Young Earth Creationism -- the belief that the universe was made in six 24 hour days less than 10,000 years ago -- is quite common among Christians in America. I think it's wrong and comes from a misreading of the Biblical text and a misunderstanding of science. I also think Young Earth Creationism is an unnecessary stumbling block which prevents non-believers from taking Christianity seriously. I'll explain why.
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So I thought we'd talk about something a little bit different today.
You know, I've been talking a lot about politics, and I hate politics, because I find politics extremely boring.
And I'll bore myself to death if I continue with it for too long.
So, a little bit of a different discussion.
I was having this debate on Twitter over the past day and a half, a debate about the issue of young earth creationism.
And of course, Twitter's the perfect forum for theological and scientific debate.
Actually, it's a terrible forum for that sort of discussion or any kind of discussion.
So I thought maybe we'd move the discussion into a slightly more fruitful venue.
Although I have been told that I'm alienating and may in fact lose half my audience with my opinion on this topic.
So maybe I should just drop it.
That's what I've been told.
But I'm not very good at dropping things, number one.
And I like to try to hold People and myself to a higher standard than that.
We should be able to discuss an important and interesting issue without getting angry, without getting offended or losing respect for each other and all this kind of thing.
And I know that I need to work on that, first and foremost, because in our debates on Twitter about this, I know that I got a bit heated and angry at points.
And I regret that.
I regret it because it detracts from the topic, which is an interesting and important one.
But sometimes I let my passion run away with me, as I'm sure you've noticed.
Something I need to work on.
So let me say, at the outset, that good and faithful Christians reside on either end of this debate.
There's no reason for it to be a source of division within Christians, within the church, within Christianity.
But there is reason for it to be a source of discussion.
And though I don't question the sincerity or the faithfulness of Six Day Creationist folks, I do think that their view, when it is preached and argued for, can inadvertently do some harm.
Not inadvertently.
It's not like they're trying to hurt anybody, of course.
But I do think it can put obstacles in the way, especially for non-believers.
And I'll get to that.
I'll explain why.
But first I want to explain why I'm not a Six Day Creationist, and then I'll talk about why the Six Day Creationist view is, in my opinion, counterproductive.
So there's a lot to get to.
We'll proceed.
All right.
First of all, just setting the stage here.
When somebody asks me, and I get this question kind of frequently, someone says, do you take the whole Bible literally?
Right.
I always find that to be a confusing question.
Do you take the Bible literally?
It's a very confusing question.
I think that the literal versus non-literal debate is a false dichotomy.
It's kind of a miscommunication, really, between the two sides.
Much like, I would say, the faith versus works debate isn't really a debate.
It's a false dichotomy.
It's a miscommunication that's been going on for 500 years.
Because nobody thinks that you can earn your way to heaven just by doing certain things and faith doesn't matter at all.
Nobody thinks that.
No church that I'm aware of teaches that.
I don't think that's really a belief that almost anyone holds.
Everyone knows that you have to have faith.
The question is not whether you must have faith.
Everyone agrees, yes.
All Christians agree, yes, anyway.
But the question is, what is faith?
And how is it expressed?
Is faith just a feeling?
An intellectual assent?
Is that all faith is?
Or is it something that you feel, think, do, and live?
You know, that's really the fundamental question there.
And as for literalism, Nobody takes the whole Bible literally, okay?
Nobody does.
We all agree that there are parts of the Bible that cannot be taken literally.
We all agree, for example, that the parables, that Jesus' parables are parables.
They're stories.
Jesus did not mean for us to assume that the prodigal son is a real historical person, so that is non-literal, obviously.
He was telling a story to illustrate a point.
Jesus speaks non-literally quite a lot.
For example, he calls himself the door, but we know he's not a literal door, right?
We're speaking in a spiritual sense.
He is the door to eternal life.
That's a metaphor.
And I tell you, you are Peter, on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Is Peter an actual rock?
No, he's not.
Is Jesus literally building a physical church with bricks and wood and things?
No.
As far as we know, he never built a church.
Is there a literal gate?
Leading into hell?
Probably not.
It's a non-physical place, so I don't know what a physical barrier, what good a physical barrier would do in a non-physical place.
So, this is non-literal language.
You get the idea.
I think, by the way, it is kind of instructive and interesting that God in the New Testament uses non-literal language so often.
You know, he uses stories to make his point, and he uses metaphors so often in the New Testament, so we have to ask ourselves, did he just start doing that in the New Testament?
Or is it possible that he did it in the Old Testament, too?
Well, even in the Old Testament, there's agreement that some of it is non-literal.
Even the so-called biblical literalists would agree that the Psalms, for instance, are not literal.
Yes, the Psalms literally exist, but they're poetry, they're hymns.
It makes no sense to say that you take poetry and hymns literally.
You may as well ask me, do you take Beethoven's Fifth Symphony literally?
What does that mean?
I take Beethoven literally.
I think he literally existed.
But a symphony is not a thing to be taken literally.
It is outside of the literal, non-literal debate.
The Song of Solomon, set me as a seal on your arm, for stern as death is love.
Again, not literal.
We're not talking about self-mutilation here, carving someone's name into your arm.
That's not what we're talking about.
Back to the New Testament, Revelation.
I don't think very many people believe that Revelation gives us an exact, literal account of what will transpire at the end of the world.
There probably aren't going to be actual horses And lampstands coming out of the sky and so forth.
This language is heavily metaphorical.
I think we all basically agree with that.
The point is that when you're reading the Bible, which is comprised of dozens of books written by dozens of different authors over hundreds of years, what you have to do is you have to first determine What genre each of the books belong to, because they don't all belong in the same genre.
There are many different genres in the Bible.
It's not one genre.
The Psalms are not the same genre as the Gospels.
The Gospels?
What's the genre of Gospels?
Well, that's easy enough.
Biography.
Paul's letters are in the epistle genre, which again is a genre that doesn't really belong in the literal verse non-literal discussion.
St.
Paul says many things literally, of course, but he also uses metaphor, simile, analogy, and so on.
So then we get to Genesis.
Now again, we've already established that the Bible contains what we might call non-literal genres.
Everyone agrees on that.
And it also contains literal genres, such as the Gospels, for instance.
So now we ask, what genre is Genesis?
Is it meant to be read?
Is it a science textbook?
Is it meant to be read as a precise scientific account of the origins of the universe?
Is that why Genesis is there?
Is that what God wants us to take from it?
Does he want us to study it like we study a science book?
Of course he wants us to study it, but is it to be studied as a science textbook?
If you were to isolate Genesis and put it in a section of the bookstore by itself, would it be in the science section?
Do you think that Genesis should or can be used as a reference for serious geological and cosmological study?
Could a theoretical physicist kind of check his work by consulting the Bible?
A historian who wants to know about Jesus will certainly consult the Gospels.
The Gospels and the Epistles are essentially the only first-hand accounts that he can consult.
So, the Gospels are historical documents.
But a cosmologist who's trying to figure out what's going on with the universe will probably not look at the creation story in Genesis, because Genesis is not a cosmological resource.
It is a theological resource.
It's not going to be in the science section.
It belongs in the theology section.
It is a theological work, not a scientific one.
Which isn't to say that it's false.
It is still 100% true, it is still the Word of God, but the truth that it contains is a transcendent, timeless truth.
So it's true, but you have to know how to read it.
Okay.
Now, there are many Christians who insist that Genesis describes a literal six-day creation, okay?
Literal six-day creation as in a literal 24-hour day, you know, six days in a week.
And they cite as their proof the fact that it says day.
That's pretty much it.
That's the entire, that's all the evidence is the word day.
And the word day is in there.
The word day does exist.
And the word day is true.
No one is saying, or at least I'm not saying, that the word day is a falsehood or that it's a lie.
It's not.
But are we talking about a 24-hour Earth Day or some sort of other kind of day?
Now I think the latter.
I don't take it as a 24-hour day.
And so I'm agreeing with many of the great doctors and fathers of the church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, many of the great current apologists and theologians like William Lane Craig and John Lennox, Bishop Barron, along with, by the way, my favorite 19th and 20th century apologists like C.S.
Lewis and John Henry Newman.
None of them were Or are avowed six-day creationists.
And a great many of the great teachers and thinkers of Christianity have from the beginning held that Genesis is not entirely literal.
Which is really, I think, interesting that you had so many Christians who came to this conclusion before there was modern science to, in my view, basically prove that it was not a 24-hour Six 24-hour periods.
So, I agree with all of them, and I feel very safe in their company, and I'll explain why.
First, let's look at what happens on day four.
Let's start with day four.
Let me jump ahead for a minute, and we'll circle back, but day four.
Then, and God said, Let lights appear in the sky to separate day from night and to show the time when days, years, and religious festivals begin.
They will shine in the sky to give light to the earth.
And it was done.
So God made the two larger lights, the sun to rule over the day and the moon to rule over the night.
He also made the stars.
He placed the lights in the sky to shine on the earth, to rule over the day and night, and to separate light from darkness.
And God was pleased with what he saw.
Evening passed and morning came.
That was the fourth day.
The sun just came onto the scene.
The sun was just created on day four.
All the stars, trillions and trillions of stars, all made on day four.
Yet God said, let there be light on day one.
He said, let there be light before there was any source of physical light.
So the light of day one is not a physical light.
It is not a light in the way that we think of it.
There is no sun.
There are no stars.
There is no moon.
There isn't a formed earth yet.
The Earth is formless on day one.
It is formless and void, we're told, on day one.
Does it make sense to assume that we're talking about a 24-hour Earth Day when the Earth is a formless void and there is no sun?
Why should we think that?
What's the reason?
Imagine yourself standing or floating, I guess, in the midst of a shapeless, formless mass with no sun or moon or stars in the sky.
What is a day in that context?
I mean, it could be a 24-hour period, I guess, but there's no reason at all to assume that.
Let's think about this.
Let's define our terms.
What is a day in our current context?
What does day mean?
If we're talking about a so-called literal day.
If we're referring to, you know, the calendar, when we say day, well, what we mean is a day is when the Earth, as it orbits the Sun, makes one full rotation on its axis, thus causing the Sun to, from our perspective, rise and set.
But the Bible talks about days before there is a rotating earth, before there really is an earth at all, at least an earth of any discernible shape, and before there's a sun for the earth to rotate around.
Thus, we can already say rather definitively, I think, that we're not talking about an earth day.
We're talking about a 20, we're not talking about a 24-hour day because such a thing does not yet exist.
Now, you know, I don't even think we don't even need to get into the translation discussion.
If you look at the Hebrew word for day, does it have to mean 24 hours, or could it be referring to a broader kind of passage of time?
In English, the word day means either a 24-hour period corresponding with the rotation of the Earth, that's one definition, or a day means an age, a period of time.
Can day be understood in Hebrew in the same sort of way?
And the answer is, yes, it can be.
The word day in Hebrew can mean several different things.
There are those who say that the Hebrew word for day, as it's used in Genesis, cannot ever mean anything but a 24-hour day.
That is simply false.
That is not true.
And this is one of my problems, you know, with some of the Young Earth creationists.
is that they look at this text that people have been studying for thousands of years, and it's very dense, and in fact, very complex, and they say, no, I know exactly what it means.
I know exactly what it means.
There's zero chance that I'm wrong.
And they'll say, no, they can't mean anything but that.
And it's just not true.
What they're saying is simply untrue.
It can mean many different things.
In English, You know, if I say back in my day or in the days of old, I don't mean a 24-hour period.
I mean a chunk of time.
In fact, in Genesis itself, day is used in at least three different ways in Genesis!
He named the light day and the darkness night.
Okay, that's one meaning of day.
First day, second day.
That's another meaning of day.
And then it says, you are free to eat from the tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.
Well, Adam lived, we're told, for 900 years.
He didn't die on the day that he ate it.
Yes, he died spiritually.
But physical death also came from the fall, so it would seem that die in that verse has two meanings, which would mean that day probably has multiple meanings as well.
So you've got day used in multiple different ways within Genesis.
All you have to do is read Genesis to see that.
So we already know that you cannot approach Genesis with only one definition of day in mind.
The text does not support it, won't allow for it.
Most crucially, though, we know from the text itself that a day cannot mean the Earth spitting on its axis as it orbits the Sun.
Because the word day is being used here completely apart from the sun, and the earth, and rotations, and everything that physically defines a day.
The light on the first day is obviously something transcendent.
It is not a light from a physical source.
It is something timeless, not physical.
There is not yet any source, any physical source of light.
So, if the light is different and transcendent, that means the evening and morning it refers to must be different and transcendent as well, which means the word day must be as well.
We're dealing with a different sort of light, a different sort of morning, therefore, and a different sort of day, therefore.
The thing that makes physical Earth days, 24-hour days, that thing has not yet been formed.
Augustine thought that the light and darkness on the first day describes the angels and demons as the light is separated from the dark, just as the rebellious angels are separated from the loyal ones.
That's how he interpreted that.
I'm not sure if that's true, but the point is that many great minds in the church, from the beginning, have recognized that we're dealing with something bigger, deeper, vaster than literal days and nights.
You know, young earth creationists like to say or think that theirs is the traditional view and the most orthodox view, but it's not necessarily.
It is a traditional view, but it is not the traditional view.
The early church fathers and doctors of the church had diverse views on this topic.
And I'm okay with diverse views.
I think that's great.
It seems to be the Six Day Creationist who insists that there can be no diversity at all, and he is absolutely right, and everyone else is wrong.
That seems to be the way that the Young Earth Creationist approaches it.
There's also a bit of a reductionist thing going on here.
Because I've heard it said many times, well, Genesis is clear.
The text says what it says.
How could you be confused?
It's very straightforward.
That's what I've been told.
Really?
Genesis is clear?
It's straightforward?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty.
Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
That's totally clear to you?
You have no confusion about that at all?
Well then you are, I mean, you're way smarter than me and I think you're smarter than almost every human who has ever existed on the planet.
Because people have been debating and talking and analyzing just those lines alone for millennia.
Because it's very hard to understand what even that means.
And we're not even past the first two sentences yet.
I mean, if you understand—well, explain to me.
Explain to me what a formless earth looks like and how it has water on it, and what it means for the Spirit of God to hover over it.
If you say that it's totally clear-cut, plain as day, nothing metaphorical happening here at all, well then draw me a picture of what a waterlogged, formless mass of Earth suspended in a starless, sunless, moonless void looks like.
Can you draw me that picture?
I mean, I don't think you can, because we're dealing with something that is actually not simple at all.
You could spend your whole life studying just the first two sentences.
Also, by the way, God rested.
What does that mean?
Do you know what that means?
I don't really know what that means.
Do you know what it means for an eternal, changeless, spaceless, timeless God to rest?
I don't dispute the truth of the passage, but I'm saying that I don't really know what it means.
I can't wrap my puny mind around it.
I don't think you can either.
We're dealing here with things that are beyond us, which is yet another reason not to insist upon particular time measurements.
And it's another reason not to be so afraid of the idea that there may be some metaphor here.
Because when God is trying to communicate something to us that is beyond our grasp, he has to use metaphor.
Because it's the only thing we can understand.
And so when it comes to Genesis, there are clearly things happening here that are beyond our grasp.
Also, keep something else in mind, just to reiterate.
A day does not mean 24 hours.
That is not the definition of a day.
So when someone says, oh, I'm a literalist, I take it literally, well, that's not the literal definition.
If you're insisting that that day must mean 24 hours, you are not a literalist.
You are actually putting a non-literal definition into the text.
A day is not 24 hours necessarily.
That is not the definition of day.
A day on Earth right now is 24 hours because that's how long it takes now for the Earth to rotate on its axis.
A day on Pluto is like 130 hours.
On some planets in the solar system, a day is thousands of hours long.
The word day depends very much on what space rock you happen to be standing on and when you happen to be standing on it.
So let me ask you.
Was the formless Earth suspended in a void without a sun spinning on an axis?
Did it have an axis?
And if it was spinning, how fast was it spinning?
The answer, of course, is you have no idea, not the faintest clue.
Which means you have not the faintest clue how long a day was in that context.
If you're saying it must have been a day as we think of it, then what you're saying, the definition of day is rotating on an axis.
Which means that you are saying that you know 100% that a formless, shapeless Earth suspended in a void with a transcendent, non-physical, spiritual light shining upon it must have absolutely been spinning and taken 24 hours to complete its rotation.
I just don't know how anyone could ever say that.
And to me, it's such an odd thing to insist upon, absolutely.
So, we have no reason at all to assume that it was 24 hours, but we do have very many good reasons, I think, to assume that it wasn't. And we'll get to those in a minute.
Remember, scripture says that a day for man is like a thousand years for God.
So really, if you're a true literalist, it would seem to me that you would have to say that the earth was made in 6,000 years, not six days.
If you're taking it literally, if you're taking the whole book literally, which no one does, as I said, but if you are, if you claim to be, then you would have to take that verse into account.
But of course, like a thousand years is not an exact math equation.
It is not a rate of exchange.
It's just a, it's metaphorical language meant to convey the point that when God says he did something in a day, it doesn't mean a day the way we think of it.
A day for Him is not a day for us.
By the way, Isaiah 40, 22.
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
Here we are told that the earth is a circle.
Circles are flat.
We're told that God is above it, enthroned.
So again, must we take this as literal?
Must we believe that NASA is lying to us and that actually God is up, literally in the sky, hanging out next to the satellites?
Must we believe that the Earth is flat, like people used to believe?
The Bible also speaks frequently of the ends of the earth.
That's one of the reasons that people that used to believe in the flat earth, they would point to those verses and they would say, ends of the earth.
Apparently the earth has an end, but a sphere has no end.
So we don't take it literally.
Psalm 104.
He set the Earth on its foundation.
It can never be moved.
Must we take this literally and believe that the Earth does not move?
Science tells us that the Earth is hurtling through space at incomprehensible speeds.
Must we deny all of that science for the sake of taking it literally?
By the way, early Christians and Jews did take this literally.
That's part of the reason why Copernicus and Galileo got themselves into trouble, because the Bible says, absolutely, that the Earth doesn't move.
And so when people, when upstart astronomers started coming along and saying the Earth is moving, they said, that can't be, the Bible says it doesn't.
Plain as day, it says it does not move.
And that's why many Christians at the time rejected and denounced, in the harshest terms, any suggestion that the Earth moves.
They did so on the basis of their interpretation of Scripture, which they insisted should not change one bit to accommodate scientific fact.
John Calvin and Martin Luther were two of the most vocal critics of the idea of a moving Earth.
John Calvin called it deranged and monstrous.
He said it was a deranged, monstrous lie.
Well, eventually Christians realized that their interpretation of these verses had to be wrong because the scientific facts are indisputable.
The earth is moving.
It cannot be disputed.
So we must take those verses metaphorically.
If we can take those metaphorically, why can't we take day metaphorically?
One other point here.
In the story of creation, every day begins with, and God said.
God speaks at the beginning of the day, and that's how we mark each day.
But read the opening of Genesis again.
The opening is, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness over the surface of the water.
And God said, let there be light.
Many theologians have looked at this over the years.
And they've pointed out that the first two lines don't take place on the first day.
The first day begins with, and God said.
So what we're being told here, according to this interpretation, which I think is a good one, is that God created the heavens and the earth at some point in the beginning, whenever that was.
And we aren't told when, because it doesn't matter at all, really.
At least it has no bearing on the point the Bible is trying to make.
And so it was made at some point in the beginning, and then sometime later, maybe billions of years, the first day began.
And there was light, etc.
It doesn't say, on the first day God created the heavens and the earth.
It says, in the beginning.
And then there's a first day.
So, with all these points in mind, you hopefully see why I think the Bible does not require us to believe in a Young Earth creationism.
You can believe it.
You can draw that conclusion theologically, but you don't have to.
It's not required.
There's a reason why faithful Christians for 2,000 years have arrived at different conclusions on Genesis.
It's not a simple text.
It is not easy to understand.
It's quite dense, quite mysterious, and theologically you can justify multiple interpretations.
But if we're interested in getting some idea as to how these things physically happened and when, If that's what we're trying to figure out, then I think we look at the science.
And then, when we look at the science, certain interpretations of Genesis become significantly less tenable.
The real point of the Bible is all about why.
Why we're here.
We're here to love and serve God.
Science has nothing to say about that one way or another.
We can't cross-reference that with science.
But when it comes to our interpretations of the how and the whens, well, then things like archaeology, cosmology, physics, all of that becomes useful.
Science tells us that the Earth is around 4 billion years old.
Or, I'm sorry, yeah, the Earth is 4 billion, around 4 billion, and the universe is around 14 billion years old.
In order to defend the six-day creationist view, we must essentially reject the fields of modern astronomy, cosmology, geology, and biology.
We must declare that all but a very tiny fraction of experts in those fields are deluded fools.
We must basically wage an all-out war on modern science because it stands so explicitly and starkly against young Earth creationism.
I'll say this, you will be very hard-pressed to find a legitimate geologist or cosmologist or physicist or astronomer who believes, based on his studies, that the Earth and the Universe are 10,000 years old.
Maybe you'll find a few who believe, who hold that belief in spite of their studies.
Maybe you'll, maybe you'll, you know, maybe you'll find a few here and there who will say something like, yeah, I mean, you could interpret the science in a way that kind of comports with young earth creationism.
Uh, wait.
I mean, you're going to be very hard pressed to find any scientists who will even say that much.
But there are a few, I mean, young earth creationists, they have a few scientific names they'll trot out and they'll say, well, this person, that person, that, you know, it's a few.
But even those people, if you listen to what they're saying, they're not claiming that they can prove this just by looking at the physical scientific evidence.
They're starting with Genesis and their interpretation of it, and then trying to make the science fit.
And that's not how you do science.
That's not real science.
Now, I fully admit that I'm neither a cosmologist or a geologist, so I must decide whether I will believe the near-unanimous consensus in those fields, or if I will come to the conclusion that they're all a bunch of godless liars and lunatics because certain Christians insist that the word day in Genesis can only mean 24 hours and nothing else.
I must ask myself, what's more likely?
That the entire fields of cosmology, astronomy, and geology are wrong, illegitimate, and falsified?
Or that young earth creationists are simply misinterpreting the text.
What's the more plausible explanation?
That modern science is completely wrong?
Or that young earth creationists are misinterpreting it?
And it isn't just those scientific fields that Young Earthers need to disqualify.
There are many others that we basically are disqualifying.
Paleontology.
Most every paleontologist in the world will tell you that dinosaurs existed and they died off 60 million years ago.
But Young Earthers, based on one word in the Bible that they have interpreted in one particular way, We'll say to paleontologists, nope, you're all wrong.
All of your work is wrong.
Your life's work is wrong.
Everything you think is wrong.
It's everything you've studied.
It's all wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Because I believe that the word day in Genesis can only mean 24 hours.
I just, you know, it doesn't make any sense.
So, we have to discard, and then, you know, Young Earthers must also say that, well, either they say dinosaurs never existed and it's all a big sham.
I've had some Young Earthers tell me that God put dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith.
It's all a prank that he's playing on us.
Or that there were Tyrannosaurus rexes and Brontosaurus and Triceratops and Stegosaurus on Noah's Ark.
Somehow they all fit on there, and they also didn't eat everybody.
And then once they got off the Ark, they all died in some mass extinction event that only affected the dinosaurs, and then all of their bones somehow sifted and sunk lower in the ground than any other bones, and they fossilized so as to take on the appearance of age.
I mean, it's just, you've got to run through All of these massive loops and you've got to do these twirls and handstands and everything to make this work when you don't need to.
Archaeology is another field of study that young Earthers would have to basically disqualify.
Archaeologists have dug up many ancient artifacts, sculptures and so forth, that are clearly made by humans and are clearly older than 10,000 years.
Significantly older.
Like 30, 40, 50,000 years.
There are, for example, many of what are called Venus sculptures.
Sculptures of large women with exaggerated features that seem to indicate some kind of fertility worship by ancient people.
Some of these Venus sculptures are significantly older than 10,000 years.
You will not find a legitimate archaeologist who will look at every prehistoric artifact and declare, based on his study of those artifacts, that none of them were made before 10,000 years.
You will not find one who can say that!
So, archaeology has to be bunk as well, on the Young Earth View.
Physics!
Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant minds ever to exist on Earth, believed that the universe was billions of years old.
But young Earthers, I mean, they basically tell us that we have to treat Ken Ham as a greater authority on the subject than Einstein.
And I just can't do that.
Mathematics must also be discarded on the Young Earth View because it is through mathematical equations that we measure cosmic distance and age.
And so Young Earthers are saying that even mathematics we can't trust.
Nothing can be trusted.
In fact, we know that if you're looking at a star, And the star is however many light years away, you're looking that many years into the past, because it took that many years for the light to reach here.
And this is a huge problem for young Earthers.
It may actually be the biggest problem of all.
I think it's the thing above everything else that settles the question.
And it's an insurmountable problem, I think, for young Earthers.
Any stars that we have located, which are over 10,000 light years from us, would seem to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the universe is older than 10,000 years.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see them because the light wouldn't have gotten to us yet.
You see?
The Hubble Space Telescope recently located a star 9 billion light years away, which is to say that it looked 9 billion years into the past, which is incredible!
You know, they say we can't look into the past, we don't have a time machine.
We do!
And go outside at night and look up in the sky, you're in a time machine!
You're looking at the past!
All of those stars!
You're looking at what the stars looked like thousands or millions of years ago.
So, I think that's a rather insurmountable problem.
Here's the thing.
To prove Young Earth creationism, you need to do a whole lot more than just quibble with the methodology of some of these disciplines.
You need to do more than say, well, maybe carbon dating isn't accurate.
You certainly need to do more than show me a couple of vague, ambiguous stains on a cave wall somewhere that you say must be paintings of dinosaurs and therefore must, on their own, upend the entire fossil record.
No, that's not nearly enough.
That's not even close.
You need to provide evidence that these fields of study are fundamentally wrong about everything.
Because that's what you claim.
But before you set out to prove that, which I don't think you can, I would ask you to think twice.
Because there are two difficulties.
that I think should give us pause before we go around preaching the Young Earth view.
Difficulties, you know, theological difficulties, I guess you would say.
First of all, the argument as I've heard it, or one of the most prominent arguments or explanations for Young Earth, is that God made the Earth and the universe to look old.
And he made, I suppose, you know, and he put fossils in the ground that look old.
And he arranged all the mathematical equations and physics and everything that they would give us false information about the world.
And he created light beams that were already in motion on the way to us so as to give the impression that the stars are much older than they really are.
God, by this view, is deceiving us.
You're saying that God is playing games.
He's tricking us.
Rather than science being a method by which God reveals more about his own creation, science becomes a method by which God confounds and confuses and obscures.
So apart from how this view degrades science, the bigger issue is how it degrades God.
Because it gives us a God who deceives and who doesn't want us to know things and who tricks us.
It gives us this kind of petty, pagan God.
Not the true God.
Not the God of truth.
Not the God of light.
Not the God who reveals more and more of himself and this world to us as we search and explore.
You know, this gives us a God who wants us to be in the dark and demands that we never look outside the pages of the Bible to learn anything.
I think that God is much bigger than that, and much more honest.
Second point.
According to this view, modern science isn't just wrong, it is useless.
Geologists can't tell us anything about the Earth.
Cosmologists can't tell us anything about the universe.
Archaeologists can't tell us anything about the past.
And if that's the case, then you have set up science and faith as two competing things.
You have taken an adversarial approach to science.
And this is a huge stumbling block for people, a serious stumbling block.
Because when you make someone choose between science or an ancient religious text, when you tell them that only one or the other can be true, many will choose the other.
If you say, to be a Christian you must reject all of modern science, and if your listener believes you, He is likely to respond, well then I can't be a Christian.
Because Christianity must just be another primitive, anti-science, anti-knowledge, ignorant superstition like all the rest.
But Christianity is not an ignorant superstition.
And you don't need to choose between the two.
And you don't need to disbelieve your own eyes in order to believe the Bible.
You don't need to do that.
There is no reason to set up this competition between science and the Bible.
They can all work together.
And much of the time, they're doing different things.
And they're doing things that are not in competition.
The Bible is telling us why.
That is the fundamental message of the Bible and science is telling us how and when and to some extent what.
This can all work together so that a person can read the Bible and be spiritually nourished and learn quite a bit.
And then they can go into science and they can learn even more about this wonderful creation that God has given us.
And even more than that, God reveals himself.
You know, rather than treating science like it's some sort of black magic, Really, we should see that science is a form of revelation.
It's God revealing things to us.
It's what it means to reveal.
Things are being revealed to us through science about the nature of the earth and how God goes about creating things.
And that's a wonderful thing.
So, this was a long one.
That's why I'm not a Young Earth Creationist.
And it's why I think this view can have the effect of discrediting Christianity and creating very unnecessary stumbling blocks.
So I hope that you'll take that into consideration.
