THE AGE OF THE EARTH

Ruminations of a Reluctant OEC

Humbly recorded by Tom Couchman

1. WHY DOES THIS SUBJECT MATTER?

No statement in scripture, nor clear reasoning from any statement, indicates that a person’s relationship to God is directly affected by what the person believes concerning the age of the earth. Why, then, should anyone take such time as even this relatively short paper will require to consider the matter?

a. A Question of Credibility

Much of the Christian message—that God cares what people do, that He disapproves of many practices that are popular in our society, that He requires certain “inconvenient” and “unpleasant” responses—is difficult for most people to accept. Nevertheless, those with “good and honest hearts” will accept it, provided they perceive both the message and the messenger to be credible. We must therefore take care not to yoke a very compelling scriptural call about sin and salvation to any other stance which we cannot readily explain to the open-minded. If elders and class leaders are going to contend, publicly, that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old, we had better be prepared to defend that position from the facts. Our chronology will inevitably color, in the minds of the intended audience, our core message of salvation, and some open-minded people who reject our chronology will reject our gospel with it. Similarly, church members—especially young people who hear evidence for an old earth in school—need to be shown clearly if that evidence is being misinterpreted; otherwise, if their faith in young-earth geology goes to the bottom of the sea of doubt their faith in Jesus Christ may go down to the same fate.

b. A Question of Like Submission

How the church, especially elders and class leaders, approaches these questions is testimony to our own receptiveness to truth. If we show that we can weigh all the facts reasonably, then non-Christians who are trying to decide whether to listen to what we say about salvation will be favorably impressed. If, on the other hand, “outsiders” see us rejecting any teaching which is uncomfortable to us or contrary to what we have always been told, how will they respond to our message, these people whom we are trying to convince to accept something which is contrary to what they have always been told?

c. A Subject Which Demands Our Attention

Since this question has nothing directly to do with salvation, we should discuss it only when we perceive that it affects the attitude of a potential hearer of the word. We might all wish it never mattered to any hearer; alas, the subject of origins continually raises its head, owing to the prevalence of the worship of materialism in our society. And we have no choice about opposing materialism-as-god, which is simply idolatry. When idolatry, yoked to science, is used to champion immoral behavior, we must make what effort we can to disconnect idolatry from science so that in opposing idolatry we do not malign true science. And that disconnection can only be accomplished by finding and embracing true science.

d. A Subject Which Everyman Can Investigate

Who is the author of this paper, why does this subject matter to him, and what makes him think it will matter to anyone else?

I am an “ordinary” Christian. I am not a preacher and not a scientist, nor do I pretend to be either. I find both the world of nature and the world of persuasion fascinating and wish I had the time to devote to either or both, but the demands of family, bread-winning and personal service make it impossible for me to maintain more than a passing familiarity with those disciplines. Consequently, I am only marginally equipped to deal either with the facts at hand or with an epistemological and metaphysical framework for constructing and arguing a position on those facts.

In short, I suppose I am a sort of Everyman, who wants to find the “Truth” but is acutely conscious of the limitations I bring to the task of Truth-seeking. Furthermore, I am a dispositionally conservative, Bible-believing Everyman who cheerfully admits to having an “agenda”: I do not wish to live without the comfort and hope I find in the scriptures.

What chance does Everyman have to arrive at some understanding of the subject of the age of the earth? I think, a very good chance. I am strongly convinced that most of the facts which have to be read for one to think about the subject are simple. Indeed, I suspect that any scientist would tell you that the evidence which most strongly speaks to him is evidence that anyone of average intelligence can grasp. We Everymen, our lives so full of the legitimate demands of Every Day, cannot take the time to equip ourselves to deal with the technical details of the scientific disciplines, nor with the finer points of argumentation and logic, nor with every book or article which has been written on this subject. But there are some things we can understand, and some approaches to understanding which we can practice with complete facility, and the approach taken in this paper is well within that blessed scope.

On the title page of this paper I have called myself “a reluctant OEC” (old-earth creationist). That self-appellation means two things. First, and most importantly, it means I don’t believe that this universe, or this world, or any feature of this world, or any living thing which inhabits this world would be here without the direct action of God: first upon Nothingness, to speak into existence Something; and then, repeatedly, upon that Something to compel it to produce what blind chance and material force would never have produced, would never even have been inclined to produce. Much less importantly, as an OEC, I reluctantly accept the notion that the Power required to propel matter and energy which were bent toward disorganization into the opposite direction of that bent was applied by God over a very long period of time, and involved a combination of miracle and ordinary causation. I therefore do not dispute the assertions of science about chronology, though I strongly suspect that science on the matter of chronology knows a lot less than it pretends.

I am a reluctant OEC for several reasons. First, I am genuinely uncomfortable with the facts that present themselves to me. I was raised among Bible-believers who were overwhelmingly convinced of the youth of the earth, though I hasten to add that there were exceptions, and no one ever suggested that a person’s position on the age of the earth or the interpretation of Genesis 1-2 had any bearing on salvation or fellowship. Second, I was not there when God acted. It is the glory of science to change its mind, so I am content to be a “provisional OEC.” Third, the notion of a small, young universe has an (admittedly irrational) appeal to me as being more consistent with the Bible story than the vast, old universe which seems to be the one we inhabit. Finally, I am instinctively resentful of the way institutional science today commonly speaks to the incognoscenti (such as myself): as self-worshipful in its regalia and as intolerant of honest dissent in its ex paleo pronouncements as any popery ever was.

I myself do not claim to know how old the earth is. It is my humble opinion that the evidence points toward antiquity, as I will shortly make clear with my presentation and interpretation of it. But as a “reluctant OEC” I would be genuinely happy to be proved wrong. From this uncomfortable stance, as Everyman, I invite my readers to participate in this brief examination of the creation of God.

2. BRIEFLY: SCIENCE AND THE “SCIENTIFIC” USE OF SCRIPTURE

What is the proper domain of science? What are its uses and its limitations? How, if at all, can scripture be used to elicit “scientific” facts? This section of the paper contains a little common-sense reasoning on these and related subjects.

a. What Is Science, And What Is Its Business?

Science may be defined as a quest for knowledge which uses a methodology of hypothesis, experimentation, evaluation and conclusion (“the scientific method”), in such a way that the results of any investigation are repeatable and may be described the same way by every observer (technically, every observer in the same relativistic frame of reference; but if you don’t understand that qualification don’t worry). Because of the methods it employs, science is well-equipped to read the natural revelation of God. This fact does not imply that we must embrace every conclusion of every scientist, any more than the fact that reading the verbal revelation is the job of scriptural exegesis implies that we must accept the conclusions of every professional exegete! But we ought to be willing to acknowledge that, since the scientific method is particularly fit to the investigation of nature, every part of the natural revelation is a proper subject of scientific interrogation. We might wish that scientists were more humble in their conclusions, and we should be skeptical of assertions about events which happened before any scientific recorder was present. But those reservations should not cause us to “withhold” from science the raw materials of legitimate scientific inquiry, including all of nature and the evidence as to how it arrived at its current state.

b. What Are the Limitations of Science?

In the first place, science can only deal with phenomena which are subject to the principles of cause-and-effect (at a gross level, so that quantum considerations may be set aside for most purposes; and if you don’t understand that qualification don’t worry about it, either). This limitation follows the fact that scientific findings must be repeatable: an experiment must give the same results every time; and, the results must be described the same way by every observer. A corollary of these principles is that science cannot directly investigate the miraculous, God not being subject to the laws of cause-and-effect (“You shall not put Yahweh your God to the test”). Science should also be able to tell us when it has encountered a phenomenon which it cannot investigate, because an investigation would be inherently unrepeatable, and/or because different observers would describe different results. Such phenomena are called “singularities.” No scientist would try to tell you what you would see inside a black hole, because the laws of physics do not work there. Similarly, the first (arbitrarily small) instant of the (supposed) Big Bang is sometimes referred to by scientists as “The Singularity,” and it is a recognized principle (though sometimes honored in the breach—see the recent writings of Stephen Hawking) that science cannot explain it.

In the second place, the scientific method by its nature demands a peculiar mode of expression which, in order to insure consistency of observational result, attempts to exclude any potential ambiguity. The data, conclusion and intermediate results of any scientific endeavor are specified using a rather sterile language, the paradigm of which is the mathematical formula. As a result, science limits itself to a domain of truths and a protocol for describing those truths which exclude many other very reliable ways of making accurate statements: not all truths are scientific truths. One outcome of this limitation is that if we mistake a “generically true statement” for a “scientifically true statement,” and attempt to evaluate what is “generically true” as though it were “scientifically true,” we may reach a false conclusion about the meaning and the reliability of the generic (literal, historical, allegorical or poetic) statement. This fact can have a profound effect on how we interpret scripture, as the next section indicates.

c. Are Statements in Scripture Meant to Be Taken as “Scientifically True”?

Most of us will agree that the Bible is not a “science book.” From the principle just discussed, we don’t expect every literal statement in scripture to be “scientifically true.” This negative expectation is simple common sense. “The sun rises in the east” is a “literally true” statement which is not “scientifically true.” Such statements are sometimes said to be “observer-true”; that is, they are true from the perspective of the observer who makes them or the narrator who is telling the story from one observer’s perspective, but they would not be uniformly true for all observers (recall that scientific statements are true for all observers in the same relativistic frame of reference). Those of us who believe in inspired scripture ask only that the same standards be used to evaluate statements in scripture which are used to evaluate literal statements that we make all the time.

Thus, I am deeply troubled to see so many apologists, in a commendable effort to validate the reliability of the Bible, try to use all manner of statements—even those found in obvious poetical contexts like the book of Job—as “scientific facts” which “prove the inspiration of scripture.” I am not saying there are no “scientific facts” in scripture; however, in general this practice is a very bad idea! When we insist that skeptics evaluate some statements as scientific, we allow them to insist that all literal statements be so evaluated; we cannot “cherry-pick” the ones which suit our case. And, while we might be able to find literal statements in scripture which are also scientifically true, I do not believe that there are any literal statements in the Bible which were intended to be evaluated as scientific statements.

What has this misguided approach accomplished? Insisting that statements in scripture which we select must be evaluated scientifically, we are forced toward the position that essentially all literal statements, including the Genesis description of creation, must be evaluated scientifically. In the time of Galileo, this approach produced a monumental disaster for the defenders of Biblical inspiration, a disaster from which, in the minds even of most theistic scientists, the case for scriptural reliability has never recovered. The Bible states in multiple texts that it is the sun which moves around the earth, and not vice-versa. Critics of scriptural inspiration seize upon statements such as this one and upon foolish arguments made by well-meaning “religious authorities” in Galileo’s day (and ours) and gleefully conclude that whoever wrote the Bible didn’t know anything about the nature of the physical universe. They are going through a door which we who believe in the inspiration of scripture opened for them, by our insistence that all literal statements in the Bible must be read “scientifically.”

Therefore, I don’t think we should regard even literal statements in scripture as expressions of “scientific truth.” To say that literal statements in scripture are not meant as scientific statements is not at all to suggest that they are untrue. It is merely to recognize that science does not have a monopoly on truth. There are statements in the scripture which are “literally” true but not “scientifically” true, the statement that the sun stood still being one, and in my opinion many statements contained within the Genesis account of the creation being others. The record of interpretations which put a “scientific” cast on ordinary or even poetic statements in scripture is a very, very dismal one (the “historical sciences,” which handle evidence differently, are another matter).

d. Can Scripture Be Used to Determine the Age of the Earth?

If we insist upon what I would call a “literal-scientific” reading of Genesis, that reading, when it is performed with the precision that “scientific” interpretation requires, tells us that, God having created heavens and earth, some period elapsed—that is, some physical processes operated—during which light had not been made available. Scientifically, there can be no “evening”—end of day—until a half-day of light has passed. Scientifically, the first evening cannot begin until there is light and the light is separated from the darkness. The period between the creation of heavens and earth and the moment the separation of light from darkness “starts the clock” on the first 24 hours of “evening and morning” might have been a few of our moments, it might have been billions of our years, or it might have taken place completely outside of our reckoning of time. The passage of “literal 24-hour days” depends on the presence of light and darkness. Any physical processes operating before the division of light from darkness are not on “earth-time,” they are on “God-time,” and most of us would agree that the passage of years, millions of years or billions of years are as insignificant to God as the passage of nanoseconds are to us. No one can prove from the Bible that the “formless and void” globe did not undergo eons of changes produced by the same natural forces at work today. The more “scientifically” one insists on interpreting the creation story, the more strongly one is committed to chronological indeterminancy for the “formless and void” earth.

By the same token, genealogies found in various texts display discrepancies among them which reveal gaps in them, and we have no way of knowing how many gaps there are or how long they were. Using the Bible to speculate about the age of the earth may be an entertaining exercise, but it is pure speculation, and it is both doctrinally perilous and divisive to use such speculations as dogma.

Through the years, many very staunch proponents of the plenary inspiration of scripture have taken the position that no finding of science regarding the age of the earth can contradict the Bible record, because the Bible does not give us any means of determining the age of the earth.

Think about that position for a moment.

Now think about this development: recently, I have read statements by advocates of a young earth claiming that they agree with that position in principle, but that they can use the scriptures, even allowing the diurnal and genealogical gaps, to set an upper bound on the age of the earth. Their upper bound is usually about 10,000 years.

Now, any Everyman who is willing to apply his reason to the issue can see that these two positions cannot be harmonized. If no finding of science about the age of the earth can contradict what scripture says, because scripture does not state how old the earth might be, then it is clearly impossible to put an upper limit of 10,000 years, ten million years or ten trillion years on the age of the earth!

I have also seen claims by some young-earth advocates that the earth is now “between 6,000 and 10,000 years old,” and that Jesus and His apostles took an analogous position on the age of the earth in the first century. These people assert that statements in scripture may be read with sufficient precision so that we know that the age of the earth today is between 6,000 and 10,000 years, and with sufficient clarity that anyone who disagrees with their conclusions can be concluded to have rejected the plain teaching of scripture and to have forfeited the right to call himself a Bible-believer.

I cannot find any statement by Jesus or any inspired writer on the age of the earth, but I do not have any trouble finding a most curious aspect to this argument. The “precision” which they claim for scriptural statements used to reveal Jesus’ position on the age of the earth, during the New Testament era, would have made the earth either 4,000 or 8,000 years old. That’s a one-hundred-percent difference! Either the Holy Spirit intended to tell us the age of the earth, or He did not. If the Holy Spirit did not intend to tell us the age of the earth, then no conviction that anyone holds is in contradiction to the silence left us by the Spirit, and any attempt to introduce such a dogmatic position is both divisive and heretical. If the Holy Spirit did intend to tell us the age of the earth, and in a manner which is clear enough to be cast as dogma, are we clearly required to believe that Jesus taught that the earth was 4,000 years old, or that it was 8,000 years old?

I hope that one result of this paper will be to lower the rhetorical barriers among those who take various positions on this matter. That result may require that all of us be willing to suspend, temporarily, some of our certainty about what we have always believed, and be a little more willing to look at contrary evidence. And that is both a scientific and a scriptural attitude!

3. “READING” THE NATURAL REVELATION

Paul tells us: “Since (from, as a result of) the creation of the world His divine attributes have been clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; so that they (Gentile sinners) are without excuse.” What can we know about “reading” the natural revelation by the proper use of science?

a. What Can Be Learned About the Natural Revelation?

There are significant lessons to be learned from the natural revelation. Paul states: “What may be known about God is evident to them (the Gentiles) …” While the primary purpose of nature may not be the revelation of God, the primary effect of nature should be the glorification of God. Therefore, Paul tells us that God holds people responsible for reading “His eternal power and divinity” in nature. It is axiomatic that in order to learn from the natural revelation, we must be able to learn about the natural revelation. For if we do not know what is true about the natural revelation, how can the natural revelation glorify God?

Furthermore, Paul tells us that we must be able to learn some things about the natural revelation independent of the verbal revelation. We know this fact because the Gentiles, who had no verbal revelation from God, were held responsible by God for properly reading the natural revelation, and because the Psalmist proclaims, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

We must, of course, be wary. People who are determined to defy the Greater Will are blind to the Greater Purpose even in the clearest evidence; they will distort facts, will get erroneous results, and will insist that we accept as truth conclusions which come only from their determination to exalt their will over God’s will. Again we have a burden: we must separate fact from interpretation. It requires effort, and we have to take up the burden knowing that examination of the facts may force a change to some of our cherished conclusions. But, unless we are content to stand silent while the wicked offspring of the modern “whore of Babylon” shred the moral fabric of our society, we are going to have to prepare ourselves, and we are going to have to make a stand. The only safe place to stand is on the facts as they are, not as we wish them to be.

b. Interpreting the Evidence—Approaches to Reading the Natural Revelation

When in this paper I refer to “reading” the natural revelation, I am talking about interpreting the evidence. The facts are the evidence; our interpretation of them is how we read them. There is a difference between fact and interpretation, a difference that we all wish scientists would be more careful to observe. I think the evidence I will present in section six of this paper leads naturally to an interpretation of age, but of course other “readings” are possible, including readings which reach the conclusion that the earth is young, not old. The question we all have to consider is: which reading makes more sense? This essay is an attempt to get people who are, for reasons I can well understand, comfortable with thinking of the earth as relatively young to re-examine the facts. Some readers may then arrive at a conclusion different from mine.

Everyone reads the natural revelation with an “interpretive approach,” a set of assumptions and pre-formulated conclusions which helps make sense of the facts. I can think of only three possible interpretive approaches for considering the evidence which will be presented in section six. A brief discussion of these three possible approaches follows.

(1) The innocent approach

One who takes the innocent approach holds that the natural revelation can and should be read just exactly as it presents itself. In cases where miracles have occurred, those who are willing to accept God’s existence would be able to recognize the product of a miracle, albeit with some careful investigation perhaps, because either something which nature produces would be missing or something which nature does not produce would be present. According to the innocent approach, if we see a natural process which is taking place today produce an object with certain features, we are entitled to assume that all of the same kinds of objects which show us the same features, which we did not see produced, came from that same natural process.

Incidentally, the innocent approach is one which both Young-Earth Creationists (YECs) and Old-Earth Creationists (OECs) claim to accept. Published YECs assert that if we interpret the evidence innocently, without bias towards either an ancient or a young earth, the evidence alone will convince us that the earth is relatively young: on the order of 10,000 years or less.

The basis of the innocent approach is the assumption that the natural revelation can be accurately read, even without help from the verbal revelation, as a plain description from the Creator about the origin of natural items. The indispensable core premise of the innocent approach is this: any appearance of natural production in a miraculous artifact will be only that appearance which is absolutely required in instantaneous creation of such a fully mature and functioning item, and no more.

Thus…

· We can observe sedimentation and lithification producing a layer of sandstone, so if we see a rock face with sandstone layers, we can conclude that the layers of sandstone in the rock face were produced by sedimentation and lithification.

· We can measure the time required for an amount of lava of a given mass and composition to cool to rock, so if we see a single flow of hardened lava rock of a known mass, we can calculate the amount of time after deposition that it took the lava to harden.

· We can see that the growth of a tree (for most types of trees) produces one ring per year, so we can conclude that a tree of a type known to display annual rings which has two thousand rings is two thousand years old.

· The original trees in the garden of Eden would have looked from the outside like old trees, because the creation of mature, functioning trees unavoidably produces trees which are large enough that they appear to have lived many decades; however, the original trees would not have had woody knots, because these knots, which are preserved at a site in the wood when limbs break off at that site, are absolutely unnecessary to instantaneous miraculous production of a mature tree.

· Five minutes after their creation, Adam and Eve would have looked several decades old, because creation of mature people unavoidably produces people who are large enough that they have lived at least two decades; however, neither would have had a navel, because a navel is an artifact of natural birth which is absolutely unnecessary for instantaneous creation of a mature human.

· The wine (alcoholic or not) produced by Jesus in Cana would have tasted like it was several years old, because “good wine” unavoidably has a taste which comes naturally only after years of storage; however, the wine jars would not have borne the seal of a local vintner, because such a seal is absolutely unnecessary for instantaneous transformation of grape juice into mature wine.

Please do not misunderstand one point here: I am not saying that one who takes the innocent approach to the reading of the natural revelation is inevitably committed to regarding all objects that we observe today, or the present state of all objects that we observe today, as the results of natural processes. In other words, this approach is not inherently uniformitarian. In principle, it is possible that there are “creation-objects” lying around. In fact, Robert V. Gentry is a researcher who has become known for contending that he has found “creation rocks.” But Gentry makes these assertions precisely because he claims to find phenomena in the rocks which would be missing from rocks produced by natural processes—in other words, he claims that these rocks contain contrarian indications of rapid generation. The innocent approach simply says that objects which look like they have been produced by (slow or fast) natural processes in fact have been produced by natural processes, and objects which have not been produced by natural processes will look different from those which have.

(2) The cynical approach

One who takes the cynical approach holds that nature contains abundant data “planted” by God during the creation with the intention of misleading those disinclined to believe in Him. Considering what is stated in scripture about creation, according to this view, we must believe that scientific investigation of natural phenomena will produce only misinformation. God has deceived scientists, and He continues to deceive them, and no findings of science about nature are reliable.

Thus…

· The trees in the Garden of Eden would have had growth rings, woody knots, and the “remains” of insects trapped in tree sap inside the wood, falsely indicating that these remains had been inside the wood for scores or hundreds of years.

· Adam and Eve would have had navels, their bodies would have borne scars from apparent childhood accidents, and they would have had false memories of years of growing up.

· Not only would the wine jars in Cana have had the seal of a local vintner, Jesus’ miracle would have produced a sales receipt to trick observers into believing that the wine had been recently purchased.

I am not aware of any YECs active in publication of their views today who openly take the cynical approach. Any YEC who did so must also insist that there is no evidence worth considering for a young earth, since the purpose of the appearance of age is to deceive, and the deception would fail if there were significant evidence for recent creation.

Of course, the cynical approach holds nature not to be a revelation at all, but rather a deception. I cannot see any way to reconcile it with Paul’s statements in Romans, and with the Psalmist’s song that the heavens tell about the glory of God. If the natural revelation cannot be read accurately, because God made it for the express purpose of deception, then God’s power and divinity are not evident in the natural revelation, and the heavens do not declare God’s glory.

(3) The agnostic approach

The agnostic approach is “agnostic” about the testimony of nature. This approach rejects the proposition that God created nature with deceitful intent. However, this approach says, we cannot determine anything about the provenance of any natural feature by observation, casual or scientific. A feature may have developed from eons of wind-and-water erosion, it may have been created exactly as we see it, or it may have been created with some appearance of shaping by natural forces and then modified by further natural influence; we cannot tell. Thus, any deception which results from scientific study of the natural revelation results not from the actions of God but from the belief of the investigator that he or she can determine the origins of a natural item by scientific investigation. According to the agnostic approach, truly scientific investigation of the natural world will not (as the cynical approach holds) yield misinformation, but it will not yield information either.

Thus…

· Though we see layers of sandstone being formed today by sedimentation and lithification, we cannot conclude that any multi-layered sandstone formation was so produced; it may have been created just as we see it.

· Though we see lava flows produce volcanic rock after many years of hardening, we cannot conclude that volcanic rock which we did not actually see produced was formed by a lava flow which cooled over many years; it may have been created just so.

· Even though tree rings are generated by annual growth, trees in the Garden of Eden would have been created with tree rings indicating decades of growth, and possibly with woody knots, so that the origin of the trees could not be specified.

· Though a navel is produced by birth, Adam and Even would have had navels, so that their origins could not be known.

· Scientific analysis of the wine at Cana would have indicated that the grapes which produced the juice came from a certain field, giving us no means of determining that it had in fact been generated directly from water.

The agnostic approach appeals strongly to me, and I think it is the approach that most Bible-believers want to use. It seems to provide a refuge from the results of “arrogant” scientific investigation of nature—which in our experience rarely yields findings with which we are comfortable—without our having to resort to attributing fakery to God.

I know of no publishing YEC who admits to espousing the agnostic approach, but all of them practice it in fact. If scientific investigation indicates that some item is millions of years old, the YECs will of course reject that conclusion on the grounds that “creation involves apparent age.” This “apparent age” assertion is just another way of stating: “we cannot determine anything about the provenance of any natural feature by observation, casual or scientific.” To assert that an item must at the instant of divine creation bear the marks of significant age—not just the unavoidable marks of significant age, but enough marks of significant age that one cannot determine that the item is a created and not a natural object—is to say that any attempt to determine the origin of any material object is vain. If the innocent approach to study of the natural revelation is true, then the trees in the Garden of Eden were created without woody knots or growth rings, these being absolutely unnecessary to creation of mature trees, and scientific investigation would indicate (though not necessarily prove) that a miracle had probably occurred by coring a tree in which we would expect to find knots and rings and not finding any. But if the agnostic approach is true, no scientific inquiry would find anything except the apparent results of natural processes, even though no natural processes were used in making the tree.

For all its attractiveness to me, however, the agnostic approach troubles me for two reasons.

First, I cannot see how to square it with what Paul states about holding those who possessed no verbal revelation responsible for correct reading of the natural revelation. All YECs whose works I know admit that the motivation for their young-earth ideas is their reading of the verbal revelation; in fact the well-known YEC author Kurt Wise has stated that no one has ever reached the conclusion that the earth is young by studying nature! But Paul says that, apart from the verbal revelation, the creation testifies to God’s power. The psalmist says that the cosmos glorifies its Creator and tells us that it is His work. How can either of these statements be true if every object in the creation looks, to investigation, exactly like an object that was produced by natural processes? If we cannot study a natural object to decide what natural process produced it, we also cannot study God’s creation for evidence that it was not produced by natural processes. The agnostic view says that no matter how hard we look at nature, we will not see signs of a Creator, for all created objects look just like natural objects. I stated earlier that those who are inclined to belief in God ought to be able to detect the results of a miracle, because either something that natural processes produce will be absent, or something that natural processes do not produce will be present. In contradistinction, the agnostic approach holds that the only way one would know that a miracle had occurred was is to see it happen, because the result of a miracle is going to look just like an object which was generated by a natural process. But if you thought you had seen a miracle, yet the object at hand upon examination bore all the marks of natural production—including unnecessary indications of a history which never happened—how would you know that you had not been the victim of a delusion? And how can the heavens, which no mortal saw being produced, declare the glory of God?

This point also bears upon the oft-expressed view that we must depend on the verbal revelation of God to tell us what we are allowed to conclude about the natural revelation of God. In this view, we are not allowed to conclude that nature is very old because, according to those who hold this view, the only acceptable interpretation of the verbal revelation is that nature is relatively young. But this view seems to me to be in direct contradiction to Paul and to the Psalmist, who tell us that, in the absence of the verbal revelation, we are responsible for seeing the creative power of God in the nature He has produced.

Second, I am suspicious about the distinction I myself have made between the cynical approach to the investigation of the natural revelation and the agnostic approach; is there really a difference? If God made created objects look unnecessarily like natural objects—if He created a tree not only ten feet around and a hundred feet tall, but also with rings—does He not know that He will deceive even the most pious investigator? Certainly, if the investigator knows that he is not supposed to regard any feature of an apparently natural object as natural, if he knows that, “we cannot determine anything about the provenance of any natural feature by observation, casual or scientific,” then he is protected from drawing a false conclusion. But that stipulation would require that the honest investigator enter his inquiry upon the natural revelation knowing a priori that the only reliable approach to science is the agnostic approach. And how did he obtain that knowledge? Not from the natural revelation itself! Where in the verbal revelation is this guidance to be obtained? Paul seems to say exactly the opposite! Apparently there is some other revelation, which I have missed, in which God has said: “You cannot determine anything about the provenance of any natural feature by observation, casual or scientific.”

The facts presented in section six of this paper will make my misgivings clearer. If an agnostic reading of nature is found to be incredible—i.e., if the facts strongly indicate that God’s creation is not just “unreadable” but is actually “deceptive”—then the agnostic position becomes untenable, and one must be a cynical YEC if one is to be a YEC at all.

c. But What Would Be “Deceptive”?

Atheists and agnostics sometimes charge that the God worshipped by Christians and Jews would be, if He existed, a “cosmic bully” who compels obedience to moral commands only because He is powerful enough to do so. To the contrary, the Christian religion holds that God is deserving of obedience precisely because He is Himself the paradigm of moral holiness; He demands of humans no more than He practices. With respect to the specific requirement that humans not deceive one another, God secures His right to command truth because He is truthful; He will not deceive a moral agent unless that moral agent has already committed his allegiance to falsehood.

If the Author of creation is God, if the purpose of creation is to glorify God, and if people who have never read a word of scripture are held to certain standards of moral behavior purely on the basis of what they can see of God in creation, then the word of God as we read it in creation must not deceive. If the earth and the universe are very young, we must find that God has left in the natural revelation no evidence which an honest and pious investigator would interpret as conclusive proof of antiquity. For if he had done so, an investigator who was intuitively or emotionally convinced of the existence of God, who genuinely and humbly sought truth from God’s creation, would be deceived into thinking that God had brought about the present state of that creation through processes of long duration. God Himself would be responsible for convincing the honest and pious investigator of something which was not true, and the natural revelation would lead one to conclude that, morally, God is a deceiver. Yet Paul states that the creation testifies not only to God’s power but also to His deity. This latter testimony is encapsulated in the statement from scripture, “Be holy, for I am holy.” If the creation does not testify to God’s holiness, then Paul is incorrect in stating that a person who has never read the verbal revelation will see God’s deity in the things which are made.

But what would be deceptive?

I have asserted that miraculous generation of a functioning object of nature inescapably involves a “false appearance of age,” because natural objects do not, in the ordinary course of events, attain mature functionality without the passage of time. So functional maturity in a created object cannot in itself be labeled deceptive. We know that whatever functioning objects God miraculously generated in the beginning were produced without a history of development. But if a miracle produces functional maturity without developmental history, a miraculously produced object must not contain unnecessary indications of developmental history. Indications of history which are not absolutely necessary to the functionality of an object which did not have a developmental history would be deceptive. In other words, if God’s miraculous action produced a mature, functioning object more-or-less instantaneously, that object did not have a developmental history. The object should therefore not contain indications of a developmental history which did not actually happen, because such indications would be deceptive—that is, such indications of a developmental history which did not happen would prevent a person who was inclined to believe in God from finding that the product of a miracle lacked some characteristic which is always found in a non-miraculous object: viz., evidence of a historical process of development.

When I discuss the innocent approach to the evaluation of nature, I am discussing an approach which interprets signs of developmental history as actually having been produced by developmental history, and not by a more-or-less-instantaneous miracle. When I discuss the cynical approach to the evaluation of nature, I am discussing an approach which interprets signs of developmental history as actually having been produced by a more-or-less-instantaneous miracle, and not by any development.

An honest and pious investigator of nature who is not familiar with scripture is going to interpret signs of developmental history in a natural object as the genuine products of such a history, not the products of an instantaneous miracle (this statement is not an abstract supposition; theistic scientists who study nature do interpret signs of developmental history as the genuine products of development, which is why most theistic scientists are old-earth creationists). It is axiomatic that God can produce a mature, functioning object without avoidable indications of a history which never happened. God must know what signs of such history are unavoidable and what signs are avoidable—that is, what signs would convince an honest and pious investigator that the object had been produced by a historical process which never happened; therefore, God must be capable of producing a mature, functioning object miraculously without infusing that object with signs of a history which never happened. If God put false signs of developmental history into created objects, then God knowingly deceived the honest and pious investigator, and God cannot hold that investigator responsible for reading from creation his responsibility to be truthful, for what the investigator has learned from creation is that God is a knowing and willful deceiver.

Some Bible-believers, however, make a different appeal. “When we look at a starry sky, or a field of flowers, or watch a baby being born,” they will say, “it is obvious that there must be a Creator behind those things. No other indication of divine production is needed. So if God saw fit to include some false signs of developmental history, those signs don’t look to me like deception at all. God as Creator has a perfect right to put any characteristics He wants into created objects.”

Of course, humans cannot limit God’s right to put any characteristics He wants into created objects. And there is some validity to this instinctive and emotional sense of awe—indeed, some atheists like the late Carl Sagan, who gained fame for proclaiming that “the cosmos is all there is, all there ever was and all there ever will be,” testified to the same feeling, though obviously with a different outcome.

But when these Bible-believers claim to see the results of an instantaneous miracle in natural objects which bear the marks of developmental history, they are saying that nature reveals the glory of God only in a wholly non-rational, “better felt than told” manner which they so often scorn when similar appeals are made in other contexts. To the best of my knowledge, every object we see in nature—every star, every flower, every newborn baby—whether it originated naturally or miraculously, reached its present state by entirely natural means. And every investigator is going to find that evidence of natural history; indeed, if either the cynical or the agnostic approach to reading the natural revelation is true, every honest investigator is going to report that natural history is all he finds.

In fact, the ironic characteristic of these three approaches is that the innocent approach, which seems to be so vulnerable to exploitation by “atheistic science,” and which many young-earth believers would condemn as un-Biblical, is the only one of the three approaches which can rationally find evidence of God in creation; the cynical and agnostic approaches will lead to the conclusion that everything we see developed by entirely natural processes!

Furthermore, while humans—being God’s creatures—cannot “limit” His prerogatives, God Himself can, and God Himself has. He has based His requirements for human conduct on limitations He puts on Himself: “Be holy, for I am holy.” God’s moral holiness precludes His practicing deception about the provision of any object in nature: if it bears no marks of natural development, then it was created, but if it contains the history of a developmental process, then it was produced by that developmental process and not by instantaneous generation. Indeed, the experience of theistic and even agnostic scientists in our time is producing more and more evidence of natural phenomena which, to the best of our ability to determine, cannot have been generated by a natural developmental process. The heavens do tell Everyman the glory of God, but not by deceiving us about the process which produced them.

4. HAVE THERE BEEN ANY REAL OECs?

Is it possible to be an honest old-earth creationist, believing that the Bible is the fully inspired Word of God, that the events described in the scriptures actually took place, and yet that the earth is very old?

Many Jewish and Christian writers around the time of Christ thought that creation took some period other than 144 literal consecutive hours. Josephus said he had a theory about the “days” of creation, but he never got round to explaining it. Philo, another first-century Jewish writer, believed that all the “days” of creation happened simultaneously. Both Justin Martyr and Irenaeus believed that each creation day was 1,000 years long. Origen held that we are still living in God’s seventh day. Augustine opined that the days were not literal days at all, but “spiritual periods” of activity by God.

Closer to our era, there have been many scientists, intellectuals and churchmen who were both devout creationists and believers in an ancient earth. Indeed, OECs dominated the scientific and intellectual community of the West for the first three-quarters of the 19^th century, and dominated the world community of creationists during the first 65 years of the 20^th century. Among the best-known figures:

· William Buckland, head of the geology department at Oxford in the early 1800s, was a believer in special creation and the literal inspiration of the Bible who did much to convince contemporary scientists of the great age of the earth.

· Adam Sedgwick was Buckland’s counterpart at Cambridge, also a believer in plenary inspiration of the scriptures, and also an old-earth evangelist.

· Baron Cuvier was a French geologist, OEC, and vigorous opponent of Darwin’s teaching.

· Hugh Miller, a contemporary of Darwin, was a the foremost geologist of his time, a religious writer who tirelessly proclaimed the full inspiration of scripture, and an OEC who wrote such famous books as Testimony of the Rocks and Footprints of the Creator.

· Edward Hitchcock was president of Amherst College during the middle of the 19^th century, a popular religious writer, a believer in the literal accuracy of the Bible and an OEC.

· Douglas Dewar, a believer in inspired scripture and OEC, was one of the foremost biologists of the early 20^th century.

· L. Merson Davies was a geologist of the middle 20^th century, a leader of the Evolution Protest Movement in Europe, a believer in the inspiration of scripture and an OEC.

· Arthur C. Custance was a 20^th century anthropologist, engineer, inventor, Hebrew/Greek scholar and author of numerous books and papers on biblical topics who remained both an OEC and a believer in inspired scripture all his adult life.

· Daniel E. Wonderly is a contemporary practicing geologist, OEC and believer in the inspiration of scripture, whose writings include God’s Time-Records in Ancient Sediments.

I am not saying that all these men would read the first two chapters of Genesis the way we are accustomed to reading them today; most of them would not. But had you accused any of them of being an unbeliever or a “theistic evolutionist,” or had you questioned the commitment of any of them to creation and to the Creator, you would have received an indignant and vigorous denial. They were all creationists and “religious conservatives” who believed the earth to be very old. In fact, in the years surrounding World War II most Europeans who would have classified themselves as creationists, whom we would have called “religious conservatives,” believed in an ancient earth. The same was true, to a lesser extent, in the US. Old-earth creationism had, by the second half of the 20^th century, been the orthodoxy among most religious conservatives in Europe and the US for most of 150 years. Young-earth creationism as a “scientific” movement is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the post-war US which started with the 1961 publication of Whitcomb and Morris’s book The Genesis Flood.

My point is not that anyone ought to believe the earth is ancient just because some creationist scientists do. My point is that “old-earth creationism” is not a self-contradictory phrase. Not all beliefs in an ancient earth are consistent with creationism, but one can believe in an inspired Bible, and accept all the truths of Christianity, and still accept that the evidence points to an ancient earth.

5. PRELUDE TO CONSIDERATION OF THE TESTIMONY

a. Claims and Disclaimers

Some OECs assert that there are no evidences from natural revelation which may reasonably be interpreted to point toward a young earth. I would not make such an assertion. While I do not know of any fact in which YECs find support for a young earth for which OECs do not also have an explanation, there are advanced from time to time arguments for a young earth which seem to me, at least at the moment, plausible. What I have noticed, however, is that over time most of these arguments weaken, as further investigation uncovers facts which better fit an old-earth model. Similarly, there have certainly been spectacularly errant findings using radioisotopic chronology. But most or all of those blunders have been explicable in terms of the techniques of radioisotopic chronology, and are subsequently corrected to give very consistent results.

b. Two Questions

There are two questions which I will ask with each set of facts presented in this section.

(1) If we wish to interpret the evidence as consistent with belief that the earth is less than about 10,000 years old, which approach to interpretation can we use: innocent, agnostic or cynical?

(2) Can the phenomenon described be explained as a result of the great deluge described in Genesis, as the most popular YEC interpretations will hold?

c. Either-Or

James Hutton was an Englishman whose life spanned the last three-quarters of the 18^th century. He grew up believing the earth to be about 6,000 years old. But in his travels as a naturalist he encountered a feature of the English countryside called Hadrian’s Wall, completed by the Roman emperor Hadrian in 126 AD. Hutton noticed that the wall, known to be 1700 years old, displayed signs of weathering but still looked, overall, pretty much the way it must have looked when it was built. If this wall was more than one-fourth the age of the earth, but the stones in the wall were so little changed by elements and the passage of time, then how, Hutton asked himself, could one believe that the drastic weathering and erosion which was obvious on the rocks of the earth’s surface had required a mere 6,000 years? Though he remained a creationist all his life, Hutton’s uniformitarian views became the basis of modern geology, because it seemed clear to reasonable people that much more than a few thousand years must be necessary to produce the geological features they could observe.

My point is not to argue uniformitarianism. Certainly, there have been catastrophic events in natural history, including the flood described in Genesis, which must have done some of the wearing of the rocks. But let’s apply Hutton’s insight. If the topography we see today is less than 10,000 years old, natural forces, including periodic catastrophes, cannot have done much more than fine-tune what was already in place. God must have shaped the mountains, seacoasts, riverbeds, canyons, deltas, and all the rocks of the earth’s crust with His own hands, to look much the way they look today. There simply isn’t enough time for natural forces to have done a lot to the original shapes. In other words, many if not most of the rocks which we see must be “creation-rocks.” And if so, our question is this: did God give the creation-rocks characteristics that would deceive an honest and pious person about their origin? Is there any feature of those rocks which could reasonably be interpreted as an indication that they are the direct products of the miraculous creation of God? Can we study nature with the innocent approach, or even the agnostic approach, or will we be forced to concede that only the cynical approach will give us an “accurate” view of God’s handiwork?

6. THE TESTIMONY OF THE NATURAL REVELATION

This section of the essay will constitute a presentation of a few of the more straightforward evidences for an ancient earth. I am not going to explain these processes in detail, nor am I going to cite sources which describe them. There are numerous texts by scientists who are devout creationists which discuss these evidences in more detail and cite authoritative publications which can confirm the facts presented.

a. The Sedimentary Rocks

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Sedimentary rocks are produced when materials dissolved or suspended in a transport medium (usually water) settle out and form a layer of precipitate. Any moisture in the sediments escapes (desiccation). During or after desiccation chemical reactions among the particles of sediment cement them into rock (lithification). The longer the period of sedimentation, the thicker a layer of rock will be and the longer the required period of lithification. Sedimentary rock formation can be observed today, and it produces rocks just like the ones we see layered in places like the Grand Canyon.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth

The average thickness of sediments on the North American continent is about a mile, though in the Appalachian Mountains it is about five miles. Sedimentary rocks are commonly layered, displaying anywhere from a few to thousands of discrete layers. While discrete layers of homogenous composition can sometimes form very quickly, for multiple layers of heterogeneous origin, composition and color to form, a period of sedimentation must occur, then the transport medium (wind or water) must be removed. If the layers being formed are of significant thickness, lithification must take place. After all of this, another layer of sediment with a different source and composition must be laid on top of the first. Lithification is a chemical process which can rarely be fast, but usually proceeds at a relatively slow rate, with no known method of making it go faster. From observed rates of sedimentation and lithification it is calculated that, even allowing for periodic catastrophes, it must have taken millions of years to form the sedimentary rocks on the North American continent. For example, the Redwall Limestone found in the Grand Staircase of the American Southwest is 700 feet thick; the known rate of lithification of limestone would require 1.6 million years for that layer alone, after deposition was finished. Furthermore, the Redwall formation had several thousand feet of sedimentary rock laid on top of it after it hardened. There are canyons such as the Grand Canyon cut through these sedimentary rocks. So the layers of rocks must have formed first, and then wind and water cut the canyons. The Grand Canyon is a mile deep. Even assuming numerous catastrophes, it must have taken hundreds of thousands of years for the Grand Canyon to be cut after the sedimentary rock had formed.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

How could a single flood event as described in the Bible—first the accumulation of diluvial waters followed by the subsidence of those waters—produce multiple discrete layers of sedimentary rocks of different compositions and origins, such as are commonly observed in the crust of the earth? Without lithification, either the old layer is removed and re-deposited downstream/downwind, or the new layer just mixes with the one already there (some sediments display signs of this mixing, showing that the layer in place did not harden before the next layer arrived). How can the great deluge, in the span of about one year, have deposited a layer of sediment, retreated while the sediment hardened, returned to deposit another layer of sediment atop the first, retreated again while that layer hardened, and so through more than nine layers of rock, and then poured retreating floodwaters through the resulting rock to cut a canyon a mile deep? Furthermore, in the Grand Staircase through which the Grand Canyon is cut, there is a layer of wind-deposited sediment between two layers of water-deposited sediment. How could the flood described in Genesis have accomplished the deposition of several hundred feet of wind-blown sediments between two thick layers of water-borne sediments? If the sedimentary layers were not lithified before the Canyon was cut, how is it that the steep canyon walls, which in some places are actually undercut, did not collapse? Finally, how could a river have cut through a mile of rock within a few thousand years? Some of the layers of rock are relatively soft and might be eroded quickly, but other layers are nearly as hard as the schist through which the river is currently cutting. More water might cut the canyon broader in a hurry, but more water cannot make it quickly deeper through these hard layers of rock—the Colorado River is deepening the Grand Canyon today as fast as any amount of water might do. If the sedimentary rocks and the canyons cut through them did not result from the natural forces that we see forming them today, then they are a sheer miracle performed by God.

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

Not the innocent approach, which forces us to conclude that the sedimentary rocks were deposited and eroded over millions of years. We can study today the forces which produce these kinds of effects, and the kinds of rocks we see being produced by sedimentation look—except for the effects of eons of weathering—much like the rocks we see on and below the surface of the earth. Since the creation of the surface of the earth would not unavoidably involve the creation of discrete layers of sedimentary rock, the innocent approach would lead us to believe that these sedimentary rocks are not creation-rocks.

Using the cynical approach, we can hold that God did, indeed, create these rocks much as we see them, and there is no way to tell that a miracle produced them. They bear all the marks of natural formation, but that appearance is what the cynical approach would lead us to expect. God has successfully deceived unbelievers into taking the appearance of these rocks for the result of millions of years of deposition and weathering.

Can we take the agnostic approach? Would it be deceptive of God to create many discrete, very thick layers of rock which appear to be products of the process of sedimentation we see today, which appear to have been cut by the process of erosion we can observe today? Perhaps not, but sedimentation is not the only feature of these rocks for which we have to account. The sedimentary rock is rich in fossils, which appear to be the remains of once-living creatures. Drs. Morris and Parker, YEC authors, estimate that the Karroo fossil beds in Africa contain the fossilized remains of billions of vertebrates, evidently once alive. If these rocks are creation-rocks, are the fossils “creation-fossils”? If so, they were never living animals at all: God placed into them a history of life and death which never actually happened. And the presence of such fossils makes the agnostic approach difficult to take, to say the least!

b. River-Mouth Sedimentary Deposits

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Sedimentary deposits at the mouths of major rivers are much thicker than the average one mile. Deposits at the mouth of the Mississippi River are about seven miles thick, and are being measurably incremented by the river on a continual basis.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

A half-million years of deposition at the observed rate (roughly an inch a year) are needed to account for these sediments. Floods cannot shorten that time much without creating other problems (next section).

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

The earth’s crust in places where these great depths of sediment is laid is sinking, under the weight of all that debris, at the same rate as the deposition. If the deposition were faster or if all the sediments were deposited in a few years, the course of the river would be blocked. These sediments could not have been deposited as the flood waters accumulated, because the sea level, which rose during the course of the flood, would have moved the point of deposition upstream, so that no point along any river would have received a significant portion of the total deposition. The sediments could not have been deposited during the subsidence of the water, because the rivers would not have left sediments at sea level, where they are now, until near the end of the flood, long after the rain had stopped, and after the waters had gone from most of the rest of the earth. Even if one assumes that the earth’s crust miraculously collapsed to allow the deposition without changing the course of the rivers, essentially all the sediment would have had to be deposited in the last few days of drying of the flood waters. Where did all that sediment come from, most of the effects of the flood having already abated?

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

Taking the innocent approach, we conclude that the sediments around and below the mouth of major rivers cannot be the result of rapid deposition. We can observe the process of sedimentary deposition and the subsidence of the crust today, and it would follow that the same processes, augmented by a reasonable number of catastrophic events, have been underway for eons.

The cynical approach would tell us that the appearance of great age is what we should expect of a creation which was fashioned by God for the express purpose of deception.

Can we take the agnostic approach? The problem we encounter is the same as for the other sedimentary rock depositions: there are fossils. The fossil problem here includes “fossil fuels”—oil and gas which tell a story of life, death and decomposition, a story which could not have happened in a few thousand years. Again, the agnostic approach fails: if the earth is only a few thousand years old, these are creation-sediments, seeded by their Maker with the elements of deception in the form of fossil fuels.

c. Coral Reefs

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Coral polyps are small shellfish which extract calcium carbonate from seawater and use it to build shells. The shells of a colony of these creatures are attached to one another to form a brittle underwater barrier called a coral reef. Corals will not begin to build reefs on silt—there must be solid stone underneath them. Growth stops when the reef reaches the sea surface.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

Many studies have shown that coral reefs will thicken, under optimum conditions, at a maximum of about one inch per year, a rate which cannot be speeded up because the polyp must extract its construction materials from sea water and the rate at which it can carry out this task is strictly limited, and because each generation of polyps builds its shells on top of the generation just deceased. As the reef becomes larger, the lower and inner levels can only support the upper and outer levels if the older levels turn into limestone, a process which requires the slow precipitation of more calcium out of the seawater. The Eniwetok reef in the Pacific Ocean is 4,600 feet thick. It has been calculated that this reef, under ideal conditions, at observed growth rates, would have taken over 150,000 years to grow. But growth must have stopped a number of times; there are layers which contain massive quantities of fossilized pollen grains which indicate that the sea must have receded now and again, allowing land plants to thrive. The Capitan Reef in Texas is over 1,000 feet thick; its growth time, which has been calculated from various materials captured in the limestone, is about 300,000 years. But this reef has thousands of feet of sedimentary rock below it, rock which appears to have been deposited and then hardened before the reef even began to be built. And that is not all. The Capitan Reef is buried under thousands of feet of sedimentary rock, which had to be deposited and hardened after the reef was completed, the coral polyps had all died, and the sea which covered that area had receded!

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

How could the Genesis flood produce reefs such as the massive ones which we observe? No matter how much water is on the surface of the earth, the coral polyp can only work with the water immediately at hand, and the process of extracting calcium carbonate and building a shell can only go so fast, even if water covers the whole surface of the earth. Furthermore, the reef cannot get bigger until the older shells have turned into limestone—a chemical process constrained in its rapidity—because the shells are fragile and cannot support the weight of many layers of later-generation shells. Some have suggested that massive undersea volcanic activity at the time of the Genesis flood produced warmer water which may have accelerated the rate of reproduction of the polyps. Even if this suggestion, which has no scriptural basis whatsoever, were supposed to be true, it can only explain a year’s enhanced growth. If the rate of growth of the reef during the flood year were a thousand times normal, that growth rate only subtracts a thousand years from the calculated growth time of these reefs.

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

If we take the innocent approach, watching coral reefs being built today, we will be forced to admit that hundreds of thousands of years were required for the construction of these reefs.

The cynical approach leads us to conclude that God has again done a great job of fooling us; we would never suspect these reefs were created, only a few thousand years ago, pretty much as we see them.

What about the agnostic approach? We have two problems. First, we would have to conclude that some of the layers within the reefs are not the products of coral polyps, but were created in a way that makes them appear to have been constructed by these polyps. Second, again, we have fossils. The limestone portions of reefs themselves contain fossils, which—if the reefs are only a few thousand years old—must not be the remains of ancient plants and animals but must have been planted there by God. The Capitan Reef is sandwiched between two layers of fossil-containing rock, each thousands of feet thick. God must have created thousands of feet of rock which looks like sedimentary rock but is not, containing fossils, then what looks like but is not a limestone reef, complete with fossils, then thousands more feet of rock which looks like sedimentary rock but is not, again complete with fossils. How is it supposed that these facts would not deceive an honest and pious investigator?

d. Shale Varves

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Shale varves result from clay—the tiniest form of sedimentary particles—settling to the bottom of inland lakes when the water near the bottom is very still. Varve formation has been studied in progress for well over 100 years. Shale varves begin as very thin layers of clay which, if not disturbed, are covered with more layers until the water is wrung out and lithification can proceed. Each year one varve “couplet” will form, composed of a lighter-colored layer and a layer darkened by summer pollen.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

The Green River shale deposits contain between two million and ten million varve couplets, indicating that it took at least two million years to produce these sediments.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

Shale varves only form in still water, not in ocean or sea water where there are currents, because it takes still water for the tiny clay particles to precipitate out of the solution. These shale varves demonstrate no “whorls” or “ripples” which would indicate deposition by moving water. How could a single flood event produce millions of these shale layers, a layer of clay which is pollen-free consistently alternating with a layer of clay which contains fossilized pollen?

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

Shale varve formation is observable today, and seeing rocks which contain these distinctive layers of very thin alternating light and dark bands would convince us that the rocks were formed over millions of years, if we used the innocent approach.

Taking the cynical approach, we would conclude that the deception involved in what appears to be millions of years’ of annual sediment couplets has been very effective.

Will the agnostic approach explain varves? The problem, yet again, is fossils. Varves are identifiable because of the color variation produced by fossilized pollen. Furthermore, there are animal fossils found in places among the varve layers. If the varves are creation-rocks they contain embedded creation-fossil-pollen, which would be naturally read as evidence for a history of life; yet, a “literal-scientific” reading of Genesis would cause one to conclude that actually this fossil-pollen was created and embedded in the rocks before God created pollen-producing plants.

e. Evaporite Varves

(1) Description of the phenomenon

If salt water is trapped among land masses so that circulation is limited, evaporation produces a much-observed and very predictable pattern of sedimentation. As the amount of water relative to the materials dissolved in the water drops, first calcium carbonate, then calcium sulfate and finally calcium chloride will precipitate out of the water. This distinctive layering, called “evaporite varving,” can be studied today in shallow salt seas with limited circulation, like the Persian Gulf.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

The Capitan Reef, already mentioned, enclosed a large salt water lagoon now called the Delaware Basin which underwent evaporite varving many times, producing about 200,000 varves. Evaporite varves do not form annual layers—it usually takes several years to get one or two layers. The Delaware Basin formation is 1,300 feet thick. Using precipitation ratios easily determined in a laboratory, the amount of water which would have had to evaporate to produce this much sedimentation can be calculated: it is about 65,000 feet. The Mediterranean Sea floor is underlain by about 7,000 feet of evaporite varves, generation of which would require evaporation of over 60 miles of sea water!

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

Evaporite varving requires shallow, still water. How could a single flood supply 65,000 feet of water which was held still enough to allow evaporite varve formation, much less sixty miles of water to be evaporated? Did volcanic action during the flood year generate the evaporites? Volcanic action will produce chemical reactions in sea water which cause some of these same chemicals to precipitate out of the solution, but they form irregular-shaped depositions of mixed chemicals, not neat layers divided into chemical compounds in the distinctive way we see them forming today. And the Delaware Basin is underlain not by igneous rock but by fossiliferous sedimentary rock.

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

Using the innocent approach, we would conclude that the Delaware Basin formation is hundreds of thousands of years old, and is sandwiched between sedimentary rocks which are themselves hundreds of thousands of years old.

The cynical approach would prompt us to say that, again, God had left created products which are very effective in deceiving people about the age of the earth.

Can we take the agnostic approach? If, for whatever reason, God decided to create rocks which looked exactly like the sediments we can today observe forming in shallow salt waters, then He certainly could have done so, and we might conclude that we ought to hold open the possibility that those rocks are creation rocks, not rocks which were naturally formed by the evaporite process we observe today. But the Delaware Basin varves are interspersed with layers of organic materials (oil and natural gas, which are the reason this formation is so well-studied) which tell a story of life, death and fossilization, a story which is not true if God created them just as they are. Here again, the evidence forces us to the cynical approach if we wish to salvage a young-earth interpretation.

f. Metamorphic Rocks

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Metamorphic rocks were originally sedimentary rocks which had their structure changed under enormous pressures. This process can be performed experimentally in the laboratory (as in production of artificial diamonds), and the resulting artifacts look much like the rocks seen occurring naturally on the earth. Calculations show, for example, that the transformation of limestone to marble requires sustained pressure of 30 tons per square inch and temperatures of 600 degrees C.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

Science knows of no way conditions necessary for metamorphic rock production can occur naturally on earth except by burial under several miles of rock. Metamorphic rocks are found on the surface of the earth, a condition which requires deposition of the original sediments, lithification, burial, transformation into metamorphic rock by heat and pressure, and finally erosion or tectonic movement to remove the overlaying rock and bring the metamorphosed rock to the surface. Obviously, this process would require a lot of time; it is difficult to specify how much with any confidence.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

I am not aware of any attempt to explain metamorphic rock formation by the great flood. I cannot think of any way that the flood waters, which covered the earth for only a year, might have produced metamorphic rocks.

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

An innocent approach will tell us that these rocks cannot be young, although we might not be able to specify their age.

A cynical approach will lead to the conclusion that these are creation-rocks which were formed by God and given characteristics intended to convince us that they are more than 10,000 years old.

We can attempt to take the agnostic approach, but we are again tripped by the fossils. Fossils in metamorphic rock are unusual, because of the changes in the material produced by the enormous pressure and heat, but enough of them occur to give indication that living creatures were around at the time the original sediments were laid. These “creation-rocks,” too, must have been created by God with “creation-fossils” of animals which did not really exist at the time the rocks were made.

g. Coal

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Coal looks just like the remains of ancient plants. It is a hydrocarbon (like living plants today), and most coal deposits contain abundant vegetative fossils. YEC authors, to the best of my knowledge, universally concede that coal originated with living plants.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

In the first place, there is a lot of coal. Estimates range from 5 trillion metric tons to 15 trillion metric tons. The process of coal production can be approximated in the laboratory, and it takes on average a lot of plant to produce a little coal. Why? Because, while there are some coal beds containing woody plant remains (the Pennsylvanian beds of the eastern U.S., for example), most of the fossils found in coal are not from woody plants but from plants which are by volume mostly water, and coal production involves desiccation which removes most of the plant volume. Furthermore, coal seams occur in layers between other sedimentary rocks, some buried miles underground. The deeper the coal is, the harder and drier it always is, indicating that pressure and time have driven more moisture out of the deeper layers. Finally, coal never contains radioactive carbon, an element which is present in all living things but decays to undetectable levels in about 50,000 years.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

No YEC that I have read has produced the calculations to explain how an antediluvian earth could have grown enough vegetation to produce anything close to five trillion metric tons of coal. And how could a single flood have buried layers of decomposing plants which would form coal neatly between other layers of sedimentary rock which bear the fossils of animals and other plants which did not form coal?

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

From the innocent approach we would conclude that the coal seams cannot be a mere 10,000 years old, that they were at least hundreds of thousands of years in the making.

The cynical approach would allow us to conclude that God has given very convincing evidence of something that did not happen—the natural production of coal.

Can we take the agnostic approach? In this case, perhaps so. Coal formation in nature is not well understood, because unlike sedimentary rock formation we cannot watch it happening in situ, and a few coal seams contain fossils which cross rock layer boundaries (“polystrate fossils”). There are reasonable “conventional” explanations for such fossils, and it remains difficult to explain the abundance of fossils in the coal and in the miles of rock lying on top of the coal; however, the agnostic approach, while a stretch, is more nearly tenable for coal than for any of the other phenomena reviewed so far.

h. Yellowstone Fossil Forests

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Near Yellowstone National Park there are between forty and fifty layers of fossilized trees, some of them stumps which are still upright with roots which extended into the ancient soil below them, encased in a kind of sedimentary rock which is produced by volcanic ash.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

The fossil tree layers sit on top of thousands of feet of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock. The rock had to be there, and to be covered by a layer of soil, before trees could grow. The process of volcanic eruption, death of the forest, piling more sediments on top of the ash layer, growth of a new forest, another eruption, etc., was carried out at least forty times! Once buried, the tree material underwent the inherently slow process of petrifaction. These layers thus appear to have taken hundreds of thousands or millions of years to be formed.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

Attempts to do so rely on the assertion that the layers of trees were “floated” into position, roots-down, and deposited on their present site so that the roots which are left clinging to the trunks appear to have grown into the soil below. Such an occurrence might happen once or twice during a single flood event; but more than forty times? And how did the volcanic sediments get there? Supposing that deposition by water cannot completely explain this observation, how can a single flood have produced the “initial” underlying sedimentary rock, then a volcanic eruption and the emplacement of volcanic sediments which somehow left trees upright, then washed over those sediments another layer of non-volcanic sediment, then repeated the process more than forty times?

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

Using the innocent approach we obtain an easy answer: the fossil forests are what they appear to be, the results not of rapid positioning but of lots of time and catastrophic natural events.

The cynical approach gives an equally easy answer: the fossil forests are a clever deception by God.

What about the agnostic approach? Are these fossils the result of trees which were once alive? Are the fossils found in the layers of rock under the lowest layer of trees the remnants of once-living creatures? If not, these are “creation-fossil-trees” encased in “creation-lithified-ash,” telling the story of events which never happened. How can we then claim that God has not wrought another deception?

i. Igneous Rock Intrusions

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Igneous rock formation can be observed in progress today in the cooling of volcanic lava. In some places igneous rock is observed to “intrude” into formations of sedimentary rock. The igneous rock pushes up over one sedimentary formation, and displaces the sedimentary rock above it in an obvious way. The time it takes a given volume of magma to cool into a solid form is easily measured, and from the size and composition of an igneous intrusion the cooling time can be accurately calculated.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

Cooling time for one granite formation in Southern California can, from its mass and from the nature of the rock which resulted from the intrusion, be determined to have been about one million years. This formation lies on top of sedimentary rocks which must have been lithified at the time of the intrusion or they would have been destroyed or at least significantly deformed by the heat. More sedimentary rocks lie on top of the granite. So the sedimentary rocks must have been in place before the intrusion, and we see a result that took at least a million years to produce after the intrusion.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

YECs have developed an unfortunate addiction to theorizing that at the time of the great deluge all kinds of catastrophic shaping of the earth’s crust was underway, from rapid continental reconfiguration to the laying down of these igneous intrusions. In the first place, scripture says nothing about “fire and brimstone” in connection with the flood. But even if we assume that the Holy Spirit somehow omitted a detail which is now thought to be so crucial to our understanding of the flood, how could the flood described in Genesis have created layers of sedimentary rocks, hardened them, forced a massive intrusion which would ordinarily take more than a million years to cool, and cooled that intrusion into solid rock, then laid more sedimentary rock on top of the intrusion, all within the space of a little over a year? It has been calculated that if all of the observed igneous intrusions—that is, all of the igneous rock except “basement” crustal rock—took place at the time of the flood, these igneous intrusions would have raised the temperature of the global ocean to 2700 degrees C. Even if the flood involved several times more water than we observe in the earth’s oceans today, how could so much heat have been dissipated without destroying all life, including that of the inhabitants of the ark?

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

The innocent approach cannot. Using this approach we would conclude that the granite formation in Southern California took a million years to harden after it intruded into sedimentary formations which were already in place and lithified.

The cynical approach can. According to this approach, the igneous intrusions were directly created by God as solid rock to trick investigators into assigning great ages for them.

The agnostic approach once again fails because of fossils found in the underlying and overlying strata. At least the underlying rock had to be lithified before the igneous rock was laid, unless of course both the igneous intrusions and the rocks in which these are found are creation-rocks, the sedimentary rocks containing “creation-fossils.”

j. Sea Floor Spreading

(1) Description of the phenomenon

The theory that all the continents were once part of a single land mass (“pangea”) which, over tens of millions of years, spread into today’s configuration was first proposed in 1912, well after the scientific establishment had embraced Darwinism, and was hooted down by that establishment. Since World War II, findings have convinced almost everyone—including many YECs—that plate tectonics and continental drift are valid explanations for today’s land masses. The Americas, Europe and Africa are spreading away from a formation in the Atlantic Ocean called the “mid-Atlantic ridge,” where production of new crust can be observed: yes, one can actually see the lava coming up from a crack in the ocean floor and spreading away from that crack as new crust. Plate tectonics also explains many other observable phenomena, such as earthquakes and volcanoes.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

The rate of continental movement can be determined with extreme precision by space-based lasers, so that a calculation of about 150 million years since pangea began to break apart fits a lot of data. But the most convincing evidence concerns periodic reversals in the earth’s magnetic field. Some varves contain particles of iron which, being magnetic, currently align themselves toward the earth’s “north” magnetic pole. When these varves are analyzed it is found that every few thousand years the earth’s magnetic field reverses itself. Similar analyses of the seafloor spreading from the mid-Atlantic ridge can be done, and magnetic readings show “stripes” of magnetic alignment on both sides of the mid-Atlantic ridge that exactly match the magnetic readings of the varves and support the interpretation that the earth is over 100 million years old.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

Some YECs have postulated that, like the igneous intrusions, the formation of the earth’s crust was a part of the general global upheaval which accompanied the great flood. YECs who want to try this theory need to do some explaining. The Atlantic basin floor which has been produced by this sea-floor spreading covers, in very rough dimension, about 32 million square miles. All of this sea floor is basalt, produced by the cooling of the lava which oozes up from the mid-Atlantic ridge, and its average thickness is about four miles. According to Genesis, the flood took a little more than a year from start to finish. If we very generously allow 400 days for catastrophic sea-floor spreading and effects like “runaway subduction” which have been suggested to explain how the entire Atlantic basin could have been laid during the deluge, we have to account for the deposition and cooling of 320,000 cubic miles of ocean floor per day! How could that much lava have been laid down and cooled without boiling all the water in the global ocean, even if the amount of water was twice what we see on earth today?

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

Taking the innocent approach, we would have to say that a lot of independent indications point to a very old earth.

Using the cynical approach, we can find that God’s creation continues to deceive very effectively.

I cannot claim to know enough about what was happening during the flood to say that all the sea floor spreading the results of which we observe today did not happen at that time. Thus, the agnostic method may produce a satisfactory result, but only if someone can explain why the ocean did not boil away, and how the ark and its inhabitants survived the heat and turbulence involved in the deposition of the entire Atlantic Ocean floor in a single year!

k. Radiometric Dating

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Most of the hundred-some natural and artificial elements have isotopes—versions of a single element all having the same number of protons and electrons but different numbers of neutrons. Some of these isotopes are radioactive: over time they “decay” into other versions of the same element or into versions of other elements. The time required for this decay to reach a “stable” isotope—one which does not decay further—is easily determined. There are methods of radiometric dating of rocks which do not require assumptions about the amount of radioactive material originally present in a sample, and the use of several of these methods independently on one sample can provide a very consistent calculation for the age of that sample.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient earth.

The findings of radiometric dating of individual rock samples are hotly disputed by the YECs, and I think they do have plausible objections to some findings. There are, however, two points that I cannot think of any way to interpret except in terms of a very old earth. First, of all the radioactive isotopes found in the earth’s crust, there aren’t any original samples which have half-lives less than 100 million years; there aren’t any! We find these elements only in the immediate physical presence of parent radioactive isotopes in the process of decay, showing that their presence is a result of the radioactive decay of the parent isotopes and not of their origination in the crust rocks. It takes about ten half-lives for the amount of an average radioactive element to decline to the point where it is no longer detectable. Therefore, at least ten 100-million-year half-lives, a billion years, must have lapsed since the earth was formed. Second, within the decay families of uranium and thorium there are four decay series. Three of them have half-lives in the billions of years, and samples of these series can be found in the earth’s crust. But the neptunium series has a half-life of only two million years, and no samples of this series can be found in the crust; such a decay to undetectable levels would require at least 20 million years.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

I an not aware of any attempt to explain radioactive decay as a result of the flood. Some YECs, however, postulate a related theory: that before and during the flood God changed many “physical constants” from antediluvian values to those we see today. Two very popular candidates for such dramatic slowing are the speed of light and the rate of radioactive decay. In section 7 of this paper I will have a more detailed discussion of this possibility.

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

The innocent approach tells us that the earth is at least a billion years old.

The cynical approach says that, yep, God has tricked those infidel scientists again!

What about the agnostic approach? If there were only one or two techniques of radioisotopic chronology, the notion that there is no evidence for the age of the earth’s crust might have a chance. But it is hard to see how the results of radiometric dating can be set aside when multiple independent techniques give similar results. And it is hard to see how the absence of isotopes with shorter half-lives, such as those mentioned above, can be explained except as deliberate divine trickery.

l. Cosmic Distances

(1) Description of the phenomenon

Most of the stars are a long way away from earth. Even some objects which, under the right conditions, are visible to the unaided eye are a very distant: the Andromeda galaxy is about two million light-years away. Instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope can observe objects which have been calculated to be over 10 billion light-years away.

(2) Why this phenomenon indicates an ancient universe

Though techniques of interstellar metrics are inferential—there is no direct way of measuring a distance of more than a few thousand light-years—they do produce consistent results. Currently publishing YECs generally do not question the distances calculated by astronomers to celestial objects, even those which are billions of light-years distant. If these objects are, indeed, billions of light-years away, and if the light we see left them billions of years ago, then they must have been there billions of years ago, and the universe must be billions of years old.

(3) Could the great deluge explain this phenomenon?

Obviously, this item has nothing directly to do with the flood, but speculations about potential reductions in the speed of light associated with catastrophes before and during the flood-time have been attempted as a way to show that light could have made the journey of billions of light-years much quicker than it does today. I will deal with this possibility in section 7.

(4) Which way of reading the natural revelation can explain this phenomenon in terms of a young earth?

The innocent approach will cause us to make the natural deduction that objects billions of light-years away whose light we can see through telescopes are billions of years old.

We don’t need the cynical approach unless the agnostic approach fails.

Can the agnostic approach be used? Some YECs think so, reasoning as follows. For stars to have the use the Genesis account implies, they must have been visible. Assuming that the creation of every stellar object took place within six 24-hour days, and that they are indeed as far away as scientists tell us, God must have created the light from distant stars and galaxies already falling upon the earth: a part of the “unavoidable appearance of age” of the new creation. When we look at distant celestial objects we cannot tell how old they are because the light we see did not come from them at all; it could not have come from them if they are more than 10,000 light-years away. We see the light created “en-route.”

Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that creating “starlight in transit” is unavoidable. There is still no reason to suppose that the characteristics of that starlight must contain indications of a historical process which never happened if that starlight has only been traveling for 10,000 years.

Unfortunately for this theory, that starlight does have some very “historical” characteristics. Light from the stars is Doppler-shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, an effect for which there are two causes. First, as most YEC scientists concede, the universe is expanding: for the most distant objects visible by telescope the red shift indicates a velocity of about half the speed of light; and second, the light is filtered through interstellar dust. Furthermore, as light travels for greater and greater amounts of time, the lines in the stellar spectra blur or “spread,” and the amount of this blurring corresponds to the computed distance and therefore the historical time over which the travel has occurred. Thus, three questions: (1) what makes the appearance that the stars are rushing away from us—an appearance which, according to the YECs, does not come from the stars at all but is built into the light—an unavoidable appearance of a historical process which never happened? We have never, according to this theory, seen the actual light from celestial objects which are more than 10,000 light-years away, so why would God have needed to create it in-route red-shifted, and why did He create it with red-shifts exactly corresponding to the distance from each object? And: (2) what feature of unavoidable appearance of a historical process which never happened compelled God to create a red-shift which results from interstellar dust when this light never passed through the dust? And finally: (3) if most of interstellar light did not travel for millions or billions of light years, if the greatest amount of time that any light from any star has been traveling is about 10,000 years, what characteristics of unavoidable appearance of a historical process which never happened caused God to create the light with the spectral lines blurred in exact proportion to the distance of the objects from which the light did not come but appears to have come?

Here’s another problem. What feature of unavoidable appearance of a historical process which never happened prompted God to create the light from objects billions of light-years distant, which in some cases could not be detected until the last five years? What purpose was there to creating long shafts of light much too faint to contribute to season-marking? And what about electromagnetic radiation in the invisible part of the spectrum? Did God also create long shafts of invisible radiation?

Here’s the final problem. There are events which happen to celestial objects more than 10,000 light years distant which work profound changes in those objects. For example, in 1987 a supernova called SN1987a appeared in the Great Magellanic Cloud. The object which exploded was not even visible to the naked eye, so it would have had no value to any person before this century. SN1987a is about 170,000 light-years away. The supernova was visible in the southern hemisphere, but the object which produced it no longer exists as a star—in a few hundred years when the gas cloud from the explosion has spread enough to show the spot from which that gas originated, there may not be anything visible to the naked eye in that spot. Therefore, two questions: (1) did God create the “light-in-transit” with the supernova explosion and the follow-on light from the planetary nebula which will be visible in a few hundred years already “built-in”? And: (2) what did God create at that spot in the first place—the star that “originally” shone there, the blob of expanding gas that we see today, or the burned-out husk that may not even be detectable from earth? Indeed, did God create any actual stars, or only trillions of burned-out husks like SN1987a, and shafts of starlight which bear no relationship at all to the stars from which they (falsely) appear to have come?

7. PROPOSED CHANGES IN “PHYSICAL CONSTANTS”

A few YEC scientists have suggested that variations in physical constants, such as the speed of light and the rate of radioactive decay, may explain some of the facts I have cited. The most prominent recent such effort of which I am aware is by astronomer Barry Setterfield and statistician Trevor Norman. Since their hypothesis touches several items of the evidence presented in this paper, I am going to spend some time discussing it. I am not technically qualified to critique in detail either the science or the statistics of this hypothesis, so my comments will mostly concern whether it accomplishes its intended objectives. The following online site— http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/4881/ — is the source of my representations of Setterfield’s positions and of the implications of this theory.

a. The Setterfield-Norman Hypothesis—“cDK”

The Setterfield-Norman hypothesis proposes that the speed of light has, during the history of the universe, slowed dramatically. A shorthand for this notion has emerged: “cDK”—meaning “speed of light decay” (technically, letting “the speed of light” equal “c” is a bit sloppy, since “c” actually refers to the propagation of light in a vacuum, but technically referring to the alleged beginning of the universe as the “big bang” is also sloppy, so I will gratefully adopt the “cDK” shorthand!).

Setterfield and Norman examined measurements of light speed over 300 years and claimed that it tended to measure faster the earlier in time it was taken. For example, they reported the 1740 value (by Bradley) as 300,650 kps, the value dropping to 299,901 kps (Perrotin) by 1902 and stabilizing near today’s value—299,792 kps—about 1925. Measurement error, they assert, cannot readily explain all this variability, because random errors should fall on “both sides” of a correct value, not mostly on the higher side. Having determined the shape of a best-fit curve for historical light-speed measurements, the authors then calculated an extended curve which would show that, beginning about 4000 BC, light could traverse billions of light-years in a few thousand years. According to the resulting curve, the speed of light immediately after creation was about 11,000,000 times what it is today, then cDK followed an exponential curve that has been essentially flat over the last 75 years.

If cDK happened, other “physical constants” must also have changed. For example, if Einstein’s famous equation e=mc² is correct (Setterfield says it is), then the value of “m” for any object in the universe must have increased with the decline of c²; otherwise the constant energy release from the sun when the speed of light was a million times what it is today would be a trillion times greater, and the earth would be vaporized. But if “m” was trillions of times less than it is today, then the value of “G,” the gravitational constant, must have been trillions of times greater than today, otherwise all objects on the earth would fly off into space! The authors published a few examples of measurements of other universal constants which did not contradict the contention that these constants may have changed, but because these measurements tend all to have been in the last 100 years there is no trend, as there apparently is in the case of the speed of light.

In response to a critique by Professor Frederick Skiff, who claimed that “an infinite number of curves” could have fit the data, Setterfield acknowledged that the curve he and Norman extrapolated was arbitrary—they picked it to “prove” that light from distant objects could have arrived at the earth in a few thousand years. But Setterfield claims that a paper now in preparation will show that the speed of light at the time of its emission can be specified, and that by measuring the varying “c” from objects at different distances from earth it will be possible to construct a definitive curve for cDK.

b. Implications of cDK Relevant to this Paper

Those implications of cDK which are relevant to this paper are as follows.

· Obviously, one need not allow that the universe is billions of years old for light from distant stars to reach earth.

· Radioactive decay rates might have been millions of times greater than they are today, and if so it would not be necessary to suppose that a billion years had to pass to allow radioisotopes to decay to undetectable levels.

· Since both “c” and radioactive decay might have been millions of times faster immediately after creation than today, it is possible that igneous rocks might have cooled much faster than the same types of depositions of magma do today.

· The redshift of light from distant celestial objects would not result from expansion of the universe but rather from the fact that the declining velocity of light causes each emitted photon to lose energy over time.

c. Difficulties with cDK

I admire the imagination and theoretical work which have gone into cDK and various commentaries upon it, but even as a non-scientist I can see some difficulties with the hypothesis. I am not qualified to call these “fatal,” but until there is more observational support I cannot regard cDK as a satisfactory young-earth reading of the evidences I have presented. The most obvious difficulties are the following.

· Setterfield and Norman report Roemer having obtained a value of 307,600 ± 5,400 kps, but the Encyclopedia Britannica gives a value for Roemer’s measurement as 298,000 kps, once Roemer’s observations are corrected for errors in his figures for the radius of the earth.

· Setterfield claims that cDK is consistent with general relativity; however, cDK requires that “c” changes from one velocity to another everywhere in the universe at the same time, a stipulation which by definition requires an absolute temporal frame of reference, something which relativity theory does not allow.

· If light speed had been much higher in the past, relativistic effects such as “gravitational lensing” of starlight would be less than we calculate them to be today, but in fact the most distant objects show the most pronounced relativistic effects.

· Slowing light speed would create the illusion that events billions of light-years away were happening “in slow motion,” but in fact we observe a rotational rate on some of the most distant pulsars which could not be any faster without the pulsars flying apart.

· The crucial part of the Setterfield-Norman curve—the “old” part which shows the speed of light at more than a million times what it is today—is not a product of observation but of hopeful extrapolation. Until Setterfield is able to support cDK with observations which can be repeated by objective peers, even those who are sympathetic to cDK must acknowledge that it remains an ad-hoc theory. It was not born of anomalous data (though it may be supported by those data); it was born of a particular interpretation of the Bible. Ad-hoc theories are not untrue because they are ad-hoc. But because they are ad-hoc they must be regarded with respectful and charitable skepticism.

d. If true, would cDK explain any of the evidences presented in this paper?

It would keep us from having to admit that starlight from billions of light-years away took billions of years to get here.

Setterfield says it resolves the radioactive decay evidence, but I cannot see how. A key proposition of cDK is that while mass “m” as gravitational mass varies with “c²,” mass “m” as “atomic mass” (I don’t understand his distinction between gravitational and atomic masses) is constant over the life of the universe. What he seems to be saying is that “within” an atom everything always looks the same: when an atom decays, releasing energy, the amount of energy released always “looks” from the perspective of that atom to be the same—the atom simply emits, instead of (say) one photon, a number of photons equal to the multiple of present-day “c” which prevailed at that time (if the speed of light was ten times faster than today, ten photons would be emitted, each of them carrying one-tenth the energy that a single photon carries today). “Energy flux,” he says, is constant over time. I conclude that the total amount of heat which a parent atom must emit to become a daughter atom was the same in antediluvian times as it is today; it just happened a million times faster then than now. Therefore, radioactive materials, which are ubiquitously found near the surface of the earth, were producing a million times as much heat in 3900 BC as today! A million times the amount of heat we measure today continuously being produced in the crust would make the earth a very unpleasant place for the sons and daughters of Eve!

The same problem applies to the cooling of igneous rocks. They might have cooled a million times faster, but they all had to be deposited over 2,000 years instead of two billion, the same amount of heat had to be removed for them to solidify, the heat was leaving a million times faster, so the amount of heat generated per unit of time must have been a trillion times greater.

e. If true, what are the real benefits of cDK to creationists?

We may be able to dispose of some of the evidence which puts the origin of the universe farthest back in time and thereby “skip” the first 12 billion years in conventional prehistory. But this span is in any case the easiest to reconcile with a “literal-scientific” reading of the Bible. All we have to do is make, to the most hard-core YEC interpretation of Genesis, two very reasonable changes which are well-supported by the most obvious reading of the text. First, we must allow that the “144 hours of creation” did not start until the introduction of light. As we have already noted, we are not told how long after creation of “heavens and earth” God waited to introduce light. Second, we must admit the possibility that extraterrestrial objects (“the heavens”) were created in the initial event, and that the day-four making of sun-moon-stars was not ex nihilo creation but rather a modification of the relationship of earth to these celestial objects which made them available for God’s purposes. This reading is required by the creation account in Job which states that the stars were already in existence when the earth was created (Job 38:7), and supported (though not perhaps required) by the different Hebrew words used for “make” and “create.” The Hebrew word bara answers to our word “create.” The word which is used for the day-four “making” of heavenly lights is asah, the generic Hebrew word for “make.” Its meaning may sometimes cover ex nihilo creation, but it most often signifies that something which already exists has been given a different purpose: e.g., Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves and asah themselves clothing; God took animal skins and asah more-substantial clothing. This interpretation of Genesis shrinks the benefit of cDK for harmonizing science and scripture almost to zero. Nobody needs cDK to read six “literal-scientific” days of creation from Genesis.

Indeed, the most difficult problems which have to be solved to reconcile a “literal-scientific” reading of Genesis with an “innocent” reading of the natural revelation concern the other lines of evidence which I have presented, which address dating back to about 100 million years. It is that most recent 100 million years, not the 12 billion which preceded it, which produce the really difficult problems for creationists. I cannot see how cDK contributes much to our being able to place what happened after the “literal-scientific” 144 hours of creation into the context of the natural revelation which we read today.

What about the value of cDK as evidence of a young universe? Many atheistic cosmologists speculate (Setterfield agrees with them) that its initial expansion pushed the universe out to a diameter of billions of light-years in a few seconds! If cDK could prove that cosmic redshifts are not the result of expansion, and that the universe is not billions of years old, would that proof make belief in a Creator more compelling than the evidence that the universe began at a single point in space-time already makes it? Would cDK make atheism or scientific agnosticism impossible? Don’t count on it!

If cDK could be demonstrated, would Darwinism die? I think not. If all the other proposed changes in physical constants can have accompanied cDK, why could not mutation rates have been millions of times today’s observed values? Why could not pre-biotic chemical reactions have been qualitatively different? On the whole, the notion that “the present is the key to the past” is dearer to creationists than to Darwinists. If cDK is clearly shown to have occurred, then S.J. Gould will be the loudest celebrant, for this finding would do much to explain and validate his punctuated equilibria!

Finally, cDK does not explain fossiliferous sedimentary rocks, shale varves, evaporite varves, coral reefs, metamorphic rocks, river mouth sedimentary deposits, coal, Yellowstone fossil forests and sea floor spreading. Even if it is confirmed—which is certainly possible—cDK by itself leaves us with an earth between 100 million and a billion years old.

8. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

a. About The Evidence Presented Herein

There are twelve separate pieces of evidence presented in this paper. While they are very easy to interpret as indicative of an ancient universe and earth, in only two cases does it appear that there is any support at all for using the agnostic approach which would allow us to call the evidence unreadable. For the rest, to the best of my honest ability to determine, we must either acknowledge that the facts most obviously point to a great age for the earth or accept “on faith” that God’s creation contains deceptive elements, even though God’s verbal revelation seems to exclude that interpretation.

b. Will Science Change Its Mind?

One possible response to these facts is to say, “Yes, the evidence seems to point to a very old earth, but science has changed its mind in the past and will probably do so in the future, so I’m just going to say I don’t know.” I think that response is completely valid, and it may be wiser than a position that the earth is very old. Undoubtedly science will change; it has always done so and there is no reason to think the future will be any different! But sincere people who are listening to our message can see the difference between: “Yes, the evidence points to an old earth, but I’m going to withhold judgment”; and, “I don’t care what the evidence says, you have to believe the earth is 10,000 years old if you’re going to claim you believe the Bible.”

c. Making A Case for Catastrophism

Can periodic catastrophic events, one of the last of which would have been the great deluge, explain these phenomena without recourse to great age? Let us say that about five million years have passed since the end of the sixth day of creation. That age would be far too short to allow for any significant evolutionary changes within the framework of classical Darwinism, which would make all creationists happy. And the scriptures do not require the time since Adam and Eve to be less than five million years. It is not inconceivable that a combination of fairly frequent catastrophes on antediluvian earth and more stable conditions post-flood might have produced the kind of terra-form we see. We have to abandon the interpretation of an earth only 10,000 years old, but we might get to keep a “scientific” 144 hours of creation, plus the notion that at the end of the flood the earth looked a lot like it does today. We can suppose that tremendous upheavals shook the earth from creation until the flood, but these were not a part of the redemption story and were not much remarked because there were very few people around to observe them. We could allow that creatures like trilobites and dinosaurs lived in the earliest part of earth-history but perished long ago.

There is nothing inherently implausible about these suppositions, but if YECs are going to make a case for catastrophism there is work, not just wishful thinking, to be done. I have shown that it is incredible to attempt to account for the facts presented here as the result of a single global deluge. Perhaps multiple catastrophes can do the job that one flood cannot. But if so, those events must have left behind some traces. After all, YECs contend that these catastrophes deposited signs which conventional science falsely reads as indication of great age. Well, what are those signs? That’s the question the YECs have to answer to get even “biblical conservatives,” like me, to agree. My message here is that the case for catastrophism is not an impossible case to make, and it is a case for which I personally have a lot of sympathy. But one cannot plead that antediluvian catastrophes were so unlike the catastrophes we observe today that they left false indications of a hundred million years of time. “Unlike the catastrophes we observe today” is the same as “a miracle with no residue.”

d. The Harmony of Genesis and Science

Those, particularly, who read the natural revelation as indicative of an ancient earth need to be prepared to deal with what Genesis says about creation, simply because the most obvious reading of that and other scriptural references is that God accomplished the work of creation, from the division of light from darkness, in 144 consecutive hours. By the same token, those who hold that the earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old need to deal with the obvious evidence of age in the natural revelation. Finding harmony between science and scripture must be a cooperative work of all creationists, OECs and YECs.

Harmony may not be easy to find. I am confident we can find it, though it may sound more like Stravinsky than Beethoven when it is heard, if we are willing to use a lot more imagination and engage in a lot more study than we have given the problem to this point. That’s the main reason I have done the work to publish these ruminations. Conservative Bible students haven’t troubled themselves to examine Genesis and try to understand it in the light of what true science tells us about the natural revelation, because it’s been so easy to “blow off” science as “atheist propaganda.” If creationists can accept that there is evidence—even inconclusive evidence—for a very old earth and universe, maybe we can use our Bible study skills to look again at the Genesis record and help each other to understand it better, and maybe we can use our scientific skills to look at nature and help each other to understand better how the heavens declare God’s glory.

Therefore, having spent this much “paper and ink” on such matters, I would be remiss not to comment, however briefly, on the Genesis account. I confess that I am still unable to satisfy even myself, much less someone else, that I have an adequate grasp of what the Holy Spirit was trying to express in the creation account. I would not consider the speculation in the next few paragraphs an “explanation,” or even “the road to an explanation,” but I believe it may be a “paving-stone” on the road to an explanation.

Near the beginning of this essay I used the term “singularity” to refer to an event which science cannot describe. I now ask the reader to consider this question: if one were to find an in-progress description of a singularity in the Bible, how would it read? Every miracle is a singularity, but most miracles are described as “completed” events; that is, the record simply tells us that it happened; it doesn’t tell us how. Even Joshua’s long day, which was certainly a singularity, is not described in terms which allow us to understand how God made the sun appear to stand still in the sky.

Of course, the exception to my generalization is the Genesis account of creation. What it describes is not multiple singularities, but one singularity which spanned six days, a part of which, before the division of light from darkness, may itself have lasted for billions of years! That this was a unity of miraculous divine activity is attested by the various Hebrew words used for “create” and “make”: God creates some things, uses created things to make other things, and makes available both created and made things. This is the period of activity in which God miraculously created and formed the earth, including the biosphere and all its denizens. It is divine-time, which is expressed to us in scripture as “six days.”

“What is the scientific description of what one would see inside a black hole?” That, remember, is a question I said no scientist would attempt to answer. Why? Because there is no scientific description for what happens inside a black hole. There is no science there! If it were possible for a person to enter a black hole, survive, and return to our space-time, there would be no scientific account that person could give for what he had seen, because the next person to do the same thing might have a completely different experience. And even if a scientist took instruments with him into a black hole to record what happened, no one would pay the slightest attention to the recorded data as “scientific results,” because the next set of instruments might provide completely contradictory data. Such is the nature of a singularity!

“What is the scientific description of what one would have seen during the event of creation?” That is a question no “scientific creationist” should attempt to answer. Why? Because the creation was a singularity, and there is no scientific description for a singularity. The easiest “literal” understanding of the duration of the creation singularity, from the division of light and darkness, is six “ordinary” days. But we do not have to understand this time span as a “scientific” measurement, nor do we have to accept the descriptions of what was done on each of those days as a scientific explanation for God’s management of this ongoing singularity, nor are we compelled to allow that “scientific time” even existed during the creation singularity. I am not saying the Genesis account tells us nothing; there is a reason for it, which I admit I do not adequately understand. I am saying it is a mistake to attempt to interpret it as the record of a scientific process, and we should be very careful about interpreting it even as the record of a historical process. The Genesis account is unique, within the Bible and within all literature. We must be as careful when we apply the ordinary rules of understanding to this record as when we apply ordinary language to God.

And that, as of this moment, is the extent of my “paving” ability. Perhaps others can begin to supply some more paving-stones, and we can build a road to that meeting-place of science and scripture we would all like to visit.

e. In Closing, Pleadings

I certainly do not expect that all YECs, or even most YECs, will be “converted” to an old-earth position by the evidence I have offered. I will not regard this essay as a waste of time even if none of them is. There are, however, objectives for the effort I have expended which are dear enough to cause me to close with the following pleadings.

Deal with the evidence! Gird yourself, and defend your position! This is a challenge, but a challenge of encouragement. I do not think the interpretation of antiquity which I have presented is conclusive, and I would not ask for a conclusive young-earth refutation of my old-earth reading. I only ask that a publicly argued young-earth position be sufficiently credible to leave an open-minded person with a reasonable doubt that there is definitive evidence for an ancient earth. Alas! This request is one which very few young-earth readings of any part of the evidence, and no young-earth readings of the evidence as a whole, have been able to answer.

If you do not wish or do not choose to deal with the evidence, hold your conviction that the earth is young between yourself and God. No one has a right to demand that another person take a public stand on this or any other issue that does not directly bear upon salvation or the imitation of Christ.

Do not slam the door on science, for in so doing you shut-out both the natural revelation of God and honest believers who are doing their best to handle that revelation accurately. Accept the “right” of science to read God’s natural revelation. Challenge the right of pseudo-science to elevate any interpretation, no matter how well-supported, to the status of fact.

Leave the “loaded arguments” to the Darwinists, who are afraid of reasonable discussion of their faith. Such tactics are unworthy of creationists, either young-earth or old-earth. When a Darwinist prefaces his interpretation of the evidence by telling you, as does Richard Dawkins, that you are an ignoramus unless you accept Darwinism, you may consider yourself warned that his case isn’t very strong. For if it were, he would let the facts speak for themselves, wouldn’t he? When a YEC author does as too many YEC authors do, and prefaces his arguments for a young earth by telling you that those who disagree with his interpretation also disagree with Jesus and the apostles, you may consider yourself warned that this author is not very confident of his case. For if he were, he would let the facts speak for themselves, wouldn’t he?

Finally, if the reader as a YEC wishes to regard OECs like me as weaker brethren, I will not make the slightest objection. I will ask only what Paul asked, “Accept those who are weak in the faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on their opinions.” Working together, I am convinced that OECs and YECs can make progress toward resolving the tension between science and scripture. But we cannot work together if one side makes pariahs of the other. “Working together” does not mean either party must endorse every assertion of another: “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” It does require that our disagreements should be charitable and respectful, that we should discover and acknowledge the reasons that those who disagree with us hold their positions, that we should be willing to accept one another as fellow-laborers, that we should strive to learn from each other, that we should help each other toward the goal.

One day faith will be sight. Let us conduct ourselves so that when that day comes even the follies of our thinking in this life will be seen not to have tarnished the love which overflows our hearts. May God help us to serve one another.