What is old earth creationism and is it a biblically valid viewpoint? - Podcast Episode 53

On today's episode. I have with me Dr. Jonathan McClatchy of Sattler College. He's a professor there and also a good friend of mine. We go way back. If you listen to one of the early podcasts, you'll hear a little bit more about how Jonathan and I originally met and how he totally schooled me at chess without even looking at the board, but that's not the topic today.

Old Earth Creationism and the Limits of a Plain Reading of Genesis

So a couple episodes ago, we had a guest on who spoke about young earth creationism. So today we're going to focus a little bit more on the old earth creationist viewpoint and how that is actually a biblically plausible viewpoint.

So Jonathan, welcome back to the.

Show.

Thanks so much for having me on Shay. It's great to be with you again.

So I discovered, I read some of your articles on this probably a couple of years ago, and I found myself adopting some of the language because I thought you said it better than I did. So with my opening question, I just want to ask, so you've said something to the effect of a plain reading of the early chapters of Genesis would lead to a young earth creationist viewpoint.

But your question is, is the plain reading the proper reading? So explain what you mean by that so that our audience can get a better grasp of the direction you take with these passages.

Right, sure. So when people typically make arguments for young earth creationism from scripture, there are two implicit premises. One is that the plain reading of biblical text or the simplest reading of the biblical text would incline one towards adopting a young earth perspective.

The second premise is that the face value reading or the simplest reading should always be the one that is preferred as our interpretation of the biblical text. And I would question that particular assumption that we should always favor the simplest or most face value reading of the biblical text.

When we come across, when we encounter a text that appears to be in conflict with the natural sciences, there are three possibilities. One is that we have evaluated the scientific, we've mis-evaluated the scientific evidence.

And that is typically the way that young earth creationist organizations will argue. Or alternatively, we have mis-evaluated the text of scripture and actually our interpretation of the Bible is in error.

Or thirdly, the biblical text itself is in fact in error. And then we'd have to, of course, appraise the ramifications of that finding. I think that although the interpretation of Genesis 1 through 11 and relating it to our modern scientific understanding is certainly a challenge, I don't want to deny that.

But I think that we have to get into proper perspective and understand that for much of the discussion, with some exceptions like the debate over the historical Adam and so forth, I don't think that it's critical to the veracity of Christianity.

Joshua 10, Phenomenological Language, and the Bible’s Use of Appearance

So what about the other two options? So we've mis-evaluated the scientific evidence or we've mis-evaluated the text of scripture. Well, let's take, for example, a very well-known text, Joshua chapter 10.

And I'm sure your viewers are familiar with this text where God is purported to cause the sun to stand still in the sky in order for Joshua to complete his battle. And this was often interpreted prior to the Copernican Revolution as evidence for the fact that the sun moves in relation to the earth that supported the geocentric model, or so it was thought.

And now that we now understand that, in fact, the heliocentric model is correct, not the geocentric model, we Christians generally understand that to be using phenomenological language. So science can and often does shape and influence and inform our approach to the biblical text and can sometimes eliminate and clarify the biblical text.

So when we're evaluating between these three options I listed earlier, that we've mis-evaluated the scientific data, that we've mis-evaluated the text of scripture, or the biblical text is an error, then we need to, what we're really asking is which of those is the least epistemically costly.

So for example, let's take the example with Joshua chapter 10. Let's suppose that we have the scientific data that confirms the heliocentric model is correct and the geocentric model is false, which is more reasonable that we've mis-evaluated the scientific evidence for heliocentrism, the fact that the planets orbit the sun, or that we've misinterpreted the text of scripture, or the biblical text is an error.

And I certainly think that to propose that we mis-evaluate the scientific evidence is a very, is very, very far-fetched. I think that the evidence for the heliocentric model is overwhelming. So then that leaves us with the remaining two options, and of those I think that there's no problem with taking the view that we've mis-evaluated the text of scripture and actually the text is using phenomenological language, which is how virtually all Christians understand that text and others like it.

So it doesn't necessarily follow, in conclusion then, it doesn't necessarily follow that if a text is the most face-value reading of the text, if an interpretation is the most face-value reading of the text, that that always should be the reading that's preferred if it puts the Bible in conflict with scientific evidence.

Does that make sense? It does. No, I mean, we've been asked this question many, many times about, well, why does the Bible seem to teach that the sun revolves around the earth? And it's like, well, if you're going to interpret it that way, so does my weatherman every morning when he refers to the sunrise and the sunset.

So the Bible using the language of appearance, so to speak, is to me, it's not a problem at all. And God's purpose in writing the Bible was not to give ancient people a perfectly scientifically accurate understanding of how the solar system works.

He was just, from our parents, from our vantage point, it looks like the sun rises and the sun sets. It looks like the sun revolves around the earth, but now we know thousands of years later that that's not the case.

So no, what you said makes perfect sense. Jumping to the text in Genesis, I'd really just love, how do you, and you're somebody who's very scientifically trained, what is your reading of Genesis chapters one through 11 specifically regarding the age of the earth?

And how did you come to that conclusion?

Genesis 1, the Days of Creation, and the Age of the Earth

Sure. So obviously that's a very broad topic, so probably you won't be able to cover all 11 chapters of Genesis, give my perspective and all that, but let me just give a few key points. People are interested in diving into more detail on this.

I do have a series of articles on my website where I unpack this in more detail. I've covered Genesis one through five there, I'm planning to write also an article concerning the flood and Tower of Babel and such as well, but there's quite a lot of detail there if people are interested in diving into that.

Now, if we go over to the biblical text then from Genesis one, so in Genesis one it says, starting in verse one, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

So that's the first two verses of Genesis chapter one. And then verse three begins with the phrase, and God said, let there be light, and there was light. And so you'll notice that verse three is the first occurrence in the Genesis one passage of the phrase, and God said, which if you study the text of Genesis one carefully, you'll notice that each of the days of creation week begins with the phraseology, and God said, and God said, and God said, which implies or suggests that verses one and two actually occurred prior to the first day.

The first day actually doesn't begin until verse three of Genesis one, and if that is the case, if Genesis one, one, and one, two occurred an indefinite period of time prior to the first day of creation week, then the biblical text is actually silent on the age of the earth, and indeed the age of the cosmos.

Now that's a separate question from what you think of the age of the biosphere, but regarding the age of the universe and the age of the earth, it seems to me that scripture is completely silent on that, and if we look at the days of creation week, the view that is most closely aligned with the perspective I would subscribe to would be that of C. John Collins, who is a biblical scholar.

He was on the translation committee for the English Standard Version of the Bible, and he's an expert in Hebrew. He's written a number of books dealing with these issues, the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

The view that he would subscribe to in regards to the days of creation week is to interpret the days as literal 24-hour days, and by the way, one false dichotomy I often see in this debate is young earth creationists will often make it sound like the debate is between those that think that the word yom in Genesis 1 is correctly translated to 24-hour or 12-hour day, and those that think it should be like Hugh Ross's camp, that it should be translated as an indefinite but finite period of time.

I don't think that that's an appropriate dichotomy. I think that as an old earth creationist, I think that the correct and appropriate translation of the Hebrew word yom is indeed a solar regular day.

I think Hugh Ross is mistaken on that. So the view that C. John Collins takes is that the days of creation week are not like our earth days, but rather they're not identical to our earth days, but rather they're analogical to our earth days.

So it sets and establishes the rhythm of our work week, the rhythm of the human pattern of work and rest. Six days we are to labor, and the Sabbath day we are to rest. So I think that is the purpose, that they are not identical to our earth days, or at least you don't necessarily need to read them as identical to our earth days, but rather they are analogical for our earth days, for our.

Human rhythm of work and rest. Does that make sense? It does. That's helpful. An interesting thing I often hear from the young earth creationists is the proposal, and we even talked about this briefly before the show, that, and I know this isn't necessarily your area of expertise, your expertise is far more in biology than in geology, but what do you think of the argument that God created the earth and the universe with the quote unquote appearance of age, and that explains why the universe and the earth seems to be much older than the young earth creationist viewpoint, which would say it is approximately 6 ,000 years old.

Appearance of Age, Distant Starlight, and Geological Evidence

Right, so one attempt to salvage young earth creationism that I often encounter, in particular from lay creationists, though less frequently also from academic creationists, is to postulate that the earth and the universe were created mature in a manner akin to Christ's transformation of water into mature wine in John chapter 2 verses 1 through 11 at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the argument is, well God, Jesus transformed the water into wine, and so if you'd inspected the wine it would look like mature wine, but in fact it was young, and so could something similar not be true of the earth and the universe and so forth, and to many that postulation has the attraction of allowing one to dismiss the evidence of vast age as saying nothing about how old the earth actually is in a similar manner to how Adam, having been created mature, would appear to be much older than he actually was, but I would argue actually this explanation doesn't work because the geological record appears to tell a story of historical events, including the existence of animal death, for example, long before man, which of course young earth creationist interpretations typically conclude.

There's also a remarkable correlation, and this is one of the reasons, this is one of the lines of evidence that persuades me of an old earth, is that there's this remarkable correlation between the dates that are yielded by the radiometric dating methods and the types of fossils that you find in the strata, so for instance if you were to give me rock dating to the say the Cambrian period from anywhere in the world, it doesn't matter which continent, I could tell you with precision what fossils you'll find and what you won't find.

You'll find things like Trilobites, Anomalocaris, Seleucigenia, Wolbachia and so forth, Opabinia, and you won't find things like whales, for example, and that correlation is something which is very surprising on the young earth view, but it's not very surprising at all on an old earth view, and so that tends to support, I think, the old earth interpretation.

Also the fact that our observation of distant galaxies, which are often millions or tens of millions, hundreds of millions of light years away from the earth, and a light year in astronomy, of course, is a measure of distance, not of time, so when we say that light from distant galaxies is millions of light years away from us, then what we mean by that is that it takes millions of years to be observed by an observer on earth, because light takes time to travel, and so that observation is highly expected on an old earth interpretation, but rather surprising on a young earth interpretation.

Now some creationists, not the more scholarly ones, but a common approach that's taken by lay creationists, and this would comport with the analogy that I mentioned with the converting of the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, is the idea of positing light created in transit, where God created the light already on the way to earth, so that it could be observed even from an earthly, by an observer, even though the earth is in fact young, but that idea I think won't help here, because we are actually able to observe events in deep space, such as supernova, which are exploding stars, and on such a view that would be an illusion, since the light would never have actually left those events in the first place.

We're actually observing light that is depicting events that, it didn't actually, the light that we're observing didn't actually leave those events, and so we're actually observing these cosmic illusions, which I feel deeply uncomfortable with, that God is creating this cosmic slideshow or this cosmic illusion for us to observe.

So one can attempt to postulate convoluted rationalizations of this distant starlight enigma, as some have done, then I would argue that it still has to be recognized as far less surprising on an old earth view than it is on a young earth view, and thus is evidence that is confirmatory of the old earth view.

One common mistake, by the way, that I often see young earth creationists make is that they spend a lot of time trying to show that they can make the data fit with the young earth view, and they can find ways of making it consistent with the young earth view, and there are ways of doing that.

For most of the evidence for an old earth, you can find a way to make it fit with a young earth view, if you try hard enough, if you're prepared to invoke enough ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses, you can make the data fit.

But the same is true for virtually anything, for any hypothesis, and this is how conspiracy theories argue. They find a way of making any data fit, so that no matter how much the data contradicts the thesis, they come up with an explanation for how it must fit.

And the real question that we want to ask is not can we make the data fit, which is usually yes, you can, but rather is this data more surprising on a young earth view, or is it more surprising on an old earth view?

And to the extent that it's more surprising on a young earth view than it is on an old earth view, it tends to be evidence that this confirms the young earth view relative to the old earth view. So I think that's an important distinction.

So although yes, you can read people like Danny Faulkner, or Jason Lyle, or Russ Humphreys, and they come up with these elaborate attempts to explain the distant starlight enigma, but at the end of the day, it's still evidence that tends to confirm the old earth view, because that data is very well expected, very well predicted by an old earth view, but very quite surprising on a young earth perspective.

And so that's another issue. A further difficulty with the young earth view in terms of the science is the need to postulate that all the meteor impacts with the earth have taken place during the past 6 ,000 years.

So for example, the one that caused the meteor crater in the Gulf of Mexico, which is thought to have resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, or the meteor that caused the Vredevoort dome in Pontchartrum in South Africa, which I've visited, in fact.

Now, the dome in South Africa is thought to have taken place at that meteor impact some 2 billion years ago. Now, if either of those impacts, and the dome is thought to be the largest meteor crater, I think, in the world, or it's one of the biggest meteor craters.

So if either of those impacts had occurred in the last 6 ,000 years, as required by young earth creationism, then the effect on human civilization and animal life around the globe would have been devastating.

But there's no evidence of such impacts that have occurred in recorded history. So some geologists have argued that the dome in South Africa is the result of some volcanic event, but this is only a minority fringe view, which is not generally accepted.

The consensus view among experts on the subject is that it's a meteor impact zone. And there's various lines of evidence to support that, such as evidence of shock and quartz grains, evidence of rapid melting of the granite, which turns it into glass and so forth.

So again, another related point is the meteor impacts on the surface of the moon. I mean, are we really to cram all of those meteor impacts into the last 6 ,000 years? It seems to me to be rather far-fetched.

Now, you can say that if you want to, but at the end of the day, is that evidence more surprising on a young earth view, or is it more surprising on an older view? And these things start to add up. They start to accumulate and point, I think, quite powerfully to an old earth view, not a young earth view.

One argument sometimes given in support of a young earth creationist view is certain limiting factors that suggest kind of an upper limit on the age of the earth. So for example, a very popular one that if you come across a young earth creationist who's interested in science, it's kind of a guarantee that you'll come across this argument, and that is the presence of soft tissue in dinosaur bones that has been discovered, which is taken by many young earth creationists to indicate that the bones cannot in fact be millions of years old because the biological tissue disintegrates rapidly.

Now, I would agree with the identification of those collagen fragments that they come from dinosaur tissue, but I don't consider the preservation of those dinosaur collagen fragments, especially in an environment devoid of oxygen, water, and microorganisms to be particularly surprising on an older hypothesis, because the basic structural unit of collagen is an intertwining of three protein chains, which is known as a triple helix, and the individual chains at particular points along the length of the triple helix form chemical bonds with each other, and that forms cross-links.

Numerous collagen triple helices assemble to form collagen fibrils, and these in turn assemble to form collagen fibers, and given just the highly intertwined and cross-linked is the structure of collagen, it's not particularly surprising to find fragments of this molecule preserved for six to eight million years.

So, in fact, Fazali Rana, who's an old earth Christian biochemist, has a book on this topic called Dinosaur Blood in the Age of the Earth, which I commend to people who are interested in reading out more on that particular subject, but does that make sense in terms of the general issues?

Oh, it does for sure. I mean, this is fascinating stuff, like we talked about before the show started. I mean, I am not a scientist, but I love studying this stuff, and probably, maybe for our last question, do you want to get your insight in?

Because one of the things I talked about in the Young Earth Creationist video interview was once you get to a literal atom, I've already said that you think is a crucial part of the Christian faith, but go to the Book of Romans, how important it is to have a literal atom from which all humanity springs.

Once we get to that point, generally speaking, Young Earth Creationists and Old Earth Creationists can agree on the main doctrines of Christianity, the stuff that's before that. That being the case, why do you think there's so much, I don't know what the right word is, animosity, so to speak, from both sides?

Is what I'm saying accurate in that as long as you have a literal atom, the timeframe of what came before that ultimately really doesn't matter to the Christian faith in terms of whether it's true or not?

Adam, Original Sin, and Why the Debate Becomes So Heated

Yeah. I think the historical atom, as I said earlier, is very important because the biblical doctrine of original sin hinges upon the historicity of Adam and Eve. I have an article on my website if people want to dig into the details of the historical atom, why I think it's biblically important and why I think that it's scientifically defensible.

I personally would push Adam and Eve back into, say, two or 300 ,000 years ago. It's sometimes argued by population geneticists that you cannot have all of humanity descended from a primordial couple because there's too much genetic diversity.

The argument is that the human population size never got below 10 ,000 individuals at the time. I don't buy that argument. I think that you can make such an argument if you're talking about an Adam and Eve that existed in the last 100 ,000 years or so.

But if you're prepared to push them back further than that, I think that it can certainly be consistent or interpreted along those lines. There's been papers published. Ola Hostier, who's a mathematician and population geneticist, has done some work on this showing that you can have all of humanity descended from a primordial couple within the past few hundred thousand years.

Of course, the issue then is, well, what about the biblical genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11? I would be inclined to posit gaps in those genealogies. We know that there are other genealogical records in the Bible which have gaps demonstrably so.

Now, of course, one might still argue or object, well, yeah, we have examples of genealogies with gaps, but we don't have any examples of genealogies with that many gaps, which is true. I would own the fact that this is an ad hoc postulation, though I would argue that invoking ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses is justified if and only if the evidence that confirms your overall thesis is sufficient to bear the weight of it.

And in my assessment, the evidence for Christianity is quite strong, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and so forth from the prophecy. And so that provides indirect reason to think that there was an historical Adam, even if we don't have any direct evidence for an historical Adam even.

So that can provide a basis for making that postulation in regards to the genealogies. In terms of animosity, I think that it is very unfortunate that a lot of young earth creationists will claim that old earth creationists are compromising scripture and so forth.

That's often the source of the animosity from young earth towards old earth. And I think that that is incorrect because, well, I mean, it's going to vary from person to person, their motivation, and their general approach to these issues.

But at least from my side, I'm simply trying to read both the scientific evidence and biblical text faithfully and come to the view which I think most faithfully represents the state of the evidence. Because God hasn't just given us the book of scripture, he's also given us the book of nature as well.

And both of those, I think, are legitimate sources of information. And we're trying to work out, okay, how do those fit together? And can science actually illuminate and clarify elements and aspects of the biblical text?

In terms of animosity from the old earth side towards young earth creationists, the source of that is typically a frustration. I think that it is a bad testimony to the academy that people look at young earth creationism and see that it doesn't really stand up.

And so it brings the gospel into disrepute. So I think that's a common frustration that older creationists share in regards to young earth creationism. And also, I think, yeah, I think that's probably the main source of animosity from both sides.

Towards the other. Does that make sense? It does. Thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation. Maybe at some point later, I've never wanted the podcast to be like a format for debate, but I would love to have a reasonable old earth creationist and a reasonable young earth creationism on just to discuss some of these issues.

Because, again, I'm not a scientist. But what I wanted to kind of do with these interviews is point to the fact that from evangelical Christians, you can be either, as long as you have a literal Adam from which original sin, the need for salvation comes from.

So Jonathan, thank you for being on the show today. I enjoyed your insights and learned a couple of new things that I hadn't thought of before. So some more stuff for me to ponder in the coming days. This has been the Got Questions podcast with Jonathan McClatchy, professor at Sattler College.

And he mentioned several links that he would like people to read. We will include those on the show notes, on the comments field, and on YouTube, but also at podcast .gotquestions .org. Got questions?

The Bible has answers, and we'll help you find them.