Response: The beginning of the creation of what? The universe? That’s certainly plausible: “the beginning” may be a reference back to the opening line of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But this raises an obvious problem: human beings weren’t made male and female at the beginning of the universe because they weren’t created at the beginning of the universe. They were day six. If Jesus’ statement refers to the beginning of the universe, it would be just as much a problem for the calendar-day interpretation as the day-age view. But regardless, I think this is easily resolved. “The beginning of creation” could just refer to the total era recorded in Gen. 1, when God was creating new types of physical things. This resolves the problem regardless of how long you think this period was; it could just as easily be a period of billions of years as a period of six calendar days.
However, Jesus may not be referring to the beginning of the universe’s creation in this passage. The context of Jesus’ statements, after all, is human beings and the institution of marriage. Why wouldn’t it refer to their creation? In other words, Jesus is probably saying that when God first made people, he made them male and female, and it is upon this fact that the marriage covenant is based. And again, this would hold regardless of how old the universe is.
Objection: Rom. 1:19 states that “God’s invisible qualities” have been “clearly seen” “since the creation of the world.” Therefore, human beings have been around as long as the universe.
Response: Well, again, human beings haven’t been around as long as the universe since they weren’t created until the sixth day of creation. This is just as much a problem for the calendar-day advocate as the day-age advocate. So then we (presumably) have to ask who did witness the universe before the creation of human beings. One could argue that, since the angels witnessed God’s acts of creation (Job 38:4-7), this verse could be referring to their observation of “God’s invisible qualities.” But I suspect Rom. 1:19 is simply referring to creation’s testimony, regardless of whether there were observers to actually receive this testimony. The Apostle Paul is just saying, “the physical universe has testified to God’s existence ever since its instantiation.” That’s its nature.
Objection: Rom. 8:20-22 states “the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” This refers to the second law of thermodynamics which was instigated when God put a curse on the land after Adam and Eve sinned.
Response: I have several responses to this: first, while “bondage to decay” is an excellent, albeit negative, description of the law of entropy (i.e. the second law of thermodynamics), nature doesn’t really experience frustration because nature is not a person; Paul is obviously writing metaphorically here to express a theological truth by personifying nature. Second, the passage in question states that the one who subjected creation to futility did so with the intention of eventually freeing it. If we must assume that this has a connection to the fall of humankind, neither Adam and Eve nor Satan sinned in order to set nature “free” from this “bondage”; they sinned because they wanted to be like God (Gen. 3:5). Besides these three, the only other agent involved in the fall of humanity is God. Thus, the one who subjected creation to futility must be God. This is true regardless of whether this refers to the fall of humanity or not: God is the only agent who is willing and able to bring creation “into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (cf. Rev. 21:1-5)
Third, this verse doesn’t tell us when God did this, except to say that “the whole creation has been groaning … right up to the present time.” This sounds like it’s referring to the entire history of the universe, not just the part that came after the fall of humankind. To tie this verse to the sin of Adam and Eve is purely conjectural. In addition to this, the fact that God’s acts of creating new types of physical things are represented as being unique to the first six days of creation, as well as the fact that there are passages in the Bible which refer to the steadfastness of the patterns or “fixed laws” of nature (Jer. 31:35-7; 33:19-26), argue strongly that the laws of thermodynamics are some of the patterns God created the universe to have “in the beginning,” not something that began after Adam and Eve sinned.
Objection: 2 Pet. 3:5-6 states, “…long ago by God’s word the heaven existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.” Thus, the creation of the world and Noah’s flood belong to the same era. So not much time could have transpired between these two events.
Response: Well, I have no problem saying that the creation of the world and Noah’s flood belong to the same era. Specifically, “the world of that time” refers to the era of everything up to and including the flood. How long that era was is an issue that this verse simply does not address. To assume that it could only have been a few hundred years strikes me as completely arbitrary; it could just as easily have been billions of years. I see no reason to think otherwise.
Objection: The genealogies in Gen. 5 and 11 don’t allow for an old earth. They are very specific: “A lived for X years and begot (or became the father of) B.” When these ages are all added up you end up with a date of about 4,000 BC; thus this constitutes evidence for a young earth.
Response: First of all, even if this argument were valid, it would only demonstrate a recent creation of humanity, not of the earth or the universe. Claiming that human beings were created in 4,000 BC tells us absolutely nothing about how old the rest of creation is. This objection doesn’t even address the age of the universe.
Second, there are several factors in this issue which need to be dealt with before we can consider the case closed: for example, the ancient Hebrew concepts of father and son were not limited to the individual’s male parent or offspring, but applied to any male ancestor or descendent; thus you have statements like, “Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1), even though there were many intervening generations between Abraham and David, and between David and Christ.
This goes far beyond the mere use of the words “father” and “son,” but applies to the concept of parenthood regardless of the terminology used. Case in point, the Hebrew verb “to beget” used in the Genesis genealogies (yalad){i} is used in the above sense, particularly in the book of Genesis: we are told that Canaan begot whole ethnic groups (10:15-18), and that Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah begot their grandchildren and great-grandchildren (46:6-25). So we see that the concept of parenthood, and the terms used in the Genesis genealogies in particular, can refer to any ancestor and not merely to one’s parent.
In fact, the concept of fatherhood is sometimes even extended to one’s predecessor regardless of whether or not they’re related. Gen. 4:20-21 describes Jabal as “the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock,” and his brother Jubal as “the father of all who play the harp and flute.” What’s especially interesting about this passage is that the context in which it occurs is concerned with biological fatherhood. Thus, the Genesis genealogies move back and forth between different concepts of fatherhood without any textual indications that they are doing so.
This leads us to another factor: Jewish genealogies were not exhaustive, nor were they meant to be understood as such. Rather, they were selective to give the “highlights,” or to emphasize a numerical structure by reducing the number of names to a multiple of seven and/or ten (this is called “telescoping”). For example, when Matthew describes the genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1) he deliberately skips over several people who lived during the exile to Babylon. Why? Because he’s trying to arrange it so that there are 14 names from every period he’s describing (from Abraham to David; from David to the Babylonian exile; and from the exile to Christ). This does not constitute error, it’s simply the way the ancient Jews wrote genealogies. A similar pattern is found in the genealogies in Gen. 5 and 11 where each list consists of ten names, which implies that the author was limiting who he included for some literary purpose. Other examples of this include Gen. 4:17-18 which lists 7 names; Ruth 4:18-22 which lists 10 names; 1 Chr. 1:5-23 (the list of the nations) which lists 70 names, and Luke 3 which lists 77 names (21 + 21 + 14 + 21).
In fact, the Bible specifically tells us that there are gaps in the Genesis genealogies: in Luke 3:35-36 we are told that Noah was the father of Shem, who was the father of Arphaxad, who was the father of Cainan, who was the father of Shelah. But this genealogy is mentioned twice in the early chapters of Genesis, and in both cases Cainan is not mentioned. Instead we are told that Arphaxad begot Shelah (Gen. 10:24; 11:12):
Luke: Noah --> Shem --> Arphaxad --> Cainan --> Shelah
Genesis: Noah --> Shem --> Arphaxad ---------------> Shelah
Again, I want to reiterate that this is not a contradiction, it’s just how Hebrew genealogies were written.{ii}
If we delve further, we find that there is a very close parallel to the Genesis genealogies elsewhere in the Bible: the genealogy from Jacob to Moses is described in four passages, two of which are traditionally ascribed to Moses himself (Exod. 6:16-20; Num. 26:57-59; 1 Chr. 6:1-3; 23:6-13). All of these passages list five generations: Jacob --> Levi --> Kohath --> Amram --> Moses. Part of the problem comes in when we recognize that Gen. 46:11 states that Kohath was born before the descent into Egypt, and one of the genealogies (Exod. 6:16-20) states how long the individuals lived. If we ignore the facts that Kohath was probably already a grown man when he went to Egypt, and that he and Amram probably didn’t father their children on their deathbeds, the maximum amount of time the Bible gives us between Kohath’s birth, before the descent into Egypt and the time when Moses led the people out of Egypt is Kohath’s lifetime (133 years) plus Amram’s lifetime (137 years) plus the age of Moses at the time of the Exodus (80 years—Exod. 7:7). But this only adds up to 350 years, and we know that the Hebrews were in Egypt for 430 years (Exod. 12:40-41).{iii}
This problem is further exacerbated when we note that 1 Chr. 7:20-27 covers the same period, giving the genealogy from Jacob to Joshua, a younger contemporary of Moses. Rather than listing only five generations, this passage lists twelve. Another problem is that Num. 3:27-28 states that at the time Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, Kohath had 8,600 male descendants. If Kohath was Moses’ grandfather, this number cannot be correct: if Kohath had 20 sons, and each one of them also had 20 sons, and each one of them also had 20 sons, you’d still come up short—not to mention the fact that the Bible never mentions such an extraordinary scenario. The only resolution to these problems is that there are gaps in Moses’ genealogy, and we cannot create a timetable based on the ages it gives.
When the Bible intends that a series of numbers be added together to produce a total, it gives this total itself (Num. 1:46; 2:32; Matt. 1). Since the genealogies in Exod. 6:16-20 and Gen. 5 and 11 do not give any such summation, or are ever used to provide such a summation anywhere else in the Bible, they were not intended to specify the amount of time that passed during these genealogies. The ages are given rather to demonstrate the age at which someone became a father, and how long he lived, because fatherhood and old age are considered blessings from God.
So how should we understand the genealogies in Gen. 5 and 11? Given the fluidity of the Bible’s concept of fatherhood and the nature of biblical genealogies, when the text says “A lived X years and begot B,” it could simply mean that A was X years old when he became the ancestor of B; that is, when he fathered the genetic line that would eventually culminate in the individual B and the B tribe. To apply it to the case where we know of a gap, when the text says, “When Arphaxad had lived 35 years, he became the father of Shelah” (Gen. 11:12), it means Arphaxad was 35 when he fathered Cainan, and Cainan eventually fathered Shelah. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that there are probably more gaps between Arphaxad and Cainan and between Cainan and Shelah. Moreover, when we note that the Bible often refers to representatives of nations or tribes (like Canaan, Israel, or Judah) as if they are the individuals they are descended from and named after (Jdg. 1:3; Ps. 80:1), “A” and “B” could merely refer to representatives of the A and B clans, either ancestors or descendants of A and B.{iv}
Since biblical genealogies vary greatly in how complete they are, we can safely say that the Genesis genealogies place the creation of Adam between about 7,500 years ago (if they are 80% complete) and 60,000 years ago (if they are 10% complete). And just in case you’re wondering, human beings (homo sapiens sapiens) are estimated to have first appeared on the earth between about 25,000 and 50,000 years ago.{v}
Objection: Jude 14 refers to Enoch as “the seventh from Adam.” Therefore, there were no gaps in the genealogies from Adam to Enoch in Gen. 5:18-24.
Response: Jude 14 is referring to the genealogy in Gen. 5: Enoch is the seventh name listed in the genealogy. This does not imply that there were no gaps in it.
Objection: Isa. 65:25 states
The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox,
But dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy.
This passage (and a parallel one in Isa. 11:6-9) gives a very clear image of what it was like in Eden before the fall. Therefore, there was no animal death before Adam and Eve sinned.
Response: First, the context very clearly defines this verse as an image of “a new heavens and a new earth” a few verses earlier in 65:17. It’s describing the new creation in which “the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4), not the garden of Eden. Perhaps it is using imagery of Eden before the fall to do so, but it is question-begging to simply assume this. That has to be demonstrated, not just asserted.
Second, this passage includes the following statement:
Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
he who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere youth;
he who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed. (Isa. 65:20)
But this is referring to the new heavens and earth, in which “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev. 21:4)! Obviously, these are simply images taken from the daily life of Isaiah’s audience with certain aspects—death by dangerous animals or dying young—removed.
Third, if it is using “Edenic imagery,” this fits just as well with the claim that there were no carnivorous animals in Eden. In this case, Isaiah is simply describing a world in which the human suffering that results from carnivores and dangerous animals is no longer present. Since his audience lived (and lives) in a world in which there are carnivores and dangerous animals, he expressed this idea with the animals they knew, but without their carnivorous or dangerous properties.
Fourth, this passage is poetry. It’s imagery. It’s not meant to be taken literally.
Objection: The day-age theory is based on secular science, not the Bible.
Response: First of all, even if this were the case, it’s a fallacious argument known as the genetic fallacy. You don’t prove a belief wrong by showing how it originated, but by examining the evidence for and against it. If I believe the Bible is the word of God because my parents told me so, pointing this out does not somehow prove that the Bible is not the word of God. It is necessary to make a distinction between how we come to believe something and whether the object of that belief is true. Second of all, the first section of this little treatise deals with biblical grounds for thinking the days of creation can be reasonably understood as long periods of time. I’m not defending it by appealing to science.
Third, this objection is simply false. Several Church fathers claimed that it’s difficult to understand what the days of creation really refer to,{vi} while others thought that they were millennia.{vii} Clearly, these views cannot have been motivated by a desire to harmonize Scripture with science, since there was virtually no scientific evidence at that time concerning the age of the universe.
Fourth, many Christians before the modern era, such as Augustine and most of the Church fathers, believed that we should allow extra-biblical knowledge inform our interpretation of the Bible.{viii} As David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, two historians of science, write, “The notion that any serious Christian thinker would even have attempted to formulate a world view from the Bible alone is ludicrous.”{ix} To illustrate, Jesus seems to identify the fall of Jerusalem with his return in Matt. 24, Mark 13, and Luke 17. If we don’t let the extra-biblical evidence (in this case, secular history) inform our interpretation, we would have to conclude either that Jesus has already returned and we just didn’t notice it, or that Jerusalem never really fell in AD 70.{x}
Objection: Belief that the universe is 13.5 billion years old is a part of the evolutionary time scale. It’s mandatory to posit an ancient universe in order to supply the necessary time for evolution to take place.
Response: As I said in the Introduction, I will not be addressing whether or not evolution is true. Here, I will only point out two things. First, there are plenty of old-earth creationists, Christians who accept that the universe is billions of years old but do not accept evolution. So it seems clear that you can accept one without the other.
Second, young-earth creationist ministries actually appeal to biological macro-evolution in order to account for a) the origin of carnivores after the fall of humanity, and b) the presence of millions of species after only tens of thousands were potentially saved on Noah’s ark (a more realistic figure would be in the thousands or hundreds). Since the carnivores and millions of species were present immediately following the fall and the flood respectively, this evolution took place within a few hundred years at the most. This posits a super-efficient macro-evolution at a rate that Darwinists have never envisaged.{xi} That these ministries do so while condemning the much less radical evolution actually proposed by biologists strikes me as hypocritical.
Objection: If God needed to take billions of years to create the universe, he is not as powerful as if he did it in six days.
Response: God didn’t need to take billions of years to create the universe, nor did he need to take six 24-hour periods. He could have done it instantaneously. The issue is not what God could have done, but what God has done. The Bible claims that God created the universe over a period of time. Whether this period consisted of billions of years or a calendar week does not in any way limit God’s creative power. It just tells us how he used it.
Objection: If the universe existed for billions of years before human beings were created, humanity can’t have the significance the Bible ascribes to them.
Response: Well, the first thing to point out here is that whatever significance humanity has is derivative. We are significant, not because we are worthy, but because God loves us. And God doesn’t love us because we are lovable or lovely, but because he is loving.
Second, this objection can best be answered via analogy: does the vast size of the universe mean that human beings are insignificant? Some scientists such as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have thought so.{xii} God could simply have created one sun, one moon, and one planet. Anything beyond this is excessive and suggests that there is nothing particularly important about us.
But of course, this is complete bunk. The ancients knew that the universe was incomprehensibly large, and that the earth was, for all practical purposes, infinitely small.{xiii} Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, wrote that “our observations of the stars make it evident, not only that the Earth is circular, but also that it is a circle of no great size.”{xiv} This was the standard view thereafter, and was made universal when Ptolemy re-affirmed it in the second century AD, writing that “The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point”{xv}; that is, as if it were infinitely small.
Of course, modern science has certainly discovered that the universe is even more incomprehensibly large than the ancients thought. But this does not suggest that the ancients and medievals thought it small, much less that humanity’s value was somehow tied up with its size. In fact, this is just another attempt by secularists to invent conflicts between Christianity and science in order to justify rejecting Christ.
People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago.{xvi}
There’s another wrinkle to this story, however. In the 20th century, scientists discovered that in order for life to be possible in the universe, there are multiple conditions that must be met in the universe’s properties. The ratio of electrons to protons, the value of the fine-structure constant, the speed of light, etc., must all be precisely what they are in order for life to exist anywhere at any time in the universe’s history.{xvii} In fact, one of the conditions necessary for life is that there must be a certain amount of matter in the universe—that is, the universe must be a particular size. The amount of matter in the universe, its mass density, is directly related to the universe’s rate of expansion. The more matter there is, the more its gravitational effects will slow the expansion. But this expansion has to be very exact, so much so that the universe’s mass density must be precisely what it is to within one part in 1060. If it were any greater, the universe would collapse on itself; but if it were any less, galaxies, stars, and planets would not form.{xviii} Thus, while the vast size of the universe may superficially seem to challenge the biblical concept that human beings are important to the Creator, a closer look shows the exact opposite.
In the same sense, a vast age of the universe doesn’t mean that human beings are unimportant to the Creator. And just as the universe must have a certain amount of mass for life to exist, so must the universe be a certain age in order for there to be solar-type stars in stable burning phases so that life can exist.{xix}
On a more spiritual level, when an individual comes face-to-face with the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, he gets a glimpse of its Creator. As unimaginably huge and powerful as the universe is, God is even more powerful and (if I may put it this way) bigger. Similarly, the unfathomable age of the universe (13.5 billion years) hints at God’s eternity. It gives us a glimpse into God’s everlasting nature and eternal power, the very aspects of God that the Bible tells us creation bears witness to (Job 15:7; Ps. 89:36-37; 90:2; Prov. 8:22-31; Ecc. 1:3-11; Mic. 6:2; Hab. 3:6; Rom. 1:20; 2 Pet. 3:5). Such an astonishing agreement between the Bible and the universe should make us very wary of rejecting the testimony of either.
Notes:
{i}
{ii} I’ve seen several young-earth leaders try to explain this by arguing that the biblical text must have been corrupted at this point. They based this on the fact that the Septuagint (the earliest Greek translation of the Old Testament) includes Cainan in its translation of Gen. 10:24. However, all of the Hebrew texts of this verse do not include Cainan, and at any rate, it does not address Gen. 11:12, which lists Arphaxad as the father of Shelah. In order to make this work, they would have to argue that the Hebrew original mentioned Cainan in both Gen. 10:24 and 11:12, both texts were corrupted at precisely these points, none of the original Hebrew versions have survived, and the translators who wrote the Septuagint had access to the original version of 10:24 but not 11:12. This is completely ad hoc, since virtually any position could be defended using methodology like this.
{iii} If we wanted to be hyper-stringent, we could add another two years minus two days, if each man died a year before his birthday (ignoring, of course, how the ancient Hebrews calculated age), and another year and a half to include the entire gestation periods. So, Kohath was 133 years and 364 days old, impregnated his wife, died, and then nine months later Amram was born.
{iv} To read better treatments of this issue, see John Millam, “The Genesis Genealogies”; William Henry Green (1890); and R. K. Harrison (1999), 147-52.
{v} Hugh Ross (1998).
{vi} Papias, Fragments 9; Theophilus of Antioch, Epistle to Autolycus 2:12; Origen, De Principiis 4:1:16; Against Celsus 6:61; Augustine, The City of God 11:6.
{vii} The Epistle of Barnabas 15; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 81; Victorinius of Pettau, On the Creation of the World.
{viii} See, for example, Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis 1:39. In the Conclusion, I quote the relevant text.
{ix} David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (1987). See also Lindberg and Numbers (1986).
{x} Although it should be noted that Philip K. Dick, one of the great science-fiction authors (and a Christian) offered an even more unusual explanation (Philip Dick [1978]).
{xi} Hugh Ross (2004), 121-9; Greg Moore (2004); for examples, see John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (1961), 66-9; Henry Morris (2001); Carl Wieland (1992); (1996); (1997); (1999); (2001); (2003); Paula Weston and Wieland (1998); David Catchpoole and Wieland (2001); Don Batten (1996); (2000); Don Batten, et al. (2000), 182-3; Jonathan Sarfati (1997); (1999); Sarfati and Michael Matthews (2002); John Morris (1997); David J. Tyler (1997); John L. Groenlund (1998); Michael Brown (2005); Philip Bell (2003).
{xii} Carl Sagan (1993); Stephen Hawking (1988).
{xiii} Albert Van Helden (1985), 1-40.
{xiv} Aristotle, De Caelo 2:14.
{xv} Ptolemy, Almagest 1:5.
{xvi} C. S. Lewis (1970b), 75.
{xvii} Ross (2001), 145-67.
{xviii} Ross (2001), 54.
{xix} Ross (2001), 152, 176-80.