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Chapter 5

The Age of the Earth

It has been shown that neither the day-age theory, nor the gap theory, nor any other accommodationist theory can be applied legitimately to the creation record to allow for the supposed great ages of geology. The same is true for the vast span of cosmic time demanded by astronomers to accommodate their big bang and the subsequent eons of assumed stellar and galactic evolution. Whether we like it or not, the inspired record of Genesis has told us plainly (as God later re-emphasized on Mount Sinai) “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day” (Exod. 20:11). If the Bible is truly the infallible and inerrant Word of God, as the Lord Jesus believed and taught (“the Scripture cannot be broken,” He said, for example in John 10:35), then that should settle the question. At least it should settle it for those who claim to believe in the inerrancy and authority of the Holy Scriptures.

There may be scientific questions related to the concept of recent creation, and these are discussed in Volume 2 of this Trilogy. There, the real hard data of science are shown to be in full harmony with both recent creation and a worldwide flood. Even if there still remain some unresolved scientific problems, however, these can never invalidate the plainly revealed Word of the eternal living God. He was there, and the scientists who reject His Word were not there. Furthermore, He cannot lie, whereas even the greatest scientists are fallible, sinful human beings, like everyone else. They can, and do, make many mistakes, and they have many biases. “Let God be true, but every man a liar!” the Scripture enjoins (Rom. 3:4).

Because this doctrine of recent creation and the global cataclysmic flood seems to be the chief point of attack by unbelievers and the chief stumbling block for believers, we want to emphasize it further in this chapter. Even if one could manage to re-interpret the plain words of Scripture to allow the multi-billion years demanded by evolutionists, there are many other theological, moral, and philosophical reasons for rejecting these great ages. There are also many good scientific evidences for a young earth as well, but these are discussed in Volume 2.

Why Recent Creation Is a Vital Doctrine

The one aspect of strict creationism that is under greater attack by evolutionists than any other is the biblical doctrine of recent creation in six literal days, which then implies also the worldwide Flood. The evolutionist, realizing the weakness of the scientific case for evolution when he really tries to defend it, will almost always direct his main arguments not against creation per se, but against recent creation and its corollary, flood geology.

As a result, some people who consider themselves creationists have been so intimidated by this biblical concept that they try to cling to the 19th-century evolutionary compromise now known as the “day-age theory” and “progressive creation.” Some still rely on the “gap theory,” hoping they can ignore the problem by pigeon-holing the evolutionary ages of the geologists in an imaginary gap between the first two verses of Genesis. These theories attempt to accommodate the geological ages, even though it is the geological ages that provide the main basis and framework for evolution. “Young earth creationists” embarrass both the progressive creationists and the gap creationists, so they complain that recent creation is merely an optional interpretation that is unimportant and expendable.

But this cannot be. As a strictly scientific question, divorced from any biblical or theological considerations (as presumably, in a public school textbook or in a scientific debate), the date of creation can and perhaps should be treated as a separate topic from the fact of creation. This does not make it expendable, however. It is an important and basic issue that deserves serious study in its own right, strictly in terms of the relevant scientific data. When the biblical and theological data are also considered (as in a church or other Christian context), the doctrine of recent creation becomes critically significant, integrally interwoven with the doctrine of creation itself. Outlined below, very briefly, are a few of the reasons why the doctrine of recent creation is vitally important to true biblical Christianity.

1. Historical Reasons

“Progressive creationism” is not a modern interpretation developed to bring the Genesis record into harmony with modern science, but a very ancient concept devised to impose a theistic meaning upon the almost universal pagan evolutionary philosophies of antiquity. The eternal pre-existence of the physical universe of space and time, with “matter” also present in some form, was a belief shared by all ancient religions and philosophies, seeking as they were to function without an omnipotent, holy, eternal, personal, creator God. Sad to say, compromising monotheists, both in ancient Israel and in the early Christian church, repeatedly resorted to various allegorical interpretations of Scripture, involving some form of long-stretched-out creation, seeking to combine creationist/redemptionist theology with pagan humanistic philosophy. Almost inevitably, however, such compromises ended in complete apostasy on the part of the compromisers.

In modern times, Charles Darwin himself is a classic case in point. Starting out as a biblical creationist, his decline began with his acceptance of Lyellian uniformitarianism, the geological ages, and progressive creationism. He then soon became a full-fledged theistic evolutionist, and eventually an atheist. The same steps were traveled by many other scientists of that period. In fact, science itself was originally (in the days of Newton and the other founders of modern science) committed to the strict biblical chronology, then drifted into progressive creationism (after Georges Cuvier, Charles Lyell, and others), then into a Darwinian theistic evolutionism, and finally into total evolutionary naturalism.

The creationist revival of the first quarter of the 20th century was short-lived because it again tried to compromise with the day-age theory. This was William Jennings Bryan’s fatal mistake at the Scopes trial. The various early creationist organizations also failed to take a firm position on recent creationism and soon either died out (e.g. The Religion and Science Association, which lasted just two years, and the Creation-Deluge Society, which survived for six years), or became almost impotent (as in the case of the original Evolution Protest movement), or capitulated to theistic evolutionism (for example, the American Scientific Affiliation). Multitudes of churches, schools, and other Christian organizations have followed the same dead-end path of compromise during the past century. For a fuller account, see History of Modern Creationism1.

2. Theological Reasons

Even if one does not accept the Bible as the inerrant and authoritative Word of God, the concept of a personal, omnipotent, omniscient, loving God is fatally flawed by the old-earth dogma. The very reason for postulating an ancient cosmos is to escape from God, to push Him as far away in space and as far back in time as possible, hoping thereby eventually to escape His control altogether by letting “nature” become “god.”

Surely an omniscient God could devise a better process of creation than the random, wasteful, inefficient trial-and-error charade of the so-called geological ages, and certainly a loving, merciful God would never be guilty of a creative process that would involve the suffering and death of multitudes of innocent animals in the process of arriving at man millions of years later.

It should be obvious that the God of the Bible would create everything complete and good, right from the start. In fact, He testified that all of it was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). The wastefulness and randomness and cruelty that is now so evident in the world (both in the groaning creation of the present and in the fossilized world of the past) must represent an intrusion into His creation, not a mechanism for its accomplishment. God would never do a thing like that, except in judgment on sin!

Furthermore, if one must make a choice between a full-fledged theistic evolutionism and a compromising “progressive creationism,” with its “day-age” theory of Genesis, one would have to judge the latter worse than the former, theologically speaking. Both systems are equally objectionable in terms of their common commitment to the geological-age system, with its supposed three-billion-year spectacle of random wastefulness and a suffering, dying world. However, progressive creationism compounds the offense by making God have to redirect and recharge everything at intervals.

Theistic evolutionism at least assumes a God able to plan and energize the total “creation” process right at the start. Progressive creationism imagines a world that has to be pumped up with new spurts of creative energy and guidance whenever the previous injection runs down or misdirects. Surely all those who really believe in the God of the Bible should see that any compromise with the geologic-age system is theological chaos.

Whether the compromise involves the day-age theory or the gap theory, the very concept of the geological ages implies divine confusion and cruelty, and the God of the Bible could never have been involved in such a thing as that at all.

3. Biblical Reasons

As far as the biblical record itself is concerned, there is not the slightest indication anywhere in Scripture2 that the earth endured long ages before the creation of Adam and Eve. The Lord Jesus Christ himself said: “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6).

The crystal-clear statement of the Lord in the Ten Commandments also completely precludes the day-age interpretation of the six days of creation:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work . . . 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 (Exod. 20:8–11).

If God’s six work days were not the same kind of days as the six days of man’s work week, then God is not able to say what He means! The language could hardly be more unambiguous and explicit. Note also this further confirmation later in the same Book of Exodus:

[The Sabbath] is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed. And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God (Exod. 31:17–18).

All Scripture is divinely inspired, but this portion was also divinely inscribed!

Still further, the record of the six days of creation concludes with the statement by God that everything in His creation was “very good” at the end of the six days (Gen. 1:31). There is no way that this could be harmonized with a worldwide fossil graveyard a mile deep all around the earth. The Bible makes it plain, in fact, that death never even entered the world until Adam sinned (Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:21) and brought God’s curse on the ground (Gen. 3:17; Rom. 8:20–22). The Bible says that death is “the wages of sin,” and that “Christ died for us” (Rom. 6:23; 5:8). The entire biblical doctrine of substitution and blood redemption becomes meaningless if death and bloodshed reigned in the world for ages before sin came into the world.

4. Scientific Reasons

Those who insist on accommodating the geological ages, despite all the biblical, theological, and historical arguments against them, do so on the grounds that “science” requires it. “God would not deceive us,” they say, “by making the earth look so old, if it were really young.”

But it is, in fact, the other way around. If the earth were really old, God would not deceive us by saying so clearly and emphatically in His inspired Word that He created it all in six days.

For that matter, the earth does not really look old anyway. Evolutionists have tried to make it look old by imposing the unscriptural3 and unscientific dogma of uniformitarianism (“present processes are sufficient to explain all past geological formations”) on the geological record of earth history as preserved in the rocks of the earth’s crust. The fact is that geologists are today finally abandoning their outmoded 19th century uniformitarianism, realizing that catastrophism (“past formations produced by intense convulsive processes”) provides the only realistic explanation for the great geological structures on the earth. Even though they are still unwilling to acknowledge the validity of flood geology as based on the Bible, they do recognize now that the earth’s various geological features were each formed rapidly, in intense catastrophes of one kind or another.

Furthermore, there are many times more geological processes and systems4 that imply a young age for the earth than the handful of radiometric methods that can be forced (through an extreme application of uniformitarianism) to yield an old age. This perversely continued insistence on an ancient earth is simply because of the philosophical necessity to justify evolution and the pantheistic religion of eternal matter, while rejecting the Triune God.

If it were not for the continued apathetic and compromising attitude of liberal and neo-evangelical Christian theologians and other intellectuals on this vital doctrine of recent creation, evolutionary humanism would long ago have been exposed and defeated. The world will never take the biblical doctrine of the divine control and imminent consummation of all things very seriously until we Christians ourselves take the biblical doctrine of the recent creation of all things seriously. Neither in space nor in time is our great God of creation and consummation “very far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27).

The Testimony of Christ and the Apostles

Christians who go along with the standard “old-earth” model of the evolutionists must realize that they are going against the strong testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ, for He clearly affirmed the truth of recent creation. Jesus Christ was the Creator of all things (note John 1:1–3, 10; Col. 1:16; Eph. 3:9; Heb. 1:2, 10; etc.) and so knows far more about when He created the world than all the modern evolutionary geologists and big-bang astronomers combined. Christ says that there have been people on the earth since the very beginning of the world — and He ought to know, for He was there!

For example, when the Pharisees asked Him about marriage and divorce, He replied that “from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). He did not say that God made the first man and woman 15 billion years after the beginning of the creation, but right from the beginning of the creation. In fact, the whole creation had been prepared for them — even the stars had been made to serve mankind “for signs, and for seasons” Gen. 1:14, 16), and they were given “dominion . . . over all the earth” (Gen. 1:26). Such a stewardship responsibility would be an anachronism if animals and plants had already been living and dying — many even becoming extinct — for long ages before they were placed under some kind of human “dominion” (note also Heb. 2:6–8).

Soon after this primeval dominion mandate, sin and death entered the world through man’s disobedience, and God had to begin His work of redemption. His divine Lamb “was foreordained before the foundation of the world” and thereby became “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” with the names of those who would be redeemed “written in the book of life from the foundation of the world” (1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8; 17:8). What conceivable purpose could God have had in interposing a billion years of suffering and death in the animal kingdom prior to implementing His great plan of salvation for lost men and women? Our Lord is neither cruel nor capricious, and He would never be guilty of such pointless sadism. A further question is why so many evangelical Christians seem eager to advocate such an unworthy and demeaning compromise!

Beginning with Abel (the first prophet of God according to Jesus in Luke 11:51), God sent prophet after prophet to transmit His Word to men. More often than not their message was opposed, even to the point of bloodshed, and this persecution also has been going on from the beginning. Jesus himself referred to “the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world” (Luke 11:50). That is, God’s prophets have been preaching and dying since the very foundation of the world — not starting five billion years later.

This opposition to God’s plan has been instigated by Satan himself. Jesus called Satan “a liar, and the father of it,” as well as “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). He had not only deceived Eve with his humanistic philosophy: “Ye shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5), but also he had caused Cain to murder God’s first prophet, his brother Abel. This, too, was at “the beginning,” not five billion years after the beginning, for even if animals had been dying for a billion years before this, as theistic evolutionists assert, their deaths could not be called “murders.” Note also 1 John 3:8: “The devil sinneth from the beginning.”

There is yet coming a time of God’s great wrath on this unbelieving world. Again it was Jesus who said: “In those days shall be affliction, such as was not since the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time” (Mark 13:19). The clear premise of this prophecy by Christ was that there had, indeed, been tribulation and affliction “since the beginning of the creation which God created” (and, therefore, people had been on the earth all during that time), but that the coming period of “great tribulation” would be still worse.

Also note that, according to these words of Christ, the creation had both a “beginning” and would have a termination (“created” is in the past tense, in consistency with the use of this word all through the Bible). The world and its inhabitants are not continuously being created, as evolutionists and many progressive creationists would have us believe, for the creation was a completed event in the past. See also Hebrews 4:3 for a clear affirmation that all God’s “works were finished from the foundation of the world.”

Thus, the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things were created in the beginning, has repeatedly made it clear that the supposed billions of years of a groaning, travailing creation (note Rom. 8:22) prior to man’s creation and fall never existed at all. God created men and women at the beginning, and then, when Adam sinned, He quickly began to implement His great plan of redemption. To the redeemed He has promised “a kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34), without the slightest intimation that there would be a 15-billion-year prelude before He would even start His program of redemption.

The same emphasis was later carried forward by His apostles. Peter, for example, promised the imminent return of Christ, “whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began” (Acts 3:21).

Similarly, at the birth of John the Baptist, the prophet/priest Zechariah emphasized that God’s “horn of salvation” was coming, “as he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began” (Luke 1:69–70). Thus, just before and just after Christ’s earthly ministry, we are assured that Jesus spoke clearly and truly when He said that God’s prophets have been transmitting God’s Word to man not just since human history began, but “since the world began.” Therefore, the world and its human inhabitants began at essentially the same time.

Consider also this testimony of the apostle Paul: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). This powerful verse explicitly tells us that the evidences of God can be seen so clearly in His created world that it is inexcusable for people not to see them. Furthermore, these evidences were being seen and understood by people, not just since a certain imaginary population of evolving hominids somehow acquired souls, but “from the creation of the world.”

Lest anyone equivocate over the meaning of “world,” note that two different Greek words have been translated as “world” in the passages cited above. In Matthew 13:35, 25:34; Luke 11:50; Hebrews 1:10, 4:3; 1 Peter 1:20; Revelation 13:8, 17:8; and Romans 1:20, the Greek word is kosmos. In Matthew 24:21 and Acts 3:21, the word is aion. As defined in Strong’s Greek Dictionary of the New Testament, kosmos means an “orderly arrangement” (that is, a cosmos instead of a chaos), referring in biblical context to the fact that the heavens, the earth, life, man, and man’s systems had been divinely designed and arranged, not randomly produced by chance processes.

Aion is defined as “age,” and also as “world,” thus carrying the concept of both time and matter. In modern terminology it suggests the space-time-matter “continuum” that constitutes our physical universe. Therefore, whether the “world” in these texts is considered as the universe of space, time, and matter, or as the orderly structure of all its components, it does not make any difference as far as the time of creation is concerned. People have been a part of the created world since both the beginning of time and the foundation of the world.

This, of course, is also the teaching of all Old Testament passages dealing with this subject, as well as of many other New Testament verses. In Henry Morris’s book Biblical Creationism, every passage in the Bible dealing in any way with the subject of creation is analyzed, with the conclusion that the unequivocal teaching of the whole Bible is recent creation of all things. There is no hint of long geological or astronomical ages before man anywhere in the Bible.

Why, then, do so many Christians insist that we should believe in these long ages, pushing our Creator as far out in space and as far back in time as we possibly can? The apparent reason is that they feel it is more important to be “scientific” (as currently defined) than biblical (as eternally defined, Ps. 119:89). The statement of Dr. Pattle P. T. Pun, professor of biology at Wheaton College, is typical.

It is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of the Genesis record, without regard to all the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science [emphasis mine] is that God created heaven and earth in six solar days. . . . However, the recent creationist position . . . has denied and belittled the vast amount of scientific evidence amassed to support the theory of natural selection and the antiquity of the earth.5

Although Dr. Pun is reputedly a sincere and gracious Christian, he feels, nevertheless, that we must base our biblical hermeneutics on “science,” and the same is apparently true of most of his colleagues at Wheaton College and in the American Scientific Affiliation, as well as of numerous leading theologians, scientists, and educators throughout the evangelical world.

Although ICR scientists (with academic qualifications at least equal to those of Dr. Pun and his colleagues), as well as large numbers of other creationist scientists in many fields, hold the greatest respect for true science (i.e., knowledge, not naturalistic extrapolation), we believe that the clear teachings of Jesus Christ — as well as of God’s Word in general — must be given higher priority. His approval has far greater value in the light of eternity than that of our professional peers, and He taught that the world is young.

1 Henry M. Morris, History of Modern Creationism (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1993).

2 See Henry Morris’s book Biblical Creationism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1993, 276 p.), in which every passage in the Bible dealing with creation and primeval history is carefully examined. The uniform teaching of the whole Bible is that of a recent, supernatural, completed creation of all things.

3 See 2 Peter 3:3–6, where uniformitarianism in studying origins and earth history is called “wilful ignorance.”

4 See What is Creation Science? by Henry M. Morris and Gary E. Parker (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1987), p. 285–293, for a listing of over 60 such processes.

5 Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, March 1987, p. 14.