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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A List of Proposed Biblical Reasons to Accept the Scientific View of the Age of the Earth (and Evolution)

As part of the “wrapping up” part of my inquiries here at BioLogos (having begun June 23rd), I want to compile a list of biblical interpretive options you have offered to help me past the obstacles identified in the OP. Please correct or add as necessary. I have not put these in any order.

  • The John Walton View (espoused by @Chris_Falter and others)

  • Viewing Gen 1-11 as “a different kind of history” (espoused by @Bill_II, @Casper_Hesp, and others)

  • The Non-Moses View (seeing Gen 1-2 as a vision, and Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 as allusions to it, all 6th-century additions to Moses by Daniel or someone unknown (espoused by @Jonathan_Burke)

  • The 1 Corinthians 9:20-22 View (espoused by @Swamidass and explained here)

Have I left out anyone’s view? Have I misrepresented, mislabeled, or misattributed anyone’s view?

Note: Based on responses to this list, I have been revising it. Therefore, what you read now is not exactly what was originally posted…but neither is it dramatically different.

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How do you determine the veracity of a literal Genesis?

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I think how we interpret a given passage of Genesis or any other part of the Scriptures can be a point of legitimate debate, but all sides entering such debates should regard the Scriptures’ veracity as previously settled and not up for debate.

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That seems somewhat circular. You are saying that we should believe in a literal Genesis because it has been verified to be true, but now you are saying that one should just assume that it is true without testing it. Which is it?

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Actually, neither…though the latter is closer to what I am saying than the former.

I am saying that the appropriate attitude to have toward Scripture is that Jesus has declared it trustworthy. With that in mind, we then seek to understand what it is saying. I am allowing that others may have a better interpretation of the Bible’s statements about creation than mine (“figurative,” “literal,” or whatever). That’s what I came to BioLogos to find out. But if someone doesn’t accept Jesus’ view that the Scriptures are the word of God (e.g. John 10:35), then he is in no position to help me with the question I asked in the OP no matter what his interpretation. This is because I will not under any circumstances forsake the view of Scripture that Jesus had. He considered it truth (John 17:17).

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Hi Mike,
My main remark here would be that the four options you have listed are not mutually exclusive. For example, I can appreciate Walton’s approach and I agree with Joshua that we should put the Gospel first when inconsequential things happen to be consequential for others.

Second, not sure about the phrasing “less historical” concerning Genesis 1-11, although I understand my view qualifies as such under your view of history. I would prefer to describe it as a different kind of history, compared to the parts of the Bible that were written down almost directly by eyewitnesses. For this kind of history, things beyond the reach of man’s mind can be grounded in an everyday reality like an ordinary working week :slight_smile: .

Third, I also remember your remark that you could agree with the claim that the biblical writers and even Jesus (while in the flesh) all operated under humanly limited knowledge of the natural world. Now, this can be helpful when considering their views of natural history. Compared to their contemporaries, they begged to differ on questions of monotheism, God’s authority over Creation, humanity’s place therein, sanctity of marriage, et cetera. In these things, the Bible’s message is clear. Now, “do not go beyond what is written” (as @r_speir said) could also be taken as a warning against going beyond that intended message. One way of making that same mistake would be to interpret the writings as if they exert authority on matters for which they were never intended to be used in the first place.

Peace,
Casper

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Hi Mike,

Hope you are continuing in God’s grace!

It does not necessarily imply that, not in the least bit.

Now if you start with the assumption that the only correct interpretation of Genesis 7 is a global flood, you would also have to insert that implication into the text of Genesis 7.

You keep phrasing your statements as if the one and only faithful way to interpret Genesis 1 - 11 is in accordance with young earth creationism. The way you keep formulating your steps of reasoning–your use of phrases in this fashion–are not helping you to consider alternative views like evolutionary creationism with an open attitude. It’s your right to accept or reject as you will, but the way you have been articulating your arguments does not seem to square with your professed goal of wanting to seriously consider alternative hermeneutical methods.

So your response is to attack the credibility of archeologists.

That’s not a strategy I would employ, myself. I would want to respect the archeologists enough so that when they find an engraving from 900 BCE in Palestine that references “Daoud,” a king, that I would be able to herald it as evidence for the veracity of Scripture.

If I attack what the archeologists say about the Magdalenian civilization (16,000 BP - 12,000 BP), however, I can’t rely on archeological evidence, period. Essentially, my faith in God’s revelation in Scripture must become something completely divorced from any discussion about textual, historical, and archeological evidence.

And that is why your line of reasoning leads to a very powerful version of post-modernism. There is no way to discuss evidence; there is simply the story that one wishes to believe. You have reached the apotheosis of post-modernism.

Moreover, you are making the assumption that I am asking you to deny the Scripture in favor of archeology. Far from it! I am asking you to consider whether your particular exegesis of Genesis is less reliable than you think it is. As Jon has pointed out, many ancient Jewish scribes did not believe in a global flood. As I have pointed out, Augustine of Hippo, the theologian that both Protestants and Catholics tried to claim for themselves during the Reformation, did not believe in six-day creationism.

There is plenty of room for very well-reasoned, faithful interpretation of Genesis in a non-6-day formulation.

In the opinion of Augustine, we do not have that testimony, Mike.

We do have the testimony that He created the universe out of nothing (Hebrews 11:3) and that He arranged it with an order that would be suitable for His habitation and ours (Genesis 1-3). We also have the testimony that the entry into peace and our true calling, which can occur after God has established the order and which the Bible refers to as “rest,” is worth celebrating once a week. And that is the rest that we enter into when we trust in Christ (Hebrews 4).

Thank you for clarifying that. I still stand by my contention that the statement that God took 6 days to create something does not imply that the something cannot be billions of years old.

CONCLUSION:
My bottom line, Mike, is not that my favored interpretation of Genesis 1 - 11 is the only possibility for the faithful. I know that my interpretation is not the gospel! The gospel is the gospel. :slight_smile:

However, my experience of living in a foreign culture has helped me to make the imaginative leap that is part of faithfully and respectfully interpreting Genesis within its cultural milieu–a cultural milieu which is even more foreign than West Africa to my “home” culture. So I see the young earth creationist view as just one of the many hermeneutical approaches that can provide insight into Genesis. Other possibilities include the framework interpretation and the functional ontology interpretation.

Given that there are many such approaches, how do I choose which one is best? I could simply choose on the basis of my own comfort: choose the one I grew up with, and that my fellow church members follow. That would certainly be the most comfortable path for me, and it would lead me into a YEC hermeneutic. However, because I am aware that my degree of comfort is irrelevant to the discussion, and because I have, through my experience in West Africa, become acquainted with the difficulties of interpreting texts from one cultural context into another, I am willing to give other hermeneutical approaches careful consideration.

On further investigation, I discover that the YEC hermeneutic leads me into a very militant post-modernism, where classes of evidence that I widely accept and even herald when they agree with my story (such as archeology) get roundly rejected when they disagree with my story. In this case, the only important consideration is my story and the tenacity of my belief; evidence is ultimately meaningless.

Since I am aware that other hermeneutics are plausible, I can also investigate them as well. And it just so happens that the “framework” hermeneutic and the functional ontology hermeneutic are not only highly compatible with a culturally aware exegesis of Genesis, but they are also highly compatible with evidence from science and archeology.

So I have a choice between two plausible ways of interpreting Genesis. One leads me to reject vast bodies of evidence; the other is compatible with those vast bodies of evidence.

Which one should I choose?

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

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Where did Jesus declare a literal interpretation of Genesis to be trustworthy?

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Understood.

I modified the label to your preferred wording.

I’m having a hard time figuring out how to respond to this paragraph. It seems to cover a lot of ground and I’m not sure how to define it. Are you saying more than one thing? Could you re-phrase? Is there a more succinct way of making the point that is important to you?

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I too get the impression that Mike Gantt has an unusual/atypical definition of what is “supernatural.” For example:

And Mike replied:

Of course it was. That’s what the Genesis text states. It doesn’t say that God supernaturally created excess water ex nihilo and that water inundated the world. No, it says that rain fell and the subterranean aquafers and springs released their torrents. Precipitation and ground water are both natural processes. Of course, the natural process called gravity was also involved, such that the water rose higher and higher. I don’t see anything in the Biblical text that describes a supernatural process–other than the fact that God, the epitome of that one who is supernatural used these natural processes to judge sin.

Indeed, in Genesis 1 itself I don’t notice anything supernatural after Genesis 1:1. For example, when describing the creation of living organisms, the text says that “the land brought forth…” and “the waters brought forth…” I can’t think of a better way for the Hebrew text to describe natural processes gradually producing ecological systems. I don’t see any “instantaneous poofing.” Even if the six days of creation are interpreted literally instead of as a literary device as countless scholars have described for centuries now, it doesn’t say that the fulfillment of God’s creative commands occurred during those six days. And that’s why I don’t see billions of years of earth history contradicting what I read in the Hebrew text. Frankly, I was a traditional Young Earth Creationist until I studied Hebrew in grad school. That is also when I realized that the Noahic Flood was not global—although I got my first grasp of that when studying Greek exegesis and seeing that 2Peter 3 emphatically contrasts the more restricted nature of the judgment by water (KOSMOS, the world of Imago Dei Adamic beings and not including the Nephilim and other non-Imago Dei creatures) versus the future judgment by fire (GE, the entire planet.) That’s when the regional flood versus global fire judgment really jumped out at me. Even the newer English translations of Genesis have footnotes which help avoid the traditional confusion of earth with planet earth and correctly associating the Hebrew ERETZ with “land, country” instead. The entire/whole ERETZ was flooded, not the entire planet earth. (The nation of Israel today calls itself ERETZ YISRAEL but nobody tries to translate that as “planet Israel”! The ERETZ is closer to the word earth in the English language of the 1611 KJV Bible, not the word earth in post-Apollo 11 modern English. We hear the word “earth” today and automatically think of “planet earth” but that is a relatively recent linguistic development. So it is easy for Bible readers today to read Genesis 1 to 11 anachronistically.)

Absolutely! And that is why I always point to 2Peter 3 when I’m explaining why I quit affirming a global flood after I had learned the tools of Greek and Hebrew exegesis. It cleared up so many of the contradictions I’d wrestled with during my Young Earth Creationist years.

I don’t understand you on this, Mike. God’s supernatural action to create the universe is certainly beyond the scientific method. But from the moment the matter-energy universe began to exist, the laws of physics applied and generated an enormous volume of evidence, second by second, which the methodological naturalism of science can investigate. You seem to be implying that a supernatural origin for some object or phenonmenon makes it perpetually outside the realm of human observation and study. I don’t understand how you came up with that.

For example, we can all agree that the resurrection of Jesus was a supernatural event. Yet the post-resurrection Jesus told Thomas to observe his nail-pierced hands. Thomas could touch and visually inspect the body of Jesus because all matter is subject to the scientific method—and supernatural intervention at some time in the past does nothing to exempt that matter from observation and investigation. So Thomas could experience the body of Jesus just like any other. He could see that it reflected light and that the van der Wahl forces of the atoms in Jesus’ hands pushed back and generated signals in Thomas’s fingertips.

After God created the matter-energy universe, natural processes continued to function in that universe. A timeline began and all of the evidence associated with that timeline makes consistent sense. Its supernatural origin does not render it beyond our observation and scientific investigation. (Mike, it almost sounds like you have a kind of “mystical” view of any object which has been acted upon by God, permanently making it not subject to conventional routine observation.)

Yes, your definition of the word “supernatural” is quite different from mine. And I thank you for clarifying. This has been very interesting.

Mike, I do hope that these clarifications are helpful. I think I understand from personal experience where you are coming from. I used to be an adamant six-day-creation and global-flood advocate.

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Hi Mike,

You have done a fine job of distilling the views, I think. The only point I would add is that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, I think you could agree with all four of them simultaneously in a logically coherent fashion.

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

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None of those passages contain warnings about using science to make conclusions about the age of the earth, as far as I can tell.

Honestly, I don’t see any such warnings. Could you show me Biblical texts that are framed as warnings about investigating the age of the earth? So far, what I am getting are Mike’s inferences drawn from Mike’s hermeneutical method. These are based on the worldview glasses that Mike is wearing as he applies his hermeneutics and makes his inferences.

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

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I would agree with him. Science does not consider supernatural (God-like) causes. This is very well established. It is often referred to as Methodological Naturalism, but has roots in theology.

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Joshua, I would encourage you to read my post again. Slowly. I said that the ORIGIN of the universe was a supernatural event and therefore cannot be studied by the scientific method. But the moment it began to exist, the matter-energy world became subject to study through methodological naturalism. Why? Because it became subject to what we commonly dub “the laws of physics.”

Mike appears to be saying that anything with a supernatural origin becomes forever immune to study (such as determining its age.) I’m still trying to determine that that is his position–but many of us strongly reacted to it because we were so surprised by that.

Perhaps what I thought was a careful and extended explanation on my part was unclear. But I would encourage you to read it again but more slowly. If you TRULY believe that something with a supernatural origin becomes forever immune to scientific study, you couldn’t be a scientist—because we all believe that God supernaturally created the entire universe. Yet the universe is subject to the scientific method.

Of course, if we are misunderstanding Mike’s position, perhaps you could help him clarify it. But the fact that the universe has a supernatural origin does not render it beyond scientific study. We can observe all sorts of things in the created world and determine their age, what processes have modified them, and even determine what they will become (as in chemical reactions.) Notice what I said about Jesus’ resurrection body. It was the result of a supernatural event—yet Jesus could ask Thomas to inspect it and determine that it was the Jesus he knew. He could see and feel the nail-prints on his hands. Jesus didn’t say to Thomas “You can’t reach any conclusions from what you are observing because a supernatural event took place.”

@Swamidass, I’m not aware of ANYBODY in this thread who has stated otherwise. If you read the posts again, I think you will realize that. (If I have left out a word or written something confusing, please let me know.) But even in what you quoted of my post, these were my words:

“God’s supernatural action to create the universe is certainly beyond the scientific method. But from the moment the matter-energy universe began to exist, the laws of physics applied and generated an enormous volume of evidence, second by second, which the methodological naturalism of science can investigate.”

And that’s why it is perfectly valid for scientists to measure the age of the universe. Mike told us that it is not valid. I doubt that you agree with that.

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As you have been told repeatedly, this is not about science claiming to know what results a supernatural creation would leave behind, but science making demonstrably verifiable claims about what natural processes leave behind.

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Or better yet, scientific hypotheses repeatedly making demonstrably verifiable predictions about the mountains of evidence produced by natural processes before the evidence is viewed by human beings.

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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.

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

I and others have been through these passages with you many times. Most importantly, it has been demonstrated to you repeatedly that you do not treat these passages the way they are treated elsewhere in Scripture, and you import interpretations from outside Scripture. I have shown you a considerable amount of evidence demonstrating that some of your foundation assumptions about the text are wrong. A lot of that evidence is here. 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.

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@Mike_Gantt

I wrote:
[@gbrooks9] “None of the writings of these groups [listed by you: ICR, AiG, CMI, etc.] have explained how 100% of the giant Brachiosaurs all drowned before giraffes, bears or humans drowned. You are carrying water for these groups with imaginary buckets.”

You answered:
[@Mike_Gantt] “I’m not carrying water for them. I’m just acknowledging that they exist, and that they might be right - however small you deem the probability.”

Mike, I know you a smart fellow. I don’t believe you think those groups have plausibly explained how giant reptiles, and even giant swimming reptiles, can all drown in a flood and be covered up in sediment - - long before relatively tiny humans, giraffes, bears, ant-eaters (and so forth) succumbed to the rushing flood waters…

You actually think “they might be right”? - - about what?

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@Mike_Gantt,

Perfect. BioLogos is the place where a Christian can most likely preserve his or her faith … while not being forced to say that the same cosmic forces (those which make Gravity and Light genuinely real) mysteriously cease to exist when it comes to the Earth’s geology, the creation of thousands of meters of sedimentary rock, and 100,000 years of annual weather patterns locked up in arctic ice cores.

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Science can’t address if creation was supernatural but it can certainly address the evidence to determine when creation happened. The question is not what results would a supernatural creation leave behind but simply what are the results of creation that we see.

You have no opinion of what the results of a supernatural creation should be?

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