Discerning Truth: Dialog on the Age of the Earth - Part 1

Hi folks, welcome to Discerning Truth, the official podcast of the Biblical Science Institute. I'm Jason Lyle and what I'd like to do today is talk about actually an interaction I had a few weeks ago.

I was on the Revealed Apologetics podcast and I had the opportunity to debate, dialogue with Dr. Hugh Ross on the topic of the age of the earth. For those of you that don't know Hugh Ross, he's an astronomer like myself, but he believes that the world is billions of years old.

He professes Christianity, but he believes that God created, using the Big Bang, that God used stellar evolution over billions of years to bring about the universe that we see today. He believes that God created organisms supernaturally, but did so over a time span of billions of.

Years.

So he creates some organisms, then slaughters them off, creates more, slaughters them off, and so on, and finally gets around to creating Adam and Eve, and of course that puts death before sin, which I take issue with that.

Those of you that have read my book, Understanding Genesis, I deal with a lot of Hugh Ross's claims in that book. The reason I picked him is because he's one of very few old earth advocates that actually tries to say that the Bible implies the billions of years.

Most old earth creationists would say that the Bible allows for deep time, but they would say their main reason for it is discoveries in science. I think very few of them would argue the way Hugh does, that you have to believe in billions of years if you're reading the Bible consistently.

And you say, how does he do that? Six days of creation? Well, Dr. Ross believes each of those days is not really a day in the ordinary sense of the term, but is in fact a vast age, hundreds of millions of years each.

By the way, that doesn't solve the problem of getting the secular timescale to line up with the Bible, because the order is different. In the secular timescale, stars formed billions of years before the earth, but according to the Bible, earth's made on day one, stars are made on day four, so there's a difference in the order there.

According to the Bible, fruit trees are made on day three, fish are made on day five, but in the secular timeline, fish evolved long before fruit trees. Now Ross does not believe in Darwinian evolution, but he does accept the secular timescale, so he would agree with when things lived in terms of agreeing with the secularists there.

So what I thought I would do today is take a look at some sections of the debate. We won't do the whole thing. I'll post the link if you want to watch the whole dialogue, but I thought I'd take some sections where I didn't have time to respond just because of the time constraints.

The moderator was very fair. It's just that I'm not really very good at jumping in at the right time, and frankly you Ross makes a lot of mistakes per unit time, and so it's very difficult to know which ones to jump in and correct and which ones to just kind of let go, but also there were some things that maybe I could have said better, and I thought, boy, you know, after the debate, you know, I'm like, boy, I should have said that, boy, I should have said that, and so I'm going to take the opportunity to say those things.

You might as well learn from my mistakes as well as my successes, so there you go. So let's take a look at some of the highlights of this debate, and I'll respond to some of the things that I didn't during the original.

Summary of the Young-Earth Position and Biblical Authority

Dr. Lyle, why don't you share a brief summary of your position with regards to the question of young earth creationism?

Okay.

I have a high view of Scripture. I believe that Scripture is the inerrant Word of God in the original manuscripts. People complain we don't have the original manuscripts, but we have very, very reliable copies, so that's not really an issue.

I do believe in the perspicuity of Scripture, that the Bible is basically clear in what it intends to communicate. It's not a puzzle that we have to try and solve and, you know, get all these different parts to really understand what it means.

It's clear. That's not to say there aren't any difficult sections. The Bible itself says there are some difficult sections, but I think that's more in terms of accepting what it has to say than understanding what it has to say.

There's a difference between those two, and I believe in the grammatical historical approach to interpretation, to hermeneutics. How we read the Bible should be based on the grammar of the passage, given the historical context, and generally the historical context is given by the Bible itself.

The Bible is primarily a history book, and so I believe that when you combine those three things, the inerrancy of Scripture, the perspicuity of Scripture, and the grammatical historical approach, when you then read Genesis, you come to the conclusion that God really made in six days, each of those defined as an earth rotation bound by an evening and a morning.

Now you'll notice what I did at this point. I'm laying out my interpretive framework, because that really is the difference between Hugh Ross's position and mine. I do have a high view of Scripture, I believe it's inerrant, and I believe that it's perspicuous.

Now Hugh Ross would claim to believe that the Bible is inerrant, and he might say that he thinks it's perspicuous, that it's clear, but in practice he doesn't do that. In practice he reads the Bible as if it's a code that we need to deconstruct, and so that's why I said that the way that I did, because I'm defining the parameters of the debate.

This is a debate over hermeneutical method. How should we read the Bible? I also indicated the grammatical historical approach, that I believe the Bible should be interpreted according to its own grammar, according to the history of the time, which the Bible itself provides.

And the reason I said that is because if you believe those things, if you believe in inerrancy perspicuity, and the grammatical historical approach, you cannot come away with Hugh Ross's position in terms of the billions of years.

It's not there. And so that's why I felt it was necessary to start the debate that way, because I'm framing it in terms of the differences in our hermeneutical approaches. And that is in fact the basis for our work week.

The Six Days of Creation in Exodus 20 and Genesis 1

And so in Exodus 20, beginning in verse 8, where we remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and on six days you'll do your labor, the seventh is the Lord's, then God gives the explanation for why. In verse 11, we work six days and rest one.

We have a seven day week because God worked in six days and rested one. He uses the same word for days there, yamim, which always means days, yamim is the plural form of yom. And so it's very clear that God created six ordinary days.

He did that for our benefit. He could have created the universe in an instant. He had the power to do that. He really slowed himself down to make in six days. Then he rested one, again, as a pattern for us.

I have to think that the Exodus 20 argument is very strong because God uses exactly the same word for day in the plural form, yamim, to indicate the days of our week with his days of creation. And so if you're following the grammatical historical approach, you have the same word in the same context.

It must mean the same thing. And something I didn't, I mentioned it briefly, but the plural form of day, yamim, it never means a long period of time anywhere in the Bible. Days, plural, is always ordinary days, might be a lot of them, but it never means millions.

Of years.

It never means a long period of time. But in my mind, the issue here is, is the Bible inerrant and perspicuous and what is the apologetic or the hermeneutical approach that we should use to scripture?

And then the theology that follows from it, namely, I would suggest that all Christian doctrines, maybe we can go into more detail later, but I would suggest that all major Christian doctrines are based on historical grammatical reading of Genesis, where God really did make in six days, death really did enter the world as a result of Adam's sin, there really was a global flood, and that these are foundational issues to the Christian worldview.

At this point, I was hoping that the conversation would go towards the theology that follows logically from an old earth versus a young earth, because death is not the penalty for sin if you believe in millions of years, and unfortunately, it didn't really go that way.

I mentioned the worldwide flood, I was really hoping we'd get to talk about that, because Hugh Ross does not believe in a global flood, he'll say he believes in a worldwide flood, but he doesn't believe in a global flood, and the Bible's very clear about the extent of the flood.

And so that just, that would have been a neat issue to really kind of focus in on. It didn't go that way, but I tried.

The Meaning of Literal and the Hebrew Word Yom

Well, I hold to all the affirmations and denials of the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy, and likewise all our affirmations and denials on hermeneutics.

But nothing about perspicuity, nothing about whether Scripture is clear and to be understood on its own terms, and that is a distinguishing difference between our positions.

I believe that Genesis is historical, it's chronological, you know, I'm not a theistic evolutionist, and I don't believe that we should be taking those texts figuratively. I think there's plenty within the text that tells us they should be read literally, historically, and chronologically.

However, I do believe that these creation days, I actually sign a statement that I believe that God created in six literal days, but the Hebrew word for day has four distinct literal definitions, one of which includes a long period of time.

So what is the literal meaning of the Hebrew word that is translated day in Genesis 1? The Hebrew word is yom. Its literal meaning is day. Now Ross says it has other definitions, and it's true. It can, in certain contexts, mean a longer period of time, but those would primarily be in poetic literature, and when used as part of a figure of speech, part of a prepositional phrase, like the day of the Lord, or even in the day, be yom, which is a little bit of a different meaning there.

So yes, yom can mean a longer period of time. That's not the literal meaning, and I wish that Hugh would not spend so much time trying to convince us that he's taking a literal meaning, rather than say, look, here's why I think it should be interpreted according to one of these lesser-used definitions.

Because there are places in Scripture where words are used in a non-literal fashion, especially in poetic literature, but there might even be a few places in Genesis where a figure of speech is used.

I get that. And so that's the real issue, is what does the word mean in a given context? That's the issue.

And the thing that struck me when I first looked at the Bible at age 17, before I became a Christian, is that this word day, just in the first page, is used with three different definitions. I mean, creation day one is contrasting days and nights.

That's day for the daylight hours. Creation day four is contrasting seasons, days, and years. That's day for 24 hours. But Genesis 2 -4 uses the word day for a long period of time.

Now, whether or not Genesis 2 -4 really is using day for a longer period of time, it's actually a different form of the word. It's be-yom, in the day, which is different in Hebrew. But you'll notice, not in Genesis 1, there's no indication in Genesis 1 that yom is being used for a period longer than 24 hours.

And it's interesting. He didn't even claim that, at least in this portion of the dialogue. You see, in Genesis 1, yom always means an ordinary day. It's defined that way. He correctly pointed out that day is contrasted with night, and so that would be an ordinary.

Day.

But then, if he'd have just finished the rest of that verse, Genesis 1 -5, God defines the day as being bound by evening and morning. And so that also indicates an ordinary day. That's the first day. And then the second day is bound by evening and morning, and so on.

Every day of creation is mentioned as being bound by an evening and a morning, which constitutes an ordinary day. And so you see, if we're paying attention to the context, there's no doubt that those days are ordinary days.

Something else that, I wasn't sure if I should bring it up or not, but the fact is that Hugh Ross, by his own admission, already believed the Big Bang when he was a child. He believed in the Big Bang, the billions of years, and then he doesn't even come across the Bible until he's 17, and then he reads it.

Is it possible, Hugh, that maybe you're taking some of your beliefs and reading them into the text a little bit? Because that's a tendency that we all tend to do, and since Hugh didn't grow up in a church environment, he doesn't really know anything about hermeneutics at this point.

He's got this belief about the Big Bang, and then he reads the Bible, and the Bible has a power to it. We recognize it as God's Word. And so it's very tempting to take our views of what we think we know about reality and read them into the text.

And I know Hugh would claim that he's not doing that, but I really think he is. And I think if he's honest about it, he would have to admit that. That's at least a possibility.

And just noticing that there's no evening and morning for the seventh day, and that there's three texts in the Bible that are explicitly or implicitly tell us we're still in God's seventh day, tells me that at least the seventh day is a long period of time.

Well, in reality, there are no texts in the Bible that say we're still in the seventh.

Day.

There are texts that deal with God's rest, because God's rest continued beyond the seventh.

Day.

God has rested from his work of creation since the end of the sixth day. But that doesn't mean that the seventh day continues.

We're still in it. And as a young scientist that said, now I understand why so many in the life sciences say we see no scientific evidence for God, and why so many of us in the physical sciences say we see evidence for God everywhere.

The reason that anyone would say they don't see evidence for God is because they're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. The evidence for God is just as obvious in the realm of biology as it is in the physical sciences.

It's just people don't want to believe in a God who is rightly angry at them for their.

Sins.

For six days, God creates, and the seventh day he stops creating. So if you're doing your scientific research on the human era, which is typical for most in the life sciences, all you're going to see is the natural process.

But if you're looking before the human era, this is when God is actively creating. So this explains why so many of us in the physical sciences believe in God as a creator and why you don't see quite as many in the life sciences.

But we can't look before the human era. The days of creation, they're over, whether you're looking at physical sciences or biological. And I know Ross is going to make the claim, well, we're looking back in time, we're looking at, you know, when we look out in outer space.

But the ironic thing is, in his view, the processes that formed the stars were natural processes. You might say God's behind it or God started it, but he doesn't believe in a supernatural creation of, for example, the stars.

He thinks that they collapsed from clouds of gas under the forces, the natural forces.

Of the universe.

And in terms of the flood, I believe the flood was universal to all of humanity, all the animals associated with them. I mean, second Peter 2, it's the world of the ungodly that God flooded. And second Peter 3, 6, the world that existed at that time, the very fact that we see Peter qualifying the Greek word cosmos tells us he's not referring to the entire planet, but he's referring to the entire region of the earth where human beings lived.

I really wish we'd had the opportunity to spend more time on this issue because Hugh Ross's view of the flood is not biblical. Genesis teaches very clearly that the flood was global. Hugh Ross believes that the flood of Noah happened, but it was just a local flood limited to the Mesopotamia Valley.

You see, how could it destroy all of humanity? He believes all of humanity lived in Mesopotamia at the time, despite the fact that this is over a millennium and a half after creation and much, much longer in his view, because he believes that human beings go back far beyond 6 ,000 years.

And so really all people, they just collected in Mesopotamia. Where do you get that idea? Not from scripture. The Bible's clear that the flood was global. And that's specifically alluded to in Genesis 7, verse 19, and the water prevailed more and more upon the earth so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered.

Verse 20, the water prevailed 15 cubits higher and the mountains were covered. By a local flood? That's not going to work. The Bible indicates that all the hills, all the high hills, all the mountains under the whole heaven, that means everything under the sky.

That's a way of saying everything on earth, the waters covered those mountains. Have you ever seen a local flood cover mountains, cover the high hills? Same word in Hebrew. No, it doesn't make any sense at all.

And we have another indication of this in Genesis 6, verse 17. God says, and behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven.

Everything that is in the earth shall perish. So God indicates that everything under heaven, everything under the sky would perish in that worldwide flood. And what was the purpose of the ark? Well, the Bible tells us that in Genesis 6, verses 19 and 20.

And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. Verse 20, of the birds after their kind and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind shall come to you to keep them alive.

So the Bible is very clear. It's to preserve the the organisms that God had created, the land dwelling, air breathing organisms that would not be able to survive outside the ark. That would be totally unnecessary if it was just a local flood, because the animals would survive in other parts of the world.

You certainly wouldn't need to take birds. Birds can easily get away from a local flood. That's not a problem. The ark only makes sense in light of a global flood. And the scriptures are very clear. Now, in the New Testament, I understand Peter's focusing on the world of man.

I get that. They were they were destroyed when the earth was. That makes sense. But Genesis is very clear that this is a global flood, one that wiped out all humanity and all organisms under the sky, everything on the earth.

You might wonder, well, why would Hugh Ross have a problem with that? And the answer has nothing to do with scripture, has to do with the secular interpretation of scientific evidence, because you see, we find evidence of the global flood all over the world.

We find all kinds of organisms that have been killed by that flood that were buried in mud, which has turned to rock at what we call fossils now because they've they've been per mineralized and we find them everywhere.

We find them all over the earth, even on mountaintops. You find marine fossils on mountaintops. So there's no doubt the world was flooded. But you see, in the secular view, they believe that these fossils are hundreds of millions of years old and therefore they can't have a worldwide flood depositing the bulk of them all at once.

They believe that therefore that there was no worldwide flood and that the fossils were deposited gradually. And so I don't think Hugh Ross realizes how much he's been influenced by secular naturalistic thinking.

But that is the reason why he rejects a worldwide flood, a global flood. It has nothing to do with the text of scripture.

So I don't believe that God necessarily flooded Antarctica, but he certainly wiped out all the places on the earth where human beings lived.

There are mountains in Antarctica and the Bible says all the high hills, all the mountains under the whole sky were covered with water.

Literal Interpretation, Lexicons, and the Meaning of Yom

OK, now you said something interesting here. You said that there are multiple literal meanings for the word gone. My question, I guess, for Dr. Lyle, with respect to what you just said, Dr. Lyle, do you think Dr. Ross's interpretation is a legitimate, not that you think it's true, but it's legitimate for him to say this is the literal interpretation so that it's really an issue of one's literal interpretation versus another person's literal interpretation of which the context is going to determine who's using the proper literal terminology.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I would say not. I would say that literal the word literal means the ordinary everyday usage of a word. And if you do a search in scripture, you'll find that the ordinary everyday usage of the word Yom is day.

It's not it's not generally used to mean a long period of time. It is occasionally, but that is almost always in the poetic literature where we would expect non-literal uses. And so, for example, the day of the Lord, I think that does refer to a period of time longer than 24 hours, but it's it's qualified.

It's part of a figure of speech and it's primarily in the places like the Psalms or the the the prophetic literature, which tends to be written in a poetic fashion that uses the Hebrew parallelism. It's just we need to decide which parts are literal and which are not.

And even within historical narrative, you can have occasional figures of speech. So the question is, is that what we find in Genesis? And I would say, no, I would say that the word Yom is actually very tightly constrained in Genesis because God is using it specifically to mean either either the light portion of a day, as you pointed out, or a 24 hour day.

But it's never used as a period of time.

How about Genesis 2, 4 is definitely used there for a significant period of time.

Well, not necessarily, not necessarily, because that could be referring to in the day that could be the day God created. It wouldn't have to be the period of time that could be it could be referring to that first day.

But but in the day, by the way, it's a little different there. I don't know if you know, in Hebrew, when you attach, it's actually a different form of the word. It's actually beyond beyond. And beyond is often used to mean when.

And so it's not just Yom, it's beyond. It's a little different. And that can mean when. So if you wanted to take Genesis 2, 4 as beyond, it's not Yom, it's beyond as meaning when. I'm OK with that.

That's fine.

And then I have a question based upon Dr. Lyle's definition of the term literal. And I want to see if you agree with that. But why don't you speak to what he just said there and then we'll go from there.

Well, I've actually consulted with a number of theologians that are very fluent in Hebrew, both young earth and old earth, and all of them tell me that indeed a long period of time is a literal usage of the word Yom.

So now here he was appealing to authority. And of course, it's fine to consult an expert, especially in areas like language and things like that. That's fine. I don't think the majority of Hebrew scholars, though, would argue Hugh's position on this.

But what's even more important than what the scholars say is what the evidence itself indicates. We can look up the word literal in the dictionary to find out what it means. We find it's the ordinary, common, the primary meaning of the term.

And then we can look at the number of places where Yom is used as a day or as a long period of time. And we'll find that overwhelmingly Yom means an ordinary day. The places where it's indicating a longer period of time, very, very few in Scripture.

There are some, but very, very few.

I mean, we need to understand, I think it helps to understand that this is primarily an English language debate, and it's because you're dealing with translating from biblical Hebrew, a very small vocabulary language, into an extremely large vocabulary language.

And it isn't just the Hebrew word Yom. Virtually every Hebrew noun has multiple literal definitions.

It's not only Hebrew, most languages, including English, have multiple definitions, not all of them literal, for a word. So the real issue is not what the word literal means. The real issue is what does the word Yom mean in the context of Genesis?

And that's something that never was really brought out in this debate, unfortunately. But that's where I would say Hughes' position is not rationally defensible. Because the fact is, we're supposed to use context to determine which meaning is in play, whether it be literal or figurative.

You always use context to figure that out. And in Genesis 1, the context of day is bound by an evening and a morning. And so there's no doubt that that's an ordinary day. It can't mean a period of time, not in that context.

The mistake that Hughes' making is he's taking a word that does have multiple definitions, not all of them literal. And he's taking one that cannot fit in the particular context. The longer period of time where it's attached to a figure of speech, like the Day of the Lord, that does not fit the context of Genesis 1, where the days are bounded by evening and morning.

In fact, the evening and the morning comprise the day.

So that's why it's important to actually take advantage of lexical aids. But every Hebrew-English lexicon I've ever looked at explicitly states there are four distinct literal definitions of the word yom.

That is simply wrong. The Young's Analytical Concordance, it does list multiple definitions for yom, but it does not say that these are literal. Strong's Hebrew Concordance, it specifically says that the longer period of time definition of day is figurative, non-literal.

Let me read to you it verbatim. Yom, from an unused root, meaning to be hot, a day as the warm-out hours, whether literal, from sunrise to sunset, or from one sunset to the next, or figurative, a space of time defined by an associated term.

There are places where yom is used figuratively to mean a longer period of time. But that's not really the issue. The question is not whether the word's literal or not, because we're just having a semantic debate about whether or not, what the word literal means, but rather what does it mean in Genesis?

And there's no doubt from context, it's an ordinary day in Genesis 1.

Now, real quick, so Dr. Lau, can you define literal the way you defined it before, if you remember your wording? And then I want to see if Dr. Ross agrees with your definition of what it means to interpret something literally.

Literal is the ordinary, everyday meaning of a term.

All right, Dr.

Ross, would you agree that that's what literal means?

Nor would not, because there's multiple words where we had several distinct definitions that we could use.

Well, what does the dictionary say? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines literal as adhering to fact or to the ordinary construction or primary meaning of a term or expression. So he's just wrong. Dictionary .com, literal, in accordance with, involving or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words, not figurative or metaphorical.

So he's just mistaken about that. When people refuse to use words in the way that a dictionary defines them, that is an error in reasoning. It's a logical fallacy called a rhetorical definition. It's not considered ethical.

Granted, we can be mistaken about definitions, but when people refuse to use words the way that other people do, it makes communication impossible. And so that's why we need to go back to a dictionary and make sure that we're using words properly according to the generally understood definition.

Hugh is not doing that with the word literal. I think there's a reason why he's doing it that way. But there's no doubt that he's wrong about what the word literal means. You can look it up in any dictionary.

And this is even true in the English language, although to a much lesser degree than it is in biblical Hebrew. And so there could be more than one literal definition for words.

I never said there couldn't be more than one literal definition. Because you could have a word where two different meanings are equally primary or nearly so. Day is a usage for daylight or day is usage of 24 hour earth rotation.

Those are roughly equal in usage. But the long period of time version of day, that's figurative. Strong's lexicon says as much. What we're really dealing with here is called a verbal dispute. That's when two people are not debating the actual issue, but they've defined words differently or they're understanding words differently.

And this is something we need to stay away from. And it's unbiblical. The Bible says we're not to wrangle about words, we need to use established meaning so that we can communicate with people or at the very least explain any deviation from the common meaning.

What we're having here is not a real debate. It's a semantic debate about what the word literal means. And so the real issue is what does the word yom mean in the context of Genesis? And that was my attempt to get the debate back to the real issue, which is not what is the word literal mean, but rather what does the word yom mean in the context of Genesis 1?

And I would argue on the basis of grammatical historical context that it would have to mean an ordinary day. It's not being used in the figurative sense as it is in some poetic sections like the Day of the Lord.

Rather, in Genesis 1, it's bound by an evening and a morning and it's got a number with it and so on. And whenever you have that in the historical narrative sections of the Bible, it's always ordinary days.

Furthermore, the plural form, which is used in Exodus 20, 11, is always literal. So there's no doubt that God created in six ordinary, literal, however you want to call it, days. Well, I think this is a good stopping point for today.

We'll pick it up next time with more analysis of this dialogue between myself and Hugh Ross. Hope this has been a blessing to you. We'll see you next time. God bless.