The Age of the Earth.

8/28/2015

First...

1. There is a God.
2. Moses was His prophet.
3. Therefore, whatever Moses wrote in Genesis is inerrant.

Second...

I use what's called the grammatical-historical method of interpretation. This method represented a rejection of the medieval Roman Catholic philosophy of Scripture interpretation, which held that every Scripture had multiple levels of meaning. It is also a rejection of what is called the esoteric (secret, hidden) approach, used by occult groups. The least important level, in these two approaches is the passage's literal meaning.

Then would come what we might today call allegorical, theological, and devotional meanings, which were considered "deeper" and "truer" meanings. These approaches reduced the Bible to a blob of verbal putty which were twisted by creative thinkers into any shape they wanted. Those methods ignored contexts, used partial quotations, and treated literal words as symbols. E.g., the seven palm trees at the oasis of Elim symbolize the perfect blessing of the Holy Spirit's baptism. (hint: none of that statement is true. The palm trees were just palm trees).

The grammatical-historical method recognizes that each passage of the Bible had an author (sometimes several authors, such as Psalms or Proverbs), were written at a particular time, in a particular order, in a particular historical setting, and usually for a particular audience, with certain themes and purposes (often stated explicitly). So the reader is not free to just make up his or her own meanings as the whim moves them. Every book, chapter, paragraph, and sentence has an objective meaning that stands true apart from the wishes, feelings, and opinions of the readers. That meaning never changes, no matter how many centuries roll on.

Also, words mean what they mean according to how they are used in an immediate context, not by what they mean "to us." We are not free to project 2015 A.D. word-meanings onto 2015 B.C. words. This is why we use tools like concordances, Bible encyclopedias, Bible atlases, and Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic dictionaries.

Third...

I have no good reason to take the Hebrew word yom in Genesis 1, translated "day" in English Bibles, as anything other than a 24-hour period. That is how Moses uses it in Exodus 20:8-11, in the Fourth Commandment. Moses explicitly equates the Sabbath yom to the six yoms of creation. There you have the same author, speaking on the same topic, using the same noun, in the same context, saying the two things (the six days of creation in Genesis 1 and the Jews' Sabbath day) were the same thing.

Some people object to this, but their objections don't hold up. Some say that there couldn't have been 24-hour days, because there were no constellations till the fourth day (Gen. 1:16-19). But reality, such as time, is determined by what God knows. In Genesis 1, this is God saying that a day, comprised of morning and evening, had passed. God knew how long a day would be. He applied the term to creation days 1-3 before He created the constellations.

Some will say that the days could not have been 24-hour days because of the appearance of age (such as, the amount of time that starlight takes to travel from the originating star to earth's atmosphere, or the amount of radioactive decay in a rock). But these objections do not hold up, because they are based on a presuppositions of naturalism and uniformitarianism. And both of those presuppose atheism. But God inhabits the universe. God created the vacuum of outer space, not just the thing sin it. God is inside the universe.

So, this God -- not some Greco-Roman Unmoved Mover, but Yahweh -- created the star that emits the starlight, and created the starlight in transit through space, and caused the starlight to be striking and penetrating earth's atmosphere. When Adam looked up, he saw stars in the sky. God said He created the constellations as methods for shedding light upon the earth (Gen. 1:17). Humanity didn't wait thousands of years before a small number of weak twinkles appeared. By Abram's time, the sky had millions of stars (Gen. 15:5). God created all starlight in mid-existence and mid-function.

God created everything on earth in mid-existence and mid-function. God didn't create a world full of bird eggs. He filled the sky with flying birds. If you could have been there and caught a seagull, you would have said it was a year old, but it might have been 30 seconds old.

God didn't create the seas and rivers full of fish eggs. He filled the seas and rivers with millions of adult fish and other swimming creatures.

God didn't plant a world of tiny saplings, He created forests of fully grown trees, and every other kind of vegetation (because His creation would need all of it as a fully-ready food source).

God didn't create two human fetuses and keep them in a cocoon. He created Adam and Eve as fully-reasoning adults. They had fully formed speech and vocabularies. Adam was created with the intellectual powers to name every creature (Adam never went to school, yet he could talk to God, and be entrusted with the garden's management). Adam and Eve were already able to reproduce. Everything in Genesis 1-2 shows God creating things fully grown, fully developed, and already well along.

This is why the argument for a millions-of-years-old earth from radioactive rock-dating carries no weight. Once you allow for a Creator God at all, and then say that Genesis 1 is true (not an allegory), uniformitarianism is shot (and we don't know whether decay rates can change. There is no difference between dating the age of Adam and dating the age of a rock.

If you had a TARDIS, and could travel back to half-an-hour after God created Adam, you would swear that Adam had been born, let's say, 25 years prior. His teeth were fully formed. His skeletal structure was 100% mature. The proteins in his blood would have been adult proteins. But he says to you, "No, God made me three hours ago!"

Your efforts to use science to date Adam's age would fail. Every effort to date things by tracking features of them backward through time only work to a point, because God made everything out of nothing. Moses comes to uniformitarianism like a sword, and he cuts its head clean off.

There is no categorical difference between Adam being made as a fully grown, functioning, knowledgeable adult, and God creating trees already having hundreds of rings (and bugs), and rocks having the elements in all stages of radioactive decay. It's all the same. And the accusation that this would make God "tricky" is an empty complaint, since God tells everyone in Genesis 1-2 that this is how He did it. It isn't deception. It's the faultiness of finite human reason. Reason cannot know certain facts unless God reveals those facts. Genesis 1-2 is included among those otherwise-unknowable facts.

Scripture does not exist to sanctify Darwinism. Scripture and science are not equal partners. Scripture is over science, at all points, and every point. Scientific findings are always mutable. The Scripture is not. And the Genesis 1-2 account of creation shatters uniformitarianism. So the real question is, was Moses the prophet of God?

Justin Tapp link

8/29/2015 05:41:03 am

I don't know if this post was inspired by my blog post yesterday or if it's just serendipitous. After reading through some cosmology and "astrobiology" I went back and looked at Grudem's Systematic Theology and his lectures at a Baptist church in Arizona that are out on iTunes. Grudem also points out that YOM is also used for things like "day of harvest" which is never on one day for everyone, but a week or a season. Grudem believes that theistic evolution is unacceptable but an old earth is, apparently Biola holds that view for its faculty. (Grudem's Systematic is the required text at Southern Sem.). He leans toward old-earth for several reasons, one of which is because he's never heard of any scientist converted to a young earth based on scientific evidence, but he's heard of plenty going the other way.
There's a physicist and biochemist (Mike Mobley) in the audience who makes some points regarding time. Young-earth theories tend to require the speed of light to have changed over time, which seems to have no scientific evidence. Mobley argues that if the earth is only 10,000 years old then God certainly made it look much older-- which is another of Grudem's arguments. That's possible, he apparently made Adam as an adult, even though he'd only existed for an instant. But Grudem sides with Frances Schaeffer that there is room for both views in Scripture.
I've read through some recent books on astrobiology and origins of life (First Life, Randomness in Evolution, Arrival of the Fittest) to get the non-biblical views. In the end, both old-earth and young-earth views believe that the universe had a beginning and that the laws that govern the universe could not have just happened. That's something that gets neglected by non-Christian scientists. Any other thoughts on the above?

JTapp

8/29/2015 05:48:18 am

Also curious if you believe, like Grudem (and RC Sproul, I think), that time began with Genesis 1:1 and that God is therefore apart from time, or if you take William Lane Craig's position that "to say God prior to creation existed both timelessly and at all times is clearly contradictory."

Jack

8/31/2015 04:12:58 am

I can only speak as a slightly clever amateur. Time can't exist apart from creation, so time could not exist prior to Gen. 1:1. Time, to exist in the real world, also requires an object against which change is measured. So time could not exist prior to the creation of the sun, even if God was measuring off time-sequences (morning/evening) in His mind from the beginning. Maybe this depends on how you define the word "exist." God knew what earth-time would be like, in His mind, from all eternity, but time only came into existence on the fourth day. I also do not think of time as a dimension or a "place." God can't be "in" the future, since the future does not exist. I have purged my thinking, pretty much, of all sci-fi versions of time, as if there is a corridor one can run up and down, and events are happening all at once, in all the various rooms. I think of history as a constant forward-moving wave, and we're all balanced surfing on its lip. God knows what the future holds because He absolutely controls and causes its formation, but it doesn't exist until it happens -- at which point it becomes the present! We never reach the future.

JTapp

8/31/2015 12:53:28 pm

I had posted a previous comment prior, not sure where it went. Craig points out that philosophers generally deal with two theories of time A-theory and B-theory. Grudem seems to hold to a B-theory but describes his belief inconsistently. I think I see the A-theory in your answer, time is moving forward and events in the future are not as real as events today.
In B-theory, which is what the standard model of physics holds, is where every moment in time already exists. In B-theory, God sees past, present, and future as equally real because he is outside of time, he made it. We see time under the illusion of the "arrow of time," where it feels like we're moving forward but in reality we're like tracks on a DVD. Grudem allows a Christian physicist/biochemist attending his lectures on the Doctrine of Creation do a lecture on this subject. It's interesting. He maintains that God alters the "apparent past," such as changing water into wine and various miracles. Grudem and the physicist, however, come down on the old-earth side namely because a young earth typically requires speed of light to vary where so many laws of physics require it to be constant. I find it interesting because Grudem's text is required at Southern Sem., but Mohler and so many of the faculty seem to be young-earth-only types.

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The Age of the Earth.

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