You might be better off engaging YEC through the Bible, because anyone can come up with a ‘just so’ story to counter scientific evidence they don’t agree with.
Was Adam the first human?
The purported 7,000-year age of the Earth was arrived at by adding up the genealogies in the Bible from Adam to Jesus. This presumes that the Adam of Genesis 2 was the first man. As one scholar put it:
“In order to use Biblical genealogies as a calendar, one must make the fundamental assumption that Adam and Eve were the first humans. Obviously, if this is not the case, then the Bible’s genealogical record is incomplete, and thus any calculation made using its genealogies would be erroneous.” Mike Janssen, Creationism and Biblical Geneologies.
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However, there are two creation accounts in Genesis. The first account, Genesis 1:1-2:4, doesn’t mention Adam and Eve by name. It simply says that, “God created man [‘adam’ in Hebrew, or ‘mankind’] in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).
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At first glance, the second account (Genesis 2:5-25) seems to be a re-retelling of the first. This is partly because most translations place Genesis 2:4 under a header that says something like “The Creation of Man” or “Adam and Eve”, thereby making 2:4 the opening verse of the second account. E.g. here’s the NIV version:
Gen 2:3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Adam and Eve
Gen 2:4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
- This is unfortunate, because there were no headers, paragraphs, chapter/verse numbers or even punctuation in the earliest available manuscripts. So 2:4 could actually be the closing verse of the first account, which is where the New Living Translation (among others) places it, though it makes the mistake of splitting verse 4, placing the second half below the header and merging it with verse 5 (remember, they’re guessing, because there was no punctuation in the earliest available manuscripts):
Gen 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation. 4 This is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth.
The Man and Woman in Eden
When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 neither wild plants nor grains were growing on the earth.
- A more reasonable translation would be as follows:
Gen 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation. 4 This is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.
The Man and Woman in Eden
5 Neither wild plants nor grains were growing on the land [Eden, not the whole Earth]. For the LORD God had not yet sent rain to water the land, and there were no people to cultivate the soil. 6 Instead, springs came up from the ground and watered all the land. 7 Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person. 8 Then the LORD God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made.
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On this reading, the creation of the heavens and the earth, along with humans, happened before the creation of Adam (‘ha’adam’ or ‘the man’, as distinct from the generic ‘adam’ or ‘mankind’ of Genesis 1).
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Another cause for confusion is that the Hebrew word translated ‘earth’ actually means ‘land’, the boundaries of which are determined by context (the NIV footnote concurs, “Genesis 2:5 Or land; also in verse 6”). So when Genesis 2:5 says “Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground,” it doesn’t necessarily refer to the whole planet Earth.
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Instead, the second account appears to be of a local event, because 2:8 says “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed [a specific man, Adam, formed in 2:7, not generic ‘mankind’ created in 1:27].” So plants may have existed elsewhere on Earth (from the Genesis 1 creation), just not in Eden, until God planted the garden there. 2:10-14 names some rivers and places near Eden, including the rivers Tigris and Euphrates which are in present-day Iraq (although Adam’s descendants possibly named the Iraqi rivers after the original ones located elsewhere), thereby showing that this is a local event, not a cosmic one.
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Note that God ‘planted’ the garden in 2:8, He didn’t create new plants there. As for “formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air” in 2:19, the verb translated ‘formed’ or ‘made’ is in the pluperfect tense, so it can be construed as ‘had made’, referring back to the creation in Genesis 1, not to a new local creation. God brought the animal species created in Genesis 1 to Adam to name in Genesis 2. Point 10 below discusses why God created Adam and Eve instead of populating Eden with the humans of Genesis 1.
9. So it is possible that mankind was created long before Adam and Eve came on the scene, and this throws the genealogical dating method off-kilter, because that method starts the clock with Adam.
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One potential objection to the view that Adam was not the first human is that Genesis 3:20 says Eve “would become the mother of all the living.” If there were females before Eve, wouldn’t some humans alive today be descended from them and not from Eve? Not necessarily. It is possible that God created Adam and Eve because the earlier humans had died out, including all their descendants. So Eve would “become the mother of all the living.” Not all who ever lived, but all who lived after her.
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This approach addresses another potential objection. If there was life before Adam, then part of the fossil record predates him. The entire fossil record shows death and suffering, so since all death and suffering is the result of sin, there must have been sin before Adam. Then why does 1 Corinthians 15:22 say “… in Adam all die …”? Just as Eve was the mother of all who lived after her (not of all who ever lived), so in Adam all who lived after him (not all who ever lived) die. The “all” in that verse is referring to Paul’s readers, as in “all of you …”
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Some may object, “Why would God allow possibly millions of years of death and suffering?” Well, why would He allow thousands of years of death and suffering? Either way, every living thing experiences no more than a lifetime of suffering in this life.
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From a scientific perspective, some may object that if mankind was created about the same time as the earliest animals, then we should find evidence of humans living more than 7,000 years ago. Well, bearing in mind that fossilization is a rare event and there may not have been many humans that far back, it seems we do (e.g. Michael Cremo’s book, Forbidden Archaeology. Note: Cremo is not a Christian and his scientific claims should be considered separately from his religious explanation for those claims).
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Another potential objection. 1 Corinthians 15:45 says “So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam [Christ], a life-giving spirit.” If the first man was Adam, how could there have been men before Adam? Paul was addressing Adam’s descendants, and their sins which they inherited from Adam. So for the purposes of 1 Corinthians, Adam was ‘the first man’. If someone says, “As the first man climbed the wall, you too will climb it,” we don’t immediately assume he’s referring to the first man that ever climbed the wall. Instead, we look to the context to indicate which first man the speaker is referring to (perhaps the first man that the audience saw climb the wall).
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The same construal would suit Romans 5:14, “Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses …” Again, Paul is emphasizing the original sin that Adam passed on to his descendants. This is not to suggest that Jesus’s atonement does not cover the sins of those before Adam, all the way back to the first human of Genesis 1. However, those sins are irrelevant to Paul’s audience, so as far as they (and those after them) were concerned, he’s referring to the Adam of Genesis 2.
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Having said that, it is possible that ‘Adam’ has a double meaning in the above New Testament verses, as referring both to the first human (‘adam’) of Genesis 1 and Adam of Genesis 2. Paul’s mother tongue was Hebrew, and he would have known that ‘adam’ is both the generic word for the first humans in Genesis 1 and the proper name ‘Adam’ in Genesis 2 onwards. As the NIV footnote to Genesis 2:7 states, “The Hebrew for man (adam) … is also the name Adam (see verse 20).” Paul’s Greek-speaking audience would have been unaware of the Hebrew double-meaning, but God wrote the scriptures for a wider readership.
Conclusion
Creationism seems to be in tension with much of the scientific data on the age of the Earth and the universe. Even if some of those findings are inaccurate, 7-10,000 years is too short a time to account for much of the evidence. The problem is, the genealogical dating method rests on the assumption that the Earth and Adam were created at about the same time, but the Bible doesn’t say that. So Young Earth Creationism is possibly mistaken, and it’s a shame to reject scientific findings just because of an error in biblical exegesis.