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NASB | Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God (Elohim) created [by forming from nothing] the heavens and the earth. [Heb 11:3] |
Subject: How old is the earth scripturally? |
Bible Note: My New Friend, Philip, I appreciate your desire for truth and your heart to know God and to be obedient to His Word. May His Spirit lead and guide as we seek to understand His Word. You have obviously spent some time thinking about this difficult issue. However, your assertion that old age creationism is a “stepchild” of evolution - is simply not true. Note the following: (1) In the earliest days of the church, Origen, Augustine and others held to non-calendar day interpretations of the six days based on their understanding of the text alone. (2) The Protestant reformers did not all hold to a calendar-day interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2. (3) Both the Gap Theory and the Day-Age Theory were originally developed before Darwin’s theories were published. (For documentation of these points, see http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/pca_creation_study_committee_report.html ) (4) Finally, while some old age creationists point to science as supporting their interpretation, those references are generally to astronomy and geology - fields that are entirely independent of evolutionary theories. For example, direct observation of stars millions of light years means that the light has been traveling toward us for millions of years. This is a direct, repeatable, observation (not a fanciful theory based on a few bones like evolution). Since God cannot lie, and therefore general and special revelation must agree, apparent disagreements require that we go back and reexamine our interpretation of both Genesis and of the observation of the stars. First, we find that the distances between stars are measurable and seem to be very solid science, and when we reexamine Genesis, we find that an old earth interpretation is compatible with the text - in fact such interpretations have been around for centuries. Personally, I think that even without bringing science into the discussion, the bulk of the Scriptural evidence supports non-calendar days for creation, but that is admittedly heavily dependent on interpretation. I checked out the web page (Dr Carl Baugh www.creationevidence.org) that you referenced. There is a lot of anti-evolution material, but since I don’t accept evolution anyway, there appeared to be only one reference which is directly applicable to our discussion - the reference to “Starlight and Time”, a book by Russell Humphreys. Dr Hugh Ross has responded to the views proposed in this book on his web site, (See http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/unravelling.html ) In your response you said, “I do not believe that God would call creation good if it was marred by death of any kind (spiritual,physical, human,animal or plant)” You may have this belief if you wish, but its seems very strange to me. God giving the plants for food and then afterward calling the creation good clearly indicates that God found plant death acceptable in a good creation. To say otherwise would be to accuse God of doing the first “ungood” thing by giving the plants for food! (2) The events of Genesis 2:4-25 all occur (time-wise) before God calls creation good in Genesis 1:31. So the plants of the field were already there. Regardless of how superior Adam’s intelligence and abilities might have been before the fall, and regardless of the introduction of new types of animals, I think if you research a little about how many animals and birds, and then count the number of seconds in a day, you will see that any being that could name them all in one day, and do the emotional processing required to discover that none of them were emotionally satisfying companions would not be human in any conceivable sense of the word. (Also, remember that the extinction eliminated many, many species.) You said, “God created vegetation and trees on the third day and then created the sun on the fourth day.” and then objected to the old earth interpretation because , “That would mean that vegetation and trees would have had to survive for one thousand years before sunlight was created.” This is no problem because (1) Light, whether from the sun or other sources was already present, so plants could survive without any difficulty. (2) An alternative reading of the passage is that the sun and the moon were actually created in Genesis 1:1 and that their creation is noted specifically on Day 4 because that is when they became visible from the earth due to atmospheric clearing. This view would also help us to understand why Genesis 1:2 tells us that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” - this statement would then have the function of establishing the location of the observer of the creative work as being on earth. Have a nice day and God bless you! Daninjapan |