However, I qualify this by saying that it does have some extrinsic significance with regards to our Christian testimony. Non-Christians often view this issue as just one of many examples of religious belief conflicting with truth. Why should they take seriously a religion which doesn’t even try to deal with reality? If being a Christian entails dismissing the world that systematic observation has revealed, how (they argue) can they be challenged to take it seriously?
Unfortunately, many Christians respond to this by feeling backed into a corner or (to mix metaphors) drawing lines in the sand rather than looking at the issues head on. Often, this results in Christians letting the secular world define the terms of the debate, including Christian doctrine! Instead of considering the possibility that we may have taken a wrong turn somewhere, we give knee-jerk reactions to defend what we think Christianity requires, instead of making sure that we’ve got it right in the first place. This sometimes results in Christians fighting tooth and nail to defend their take on a certain issue which has no inherent significance at all.
Flat-earth creationism
Let me give you an example: in 1828, Washington Irving wrote his story of Columbus.{i} In it, he took some liberties with the historical facts, by saying that Columbus was trying to prove that the earth is round. In actuality, Columbus was trying to discover an alternate passage to the East Indies by sailing west, as opposed to the usual route of south, around Africa, and east. But the belief that the earth is round has been the dominant position ever since Aristotle based his cosmology on it in the fourth century BC, and became almost universal once Ptolemy did the same in the second century AD. Basically, every educated person after Aristotle knew that the earth was round, and most of the uneducated ones did too.{ii}
However, by about 1870, western society had pretty much uncritically accepted the idea that, prior to Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat. There were two primary reasons for this: first, the 19th century was a time of great optimism for the human race. People thought that we were quickly advancing towards a manmade utopia, and for many this implied the superiority of modern man over his predecessors. Thus, it was very conducive to this worldview to portray those who lived prior to the Enlightenment as a bunch of uneducated half-wits who didn’t even know the earth is round.
Second, at this time, some people were very confident that scientific discoveries would eventually explain everything without any recourse to God (a view known as “naturalism”). However, many scientists did not accept naturalism,{iii} so a cultural campaign was initiated which sought to identify it with science itself, and to this end represented any denial of naturalism as part and parcel of ignorant religious believers getting in the way of truth and progress.{iv} Examples were found, twisted, and sometimes completely invented in order to illustrate the point. The flat earth was a perfect candidate for one of these “examples”: in Irving’s story, he had made Columbus’s opponents the priests and inquisitors who didn’t want anyone challenging their authority to make pronouncements about what constituted reality.
But then a very strange thing happened. Some Christians, in an attempt to defend their worldview, allowed the tenets of their faith to be dictated to them by those who proudly pronounced themselves as enemies of Christianity. In the mid-19th century, Samuel Rowbotham, calling himself “Parallax,” claimed that a flat earth is the only valid interpretation of the Bible. He then devised an entire astronomical system called “zetetic astronomy” on the assumption of a flat earth, and compiled dozens of scientific “proofs” that the earth is flat and stationary. Flat-earth creationism produced a plethora of books and tracts, and was still being defended well into the 20th century, and even the 21st.{v}
Of course, there are biblical passages which refer to “the ends of the earth” and “the four corners of the earth.” However, as with terms such as “sunset” and “sunrise,” “This is a perfectly acceptable type of phenomenal terminology, employed by all languages at all periods of their history.”{vi} “The ends of the earth” merely refers to the most distant places, and “the four corners of the earth” refers to the most distant places in the four directions in which one can go (north, south, east, and west). Some have even argued that there are biblical passages which describe the earth with the Hebrew word hug, or circle, and suggest that these may be statements affirming that the earth is spherical (Job 22:14; Prov. 8:27; Isa. 40:22). However, in light of phenomenal terminology, I think these are more likely mere references to the horizon.
Additionally, there are a few historical figures who went against the flow, but this does not negate the consensus view. The extent to which a flat earth was accepted in ancient and medieval Christianity is sometimes exaggerated based on criticisms of the theory of “antipodes.” But this seems to be a misunderstanding: “antipodes” referred to people who were alleged to live on the other side of the earth. The Christian authors who rejected this (not all did) pointed to the almost universally-held belief that it was impossible to travel from one side to the other, “either because the sea was too wide to sail across or because the equatorial zones were too hot to sail through.”{vii} Therefore, no one from one side of the earth could have gotten to the other side, so that if there were people on the other side of the earth they could not share a common origin with us. Some have unfortunately taken these statements to mean that they were denying there was an “other side” of the world at all. But these authors were making anthropological statements, not geographical ones.
The only individuals who clearly affirmed a flat earth were Lactantius (third and fourth centuries), whose “views eventually led to his works being condemned as heretical after his death”; Severian (fourth century); and Cosmas Indicopleustes (sixth century) who exerted virtually zero influence on his contemporaries or the Middle Ages: “The first translation of Cosmas into Latin, his very first introduction into western Europe, was not until 1706. He had absolutely no influence on medieval western thought.”{viii}
Additionally, Diodore of Tarsus (fourth century) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (fourth and fifth centuries) are referenced by other Christians as affirming a flat earth in order to refute them, but their actual writings are lost.{ix} Isidore of Seville (sixth and seventh centuries) is often given as an example of a flat-earther, because some of his writings seem to affirm corollaries of a flat earth. But since he also gives a figure for the earth's circumference (80,000 stadia) and affirms that the sky is spherical and equidistant from the earth on all sides, it is difficult to attribute a belief in a flat earth to him.{x}
So Lactantius, Severian, Cosmas Indicopleustes, Diodore, and Theodore of Mopsuestia make a grand total of five Christian writers who affirmed, or apparently affirmed, a flat earth, all of whom lived in late Antiquity at the very latest, and none of whom were taken seriously.
Young-earth creationism
What is the point of all this? The calendar-day interpretation (the belief that the days of creation are best interpreted as calendar days of 24 hours each) has been one of several views held by Christians throughout history, and by itself does not at all parallel flat-earth creationism. However, the modern expression of the calendar-day interpretation is a system known as “young-earth creationism” (a.k.a. “creation science,” “scientific creationism,” or “flood geology”). According to this view, all of the features or characteristics of the modern world (such as mountain ranges, the geological column, the fossil record, etc.) formed during Noah’s flood. This view parallels flat-earth creationism in that it is a very recent interpretation of Scripture which began as a reaction against the advance of naturalism.
At the end of the 19th century, “about the only Christians to insist on the recent appearance of life and on a fossil-burying flood were the Seven-Day Adventists disciples of Ellen G. White, who claimed to have witnessed the creation of the world in a vision.”{xi} In the early 20th century, a Seventh-day Adventist named George McCready Price developed the scenario he dubbed “flood geology” in order to justify White’s claims.{xii} It needs to be pointed out that Seventh-day Adventism was originally very cultic, if not an outright cult, and maintained that White’s visions were as authoritative as Scripture, or even more so (in the last several decades, they have backed away from this view).{xiii} In the late 1920s, one of Price’s only non-Adventist supporters publicly encouraged Christians to abandon the older, traditional renderings of Gen. 1 (i.e. the day-age and gap interpretations), and to embrace the new, innovative Seventh-Day Adventist version.{xiv} When Price’s project was picked up by more mainstream Christians Henry Morris and John Whitcomb,{xv} they included only a few passing references to Price (which Morris apologized for when he submitted the original manuscript to Price for review), and carefully eliminated any reference to the historical dependence of creation science on Seventh-Day Adventism and Ellen White’s visions.{xvi} Within a few years, “their once marginal views, inspired by the visions of an Adventist prophetess, now defined the very essence of creationism.”{xvii}
Until the last few decades most creationists would have regarded such notions [as young-earth creationism] as unnecessarily extreme. By the late nineteenth century even the most conservative Christian apologists readily conceded that the Bible allowed for an ancient earth and pre-Edenic life. With few exceptions, they accommodated the findings of historical geology either by interpreting the days of Genesis 1 to represent vast ages in the history of the earth (the so-called day-age theory) or by separating a creation “in the beginning” from a much later Edenic creation in six literal days (the gap theory). … The chief architect of flood geology, a term virtually synonymous with creation science and scientific creationism, was the self-described geologist George McCready Price, who during the early decades of the twentieth century stood virtually alone in insisting on the recent appearance of life and on a flood that rearranged the features of the earth. … It was not until the creationist renaissance of the 1960s, marked by the publication of Whitcomb and Morris’ Genesis Flood and the subsequent birth of the Creation Research Society, that fundamentalists in large numbers began to read Genesis in the Pricean manner and to equate his views with the intended message of Moses. By the 1980s the flood geologists had virtually co-opted the name creationism to describe the once marginal views of Price. This [was a] remarkable shift in the prevailing meaning of creationism—from the theologically orthodox day-age and gap theories that allowed the history of life on earth to span millions of years to a doctrine of suspect provenance (because of its Adventist origins) that compressed earth history into no more than ten thousand years.{xviii}
Another resemblance between flat-earth and young-earth creationism is the rejection of modern science as entirely contaminated by philosophical naturalism. However, while some of science is certainly interpreted under the tyranny of naturalism (cognitive science, for example), this is not the case for all, or even most, of science. After all, God has told us that he reveals himself through what he has created (Ps. 19; Rom. 1:18-20), so it would seem evident that the systematic observation of God’s creation could be trusted to reveal the truth about reality.
Other interpretations
Of course, the calendar-day view is not the only interpretation of Gen. 1. “Few passages in Scripture have prompted so many different interpretations as have the first two chapters of Genesis.”{xix} This is only to be expected, since throughout Church history, the creation account has been considered one of the most obscure and hard-to-understand passages in the entire Bible. In the early second century, Papias, Clemens, Pantaenus, and Ammonius “understood the work of the six days as referring to Christ and the whole Church.”{xx} Three centuries later, Augustine wrote, “As for these ‘days,’ it is difficult, perhaps impossible to think—let alone explain in words—what they mean.”{xxi} Martin Luther, while accepting the calendar-day interpretation, wrote that the creation account “contains things the most important, and at the same time the most obscure,” and, in light of all the differing interpretations of it made before his time, despaired of ever truly understanding Gen. 1 beyond the simple facts “that the world began, and was made of God, out of nothing.”{xxi} More recently, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, the Presbyterian Church of America, and Westminster Theological Seminary have convened scholarly panels to examine this issue, and they have all concluded that the biblical text allows for a diversity of views.{xxiii}
In this book I will contrast the calendar-day interpretation with two other interpretations which I will treat as one. The day-age interpretation is the view that the days of creation were long periods of time,{xxiv} and has been held at least since the early Church fathers of the second century AD.{xxv} The analogical-day interpretation is the view that Gen.1 clearly presents the days of creation as being God’s days—i.e. they make up God’s workweek; the seventh day is God’s day of rest, etc.{xxvi} And since God’s experience of time is radically different from our own (Ps. 90:4; 2 Pet. 3:8), they shouldn’t be understood as humankind’s days, that is, as 24-hour periods.{xxvii} I am treating these as the same position because I think the latter view leads to the former: if the creation days are God’s days, and God’s experience of time is not the same as ours, then they were probably long periods, just as the “day of the Lord” refers to a period longer than a calendar day (Is. 13:6-13; Jer. 46:10; Ezek. 30:1-4; Joel 2; Amos 5:18-20; 1 Th. 5:1-3; 2 Pet. 3:10).{xxviii} I will hereafter refer to it simply as the day-age interpretation, partially because I think it’s a misnomer to call the creation days “analogical” because they refer to God’s days.{xxix}
Of course, there are more positions on this issue than just the calendar-day and day-age interpretations. Another view is the gap interpretation, which originated in the 16th century,{xxx} and was the standard interpretation of Gen. 1 in the first half of the 20th—so much so that some considered it the only valid position.{xxxi} This view interprets Gen. 1:2 as saying “and the earth became formless and empty” (rather than “was”), which implies an original creation that apparently went wrong, probably due to the rebellion of Satan. The rest of the creation account, therefore, describes God’s restoration or re-creation of the earth.{xxxii} A similar view is historical creationism, which is an interpretation that goes back to a medieval Jewish scholar named Rashi, and was picked up by some Christian scholars such as John Lightfoote in the 17th century. It maintains that the phrase “in the beginning” in Gen. 1:1 refers to an undefined period of time, and the rest of the creation account in Gen. 1 is describing the preparation of the promised land (i.e. Israel), not of the entire earth.{xxxiii} The framework interpretation, which can be traced back to Augustine, notes that the events described on days one, two, and three seem to parallel or correlate to those of days four, five, and six respectively. Thus, proponents of this view maintain that while Gen. 1 describes events which took place in space and time, it describes them with a literary framework, and shouldn’t be understood chronologically.{xxxiv} While all of these interpretations (and many others){xxxv} deserve their own extended analyses, in this book I will be primarily concerned with the day-age interpretation over against the calendar-day interpretation. Note, however, that all of these views originated before there was any scientific evidence for the antiquity of the earth.
This book represents my wrestling with the issue of the age of the earth and universe, and my response to the charge that any denial of young-earth creationism is motivated solely by scientific, rather than biblical, concerns. To this end, the first two parts answer this by looking at the arguments for and against the day-age interpretation from an exegetical standpoint and other issues in this debate.
The third part of this book also answers this charge, but in a different way. It deals with the nature of science, its relationship to the Bible, and why the Bible-believing Christian should accept its findings—although not uncritically of course. It should also be noted that each chapter ends with objections and responses. These are meant to re-emphasize points from the body of the chapter in a different format, or to close possible loopholes. As such I do not mean to imply that all of them have actually been made by young-earth proponents (although many have).
I treat the early chapters of Genesis as historical, and accept the traditional authorship given to the various books of the Bible. If you have a problem with this, feel free to take it as hypothetical; that is, as granting the historicity and authorship of these texts to the young-earth proponent in order to argue that, even on those terms, the Bible does not teach a young earth. On a similar note, one issue that I will not be addressing is the truth or falsity of biological evolution. Evolution will be mentioned, but not with an eye as to its ultimate truth value. For many Christians the age of the earth and evolution go hand-in-hand, but I think this is simply a mistake: evolution is a completely separate issue. Whether your views on evolution are pro or con, I am perfectly willing to grant them for the purpose of the present study.
I’m making this book available because I believe this issue is like a forest fire burning out of control: while it’s important not to throw gasoline on it, it wouldn’t be wise to just ignore it, either. I am very aware of my finitude, my capacity to make mistakes, and even to deceive myself. Part of the problem is that both sides are simply unable to seriously consider the validity of the other position. I would therefore like to call on the Christian community to pray that God would move in our hearts and minds so that we could seriously consider the claims of those we disagree with on this issue. If you believe in an old earth, ask God to open your mind to the possibility that the earth is young; and if you believe in a young earth, ask God to open your mind to the possibility that the earth is old.
I had three concerns that motivated me to post this book online: first, many Christians are confused and distressed by the apparent and much-publicized discrepancy between Christianity and science. If they can become confident that no such discrepancy exists, their spiritual discomfort will be greatly alleviated. Second, the age of the earth is an issue which has, very unfortunately, caused division among God’s people. It is an absolutely shameful situation that Christians refuse to fellowship with each other over such a trifling disagreement. Third, one of the main reasons people give for rejecting Christianity in the western world is that it teaches unscientific things, and the age of the earth is one of the offending parties mentioned most often.{xxxvi} If the Bible doesn’t really teach a young earth, clarifying this point would obviously have very important ramifications for evangelism, especially to the scientifically minded.
With regards to the last of these, I suspect that at least some of the people who reject Christianity as being incompatible with science are merely using this as a smoke screen to avoid the larger issues, so this will only force them to face these issues more directly (or to find another smoke screen). Others, however, are sincerely looking for truth, and in these cases the perceived incompatibility between science and Christianity isn’t a smoke screen, but an obstacle. If it can be removed, it should be.
Notes:
{i} Washington Irving (1828).
{ii} Aristotle, De Caelo; Ptolemy, Almagest; Jeffrey Burton Russell (1991).
{iii} See, for example, David N. Livingstone (1984).
{iv} Colin A. Russell (1989), 7.
{v} Samuel B. Rowbotham (1881). In addition to Rowbotham’s works, the two most prominent books are David Wardlaw Scott (1901); and C. S. DeFord (1992; originally published in 1931). Charles Johnson, the president of the Flat Earth Society, died March 19, 2001 (link), but there is still a Flat Earth Society discussion forum online (link). Additionally, here is a sampling of writings about flat-earth proponents: Walter Davenport (1927); Patrick Moore (1972), 16-29; Daniel Cohen (1972); Robert J. Schadewald (1980); (1992); John Michell (1984), 21-35; Carl Sifakis (1984), 226-9; David Gates with Jennifer Smith (1984). Further references can be found online (link).
{vi} Gleason Archer (1982), 93.
{vii} Russell (1991), 19-20; see also C. S. Lewis (1964), 28, 61.
{viii} Russell (1991), 32, 35. To clarify, Lactantius was condemned for his theological, not his geographical, views.
{ix} Russell (1991), 23-4.
{x} Isidore, Etymologies 48, 3:32, 14:1; Russell (1991), 87, note 53.
{xi} Ronald L. Numbers (1995).
{xii} Numbers (1993).
{xiii} Walter Martin (2003), 534-627.
{xiv} Numbers (1993).
{xv} John C. Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry M. Morris (1961).
{xvi} Numbers (1993).
{xvii} Numbers (1995), part 3.
{xviii} Numbers (1993). Just in case you find these claims dubious, Henry Morris himself endorsed this book as “a rich mine of information and historical insights” (back cover), although he states that these developments constitute the rediscovery of flood geology rather than the origin of it.
{xvix} John Sailhamer (1996), 21.
{xx} Papias, Fragments 9.
{xxi} Augustine, City of God 11:6.
{xxii} Martin Luther (1858), 23.
{xxiii} Earl D. Radmacher and Robert D. Preus (1984), 283-348; “PCA Report of the Creation Study Committee”; “Westminster Theological Seminary and the Days of Creation: A Brief Statement.”
{xxiv} Hugh Ross (2004); Ross and Gleason Archer (2001a); Don Stoner (1997).
{xxv} See chapter 8 and the appendix.
{xxvi} C. John Collins (1994).
{xxvii} In saying that God’s experience of time is different from our own, I am not making any statement about the much more controversial issue of God’s metaphysical relationship to time. On this, see Gregory Ganssle (2001).
{xxviii} Biblical references to “the day of the LORD,” “that day,” etc. could be multiplied.
{xxix} I explain why in chapter 1.
{xxx} Numbers (1993).
{xxxi} Numbers (1993).
{xxxii}
{xxxiii} Sailhamer (1996); (1992), 81-102; Sailhamer (1998). Sailhamer’s references to early acceptance of this view include Chaim D. Shual (1988) and John Lightfoote (1642).
{xxxiv} N. H. Ridderbos (1957); Meredith Kline (1958); Mark D. Futato (1998); Kline and Lee Irons (2001a).
{xxxv} One particularly ingenious position is the revelatory-day view, which holds that the days of creation refer to the calendar days on which God revealed to Moses the content of Genesis 1. See P. J. Wiseman (1958).
{xxxvi} Hugh Ross (1998), 9.