Argument from contact against an Old Earth and my response

Debating EC skeptics is not easy, they often come up with two arguments.

  1. Why would God wait 95000 years to make contact? The Bible would only make sense with a literal reading of Genesis.

  2. We only have records of the Christian God from 6000 years ago, while humanity has existed since more than 100000 years. Therefore, Genesis should be read literally.

The first time I found both of them, I didn’t even know what to say, but I found a response that could refute both of them.

  1. According to the Genesis account, God constantly made contact with humans, so He was always there for them.

  2. Take into account that God is against images (Exodus 20:4), so He probably commanded the first humans not to make anything resembling Him. Plus, don’t forget that writing is something pretty knew (it dates from about 5000 years ago).

After answering those objections, they make this one:

Why God and not any other deity worshipped by ancient humans?

Well, that is a hard one! Take a look at Genesis 4:5 and Genesis 4:11-16. I think that Cain represents humans who stopped worshipping God and created other deities (like the Israelites in Exodus 32).

Well, those were my responses to these objections. What do you think? Do you have any other one?

Not sure I have an answer, but I want to make sure I understand the question first. Does this mean, “Why should we worship God and not some other deity worshiped by ancient humans?”

Let me paraphrase it.

“Why is the Christian God the real one? Humans worshiped many gods before the Christian God”

Well, you can always refer them back to Romans 1:19-22:

“[T]hat which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.”

In other words, as long as there have been humans, we’ve known something of who God was. And it’s true in the sense that in many animistic and polytheistic traditions, they believe in a supreme God / Great Spirit who is in some way above all other spiritual beings. So we can say that we are making known the true nature of that God in Christ, similarly to Paul’s preaching to the Areopagus (Acts 17).

Secondly, I would add that even in a YEC framework, your timeline before Christ is longer than your timeline after Christ, and you have to struggle through the question of why God would have waited 4,000 years for the incarnation. You have to ask, similarly, “Why is the Trinity the real God, when Jews worshiped a non-Trinitarian God long before we understood the Trinity?” The problem gets only slightly simpler, but really not by much.

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