanation is that they were deposited rapidly with no time for soil to accumulate between layers.
4.There are polystrate fossils. Coal mines have kettles. They are very dangerous. What are they? They are the bottoms of fossilized tree trunks, and if not secured they will often fall down into mine tunnels and do great damage. The conventional line is that coal takes millions of years to form. It starts with peat, which gets buried by ocean bottom muck. Over much time, mud gets real thick and turns to stone, providing enough heat and pressure to enable the peat to turn to coal. Well, polystrate fossils are what their name suggests; they extend through more than one layer. So part of the trunk is buried, the other half or more is left exposed for a few million years while another layer forms around it. This makes no sense. The exposed trunk would last a few decades at the most. The only explanation that makes any sense is for all layers to have been deposited in a relatively short time so the trunk going through them could remain intact. There are other similar examples that are found. There are fragile segmented stem fossils, called calamites that extend through several layers of limestone, giving testimony to rapid burial and protection. Animal fossils have been found intersecting more than one layer of fossilized sediment. The obvious point of this is that no plant or animal could remain intact over vast amounts of time while waiting for layers to cover it and for itself to turn to stone!
We must now shift attention to the other primary source of evidence for an old-earth – outer space and the field of astronomy.
The universe seems to be expanding. If we can discern the rate, we can work backwards to find when it all comes together – several billion years ago – to the Big Bang. All we need are a few assumptions, a little bias and we can call it a fact. But don’t most explosions cause chaos? How can an explosion cause a universe that has order, symmetry and predictability – without which astronomy would not exist? It makes absolutely no sense. Anyway, our purpose here is to reveal a few evidences for a young universe. We will attempt a few simple examples that we amateurs can grasp. In this, again, we will play the game by the rules of the other side, in order to show that they simply don’t work!
The moon is receding from the earth at about 1.5 inches per year. If the earth is only about 6,000 years old, we have a total distance of about 800 feet, which is insignificant. However, if it were 1.4 billion years old, a mere fraction of the conventional “fact” of 4.6 billion, the earth and moon would actually touch, and long before that, there would be issues of tides and other influences the moon has on the earth. Ridiculous? Yes, but all we’re doing here is applying the two general assumptions.
The magnetic fields of the planets are weakening, yet they are still strong. They should be very weak to non-existent if they are billions of years old. Again, this shows that the universe is finite and is indeed wearing out. Other processes, like energy from the sun, would logically have been stronger in the past, and at some point would have been strong enough to make life on earth impossible.
There are spiral galaxies in space, many of them. And they spin, the inner regions moving faster than the outer regions. Over millions of years, this shape would be twisted beyond recognition, but there they are, with all their beauty declaring the glory of God!
We have comets that orbit the sun in an elliptical path. They are made of ice and dirt. Part of their orbit brings them close enough to the sun so that part of their mass is blasted away by radiation or perhaps simply melted. It is estimated they would run out of stuff and be gone in 100,000 years. Yet, there they are. How can this be? Well, there is an oort cloud. It is like a reservoir full of ice that sort of re-stocks the comets and makes new ones. There is a minor problem though. There is zero evidence that such a cloud exists. But it does exist – in the fertile imaginations of certain astronomers!
Well, it is time to move on to the biblical reasons why we believe our rock is young. It is worth mentioning yet again that the teaching of scripture and the idea of millions of years are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true. Yes, many try, but all efforts compromise something in Scripture, and we find this option to be unacceptable. So we now look at what the Scripture actually teaches that causes us to see the earth as young, probably not more than 7,000 years old. We will limit our discussion to 3 primary points, which will be discussed in turn:
1.Influence of the “Big Three” – Creation, the Fall, and the Flood.
2.The testimony of the genealogies.
3.The theological implications of young/old earth.
The Creation, the Fall and Noah’s Flood are events of stupendous importance. There is nothing in our world that was not brought into existence or changed by these events. Yet, they do not even enter the thinking of the secular scientific mindset. Research is done, conclusions drawn and declared to be fact, and these three acts are not even noticed. And why is that? First, most simply don’t believe the Bible, so there is no reason to factor in its teaching. But there is another reason. It is beyond scientific discovery, a situation that is unacceptable to modern science. The secular scientist says there is nothing he/she can’t discover; nothing can remain hidden from them. Yet the Bible reveals these things that are beyond the reach of any scientific inquiry, and to ignore their reality is to be dead wrong in any discussion of origins or the distant past.
Hebrews 11:3 tells us God created out of nothing. Psalm 33:6-9 tells us in awe-inspiring language that God spoke the universe into existence, and Hebrews 1:3 says that He sustains it all by the word of His power. This is not scientific discovery – it is revelation. Genesis 1 is also revelation but it presents problems for the Christian “old-earther”. We must remember why an old-earther is indeed an old-earther. He or she is trying to make Scripture harmonize with what science has discovered to be “true”. Historical science has given us an order of appearance of not only living things, but planets, earth, etc. And guess what? It’s not even close to the order given in Genesis 1 . The old-earther cannot ignore this – he is trying to harmonize the two. So the days of creation get turned into eons, and the eons overlap enough to lose all meaning whatsoever. The fact is, God’s word is wonderfully clear, concise and brief regarding creation, and no explanation is needed.
While we’re on the subject of creation, the Bible speaks clearly about the 6 days of creation, using the Hebrew word YOM for day, and with great clarity assigning an evening and a morning to each day, just so we couldn’t mess up and get it wrong. Turns out, the old-earther hangs a major portion of his belief system on this one word. They have no choice but to interpret the days of creation as long periods of time, because they need lots of time to agree with “science”, and that’s really the only place they can figure out to put it (not counting the Gap Theory, which we’ll discuss later).
So they focus on the word YOM, and declare, accurately, that it has more than one meaning; a solar day, daylight, or an indefinite period of time (for example, “Day of the Lord”). Therefore, they say it means a long, indefinite day in Genesis 1 . However, let’s look at a couple of numbers. The word YOM is used some 2,291 times in the Old Testament, virtually always referring to a solar day. When modified by a number (6 days or 3rd day), it is used 359 times outside of Genesis, and is always a literal day. When used with the phrase “evening and morning”, it is defining a literal day 38 times outside of Genesis – always meaning a solar day. There are words in Hebrew that would better define an indefinite time period, but YOM is used – the only one that can mean a solar day.
There is more. Exodus 20:8-11 locks in the days of creation as literal, and even gives us the reason why! In this passage, verse 8 is a command to “remember”. In Scripture, a command to remember refers back to a real person or historical event ( Numbers 15:30-40 is one of several examples of this). The event here in Exodus is creation week, and the reason given is clear. It is a pattern for the work week, with the Sabbath Day emphasized. Congress didn’t invent the seven day week – God did, at Creation. If the days were eons long, then God is a liar for using a false “pattern” for a seven day week. Incidentally, in verse 11 of the Exodus passage, the plural of the word YOM is used, as it is 845 times in the Old Testament. Every time it is used as a literal, solar day!
A favorite pair of verses used by the old-earth folks is Psalm 90:4 and II Peter 3:8, which state that to the Lord, a day is as a thousand years, and vice-versa. Their argument is that since God does not differentiate between a day and a thousand years, the days of creation can be time periods of any length and God may still call them days, since He makes no distinction between the two. This interpretation is nonsense. In II Peter 3:8, the context has nothing to do with the days of creation, but Peter is warning his readers not to disallow the prospect of judgment simply because of the long time period since the previous judgment. Verses 3, 4 and 9 of this chapter establish this line of thought and verse 8 is a reminder that God does not view time as men view time. Psalm 90 is a song of exquisite praise to God. The verse is declaring God’s magnificent sovereignty over time – not that He will violate the boundaries which He Himself created for it. He is above time and does not need time, but in dealing with His creation, He takes time very seriously, and solidified its importance by declaring it to be among the primary reasons why He created the heavens in Genesis 1:14 . Our point here is simple. We believe the Bible clearly teaches a supernatural creation, which God placed in a six solar day time period for a very specific revealed reason. For those who believe the Bible in general but have problems with this particular part, it is our contention that their reasons come from outside the Scriptures, and not from clear arguments presented in the Word of God.
The next event of stupendous influence on Planet Earth was the Fall of man and the resulting curse, recorded in Genesis 3 . We will not find it discussed in secular science books, yet there is no doubt it has affected life on Planet Earth far more than any event which science has been able to discover and describe. Just as Genesis 1 does not detail everything God actually made, so Genesis 3 does not detail all which the Fall caused. Nevertheless, the world we see – one that has death and disease, calamity, sin, etc. - stems from this event. We will discuss the theological implications of this a bit later, but here we can say, based on Genesis 3:17-19 , that God’s creation itself was affected by the Fall. The universal scope of this event is confirmed by Paul in Romans 8:22 . The many nasty things in the world, from poisonous frogs to volcanoes, can be traced to this event, yet it is non-existent to the scientist who refuses to consider anything but the secular.
The final great influence on the present Planet Earth is the Great Flood of Genesis 6-8 . There are several key scriptures which establish the scope, purpose and magnitude of this event. II Peter 3:4-6 tells us a couple of key facts about the Flood.
1.The world perished. Its life, civilizations, cultures, technology, geography, climate. You name it. Gone. Absolutely destroyed. Genesis 6:13 confirms the earth was destroyed along with all life.
2.It was a universal judgment. Genesis 6 is clear about God’s reasons for sending it, and II Peter 3:7, 10 places the flood on the same level as the yet-to-come universal judgment by fire. This is significant because it speaks of the universal scope of the flood, based on the reason that God’s judgment is universal – missing nothing.
The flood was in reality a gigantic miracle. God in all likelihood used available stuff and processes. Nevertheless, He predicted it, caused it, and set in motion everything that made it happen. That makes it a miracle. It may have employed natural processes, but no one who reads and believes Genesis would deny it was supernatural. Yet, we will search in vain for a secular model of earth history that includes this flood. To them, it never happened. There are a couple of reasons for this which have a spiritual dimension.
1.Accepting the biblical flood also entails an acknowledgment of the reason for the flood – that there is a God who will judge unrighteousness. I Corinthians 2:14 tells us that the natural man doesn’t like to admit such a thing.
2.Remember II Peter 3:6? The old earth was destroyed. That means everything – systems, stuff, evidences – all we can see now goes back to the flood and hits a brick wall. Nothing beyond that is there for us to see. How do we know? It was destroyed.
The old-earth Christian doesn’t like this either. One would be hard pressed to find an old-earth Christian who believes in the flood precisely as it is presented in Scripture. They have to drag out the local flood theory or the even more nonsensical tranquil flood theory. (How local does Genesis 7:19 sound? How tranquil does Genesis 7:11 sound?!) And why is this so? Because they believe the fossil record and the vast layers of sedimentary rock that hold the fossils are millions of years old. Once this is believed, the physical evidence for the flood disappears, having been reassigned to millions of years in age, and therefore, no longer eligible to be viewed as evidence for Noah’s flood. So the flood gets disbelieved because no evidence can be found for it.
But that’s not all. Remember when we discussed evidence for a young earth, we played by the rules of the other side and did not factor in the flood? Well, now we will. The tree rings, ice layers, salt in the sea and a multitude of other systems we did and did not mention, in reality can go back no further than the flood. Because none of them would have come through the flood intact. If the flood is true, and the scriptures are accurate in their testimony to the flood’s devastation, it becomes a very hard pill for the purely secular and the old-earth folks to swallow. The flood simply contradicts too much of their well-researched evidence. It has to go. Yet we are reminded of Christ’s statement to Nicodemus in John 3:12 , where He asks how one is to believe the heavenly things if he does not believe the earthly things. The Creation, the Fall and the Flood were earthly events, clearly recorded in God’s Word, yet they are routinely ignored, modified or simply disbelieved by all too many professing Christians who would not dream of treating the theological portions of the Word in the same manner. Christ Himself sees a problem with this!
So we hold to the revealed truth of these events, yet we have not yet established a time frame for them. When did they occur? This important question and its answer become the second of our biblical reasons for believing the earth and our rock is young – the testimony of the genealogies. God tells us when these things happened by the use of these lists. The two most prominent, for our purposes, are those in Genesis chapters 5 and 11. Genesis 5 takes us from Adam to Noah; chapter 11 takes us from Shem, Noah’s son, to Abraham. It is agreed by most everyone that Abraham lived around 2,000 B.C. (1996 – 1821 B.C.), so all we have to do is add up the totals in the genealogies, and we get the time of the Flood, and then Creation itself. Sadly, nothing is ever that simple. These are two of the more controversial chapters in all of Scripture. You’ll never guess why. Because, due to the “facts” supplied by historical science, we need a lot more years than Scripture gives us. “The earth simply cannot be that young”. So the lists of Genesis 5 and 11 need to be “re-examined”.
Just like the word YOM in the creation account, the word BEGAT becomes the focal point in looking at the genealogies. It is the Hebrew word YALAD, and the argument is that BEGAT does not always mean strict father-son relationships, and that there are actually gaps in the Genesis genealogies, which means the time line that is so clear in Scripture is really not accurate, hence the actual dates cannot be worked out.
To further complicate things, there are two places in scripture where generations are clearly skipped. Let’s trace an obvious one. Matthew 1:8 clearly tells us that Joram begat Ozias (KJV) – or Uzziah (NIV). However, if we go to II Kings 8:24, we see Ahaziah as his son. Then, in II Kings 11:2, we find that the son of Ahaziah was Joash. Moving forward to 12:20-21, it is recorded that the son of Joash was Amaziah. Then, in 14:21, we see Azariah as the son of Amaziah. So what? Well, in II Chronicles 26, Azariah is clearly identified as Uzziah (the good king who is named in Isaiah’s great vision in Isaiah 6 ). The point is simple, as is the argument: this example in Matthew skips at least two generations. If there are gaps in other lists, there must be gaps in the Genesis genealogies as well. This is faulty reasoning, and two reasons are given as to why:
1.Matthew was written in Greek, and the Greek word for BEGAT is GENNAO, a flexible word that allows for skipped generations. The Hebrew word – YALAD, is always used in the Old Testament to mean single generation relationships – and there are no exceptions.
2.Matthew had access to the information just presented. It is obvious from Matthew 1:17 that he was organizing in groups of 14 (2x7), to show completeness. This can be shown as a common practice in many ancient lists, where direct father-son connection is skipped to achieve a specific number. To the Jew, this was not dishonest, but an accepted way to organize and classify.
But we also have the sticky issue of old Cainen. He appears in Luke 3:36 and is used to prove gaps in the Genesis genealogies. He does not show up in the Old Testament. He is found only in copies of the Septuagint, written long after Luke’s Gospel. Josephus does not mention him. Scholars on our side of the issue call it a scribal error. A simple explanation that solves the problem, but we are dealing with Scripture and we don’t buy the error thing. If we use the error argument here, we open the door to using it anywhere. So Cainen remains on the mystery list. But a mystery in Luke certainly does not prove gaps in the Genesis accounts.
So let’s talk about the Genesis lists specifically, and the biblical evidence for no gaps in them. First, the Genesis 5 list: there can be no missing gaps between Adam and Seth, since Seth was a direct replacement for Abel, according to 4:25. There can be no gaps between Seth and Enos (KJV), since 4:26 tells us that Seth named him. Jude 14 tells us that Enoch was the seventh from Adam, so there can be no gaps without Jude being incorrect. In Genesis 5:24 , Lamech names Noah, so no gap is possible there. And there is the interesting case of Methuselah’s name and death. He was named based on a promise that on his death, God would send judgment. With the time line recorded in Genesis 5 , his death corresponds exactly to the coming of the flood. If there were gaps, this would no longer be true. I Chronicles 1:1-4 and Luke 3:36-38 both repeat the lists exactly as recorded by Moses. Given these facts, there is no wiggle room for other generations in Genesis 5 , and not a shred of internal evidence that any gaps exist!
Now, let’s do some math. Due to modern archeological findings, which place the beginning of ancient Egypt at around 3,500 B.C. and Babylon at 4,000 B.C., many creationists put the Flood at or about 5,000 B.C., and Creation itself at somewhere around 10,000 B.C. This is still far too short a time frame to satisfy the old-earth folks, yet it is long enough to do serious damage to the recorded genealogies. Genesis 5 gives us 1,556 years between creation and Noah’s first son. So we have 10 generations at 156 years per generation. Should this time period be stretched to 5,000 years, as some arbitrarily believe, we would need 32 generations, 22 more than the ones recorded, and therefore, 2 missing for every one actually recorded. Scripture does not support such a thing, and it makes the recorded genealogies inaccurate to the point of ridiculous.
It’s worse with the account found in Genesis 11 . Generations were much shorter after the flood. We have recorded 10 generations over 355 years, or 35 years per generation. If we place the flood at 5,000 B.C. and place Abraham at 2,000 B.C., which is generally accepted as accurate, we have to account for an additional 2,600 years. Given the recorded approximate 35 years per generation, we would need 73 generations, or something like 6 missing for every one recorded. What would be the point in giving us a genealogy with 85% of the information missing?
And remember – these numbers are only good for a 10,000 year ago creation. Try adding a few million years and see how many gaps you get. And believers give themselves permission to do this because they can’t account for old Cainen? Neither can I, but I am not willing to ignore, disbelieve and twist the Word of God because of it.
And before we move on, it also needs to be noted that these genealogies do more than provide a time frame. They show the Bible to be real history, and that all men are related back to Adam. The redeemer was first promised in Genesis 3:15 and these and other genealogies show that Jesus Christ – and only Jesus Christ – can be, and is, the coming Messiah. Only He is qualified, a fact traceable and proven by these genealogies. They are important, so we had better not be willing to distort what they clearly say in order to simply dig up more years.
So now, we come to the last of our reasons why it is imperative that we see the earth as young. The reason goes to the core of our theology. Biblical teaching about sin, death and the work of Christ are foundational to everything else; they are interrelated and are keenly influenced by our views on the age of the earth. The subject is obviously quite large, so we will begin by reviewing some basic biblical teaching, and then we will tie them in to our particular study.
Death. It is seen in scripture in more than one way:
1.Physical. The Genesis 5 list declares of those listed “and he died”. It refers to the physical death of the body, as do virtually all Old Testament references. Except for believers living at the time of the rapture, all will experience physical death.
2.Spiritual. It is man’s spiritual condition by nature. Ephesians 2:1 ,5 refer to this kind of death. Man is born spiritually dead. He, man, is alienated from the life of God ( Ephesians 4:18 ), and is at enmity with Him ( Romans 8:7 ). Man is incapable of escaping from this death in and of himself; only God can give us spiritual life ( Ephesians 2 ). Those who do not receive the life which God offers will experience the third biblical description of death.
3.Eternal. It is the final state of the unsaved dead. Revelation 20:14 refers to this. It will be eternal suffering apart from God, with no remedy. Really, really bad.
The first two are bad also, but have a remedy. The finished work of Christ applied to us by simple faith, makes us alive spiritually, and gives us the promise of one day being resurrected and given a new body, according to I Thessalonians 4:16-18 and Philippians 3:21 . Eternal death, however, has no remedy, no possibility of reversal. When one dies physically without being made spiritually alive by trusting Christ, the horrible reality of eternal death is all that remains. Our motivation to help others avoid this should be strong. II Corinthians 5:14 identifies the love of Christ as our biblical motivation. Why? Because it is He and He alone who provides life and escape from this terrible death!
Sin. Without spending too much time, it is transgression - stepping over the line between good and evil ( Psalm 51:1 ). It is iniquity - an act inherently wrong. It is rebellion - a failure to meet a divine standard ( Romans 3:23 ). It is unbelief. It is trespassing - an intrusion of self-will into God’s authority. It is an act – a violation of the revealed will of God. It is a condition – the absence of righteousness, and it is a nature – one of enmity towards God. It is, according to James 1:14-15 , and real life experiences, progressive, addictive and ultimately lethal.
These two things, sin and death, are basic, and they are absolutely tied together in the Old and New Testaments, and it is here we begin to make this information relevant to our young earth. Going way back to Genesis 2:17 , we see the connection that sin will bring death. In Romans 8:2 , this connection is identified as a spiritual law. Like the law of gravity or one of many natural laws that regulate the way things work – this law reveals the inescapable tie between sin and death. Ezekiel 18:20 gives us the same principle, as does the well known Romans 6:23 . The Ephesians 2 passage does the same thing. Death is the result of sin; sin brings death. The two are tied together as the ultimate cause and effect: one produces the other; the latter does not exist apart from the former. No serious Bible believer would deny these things, but we need to keep them in mind when we look at the work of Christ. His work on our behalf is vast, and continues even now ( Hebrews 7:25 ), but for our discussion, we will concern ourselves with His death, burial and resurrection. Most of our references to this will be from Paul’s writings, since the Gospels record the history of these events, but it was Paul who explained what they actually accomplished.
Interestingly, with most people, we define their work as what they did in their lifetime. With Christ, it is what He accomplished in His death. The things He taught and did in His earthly ministry did not impart eternal life – for that He had to die, and indeed it can be shown that dying was the primary reason for the incarnation. Christ needed a human body that could die and blood that could be shed for man’s sin. Hebrews 2:9 ,14 and John 10:10 ,28-29 state this with clarity. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Luke 9:30-31 , the topic of conversation was not His teachings or His miracles, but His death. In Revelation 5:9-12 , God’s Word tells us the primary topic in glory will be the death of Christ.
Okay – thanks for the theology lesson – now, what’s the point? Simple. Scripture ties sin and death together, and the work of Christ in His death, burial and resurrection addresses both of these issues: destruction of death and salvation from sin. I Corinthians 15:3, I Timothy 1:15 and Romans 1:16 are but three of many passages that could be quoted which bear evidence of this truth.
Moving on – we continue to build our case, turning our attention now to Adam. The Bible tells us that sin entered the world as a result of Adam’s disobedience. There aren’t a lot of references to this, but the ones we have are crystal clear and leave no room for misinterpretation. Romans 5:12-21 is a primary example, and we will see this passage again as we proceed. Notice again in this passage the connection between sin and death. The theme is dealt with again in I Corinthians 15:21-22, where, again, we see the final result of Adam’s sin is death to all. Later in this chapter, in verses 45-47, we see Christ, the second Adam, compared to the first. The first Adam brought death; the second was made a life-giving spirit. Sometimes, the awe of this truth gets hidden behind the theology, but where would you and I be had Christ not been obedient unto death, according to Philippians 2:8 , and in so doing, became the second Adam? We would be without life and without hope.
But in order for all this to be true, Adam had to be a real person, who committed a real act of disobedience, which led to death. And further, for all this basic and vital theology to be true there can be no death before Adam. And it is on this point, death before Adam, on which all old-earth people have to make a compromise. They have no choice but to place death – and lots of it – before Adam. Why? Because the old-earther sees the fossil record – all the dead things – as millions of years old, in order to be consistent with the pronouncements of modern science. And why do they care about that? Because agreeing with modern science is why they are old-earthers in the first place! Remember, no old-earther is one because the Bible teaches it. All get their conviction from outside Scripture, and then proceed to twist Scripture to fit their position.
The gigantic problem with this is that by placing death before Adam, we are breaking the connection between sin and death. If death was a functioning reality before Adam sinned, then what did Adam’s sin do to us? Precious little. Why? Because if death was already here when Adam sinned, there is no way death can ever be seen as sin’s result. It gets worse. Christ’s work is clearly presented in scripture as atoning for our sin so sin’s penalty – death – could be defeated and we could live. Logically, if sin and death are not connected, and they aren’t if there was death before Adam, then dealing with our sin does not necessarily resolve the death issue, bringing into question what Christ’s death on the cross accomplished.
Now, Christians who are old-earthers do not, in reality, deny Christ’s ability to defeat death, yet the fact remains that by breaking the connection between sin and death, Christ’s work as the second Adam is rendered meaningless.
However, there is an out for the old-earther. Romans 5:12 says death passed upon all men for all have sinned. Oh. So with this, we can have both! There was lots of death before, but human death started with Adam. Okay – we’re back on track now. But let’s take a closer look at this. We can think of three reasons why this interpretation of Romans 5:12 should be rejected.
1.Paul does not state anywhere that other creatures died before Adam sinned. When we read this passage and take the verse in its context, it is speaking of the connection between sin and death, and the marvelous remedy available through the obedience of one – Christ Jesus. Men are mentioned here because only men qualify for the penalty and remedy of this passage. Animals do not sin. The great white shark that eats a man or the black mamba that bites and kills a man is not accused of murder. The context is clearly about men, so men are mentioned. Animals have no part in the redemptive process, so they are not mentioned. Nothing in this passage lends itself to a belief in animal death before Adam.
2.In biblical history, the sinfulness of man and God’s subsequent judgments have always carried the animal kingdom with it. Romans 8:22 tells us that all of creation groans and travails. This goes back to the Fall, and the animals are included in this. Genesis 3:17-18 includes the ground and by inference, all of creation is affected. The flood is the greatest example. Man did the sinning – everything that had the breath of life paid the price and did the dying ( Genesis 7:22 ). But there are other examples. I Samuel 15:2-3 is one of several passages where God called for the destruction of animals in driving the “-ites” out of the land. Psalm 135:8 draws our attention to the plagues on Egypt and the same pattern. The coming judgments described in Revelation include the animal kingdom as well as guilty men. And what’s the point? Since God clearly extends His judgments to all of creation, for what scriptural reason would He inflict death upon the animal kingdom completely apart from the sin of man? To do this – even in animals – declares death not to be a consequence of sin, but simply a natural process which God would have had to ordain or allow. I challenge anyone to find a passage of Scripture that will verify such an idea.
3.Tied to this is God’s compelling statement in Genesis 1:31 , where God declares His marvelous creation “very good”. In the old-earth model, depending on which theory is used, by the time this statement is made, countless eons have passed and multitudes of creatures have died and turned to fossils all over the planet. Yet God declares it very good? Strange. One can say the statement is too general to rule out the dead stuff, but one simple verse renders it impossible. I Corinthians 15:26 flatly declares death to be an enemy. Remembering that God is righteous and holy, how can He call something “very good” that He Himself declares to be an enemy? The disconnect between animal and human death is not a Scriptural one. Death was a direct consequence of the Fall which affected all of creation alike. To declare the Fall to have affected only human beings is to deny the history of Genesis and the theology of Paul.
Belief in death before Adam is held for one unbiblical reason; to accommodate lots of time, and as we mentioned earlier, we must employ theories in order to do this. There are several to choose from, but the two sentimental favorites are the Day-Age, also known as the Long Day theory, and the Gap theory.
The Long Day theory, already discussed in part, declares the recorded days of creation to actually be vast periods of time which God used to make His earth and universe. For our purposes, we don’t need to say a lot more about it, but we will mention in passing that they have a problem with plant life being created on day three and the sun on day four. If there are millions of years between “days”, how did the plants get by all this time without a sun? They get really creative explaining that one. It’s a fun read.
The Gap theory is even more popular, held by Scofield, C.F. Baker and many other men of God of their generation, and our generation as well. It states that there was an earlier creation which God judged and brought to ruin before recreating it in Genesis chapter 1. This judgment allegedly took place in the “gap” between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The King James usage of the word “replenish” in Genesis 1:28 is cited as evidence for this theory, even though the Hebrew word simply means “fill”. This theory gives the old-earther his millions of years but has some problems. Gap theory people are proud to be able to believe in the six days of creation as literal, but that leaves them without a sun to shine on the earlier creation, since God created it on day four of the re-creation. A bit of Bible tweaking has to happen. Also, there supposedly was a judgment. What does God judge? Sin and unrighteousness, according to Romans 1:18 and I John 5:17 . Who sins? Men sin. So who did God judge – trees, animals and moronic cave men with no moral component? Or were there men who could sin and qualify for judgment? No, because I Corinthians 15:45 says Adam was the first man. Both options do damage to the revealed Word of God. Also, why did God create in the first place? Revelation 4:11 and Ephesians 2:7 tell us. It is the story of perfect fellowship, fall and redemption. He created us to be worshippers of Himself without sin messing things up. The Psalms and other scriptures give praise to God over and over. Okay, can we go to Scripture and find a reason why God would create and maintain a world with nothing in it that could honor or worship Him? From Scripture, why would God do that?
Therefore, the argument is put forth that Satan was the one judged some time in the misty, ancient past. Apart from zero Scriptural evidence for such a thing, Ezekiel 28:13 clearly tells us that Lucifer walked in Eden before he fell, meaning that either there was more than one Eden (no Scriptural evidence for that) or Satan rebelled between recorded creation and the Fall, which leaves no provision for an earlier, non-revealed creation or judgment.
Some old-earthers have seen the futility of these theories and correctly concluded that they do not work. However, since giving up the billions of years is not an option to them, they embrace what is known as the Framework Hypothesis. In this theory, the relevant early chapters of Genesis are simply declared to not be actual history, but allegorical, and were written to teach us “deeper truths”. We have yet to see exactly what these deeper truths consist of. This theory does avoid answering a number of difficult questions, provided one is willing to flatly disbelieve the opening chapters of the Word of God. The problem with this is the writers of Scripture, including Christ Himself, interpreted early Genesis as historical fact, and to doubt this truth is to also deny the testimony of other Scriptures as well.
It’s so much easier to simply believe what God plainly tells us. Much more could be said, but time and space require that we close off this brief work. The arguments have certainly not been exhausted, and we would not presume to be able to answer every question which can be posed by the other side of the issue. However, it has been our purpose to establish the wisdom of accepting the clear, straight-forward teaching of scripture as the basis for our position on Origins, and to show that what is marketed as “can’t-possibly-be-wrong science” is not always or necessarily accurate. To a reasonable degree, we have attempted to demonstrate this. We do not have to be wacko to look at our small rock and believe it to be no older than 6,000 – 7,000 years. Our reasons are sound, and our foundation is no less an authority than God’s Word
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