Seven reasons why we should not accept millions of years
(From
http://www.answersingenesis.org) by Dr. Terry Mortenson
July 17, 2006
There is an intensifying controversy in the church all over
the world regarding the age of the earth. For the first 18
centuries of church history the almost universal belief of
Christians was that God created the world in six literal days
roughly 4,000 years before Christ and destroyed the world with a
global Flood at the time of Noah.
But about 200 years ago some scientists developed new
theories of earth history, which proposed that the earth and
universe are millions of years old. Over the past 200 years
Christian leaders have made various attempts to fit the millions
of years into the Bible. These include the day-age view, gap
theory, local flood view, framework hypothesis, theistic
evolution, progressive creation, etc.
A growing number of Christians (now called young-earth
creationists), including many scientists, hold to the
traditional view, believing it to be the only view that is truly
faithful to Scripture and that fits the scientific evidence far
better than the reigning old-earth evolutionary theory.
Many Christians say that the age of the earth is an
unimportant and divisive side-issue that hinders the
proclamation of the gospel. But is that really the case? AiG and
many other creationist organizations think not.
In this short article (which can be purchased as a leaflet to
share with others—see side panel), we want to introduce you to
some of the reasons we think that Christians cannot accept the
millions of years, without doing great damage to the church and
her witness in the world. We hope that it will help you think
more carefully about this subject and will motivate you to dig
deeper into the excellent resources recommended at the end,
which thoroughly defend the points made here.
- The Bible clearly teaches that God created in six
literal, 24-hour days a few thousand years ago.
The Hebrew word for day in Genesis 1 is yom. In the
vast majority of its uses in the Old Testament (OT) it means
a literal day and where it doesn’t the context makes this
clear.Similarly, the context of Genesis 1 clearly shows
that the days of creation were literal days. First, yom
is defined the first time it is used in the Bible (Gen.
1:4–5) in its two literal senses: the light portion of the
light/dark cycle and the whole light/dark cycle. Second,
yom is used with “evening” and “morning.” Everywhere
these two words are used in the OT, either together or
separately and with or without yom in the context,
they always mean a literal evening or morning of a literal
day. Third, yom is modified with a number: one day,
second day, third day, etc., which everywhere else in the
Old Testament indicates literal days. Fourth, yom is
defined literally in Gen. 1:14 in relation to the heavenly
bodies.
That these creation days happened only about 6,000 years
ago is clear from the genealogies of Gen. 5 and 11 (which
give very detailed chronological information, unlike the
clearly abbreviated genealogy in Matt. 1) and other
chronological information in the Bible.
- Exodus 20:11 blocks all attempts to fit millions of
years into Genesis 1.
This verse gives the reason for God’s command to Israel
to work six days and then take a Sabbath rest. Yom is
used in both parts of the commandment. If God meant that the
Jews were to work six days because He created over six long
periods of time, He could have said that using one of three
indefinite Hebrew time words. He chose the only word that
means a literal day and the Jews understood it literally
(until the idea of million of years developed in the early
19th century). For this reason, the day-age view
or framework hypothesis must be rejected. The gap theory or
any other attempt to put millions of years before the six
days are also false, because God says that in six days
He made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that
is in them. So He made everything in those six literal
days and nothing before the first day.
- Noah’s Flood washes away millions of years.
The evidence in Gen. 6–9 for a global catastrophic flood is
overwhelming. For example, the Flood was intended to destroy
not only all sinful people but also all land animals and
birds and the surface of the earth, which only a global
flood could accomplish. The Ark’s purpose was to save two of
every kind of land animal and bird to repopulate the earth
after the flood. The Ark was totally unnecessary, if the
Flood was local. People, animals and birds could have
migrated out of the flood zone before it occurred or the
zone could have been populated from creatures outside the
area after the Flood. The catastrophic nature is seen in the
nonstop rain for at least 40 days, which would have produced
massive erosion, mud slides, hurricanes, etc. The Hebrew
words translated “the fountains of
the great deep burst open” (Gen. 7:11) clearly point
to tectonic rupturing of the earth’s surface in many places
for 150 days, resulting in volcanoes, earthquakes and
tsunamis. Noah’s Flood would produce exactly the kind of
complex geological record we see today worldwide: thousands
of feet of sediments clearly deposited by water and later
hardened into rock and containing billions of fossils. If
the year-long Flood is responsible for most of the rock
layers and fossils, then those rocks and fossils cannot
represent the history of the earth over millions of years,
as evolutionists claim.
- Jesus was a young-earth creationist.
Jesus consistently treated the miracle accounts of the Old
Testament as straightforward, truthful, historical accounts
(e.g., creation of Adam, Noah and the Flood, Lot and his
wife in Sodom, Moses and the manna, and Jonah in the fish).
He continually affirmed the authority of Scripture over
men’s ideas and traditions (Matt. 15:1–9). In Mark 10:6 we
have the clearest (but not the only) statement showing that
Jesus was a young-earth creationist. He states that Adam and
Eve were at the beginning of creation, not billions of years
after the beginning, as would be the case if the universe
was really billions of years old. So, if Jesus was a
young-earth creationist, then how can His faithful followers
have any other view?
- Belief in millions of years undermines the Bible’s
teaching on death and on the character of God.
Genesis 1 says six times that God called the creation “good”
and when He finished creation on Day 6 He called everything
“very good.” Man and animals and birds were originally
vegetarian (Gen. 1:29–30, plants are not “living creatures,”
as people and animals are, according Scripture). But Adam
and Eve sinned, resulting in the judgment of God on the
whole creation. Instantly Adam and Eve died spiritually, and
after God’s curse they began to die physically. The serpent
and Eve were changed physically and the ground itself was
cursed (Gen. 3:14–19). The whole creation now groans in
bondage to corruption waiting for the final redemption of
Christians (Rom. 8:19–25) when we will see the restoration
of all things (Acts 3:21, Col. 1:20) to a state similar to
the pre-Fall world, when there will be no more carnivore
behavior (Isa. 11:6–9) and no disease, suffering or death
(Rev. 21:3–5) because there will be no more Curse (Rev.
22:3). To accept millions of years of animal death before
the creation and Fall of man contradicts and destroys the
Bible’s teaching on death and the full redemptive work of
Christ. It also makes God into a bumbling, cruel creator who
uses (or can’t prevent) disease, natural disasters and
extinctions to mar His creative work, without any moral
cause, but calls it all “very good.”
- The idea of millions of years did not come from the
scientific facts. It was developed by deistic and
atheistic geologists in the late 18th and early
19th century. These men used anti-biblical
philosophical and religious assumptions to interpret the
geological observations in a way that plainly contradicted
the biblical account of creation, the Flood and the age of
the earth. Most church leaders and scholars quickly
compromised using the gap theory, day-age view, local flood
view, etc. to try to fit “deep time” into the Bible. But
they did not understand the geological arguments nor did
they defend their views by careful Bible study. The “deep
time” idea flows out of naturalistic assumptions, not
scientific observations.
- Radiometric dating methods do not prove millions of
years. Radiometric dating was not developed until the
early 20th century, by which time the whole world
had already accepted the millions of years. For many years
creation scientists have cited many examples in the
published scientific literature of these dating methods
clearly giving erroneous dates (e.g., a date of millions of
years for lava flows that occurred in the past few hundred
years or even decades). In recent years creationists in the
“RATE project” have done experimental, theoretical and field
research to uncover more such evidence (e.g., diamonds and
coal, which the evolutionists say are millions of years old,
were dated by carbon-14 to be only thousands of years old)
and to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster
in the past, which shrinks the millions of years dates to
thousands of years, confirming the Bible.
Prominent young-earth creation scientists
There are thousands of Ph.D. and M.S. scientists around the
world (and the number keeps growing) who believe the earth
is only about 6,000 years old, as the Bible teaches. It is
simply false to say that creation scientists do not have
reputable degrees, do not do real scientific research and do
not publish in the peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Conclusion
These are just some of the reasons why we believe that the
Bible is giving us the true history of the creation. God’s Word
must be the final authority on all matters about which it
speaks: not just the moral and spiritual matters, but also its
teachings that bear on history, archeology and science.
What is at stake here is the authority of Scripture, the
character of God, the doctrine of death and the very foundation
of the gospel. If the early chapters of Genesis are not true
literal history, then faith in the rest of the Bible is
undermined, including its teaching about salvation and morality.
I urge you to examine carefully the resources at the bottom of
this article. The health of the church, the effectiveness of her
mission to a lost world and the glory of God are at stake.