Transcription
What's the problem for Christians adding millions of years to the creation narrative?
Well, most people don't know where the millions of years comes from. And it actually comes from the belief that the geologic layers on the earth were laid down slowly and gradually over millions of years. But then when we look at the Bible, the Bible clearly indicates that Adam and Eve only lived a few thousand years ago. So if the geologic layers deep time represents millions of years of Earth's history of death and suffering, Adam and Eve would've been standing on a fossil graveyard of death and suffering. And yet at the end of day six, when God created Adam and Eve, he says everything was very good. Well, Bible's clear, death is not good. But the key is if Noah's Flood is responsible for most of those geologic layers on the earth, then there is no millions of years. And that's why it's such a big issue.
But what about radiometric dating? Doesn't this prove millions of years? Many Christians believe God created over billions of years, but Gary, you totally disagree. Can you give us a snapshot on what we're gonna talk about today?
Yeah. Well the first thing is to help people understand where the millions and billions of years idea comes from. And the second is we're gonna show them why all of these different hybrid views that people have are incompatible with scripture and actually why it's an issue for the very gospel itself.
So let's begin by setting the scene. What's the most commonly held view amongst Christians today?
Well, I wish I could say it was the biblical view that God created in six 24-hour days. But unfortunately it's not. Most Christians have really tried, I think, some sort of hybrid view. And we're gonna discuss those things like theistic evolution, progressive creation, day-age theory.
Yeah.
Et cetera, in trying to, like you said, reconcile this deep time issue, this billions of years view, in particular with scripture. But I, I, I wanna add the reason is, and we seem to forget this, that you know, even Christians attending church, the majority of us have all been educated in the public realm or the secular realm. We've been to public schools, we've been to public universities and colleges. And the government mandated view is big bang billions of years and evolution on the earth. And we are taught that as a scientific fact. And because of that, you know, it's caused a lot of people to even ridicule the creationist view as being anti-scientific. And that's something I I'd love us to cover today. And so really summing up there, the reason that these hybrid views are most popular, it's not perhaps, or maybe that our children are gonna be taught evolution in the school tomorrow. They will be taught evolution as a scientific fact and what's happened in the church, of course, we haven't really addressed that. We've taught more theological positions and Bible stories and we've kind of left that what I'd call faulty view of Earth’s history. We let it go unchecked to be the dominant view.
Yeah, well I was taught in a secular school myself, and I was taught evolution from a very young age. So when I became Christian, I had to reconcile some of these things. But what is the issue with deep time views that Christian has that is to say, what's the issue with saying that God's created over billions of years?
Well, the first thing to understand is that you don't get that idea from scripture itself. There's no way you would read the early chapters of Genesis and get the idea that there was a big bang billions of years ago. Or you know, that the days of Genesis are meant to be read as, you know, possibly millions of years or billions of years each. So it doesn't come from scripture. And, and this is one of the issues because when we hear Christians in particular trying to reconcile deep time, millions of years with scripture, they don't understand where the millions of years comes from. And it comes from a view of the earth's geology, you know, so what it was about 1830, a Scottish lawyer by the name of Charles Lyell, he actually wrote to a friend and said, you know, we need to free the science of geology, he was talking about, from Moses. So up until that stage, the predominant view in the, or the in earth sciences, the geological view was that Noah's Flood was responsible for most of these geologic layers on the earth. But he wanted to promote what became known as uniformitarianism. And that might kind of be kind of called the present is the key to the past. So all over the earth we have thousands of meters of rock strata and in particular what we call sedimentary strata. And this is the idea that some moving process like water washes in sediments, okay? And then next year, you know, during annual, annual flood and retreats and next year it washes in sediment. So it might gradually build up sedimentary layers, a millimeter or two millimeters at a time. So let's say it was depositing at one millimeter per year and you're looking at a thousand meters of sandstone, then people would say, well that's taken a million years to form, right? So you might see that occurring today. You might see particles being washed in by an annual flood on the land. And so they say, well that must have been occurring, you know, in Earth's history for, you know, an in indeterminate past like a million years.
Okay?
So what we see in the present must have been occurring for millions of years history. But what that does is it disregards the Bible's history, which says there was a global flood on the Earth. It rejects the idea of this biblical cataclysm. So that's the difference. That's where the idea of uniformitarian comes with. And it's become the basis not only of modern geology, but also modern evolutionary history. And we're gonna discuss that because in these rock layers all around the earth, we see fossils, dead things.
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So there are two very different views on the geological record. Why should Christians be certain in Noah's Flood being responsible instead of this deep-time gradual process?
Yeah, it's a good question. So there are theological aspects. So the deep-time view has hundreds of millions of years of Earth's history.
Yeah.
Clearly when we look at the Bible's history, we can trace Jesus’ ancestry in the gospels, the chronogenealogies we've got in Genesis 5 and 11, and clearly all the early theologians and even modern theologians, even though they might not accept it, I believe they would say that the Bible teaches a recent creation of about 6,000 years ago, 4,000 BC.
That's not long.
Okay? So those rock layers I mentioned earlier have fossils in them. Fossils is a record of death. But when God declared, you know, on day six after all those other days, when he said, you know, he saw what he'd made and it was good, good, good. Day six, he says it's very good. The Hebrew term there is tov meod. So the creator of the universe is describing something as very good. Elsewhere in scripture we read that death is an enemy. So with Adam and Eve kind of been standing on a fossil graveyard a few thousand years ago, which is a biblical timeframe for them.
Yeah.
Of millions of years of Earth's history with lots of death underneath them. And God says, yes, that's very good. See? So it actually becomes a gospel issue. And I wanna read some passages. I've got some notes here 'cause I knew this would come up. So, you know, 2 Peter 3:6 tells us “The world that was perished, it was deluged and destroyed.” So the New Testament, clearly the New Testament authors, when we look at it, clearly believed in a global flood. Jesus referenced the global flood of Noah's time said second coming, in fact would be like the time of Noah. So global devastation, what would you expect if there really was a global flood? I, I remember a, a secular geologist came along to one of my meetings in the US once I'm having a conversation at the end. And obviously we were disagreeing and I just said, look, just bear with me. You know, just kind of, I'm not gonna hold you to it, but try to be as honest as you can. I said just try to see it from the creationist point of view that we believe there was a global flood. What would you expect the evidence to be? What would you expect to see? And he agreed that he'd, you'd expect to see thousands of meters of sedimentary rock layers with fossils in them.
Okay?
That guess have that, guess what, we guess what we do see?
This?
Yes, we have thousands of meters of sedimentary layers with fossils in them. So we have, again, we have the same rock layers, we have the same fossils.
Yeah.
But we come to two different versions of how they got there in Earth's history. And, and that's in an area we would call historical science, right? 'cause people are taught, evolution is science, but evolution really is not the type of science that, you know, builds radio stations and, and TV monitors and sends man to the moon and develops modern medicines. They do with experiments you can do in the present. You can repeat in your test. But both creationists and evolutionists have beliefs about past and Earth's history. And I wanna make a point here 'cause some evolutionists say, well this what you're saying, the difference between operational and historical science is a, a creationist construct. Nobody really speaks like that. That's not true. Okay? Some of the world's leading evolutionist included a Harvard biologist, he called it functional biology. So you can investigate under a microscope how a cell works, how the machinery works. You are doing that in the present. But that can't tell you how the cell arose in the past he said that would be up to evolutionary biology. That's historical science. You see? So, so there's the difference. And, but the key is, you know, if Noah's Flood is responsible for most of those geologic layers on the earth, then there is no millions of years. So the millions of years comes from the rock layers.
Yeah.
But if Noah's Flood is responsible for those rock layers, there is no millions of years of history on the earth. And if there's no millions of years of history, Matthew, there's no time for evolution to happen on the earth. There's no time for biological evolution. Biological evolution requires millions of years of earth's history. And that's why it's such a big issue.
But what about radiometric dating? Doesn't this prove millions of years?
Tell you, if I, my, myself and my colleagues, if we had a dollar for every time somebody has asked us that I'd be a rich man. I got some figures here I want to mention because of some radio made radio-metric dating tests that have been done on things. Okay? But the first thing when somebody mentions radiometric dating,
Yeah,
Often they'll say carbon-14 or they mean carbon-14 because that's the most common one that people hear about. You know, on the media, they dig up a fossil and they say, oh, it's carbon-14 data tested to, you know, so many tens of thousands of years.
Yeah, it seems to be very precise.
It actually can be the, when we carbon date things that we know are recent, the more accurate it is. But the further we go back or the older we think something is, the more inaccurate it can actually be. But let me explain to people what it is. So there are various forms of radiometric dating, there's uranium-lead, potassium-argon. But let's talk about carbon-14 specifically. It can only be used to date things that were once living organic material, right? Stuff you and I have made of trees. It can even be used on coal because coal, you know, is petrified organic material, et cetera. So how it works is in the upper atmosphere, atomic nucleii, get bombarded by cosmic radiation. And it, these neutrons hit ordinary nitrogen-14. Sounds a bit complex. Gets converted into carbon-14. Now carbon-14 is an unstable atom and it decays, unlike carbon-12. So all radiometric material that's used for dating has a half life. And in the case of carbon-14, it's one of the shortest, it's 5,730 years. So let's say, I'm gonna simplify, say you found a fossil today, you dig it up outta the ground and it had ten carbon-14 atoms in it. That's operational science. You can measure it. So if the half life is 5,730 years, then somebody says, well guess what? 5,730 years ago it must have had 20 in it. And then, and then you go backwards and you date it like a clock. But the great problem with using that as a measurement is you don't know how much was in it when the organism died. Because what happens, carbon-14 is absorbed by plants, by vegetation. Animals eat the plants, other animals eat those animals, we eat the animals, it's in the life cycles. And then when the animal dies, carbon-14, the half life if you like, the decay rate starts. And so another way, I, some years ago just at my lectures to help people understand this, I developed what I call the bathtub example. And this will kind of explain it. So let me ask you a couple of questions. You know, if you, I want you to imagine you walked into a bathroom.
Yeah.
And you walked into the bathroom and you saw a tap running, right? And you go, wow, I wonder how long it took to fill the bathtub. So the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna measure the amount of water in the bathtub. So let's say there's a hundred liters there. Complicated maths coming up, right? There's a hundred liters in the bathtub.
Yeah,
That's like the amount of carbon-14 in your sample. And then I'm gonna measure the flow rate of the tap. So a hundred liters in the bathtub and the tap is running at 10 liters per minute. How long did it take to fill the bathtub?
10 minutes.
Well see, I actually asked you a leading question because remember I said how long does it take to fill the bath? You actually can't answer that question because you only came in during currently operating processes. You measured the current flow rate of the tap. But the first thing you did is you presumed the bathtub must have been empty when you started. What if the bathtub was already a quarter full when you started, or half full when you started? What if somebody turned off the tap in the past? What if somebody increased the flow rate or slow down the flow rate? All those things could have happened in history that you were not there to see. That's uniformitarianism used presently operating measurements or flow rates to determine the unobservable past.
So is there proven factors that can fluctuate that carbon-14?
Absolutely. And in the creationist model it's a big one because we know that there have been rapid reversals in the Earth's magnetic field, probably at the time of the Flood. And you can do that by looking at iron particles in these very fine layers. Sometimes I orient that way and sometimes I orient to the other pole that way. So there's been rapid reversals in the earth's magnetic field and that would also affect decay rates, et cetera. But radiometric dating of carbon-14 is actually the creationist best friend. Because remember I mentioned the half life is comparatively short to other dating methods.
Yeah.
So you should not find carbon-14. And people can look this up on Google for themselves. They don't have to take my word for it. You shouldn't find carbon-14 in anything that's much more than 60,000 years old, 60,000 years old. And yet every single fossil that's been tested has carbon-14 in it. So I was, I was taught at school like coal was supposed to be formed in carboniferous peat bogs, you know, 300 plus million years ago, coal's been tested for carbon-14 and it's in there. Shouldn't even be in there if it's 1 million years old. And, and dinosaurs, dinosaur fossils, you know, not only are we finding soft tissue in them, but they've now tested dinosaur fossils. The last dinosaur, according to evolution, died out 66 million years ago. But we have carbon-14 now in dinosaur fossils. So you can't use carbon-14, if you like, is a, a stick to bludgeon creationist with to say, well the earth's millions of years old because it doesn't prove millions of years. It only proves thousands. But we use it on things that are supposed to be, you know, millions of years old. And there's carbon-14 present, which shouldn't be there.
So Gary, you've explained why carbon-14 can't support millions of years, but are there any other methods that could?
Yeah, well I mentioned there's lots of different dating methods, but the same, same problem occurs so...
Every time?
Yeah. So I wanna, I wanna make sure I'm accurate 'cause I wanna read out some test results here that have happened. So there's rubidium-strontium, potassium 40, but what they use for dating volcanic rocks is something known as potassium-argon dating potassium decays into argon. Now the known rate, when they measure the rates today, they extrapolate it out and they say the half life is 1.25 billion years. Now, something a lot of creationists would know about is the explosion at Mount St Helens in 1986.
Yeah.
So after that eruption, lava continued to form on the dome there. So they took lava there using the potassium-argon dating method. And it yielded eight ages, I'm sorry, from 350,000 years up to 2.8 million years for a volcanic eruption that occurred in 1986. Similarly, in Hawaii, Kīlauea volcano erupted 200 years ago, potassium-argon dating method yielded dates of 22 million years. And Hualālai, which erupted the years of 1800-1801, that yielded dates, listen to this from 160 million up to 3.3 billion years for a volcano that erupted right, 200 years ago. So when we use radioactive dating methods on the, you know, on on substances or materials of known age, it often comes up a short as well. So measuring the amount of radioactive material is real science, but determining how much got there in Earth's history, that's where conjecture is. And, and belief systems play a part in determining the results.
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So what about some of the ideas that theologians have come up with to try and reconcile deep-time beliefs? Let's talk about progressive creation, for instance.
Yeah, it's a popular one. And, and look, I'm going to sound as I say, what I think they're wrong, rather critical. So let me make the point. I'm not kind of trying to attack the person I'm trying to attack, you know, errant beliefs and, and Bible tells us to destroy arguments that set itself up against the know, you know, the knowledge of God. So, so progressive creation is a view that tries to add deep time in millions of years to the Bible. It's promoted by a ministry called Reasons to Believe. And their leader is a guy by the name of Dr. Hugh Ross. He, he clearly accepts the big bang idea that there was a big bang 13.7 billion years ago. Let me just mention there. So when I went to school during my time at school, I saw the big bang go, kind of go from 10 billion years to 15 billion years, to 20 billion years. And now we're back to 13.7 billion years. So, which one was right, if you're trying to hitch your Bible to the science of the day, your interpretation of, you know, the age of the universe is always gonna change. You're gonna change your scriptural view. But another point with Dr. Ross, he accepts, for example, Neandertals. Okay? He stated for many years that these were gonna be non-humans. And then when the sequencing of the Neandertal DNA came out and it showed that even human beings, you and I actually have Neandertal DNA in us. Neandertals, we believe were clearly human. So then he came up with an idea that they were kind of soulless hominids, not quite apes, not quite fully human, but some sort of whole, whole soulless hominids that predated Adam and Eve. Now when we look at Neanderthal graves, why do I say they're human? Well, I say that their DNA is very similar and also they buried their dead. They had controlled use of fire. They built musical instruments, they had cos used cosmetics, et cetera. So I believe we're just looking at a particular group of humans. When we look at the earth today, we can find distinct groups of humans with different biological features that falls within normal human variation. So we're finding fossils of Neandertals. We always believed, as creationists, they would be human. And genetics has actually shown that. But that was a stumbling block to Hugh Ross's predictions about who they were. So he actually claimed, and this is rather disturbing, he claimed that human, human beings ended up mating with these particular soulless hominids, right? And that's how we end up with Neandertal DNA in human beings today. But a lot of people go, oh, okay, that makes sense, but hang on, that's not the biblical narrative. Adam and Eve were direct creations of God. And the Bible says that we are made in God's image. So are we actually descended from some soulless type creature or some animal type creature upon the earth? What does that do to the idea that humans are being made in the image of God? And it also is a really serious basic biological blunder. 'cause any high school student would know, humans can only interbred with humans. Dogs can only interbred with dogs. I mean, people can go to creation.com. In Creation Magazine. Some years ago we featured an article about Soviet Union, communist Soviet Union at the time, trying to actually breed humans with apes and gorillas to try to create this, if you like, I might use the word soulless, but a super warrior, you know, a group of beings that might not have no conscience and you could just send them to war.
And did it work?
Of course not. It was unsuccessful because only humans can breed with humans
With humans. So, you know, it sounds critical with Ross to make that, but again, it shows how you're always gonna have this ever shifting theological position if you don't take the Bible as a straightforward, you know, view of Earth's history.
So what does Ross do with the idea that Adam and Eve lived only a few thousand years ago, like the Bible indicates?
Yep. Well that's one that's changed quite a bit. So again, in, in my years in the creation movement, we were told that the first humans, according to evolutionist homo sapiens,
Yeah,
First arose about a hundred thousand years ago. So Dr. Ross and his apologetics said the Bible would indicate only a few thousand years. He would say there were missing genealogies, missing patriarchs in the chrono genealogies and Genesis 5 and 11, for example. And then when evolutionists pushed homo sapiens back to 180,000 years, I, I remember sitting in a group, of fellow creationists in the office, and we, first thing we said, well, what's Dr. Ross gonna do? He just said, well, there must be more missing generations. Now, today, right? Today they're trying to push homo sapiens back to 300,000 years. So what he does is he says, the first homo sapiens that aligns with when God created Adam and Eve. So Adam and Eve were created now possibly 300,000 years ago. Guess what? More missing genealogies and I worked it out. If we looked at a, a generation being 30 years, that's 10,000 missing generations we've got in Genesis chapter one.
That's an issue.
So it becomes more and more ridiculous. And again, the more that you're gonna have to change your view of scripture. And you know, I I I listened to an interview once with him and somebody said, you know, why did you, you know, kind of come to this particular view? And he said that he was kind of looking for a religion that fit his science. And Christianity fit the best. So I'm a former evolutionist. I used to believe in evolution, you know, a hundred percent. And I became a Christian and I immediately saw this deep incompatibility. And so it wasn't the science that led me to becoming the Christian, it was the call of God that led me to becoming a Christian. And then I had to kind of reconcile my science, whether, so his, his view is a different one. And another thing he's also said, and this is documented on creation.com, we've clearly shown, and I mentioned earlier, that the early theologians and the early church fathers accepted what I call the biblical date of only, you know, 6,000 years ago for, for creation. All right? But he said all the early church fathers didn't, they were all, if you wanna call them old-earthers, they had no problem with the idea of millions and billions of years. And, and this is simply not true. And actually he got called out on that by one of his own supporters who pointed out that there was an error. And this is actually not the case, that the early church fathers did believe in what we might call a young creation. And when confronted with, he said, well, it doesn't matter anyway, but hang on. He was using that as a, as a, as a stick to beat up creationist saying young earth creation was a recent invention. It was never held by the early church.
Mm.
When in fact the opposite was true. So when he was called out on it, he kind of said it didn't matter. So he kind of didn't just retreat from that argument, he didn't answer it. And again, it was a little uncharitable. Another one that comes up is Romans 5:12. So let me read Romans 5:12 'cause it tells us, therefore his sin came into the world through one man and death through sin. And so death spread to all men because all sinned. Death spread to all men because all sinned, right? And death came into the world, right? It tells us as a result of sin. So he says that only refers to the spiritual death of men, not to physical death. And in this way he can reconcile the geologic layers with lots of dead things in them. Say there was lots of animal death going on for millions of years before Adam and Eve. Now when we look at the context, Paul is clearly talking about spiritual death. He's correct, but he's not only talking about spiritual death. You know, are we gonna have lots of carnivory in the fossil record? We find cancers and disease and animals ripping each other apart. And I mentioned before, is that very good? You know, after God created Adam and Eve and he sees everything very good. I wouldn't think so in Genesis 1:29, it says, God, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth. Every tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food not only to humans, right? And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and everything that creeps on the earth. Everything that has the breath of life. I have given every green plant for food. So the Bible clearly tells us that the animal kingdom was also vegetarian up until the time of the fall, which is in Genesis three when Adam and Eve sin. So again, it's a basic theological blunder to say that there was Romans 5:12 only applies to the spiritual death of humans. And there was millions of years of carnivory going on on the earth that we see in the fossil record. And, and there's another aspect too, here, Matthew, when we talk about the new creation, okay? The new heavens and earth. Because if Romans 5:12 only applied to spiritual death of humans, why is God going to destroy this universe, this heavens and earth to make a new one? The reason is, is because in the ground there's a record of dead things. Why? Why doesn't God just dust off the earth and replace human beings here? Well again, we'd be standing on that fossil graveyard of death beneath us. A record of millions and billions of years of savagery in Earth's history according to evolution. So clearly. And you know, we can talk about that later. You know, when we talk about, talk about the new heavens and earth, it's talking about a new creation that the entirety of it is going to be destroyed to make way for new heavens and earth.
Yeah, but what about those who believe in theistic evolution, the idea that God used evolution in creation.
Yeah. That had a resurgence a few years ago, mainly due to an organization out of the US called BioLogos. Yeah. And this is headed by a very prominent Christian by the name of Francis Collins. He was the former head of the Human Genome Project. And under the President Obama in the United States, he made him the President of the National Institutes of Health. So he certainly promotes the idea that God used evolution. And again, you know, I mentioned that I'm a former evolutionist. In fact, I'd say most of my colleagues and scientists here in CMI, we probably all started out as evolutionists as well. But again, it's because it's the only view we heard. Most of us had never heard a decent creationist presentation. And I'd still say that's why the majority still believe 'cause that's all they're taught. But there are some aspects here. And I wanna read out some quotes also from Francis Collins and his, his BioLogos organization. So in evolutionary history, they have a certain order of appearance of matter and organisms upon the earth. And if we try to reconcile with that, it actually disagrees with the biblical order. And I won't read them all out, but people can look. So for example, they say the sun and the stars existed before the Earth, right? There was a big bang and the earth was a later edition, if you like, to our universe and solar system. But in the Bible it actually says the earth was created before the sun. Earth is created on day one, Sun is created on day four. Another example, reptiles, according to evolutionists, reptiles, and dinosaurs grew wings and evolved into birds. But if you look at the days of creation, we actually have birds and the flying creatures appearing on day five and land animals, which would include reptiles and dinosaurs, on day six. The order, again
Is backwards
Is wrong. Land mammals predated whales, okay? But according to the Bible, again, marine organisms predated land animals, et cetera. So the order is is wrong. So I wanna read a quote here by Francis Collins and I'll explain what he's meaning as we go along, that he said, “Many still wonder why the macro evolutionary changes have never been observed.” Let me explain what he means by macro evolution. So macro evolution, macro evolution is really the big changes. This is kind of apes to human beings. We're not talking about, you know, what Darwin talked about with finches with short beaks or finches with long beaks because you can get variation within-
Yeah, of course
- a created kind. So he's talking about the big changes. And he goes on and says, “The simple answer is that we haven't been watching long enough. The types of genetic mutations that eventually lead to macro evolutionary changes are rare. And this accounts for the slow pace of evolutionary development.” Here's the kicker. “The amount of time that we have spent observing nature is only a tiny fraction of the evolutionary timescale.” So that's a candid admission. The amount of time we spend observing nature is only a tiny fraction of what they believe. So if we don't see it happening, is it science? We haven't observed those macro evolutionary changes, but they presume that they must have occurred once upon a time in the past, right? The first, you know, whale grew, grew legs and came out of the ocean or, or whatever. But more telling is, here again is the theological problem with adding millions and billions of years. And I'm gonna read out, read out a quote by one of the BioLogos staff writers. His name is Kenton Sparks. And before I do it, I wanna make a point here that the New Testament authors, okay, every single one of the New Testament authors and the New Testament is where we get, if you like, our church doctrine from. Every one of them quoted or referred to Genesis 1–11 on 60 occasions. So Genesis 1–11, we're talking about creation. The fall, the Flood, the tower of Tower of Babel. Jesus himself referred to Genesis 1–11 on 16 occasions.
Wow.
Right? He referred to a literal Adam and Eve, a literal Noah's Flood. Every Genesis 1–11 chapter is referenced in the New Testament. So clearly the New Testament authors and the New Testament is where we read about Jesus as being the agent of our salvation refers to Genesis history. Listen to what Kenton Spark says. He says, “If Jesus as a finite human being erred from time to time,” I mean I could stop there, couldn't I?
Yeah.
This Jesus, the Son of God, the only sinless person erred from time to time. So there's huge theological implications in that. But he says “There is no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John, wrote scripture without error. Rather, we are wise to assume that the biblical authors express themselves as human beings writing from the perspectives of their own finite broken horizons.” My goodness me. Okay. So what we read in scripture, we believe to be an inspired word of God. And even the teachings of Jesus himself we're saying are in error. Respectfully, Matthew, that's not Christianity. You've just destroyed surely the whole basis of Christianity, as I said, Jesus being the agent for our salvation, we're still... What they don't realize is that is something cited there known as the kenotic heresy. This is so, I'm gonna say a heresy, this is declared by the early church that if Jesus, you know, laid aside his divine nature when he came to earth, when he became fully man, no. The answer is that he didn't lay aside his divine nature because he was still capable of raising the dead and turning water into wine. He was fully God. What he did is he added human nature to his divine. So the view that was espoused here on the BioLogos website was actually declared a heresy by the early, early church. And you know, I've been in ministry now as a volunteer and full-time for over 30 years. You mentioned at the beginning, not trying to argue from authority, but I've spoken in thousands of churches and met a lot of Christians and we get a lot of non-Christians obviously, you know, come to the meeting to question us and hear what we gotta say. And sometimes challenge us. In all of my years, okay? Now I'm not saying that there might not be what I'm about to say, but personally speaking, in all of my years of Christian ministry, I have never met a single person who became a Christian because you could add evolution to the Bible, right? Because think about what you're saying. You're saying, well believe in Jesus and be saved. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Jesus believed in biblical creation, but he was wrong. So believe in Jesus. And secondly, you're ultimately saying that that right there in the very first book of the Bible, it doesn't mean what it says. So, you know, a lot of Bible colleges say, well, we don't take a stand on Genesis because it can mean this and it could mean that, and we're not really sure. But if Genesis does not mean what it says, then it can mean anything. So where does the truth begin in scripture? And there's a great quote, I think a great quote by have, by the most ardent anti creationist, arguably in the world today, professor Richard Dawkins, a professor from Oxford. And he actually, people can see, he was interviewed on a Christian TV station in the UK stationed I've, I've been on. And he was asked by the interviewer why he abandoned Christianity because he was raised in the Methodist church. So listen to this. He says, “Oh, well by far the most important, I suppose, was understanding evolution. I think the evangelical Christians have really sort of got it right and away in seeing evolution as the enemy”, he says. “Whereas the more shall we say” now, his words not mine, “sophisticated theologians who are quite happy to live with evolution, I think they're deluded. I think the evangelicals have got it right. And there really is a deep incompatibility between evolution and Christianity. And I think I realize that at about age 16.” So I would say if you've got arguably the world's leading evolutionist saying that, you know, he thinks Christians who are trying to add evolution to the Bible, he uses the word they're deluded. Who are we gonna win over? And as I said, in my experience, I've, I've not seen it convince anybody,
But I've also heard this idea that the days in Genesis could be these long periods of time and not literal days. Is that not compatible?
Yeah, that, that's a really popular view. And actually as a young Christian, it was the, the kind of view that I subscribed to, oh, maybe those days could be billion of years. Actually, this is also promoted. Going back to Hugh Ross. This is an idea that he promotes. And the reason he says that is because the word day, which we read in English, if we look in the Hebrew, it is Yom. And he says, Yom can mean just like an English day can mean an indefinite period of time. And he's actually correct. But to say that's it doesn't mean a 24-hour day in Genesis is a bit of a bait-n-switch. And I think the best way I could explain this is use an example. So if I said to you, Matthew, okay, using the word day, if I said to you, look, I want to tell you a story about something that happened back in my father's day. What period of time am I talking about? It's not defined. Is it? It's it's some way back in the past, some, you know, back in the day. But if I said to you, Hey, it's great to be here with you this morning doing this interview, or Hey, you know, this evening I'm going out for dinner with my wife. When I use the words evening and morning, you understand I'm talking about a part of a particular day. And if I said to you, for example, oh, you know, when I, when I moved back from the United States, it took me three days to fly from Atlanta to Brisbane. How, how many 24-hour days did I just speak about? Not, not a trick question.
No, it's literal.
It's three, yeah, three days. So because I used in front of the word day a number, a definer, it's called an ordinal, right? Okay. So I said the word day can mean an indefinite period of time. But if I use evening, you understand, I'm talking about a part of a day. Morning, I'm talking about part of a 24-hour day. And if I put a number in front of it, I've just defined that I'm talking about literal days. So when you go back to Genesis, what do you read? There was evening and morning, second day. There was evening and morning, the third day. There was evening and morning. So you've got evening, morning and a number, you've got three definers of the context. And that's repeated six times over in Genesis one. So we did a bit of research here. Okay, so outside of Genesis one, in the Old Testament alone, you find the word Yom and number appears 410 times.
Wow.
Evening and morning, right? 38 times together without the word day. Okay? Or evening and morning with the word day 23 times. Look, there are all of these combinations, 523 times it appears in the Old Testament. And nobody questions any one of those 523 mentions as anything but a 24-hour day. But when we look at the same context in Genesis, because of unfortunately the evolutionary exposure and teaching that we've had, people always say, oh, these have to be long periods of time. That's an, that's not what we call the correct hermeneutical approach, which is to, you know, read scripture, interpret it with scripture everywhere else. Day, evening, morning number means a 24-hour day.
And this old idea that's starting to circulate again and gain popularity. What's so wrong about the gap theory?
Yeah, it is interesting. It's certainly in the last few years in churches, it's, it's, it's coming up again. So let's go back here. So early theologians and, and it started actually the gap theory came out in 1909 in something known as the Scofield’s Study Bible. And it was used even in evangelical seminaries, right? In the US right up until the seventies and, and some even later. So people of a certain generation were taught that
And
They kind of died off. But a, a younger generation are also now being taught that again. And we've seen a major denomination in the United States recently say, you know, we accept gap theory as one of the methods, et cetera. So why did theologians came come up with that? Well, they believed that the world's geology with dead things in them, right? Accepted the evolutionary interpretation
Yeah.
Was millions of years of Earth's history, right? Noah's Flood doesn't happen till Genesis chapter six. So between verse one, one of Genesis, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And then verse two, which talks about the infilling of God's creation, they inserted a gap of deep time.
Yeah.
Now that's all that most people hear. Oh, between verse one, one and verse one, two, there's millions of years. But they believed or came up with the idea that those rock layers and the fossils in them were created by something called Lucifer's Flood. This is what most people haven't heard. It's called ruin-reconstruction theory. And it's the idea that God judged Lucifer in a pre-adamic world. He brought another global flood, destroyed the earth. And all this occurred between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 right? And that's where the millions of years comes from. Now the big problem with that, of course, is you've gotta ask, well, you know, what did the great Flood of Noah's time do to all those rock layers? But there's a theological problem because Satan is a fallen angel. He's a created being. And remember at the, on at the end of day six when God made Adam and even all the land animals, he looked down and said, God saw all that he had made the entirety of creation, which must include the angels that he made prior to the making of the physical creation. And he declared it very good. My point there is Satan could not have fallen before day six of creation...
'cause he was good.
'cause he was good. But moreover, there's a theological reason here. I wanna make sure I get passage right. Remember I said in the beginning, God creates the heaven and Earth and then they say there's a big gap of time. And then verse two, they talk about the infilling of God creation. When we look and do the correct hermeneutical approach, which is interpreting scripture with scripture, we go to Exodus 20:11, listen to what it says, “For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and earth”. There's no gap. There's no period, no full stop. Like we're trying to insert between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. And it says “the sea and all that is in them. Six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day.” There's no gap. It's continuous. It talks the entirety of what God made. Okay. You know, in, in those six days. Now I just read there that passage, it should be a very well-known passage 'cause I just read from one of the 10 Commandments. So what are some of those other commandments? Thou shall not murder. Thou shall not steal, thou shall not commit adultery. I mean, we don't have a problem with those.
Of course not.
And the Bible tells us that those commandments were inscribed by the finger of God in tablets of stone. But right there we've got the fact that God created the heavens and the earth in six 24-hour days with no gap in them. So I think again, that's again what we call the exegetical approach, inserting a Lucifer's Flood. And I might just ask listeners to say, give me chapter and verse where you'll find Lucifer's Flood mentioned in scripture. It's not there. So that's called eisegesis. That's where you are taking an outside idea and you're, you are inserting it into the text to make your argument. So yeah, Lucifer’s Flood is a, a made-up idea to try to stick billions of years timeframe between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 And again, they did it because they accepted the geologic record as millions and billions of years.
So that's the gap theory.
Are there any others, like I've heard a soft gap theory. Does that give any precedence or explanation?
Yeah, this is a recent invention by Seventh Day Adventist by the name of Gorman Gray. So again, it's not been heard of in in past history. It's recent. So again, so he believes that the matter of the universe and the matter of the earth is billions of years old.
Yeah.
Right. So distant starlight, you know, the argument that people have that we're seeing light from billions of light years away. Not the topic of this discussion, but people can, can look that up for themselves. But after he'd say, you know, God created, there's billions of billions of years of the earth sitting there. And then he would talk about the infilling of a six day creation. So his main arguments are distant starlight. And guess what? Radioactive dating, which we've already spoken about.
Yeah.
Because we can use radioactive dating on the age of known things. And it falls, it falls short. So that's just a brief one. It's not a very popular view, but it was certainly, I'm glad you mentioned it, because I wouldn't want people to say, oh, he didn't mention this, or
Yeah.
You know, he didn't cover that.
I guess another question would be, what was God doing for those billions of years before he created?
You know, that's a, that's an interesting one. It does come up because, but when you think about, it's got nothing to do with the age of the earth, you know, so what if God was billions of years? You know, old, but it's got nothing to do with the age of the Earth. But let's cover that anyway. Does God actually have an age? How do we determine age or time?
Yeah.
So where did time come from? Let's think about that. So here in the earth, how do we measure time? We got the rotation of the earth with a light source, gives us a 24-hour day. But listen to this, if you lived on Venus, okay, A Venusian day is equivalent to 243 Earth days. On Jupiter.
Wow, that's a lot of sun.
It rotates every 9.9 hours. So we determine time in our little, you know, section of the solar system by rotation of a day. Lunar cycles give us a month, the earth goes round the sun. We determine a year. So that's how we measure time. And we measure it, as I said, according to our local perspective. You live somewhere else, you're gonna use a different perspective. But before the universe began, so before there's any planets, any stars, suns, galaxies, before there's even an atom. Before there's any empty space, which Einstein called the ether. So there's nothing, yeah, it's a bit harder for us to conceptualize it, nothing but imagine. There is nothing. Does time exist as we understand it? No. No, there is no time. But the Bible says there's God, Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God.” So that means he's there before what he made. But what he made then determined time. So God is existing outside of time. He is, he exists outside the universe that he made. Although he interacts in it obviously. So God is timeless. Very hard concept for us to understand. So when people ask what was God doing for billions of years, it's really a redundant question. It doesn't apply. 'cause God is not billions of years old. He doesn't exist in time. And you know, when I wrapped my mind around that, it really helped me understand, you know, a very profound passage in scripture when God speaks right in the wilderness to Moses, “I am that I am,” I never really understood that. I just am. And they'll swear, of course, Jesus, he's the agent of creation. It's called the alpha, the omega, the beginning and the end. He, he just is. So, time is really only relative to us because we live in our well-defined space-time universe. And we use these local parameters to measure time.
And so does adding millions of years to the Bible affect our views on the end times?
Yeah, absolutely. As the conversations I've had with people on this, because if I've spoke to theistic evolutionists, even progressive creationists, we talked about there being a restoration. So for theistic evolutionists like Biologos, if you believe that God used a process of evolution, death, and suffering, you know, culling out the weak to create ultimately to get to human beings, is he gonna restore things back to that? So you and I as Christians, we say, well, you know, when God creates a new heavens and earth, it's gonna be millions of years of death and suffering. Again. Bible doesn't teach that in the new heavens and earth. What, what's he gonna restore things to listen to this Revelation 21:4, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. There should be no more pain.” Sorry, “there should be no more death. Neither sorrow nor crying. Neither shall there be any more pain.” They're bad things.
Yeah.
“For the former things have passed away.” And then it tells us in the new heavens, and if the in the new Jerusalem, there's the Tree of Life again, by the way.
Mm.
Right. And there shall be no more curse. It says, where did the curse come in Genesis chapter three? So it's clearly telling us that the new heavens and earth will be an undoing of what went wrong. That's where death and suffering entered the earth. There wasn't death and suffering for millions of years beforehand. So yes, a faulty view of creation can certainly affect your view of the new heavens and earth. What is God going to restore things to? That's the issue.
Yeah. It's just such a controversial area, a controversial topic even amongst my own friend group and biblical creationists often get accused of being dogmatic. What would you say about that? Even divisive?
Yeah, I'd say we are dogmatic.
Yeah.
You know, I coined the term some years ago that we needed to call ourselves biblical creationists. Often we called ourselves young earthers.
Yeah.
And that kind of made us sound like we were out left field because the majority view of most people is they believe the universe is billions of years old. And the earth is, you know, 4.5 billion years of, of age. And evolution's been occurring for millions of years. So it kind of put us out there. So I coined the term, said we need to call ourselves biblical creationist because we are clearly taking the Bible at face value what the Bible authors meant when when you read Genesis, you have to read it in the way that the Bible authors meant to understand it. And that's, that's what we do. We're not interpreting it at vastly different or putting our own kind of spin on it. And I mentioned before that death is also the last enemy. Right. So death is an enemy can't be there for millions of years. I want to go back to a point too, for Christians, even if you don't believe in evolution, right? So, “Oh, I don't believe in evolution, “I don't believe God believed in evolution”, for example. But you do believe, and and I've seen a lot of Christians, well I have a sneaking suspicion that the earth is billions of years old because I've heard of radiometric dating and all of this type of stuff. Remember I said the millions of years comes from the rock layers.
Yeah.
That's where deep time comes from. But those rock layers have dead things in them. So even if you don't believe in evolution, but if you accept deep time, you're actually putting death before the fall of Adam. So it becomes a gospel issue. And that's why creationists are so strong on the age of the earth. Call us dogmatic if you like. But I would go further and poke the bear here and say, creationists are not the ones that are being divisive. It's those who just don't take a plain reading of what we call God's word at face value. I would claim they're the ones being divisive because they're adding a secular that is non-Christian view of earth's history to God's word to try to make it fit. And you know, and I never see what the problem is. 'cause you know, I I, I say to some people, I say, do you believe God created the universe? We, we can't even wrap our minds around it. You know, probably out there hundreds of billions of galaxies, all containing hundreds of billions of stars and we believe God could create all of that. Yeah. But he couldn't have done it in six days. The new heavens and earth. I don't even think it takes six days. And I read scripture, it says, in Revelations and behold, I saw a new heavens and earth. So if God did it once he can, he can do it once before we're talking about the creator of the universe.
Mm.
And when we read the Bible, he is absolutely clear about the timeframes and the earth is clearly the spiritual center of the universe. And when we look at if you want the biblical timeframe of the universe, it's talking about earth time. On first day he created second day, he created, six days he created. And I think, yeah, we are not the ones that are being divisive. It's those who don't take God at his word. They're the ones being divisive.
So Gary, where can people go if they want to find more about these topics?
Well, I think it's important because you know, you mentioned I was a former evolutionist, that's all I'd heard. And
Yeah.
And other people have probably only heard those evolutionary arguments. It's good to know why they are incompatible with scripture. So
Yeah,
There's a book here called Refuting Compromise by my colleague in the US office, Dr Jonathan Sarfati. This deals with all of those hybrid or compromised views in including one I spent a fair bit of time talking about today, which is progressive creation, the dubious apologetics of, of Dr Hugh Ross. And one of the great things with this show is we actually make a lot of free materials available for a short time. So in the link below, I believe the ministry is making this available as a free ebook. So quite a substantial treaties,
Yeah,
That you can get for free by following the link below. And you know, even if you are already convinced about six day creation, guess what? Grab the link for your friends and others who might not be so convinced.
I'll make sure that I grab it. Gary, and thank you so much for answering some of our questions today.
Oh, you're welcome.