Careful Thought

UPDATE:  I found this gem in the search engine logs: “how old is the earth? christianity vs science.”  That’s a pretty telling statement about attitudes that the young-earthers have engendered.  They force a false chasm between faith and science.  I want my kids to understand the role of science in confirming God’s creation, not fearing science as an evil thing.

ORIGINAL POST:  As a believer, I have a passing interest in various theories regarding the age of the earth. This is not a salvation issue, though some choose to make it one. In general, I guess I would be considered an old earth Progressive Creationist. In a nutshell, my belief is that God created the universe about 14 billion years ago and the earth 6-8 billion years ago. When the time was right, probably 4-6 thousand years ago, God created Adam in the Garden and that portion of Genesis began.

My concern with young-earth creationists is that they have to go to extreme lengths to either a) reject any objective physical evidence of an older creation; b) place old-earth creationists in league with evolutionists; c) create elaborate theories to make the evidence fit a young earth mold; or d) some combination of the above. The net result is false division between faith and science. Obviously there are those in the science community who reject faith and go so far as to mock the faith community for its belief, but somewhere in the middle is a harmony of Scripture, common sense, and the natural record.

I’ll go out on a limb - there is nothing in the natural world that can contradict Scripture. We can argue about interpretation of Scripture or of the natural world, for that matter, but God created the world and He is not in the business of creating something against His nature. Ultimately, any conflict can be resolved in favor of God’s Word, without standing science on its head to do it.

When I read of Christians who claim to have found evidence of man cohabitating with the dinosaurs or creating fantastic theories to explain how wooly mammoths (and the dinosaurs) died in the Flood, my head hurts and I ache for my brothers.

This is from CreationEvidence.org (the folks who found the Paluxy dino/man footprints debunked here and here). It attempts to date the demise of the big critters:

The big question is “When did it happen?” Based on Biblical history, the event happened after the Flood of Noah. Not all people agree with this conclusion.

But there were other effects of the orientation change. Great tidal waves were reported by the Chinese and North American Indians. The Sahara dried out and became a desert. Its present condition appears to have begun after 2000 B.C. The Tarim basin in China was once populated with cities and settlements and forests. Now it is mostly desert. There is evidence that India, Pakistan and Iran all had abundant rainfall before the climate changed. Large areas of former agricultural land on the India-Pakistan border are now desert. American deserts once had abundant rainfall based on pollen and tree remnants found at archaeological sites. All the world’s deserts seem to have started about 3500 years ago. This is the same period identified by Charles Ginenthal for the extinction of the mammoths. It is also the time of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

Read the whole article, but the author can’t stretch the facts enough to fit his theory. I’m thinking that if there was such a massive cataclysm after the Flood, it probably would have been recorded in Scripture. Where is the supporting evidence for assuming that all deserts started 3500 years ago?

The age of the earth is irrelevant to our salvation and to God’s plan for our lives and for the planet, but it makes for interesting debate. I just wish folks would let the physical evidence speak for itself. Maybe if things look old, they really are.

Technorati : age of the earth, old earth creation, young earth creation

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