THE AGE OF THE EARTH: PRINCIPLES

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, u