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

[Mike_Gantt]

@Jonathan_Burke

What you refer to as “The John Walton View” is a view which is included in my view. What you call “The 1 Corinthians 9:20-22 View” is simply an observation made by Joshua with which many of us agree, including myself. These are not all different views of Genesis 1.

The way I would put it is that they are different, but they are not mutually exclusive.

I think this is obvious on its face. However, I will also give an example. John Walton seems to adhere to biblical inerrancy. Your view, by contrast, seems to be informed by at least some commentators who adhere to some form of the documentary hypothesis (e.g. JEPD). Those who sign up for the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy are usually not Wellhausen fans.

@Jonathan_Burke

There’s nothing in any of those verses which says that the witness of the natural creation is untrustworthy, or which warns us that God deliberately created the earth with a fake impression of age and a false history.

You are arguing with a straw man. My point about those passages is that they are all cases of Moses telling us that creation took place in six days. One of the benefits of your view is that removes the problem by declaring Gen 1-2 to be a vision and Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 to be allusions to it - and none of the passages to be the words of Moses but rather someone in the 6th century BC. The downside of adopting your view is that I have to give up Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch which it seems clearly to me that Jesus held. I know that you dispute this, but Mosaic authorship has been and continues to be a contentious issue for many people. For you to act as if that war is over and I should lay down my arms is unwarranted.

@Jonathan_Burke

You are simply assuming your view is correct and then rejecting other views on that basis.

If that were the case, I would not have come to BioLogos as I did.

@Jonathan_Burke

The irony is that this demonstrates that your views are not actually based on what the text is saying, because you are not aware of what the text is saying.

Actually, the irony is that you are the one who is importing extratextual material into the text. For while Ex 20 is presented as a seemless recitation, you read its 11th verse as an insertion that came from another writer almost a millennium later and without anything in the text of Ex 20 to identify it as such. This does not ipso facto mean you are wrong, but it does ipso facto mean you are getting your information from some source other than Ex 20.