What biblical reasons are there to accept the scientific view of the earth as billions of years old?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Not really. Nothing in the Bible provides an age for the earth.

Even if one assumes the aforementioned Genesis genealogy pericope to be a “very literal” family chronology, at most it would tell us that the first Imago Dei human, HAADAM, lived a few thousand years ago. That still wouldn’t tell us anything about the age of the earth.

Even if one assumes that Genesis 1 describes six 24 hour days, there are multiple ways to “literally interpret” the text without demanding a young earth of a few thousand years. For example, one of the multiple Framework Hypothesis views is that the six YOM are Days of Proclamation. Under this view, God’s commands are conveniently outlined as taking place over a six-day period, where God is so powerful that he builds our world in a single workweek. The chronologies of the fufillment of each command are simply not relevant to the author’s purposes. Indeed, the usual criticisms of temporal inconsistencies in Genesis 1 (e.g., creating plants before there is a sun to power them) evaporate under the Days of Proclamation view because the cascade of events which result from each day of divine commands can unfold concurrently and in appropriate chronological orders. In this view, Genesis 1 is about an omnipotent Creator who is outside of time (because he is the creator of the time attribute of the matter-energy universe) and God’s commands can also be viewed as initiating natural processes which fulfill God’s will over long periods of time.

For example, “Let the earth bring forth [living things]…” and “Let the waters bring forth [living things]…” are the very opposite of the traditional “poofing” type of creation many of us were taught in Sunday School. Their fulfillment could just as easily involve millions or even billions of years, not just thousands of years. (Frankly, I see nothing in the Hebrew text of Genesis 1 that is suggestive of thousands of years.)

Indeed, “Let the ERETZ [land, earth] bring forth…” sounds a lot more like abiogenesis and evolutionary processes operating over long periods of time than the “special creation” and fixity of species which many Christians presume. [Yes, I realize that most YEC ministries today reject “fixity of species” but I’m talking about the traditional view of many generations of Christians including Bible Belt America of much of the last century.]

I’ve noticed that a lot of Christians simply assume that “instantaneous poofing” (immediate complete fulfillment of God’s will) is somehow more God-honoring than gradual fulfillment over long periods of time. Yet, in the Bible God’s slow and gradual but certain purposes are the norm throughout! Indeed, God tends to operate so gradually that we humans are constantly frustrated by this. That is why there are so many scriptures reminding us that God is outside of time and observes days and years with equal immediacy and omnipresence. (“I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” and “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promises…”; “Where is the promise of his coming?”) We humans may think that “instantaneous poofing” is more impressive. But aren’t the details of God’s amazing creations more evident and impressive as they unfold over vast eons of time? (Personally, I find a God who can create natural processes which inevitably produce life and the evolutionary processes which diversify that life to countless changing environments much more impressive than a weaker but traditional deity who must constantly monitor, tweak, and repair a creation which regularly deviates from his original plan.)

Of course, whatever may be our human opinion on such matters, the fact remains that God in his wisdom chose to display his sovereignty over billions of years of creative splendors! We know that because of what we observe in that creation—and I refuse to believe that God has filled the universe with misleading evidence.

For me it became a realization that long cherished traditions were comforting but reality was far more amazing.

Of course, Genesis 1 is full of accommodations to human limitations. Was “creation week” truly like a Cecil B. DeMille movie where a loud voice produced instantaneous stars and planets? Of course not. Does God have vocal cords? No. Did air molecules exist so that God’s spoken commands could resonate throughout the galaxies? No. The purpose of Genesis 1 is to describe an omnipotent God exerting his creative will—and it frames those ideas through a convenient six-day workweek outline where each creative “domain” just happens to correspond with the various “spheres of governance” by which the gods and goddesses of Israel’s pagan neighbors were thought to rule the world. For example, Yam, ruled the fishes of the seas. Shemesh was the sun god and Yanikh was god of the moon. Other deities were thought to rule the beasts of the field and the seed-producing vegetation. Genesis 1 declares Israel’s God the ruler of all of the world’s domains, and employs lots of chiasmic structures (AB+BA) as the 3+3 outline of creation week establishes a clear monotheistic worldview. The western emphasis on chronology (and even verbal tenses) is foreign to Semitic culture and language. Even the numbering of the days in Hebrew doesn’t necessarily require the same sort of sequential view of an historical narrative that we naturally assume in English. (I never gave that idea much thought until I studied Hebrew grammar under a prominent rabbinical scholar who constantly reminded us “You are still thinking like a 20th century American!”)

Reading Genesis 1 (and the OT in general) within its own cultural context is no easy task. It has taken me a lifetime of arduous study to grasp just as little of what my rabbi grad school professor was talking about. (At the time he was considered one of the world’s top experts on the MIshna, and I wish I could have recorded his many impromptu expositions which totally challenged a lot of my traditional fundamentalists views of the Old Testament. I’ll never forget his explanation of why “The fool has said in his heart that there is no god” has absolutely nothing to do with atheists. His class handout on Hebrew idioms alone was enough to upend a lot of Bible Belt amateur exegesis.)

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179

Chris,

You point me to Walton’s “Lost World” for his affirmation of creatio ex nihilo. However, Walton has published three “Lost World” books (“…of Genesis One” in 2009, “…of Scripture” in 2013, and “…of Adam and Eve” in 2015). I have the first and it only has one very fleeting reference to ex nihilo (and there’s no mention of Heb 11:3). I can’t imagine such a reference would be more likely to show up in the second and third books than the first one. Might you have read it in an article or found it in some other source to which you could point me? I’m not so much focused on ex nihilo per se, but rather where Walton sees material origins in the Bible since he doesn’t see them in Gen 1. Since he believes in creatio ex nihilo, I assume he believes the Bible somewhere testifies to that. You gave me Heb 11:3, but I’m wondering if he has a short or long list of passages that he thinks affirm God’s hand in material origins. I know most would think that such a position would be natural for him, but he makes a point of saying, “The Bible only insists that God is the one who is the Creator and that however it took place, he is responsible for creation.” (This is taken from the BioLogos article by him I excerpted for you before.) If indeed “the Bible insists that God is the one who is the Creator” and if neither Gen 1 nor occurrences of “create” (bara’) are the places where the Bible manifests this insistence, “Where are those places?” is a reasonable and natural question, isn’t it?

180

Should I infer that you are a scientist, or at least knowledgeable enough about science to use scientific data to come to your conclusion?

No need to apologize; just wanted you to be aware.

I don’t need a hint. I just need your explanation, or, more importantly, your point.

181

As I said in the OP, it is the collective witness of Gen 1-2, Ex 20, and Ex 31, and particularly the copycat behavior required of Israel, that lead me to believe the creation was accomplished in a week - not viewing Gen 1-2 through a C. B. DeMille lens.

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No I am not a scientist, but you only need senior high school level scientific knowledge to come to this conclusion.

My point is that you do not understand how to read this genealogy. The Hebrews would have understood how to read this genealogy. The reason why you are unable to understand how to read this genealogy is that you do not know how such genealogies should be read. This is why you are reading the genealogies in Genesis 4-5 wrongly. As I have pointed out several times, no one in the Bible reads the genealogies you do. As you have acknowledged, you are reading them the way James Ussher did, not the way the Bible does. Can you see why this is wrong, and why it has caused a problem which otherwise would not exist? If you can realise this, then we can move on to how to read the genealogies.

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@Mike_Gantt,

Hearing about men of God, reject Earth’s age, despite overwhelming corroboration from multiple bodies of evidence, is one of the reasons millenials are increasingly avoiding all the mainline churches.

You don’t seem at all alarmed that the very extreme position you take is contributing to the loss of a generation of Christians.

Just in case you are wondering, I define “extreme” to be a position or belief “which persists even when there is overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary.”

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You must have missed this post in which I made clear that the concern you identify is the very reason I’m going through this exercise.

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As I’ve said, unless such an exercise can bridge the gap between thousands of years and millions of years, I don’t have time for it. I’m focused on the question that began this thread.

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(1) So, then, do you agree that when Genesis 1 uses descriptions like “God said”, it does not mean that God verbalized literal audible words which were heard by no one because nobody with ears were around to hear them?

(2) What is the purpose of Exodus 11?

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

The purpose is to associate the significance of the SEVENS in the Mosaic Law, beginning with the seventh day sabbatical, with the SEVEN of Genesis 1. We know that the SEVEN is the significant point and not the definition and exact duration of a YOM because the seven of Genesis 1 becomes the basis of not only the sabbatical days but also the sabbatical years and the sabbatical weeks of years.

It is the SEVENS which are the most important aspect of the association. The 6+1=7 pattern of Genesis 1 is the basis for Israel’s being expected to special observe the seventh of the sevens: the seventh day, the seventh year, and the year associated with the sevens of seven years: the Jubilee year. All of these sabbaticals were based on the seven YOM time periods of Genesis 1.

How did the seven-day week get started? There’s a lot that we don’t know about such origins but historians have long understood that many cultures, from the ancient Babylonians to the Japanese and the Chinese, based the seven days of the week on the seven planets which they had been watching for countless generations. (In fact, the ancient Hebrews were atypical in not naming the days of the week after the names of the planets.) The number seven had a special symbolic significance in many cultures. So it would not be the only instance in the scriptures when God took something already well understood and assigned it special significance that would serve as a continuous covenantal reminder to his people. Instead of linking the days of the week to the seven stars and the deities assigned to them, Israel would view days, weeks, years, and weeks-of-years as YHWH’s.

As I wrote previously, I certainly have no problem with those who interpret Genesis 1 as God exerting his creative will for the universe over a six-YOM/day period. Generally speaking, it seems to fit with what God has revealed in his scriptures and with what God has revealed in his created universe. The conflict arises when one tries to impose the entire development of the universe (the fulfillment of God’s creative commands) into a six day period. A popular tradition says that such a view can be harmonized with Genesis 1—but, unfortunately, it doesn’t harmonize with what we observe in creation itself. Why would God create a world filled with evidence contradicting a six-day developmental history? So if there are other interpretations of Genesis 1 which fit both the scriptural evidence and the scientific evidence, isn’t that a more likely reality?

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I want to make clear that I’m not saying that the Days of Proclamation view is the only legitimate interpretation of Genesis 1. I like to use it when addressing this topic because (1) it is more easily summarized than some of the other interpretations, and (2) I believe it might be among the easiest to harmonize with the scriptural evidence and the scientific evidence for those who may share a Young Earth Creationist background similar to mine.

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@Mike_Gantt,

You are correct, I missed this post! I think you are quite the brave fellow.

You are willing to base your wager on the future of your credibility based on your ability to comprehend your God’s requirements based on a few English translations of a Hebrew document, to make a conclusion that virtually no Jewish thinker ever adopted… either before Jesus or after Jesus!

That is gutsy stuff!

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Mike, I think you posed an excellent question in launching this thread. These are important topics and just about all of us have had to wrestle with them. I do wish more people were wiling to step outside of the echo chambers and engage these topics as Biologos has done.

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And as I have pointed out repeatedly, there is no such gap. That gap only exists in your mind. It is the product of you reading the genealogies wrongly. Until you realise that you are reading the genealogies wrongly, you will not be able to understand how to read them correctly.

As I have pointed out several times, no one in the Bible reads the genealogies you do. As you have acknowledged, you are reading them the way James Ussher did, not the way the Bible does. Can you see why this is wrong, and why it has caused a problem which otherwise would not exist? Why are you reading the genealogies in a way that the Bible does not? I have asked you this several times and every time you avoid answering it.

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@Mike_Gantt

I would like to tarry over one point of epistemology: how will your grandchildren know one way or another?

Since it is unlikely that Young Earth Creationists are going to discover their Faith has been confirmed until the End of Days, the only way your grandchildren will know whether you were right or wrong in this life is if you teach them the important of Corroborating Evidence!

If you decide in favor of the Scientific Evidence, then you and your grandchildren will all have the confidence of adhereing to an Old Earth because there is no countervailing scientific evidence.

But if you decide in favor of the “Gantt Interpretation of Genesis”, and they do too, they will never know for sure until the Resurrection.

But here’s the sad news:

Let’s suppose you continue to adhere to the “Gantt Interpretation of Genesis” … confident in your faith in the text.

And your grandchildren decide that overwhelming scientific corroboration is more convincing than the “Gantt Interpretation”, they will believe you were wrong until their final days.

Conversely, if you adopt Science and they don’t, they will know you took the path of Science as a reasonable response to evidence, even though they think Faith is more important.

They still won’t know that you are right (or wrong) until the final days.

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It seems like you may be conflating the idea that you (and others) find the presentation of the history of creation in a week misleading with the idea that the history is unreliable. Is that really fair?

I could write a poem about my grandfather’s life, and use a calendar year to structure it. I could talk about his spring on the farm, and his summer fighting poverty and the Nazis, his peaceful autumn as a sign-maker, and his long, lonely winter as a widower. The words ‘spring,’ ‘summer,’ ‘autumn,’ and ‘winter’ wouldn’t be used in some secondary sense. No definition of winter will tell you a secondary meaning is “old age.” But this “seasons of life” idea is a common and accessible literary trope in English, so it is easily calculated by most native speakers.

No one is going to argue that because the meaning of the word for each season clearly denotes one quarter of a calendar year, therefore, I must be claiming my grandfather lived out his whole life in 365 days. I could tell a true history about my grandfather in a poem structured around a calendar year, and if you were to tell me my poem was “unreliable” or “untrue” because my grandfather lived 83 years not 1 year, I would think you were being ridiculous.

So, personally, I don’t have a problem allowing for the possibility that a calendar week could have been a familiar literary trope to the original audience. Perhaps it was one they associated with completion or perfection or memorializing something important. I don’t have a problem allowing that even though the word “day” there clearly refers to the normal kind of day and not some secondary sense of “eon” or “age,” that doesn’t necessarily imply the “history” of creation fit into 168 hours any more than the “history” of my grandfather’s life fit into 365 days.

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Nice, @Christy !

And this, @Mike_Gantt , is the kind of cognitive adjustment millions of Christians have already made (some more, some less) in order to pray to their Savior with conviction, despite being convinced long ago that the Earth is billions of years old!

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There you go again, portraying science as mere hearsay.

Moreover, Jonathan doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you are accusing him of seeming to be. He’s very big on evidence.

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195

I am a bit confused about this focus on genealogies, as if this tells us anything about the age of the earth. Let us say we grant that the genealogies allow at most 7K years between us and Adam. What does this tell us about the age of the earth? Nothing really.

  1. There could still be a gap between vs. 1 and 2. Yes @Mike_Gantt I read your interpretation, but the passage is ambiguous. How do you know for sure you are right?

  2. There could still be a substantial gap between the ch. 1 and 2 accounts. The first account talks about Elohim’s creation of mankind with words, but then the second account talks about Jehovah’s creation of a single man by molding him from dust. Maybe your interpretation is right, but the account is ambiguous. How do you know for sure that there was not a gap in time between 1 and 2?

  3. Given Adam was not born in the story, we do not know from when to count his age. Perhaps it was from when he was kicked out of the garden. Passage is ambiguous. How do you know for sure it was from his birth and that they were in the garden for a short time?

  4. Of course we have not even touched on how long the days are. Yes @Mike_Gantt I read your interpretation, but the passage is ambiguous. Morning and night exist before the sun and moon, which should be a clue. How do you know for sure you are right?

There is just so much ambiguity about the time between when the earth is created and when the genealogies start, it really makes no difference how long the genealogies are.

You asked for a Biblical reason to accept the scientific view that the earth is a billion years, but we have gotten side tracked into a separate question. It seems like we are arguing if the bible teaches the earth is a billion years. Let’s be clear that I do not think this is the case. Rather, I think the Bible is ambiguous about the age of the earth.

Still, there is Biblical reason to accept it.

  1. I think we both agree that the age of the earth is not consequential to our faith, and that it could be consistent with Scripture.

  2. We also agree that it is consequential to those in our scientific world.

That guides us to the best reason to accept the earth as a billion years old. 1 Corinthians 9:20-22. Rather than focusing on adjudicating an inconsequential fact that is extraneous to our faith, why not turn our eyes to more important components of the faith-science conversation?

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196

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the compliment!

I’m going to have to flat out disagree with you on this. There is a big difference in saying someone, “ceased” working on a project and someone rested the day after they finsihed it.

This is not what refreshed is. We already know that God received pleasure in what accomplished from Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

Because it’s obvious, at least to me, that the creation narratives are not to be taken literally or historically. One, the ANE people weren’t looking for modern historicity and accuracy in their creation traditions. The ancient Israelites knew that Yahweh didn’t rest and refresh Himself. The whole point of the story is to show that God formed the world as a temple and he would reside in it on the 7th Day. Just like in Genesis 1 where God created light on the 4th day, the fact that it doesn’t make scientific sense is irrelevant, to us and the ancient Hebrews, to the point of the narrative. Similarly, the fact that God stated that He rested and was refreshed on the 7th day was understood that God would reside in His work - again, that fact that it didn’t make literal sense is irrelevant. This is all in addition to the fact that there simply no way for the 6-day narrative to be historical. [quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:111, topic:36256”]

Rather, I think He’s telling us about as much as we were told when it was written that Jesus “rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Hush, be still.’ And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm”
[/quote]

You’re comparing apples to oranges. Jesus performed a miracle, of course it’s beyond us as to how that worked. The creation narratives relate a 6-day creation where the creator rests after He’s done and is refreshed. Either those things are literally true or it’s a tradition, like other peoples of the time had.

I never stated that I thought that, “refreshed” can only be understood in a spiritual sense.

A huge issue for us (and probably with others here also, judging by the posts) is that you and I see the bible much differently. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you to hold to a Chicago Statement-type biblical inerrancy, that Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch, that there can be no real contradictions in scripture or its unreliable, etc. I don’t hold to any of those things. I hold to biblical authority and infallibility, but not to a strong inerrancy (my view of scripture could be a sort of inerrancy - there are many definitions as to what inerrancy is). I see the bible as a collection of books, consisting of poems, wise sayings, prayers, songs, genealogies and doxologies, historical narratives, letters, traditions, etc., written over 1,500 years in 3 continents in (at least) 3 languages that God is some way inspired and uses to, ultimately, save us. To expect all the incidentals to line up is modernistic and unreasonable, IMO. But I can guarantee you that I take the teachings of the bible quite seriously and continue to make major life decisions based on them.

To answer what you said to another poster, I can see that you are sincere in your efforts to make sense of all of this, and you’re not an acolyte of AIG or the DI. In a way my heart goes out to you, since it would be hard to suddenly accept that scripture uses traditions and legend-building, like the contemporary cultures did, to promote, in the case of the bible, true theology. [quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:111, topic:36256”]
I hope you will continue to labor with me.
[/quote]

I’m here as long as you need me. :grinning:

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197

Actually, I take “God said” to be a central point of Gen 1. When people say that their only important takeaway from Gen 1 is “God did it,” I scratch my head. I wonder how they divorce the saying from the doing, given how the text repeatedly emphasizes this connection - and all the more so when you consider everything else the Bible says about God speaking. I would expect the minimum meaning any reader would glean from Gen 1 - if he were looking for a minimum - would be “God did it by speaking.”

As to your point about “nobody with ears were around to hear,” I don’t consider human beings to be the only beings. Therefore, just because there were no human beings around to hear God’s words does not mean that no beings heard them. What the equivalent of “verbalized literal audible words” is in the spiritual realm, I do not know; but it’s clear from the Scriptures that angels hear God speak.

I don’t see how the application of the original pattern of seven to longer periods of time disallows the possibility that the original pattern was in days. Does the application to weeks of years disallow the application to years?

For readers who take Gen 1 as a seven-day week, the answer is obvious.

See here.

I am in search of just such an interpretation which I can in good conscience accept. Hence I wrote the OP that launched this thread.

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