Could the Flood have been tranquil? Adapted from the author’s The Genesis Account

Creation Ministries International ^ | 1-30-2019 | Jonathan Sarfati

[DungeonMaster]

Please tell me where in the Bible it says the stars (or anything else in the universe) was created 6,000 years ago.

Genesis Day 4 of creation. "He made the stars also".

[Tell It Right]

I’m not following how Genesis 1:14-19 says it occurred 6,000 years ago (or 2,500 years before Moses wrote Genesis). I guess it’s possible God did it then and then went out of His way to make it look like He did it billions of years ago. But before I go there I need to see something in the Bible itself going there.

[DungeonMaster]

I’m not following how Genesis 1:14-19 says it occurred 6,000 years ago (or 2,500 years before Moses wrote Genesis). I guess it’s possible God did it then and then went out of His way to make it look like He did it billions of years ago. But before I go there I need to see something in the Bible itself going there.

OK, so long days for you?

[Tell It Right]

Yes, long days for me. And I’m not a theistic evolutionist (a term I’ve heard some people use to say they believe God took a deistic approach in creating life, including man, by saying He built the mechanism of natural selection and started the first simple organism, then sat back and watch His creation naturally create mankind). I believe God created us in a very intensive and intimate way (especially man, with phrases in Genesis like “in our image” and breathing life into man).

[DungeonMaster]

Yes, long days for me. And I’m not a theistic evolutionist (a term I’ve heard some people use to say they believe God took a deistic approach in creating life, including man, by saying He built the mechanism of natural selection and started the first simple organism, then sat back and watch His creation naturally create mankind). I believe God created us in a very intensive and intimate way (especially man, with phrases in Genesis like “in our image” and breathing life into man).

Fair enough.

I'm in awe of a God Who can speak 100,000,000,000 galaxies into existence in a single moment as part of a chore on the 4th day. This gives us a reason to consider God's relationship to "Light" which is a very important word developed throughout the scripture.

[Tell It Right]

If I may, I think we've reached a point in our knowledge of the universe that we're seeing limits to how many galaxies, stars, and planets there are. Still a very awesome creation pointing to a very awesome Creator.

But IMHO it's becoming more and more of an apologetic point to show that Earth is unique for advanced life, in a star system that's unique for advanced life, in a galaxy that's unique for advanced life, in even a universe that seems specially primed for advanced life.

For example, when the Hubble telescope was first put up in the late 90's plenty of astronomers/cosmologists made predictions on what we'd find (which is always a healthy scientific exercise to help exclude bias created after observing new experiments by focusing on beliefs held to be true before the experiments).

At the time the prevailing belief was in an oscillating universe -- that there was a big bang billions of years ago that spit out matter and energy all over the universe. But it's not a unique event because there were infinite big bangs before it -- all matter always slung out with each big bang -- and always the expansion of the universe slows and eventually reverses to bring the matter back to the point of origin to repeat the process again. It was the atheists' answer to Christians who kept pointing to the Anthropic Principle (we observe so many things in nature and astronomy that had to be fine tuned in order for life to exist -- therefore odds say a Creator set up things correctly). The idea was that with every big bang all the physics of the universe are reset in a random way, all the matter is slung out in a random way, etc. So if the big bang happens infinite times then even random chance will make all the variables just right for advanced life --- at least once every blue moon.

So the expectation before the Hubble telescope was fired up was that we'd observe that our expanding universe had been expanding at a faster rate in the past. And that the further back in time we look (by looking further away) the more we'd observe a big bang effect of the universe expanding at first at a very rapid rate to slow down to it's current expansion rate.

But that's not what we find! We find that the universe's expansion is slowly accelerating. It still looks like some major expansion event started billions (or more) years ago. But for all we can tell it's a one-time event. There's nothing we observe to make us think the expansion rate will reverse and bring all matter back to a single point to repeat the big bang process. So the universe isn't like an Xbox with a reset button to try again if things don't work out like you want. If the universal constants that drive atomic cohesion ain't right now and here, they ain't never gonna be right any time or anywhere. And that's just the universal constants. We could spend all day talking about the arrangements of galaxies so that our milky way has enough cosmic radiation from other galaxies to provide us energy and some matter, but not too close to other galaxies so that the cosmic radiation fries us like a microwave oven. And... we could go on forever. :)

[DungeonMaster]

There is a really nifty video about how the earth is placed just perfectly in the galaxy for us to observe the rest of the universe. Newgeezer pointed it out to me once but I can’t remember where it is or what it is called.

[Tell It Right]

For years I've read/listened to a group called Reasons to Believe at www.reasons.org. They're probably the first old-earth creationists to get a little traction, at least as far back as 25 years ago. I finished college with doubts about God largely because I trusted both my church/youth leaders as much as I trusted my college teachers. Who was right? They can't both be right? And both of them seem to be very religious in their science trying to prove their point -- to the point of it looking more like pseudoscience. This goes for the Christians telling me "why" they know the earth is only 6,000 years old as well as the atheists telling me "why" they know to exclude all the things in our DNA that's different from apes and focus on just what's similar to make it look like we're related.

Then a friend of mine told me he had the same problem 2 years before me and pointed out Reasons to Believe.

[DungeonMaster]

I admit that it can be a little challenging to boldly say that I believe the universe is 6000 years old. I have recently been in two conversations with two separate atheists who both consider themselves very scientifically literate. In both cases I seemed like a nut to them.

But these are both people offended at even hearing "God" in a conversation. So I welcome looking like crazy to them. 1 Cor says the gospel of Christ is foolish to those who are perishing. For some reason a lot of Christians really stumble over the 14 billion light years thing. They suggest that God would be lying to make the universe look older than it is by making it bigger than the speed of light would allow in 6000 years.

This is a strange conclusion to me. ALL miracles, by definition, defy the rules of nature. Whether it is creating matter from nothing, creating an adult man from the dust, making a day last longer for a battle, raising the dead, floating an ax head or creating strands of electromagnetic radiation 14 billion light years long.

I wonder if many Christians think got is powerful but not THAT powerful. Certainly the Pope has recently said "God is not a magician with a magic wand". What a faithless thing to say about miracles.

[Tell It Right]

Agree wholeheartedly that many of us old earthers seem to go too far in thinking that if something can't be explained then it didn't happen -- that God's not able to perform miracles unless we can understand them completely. I'll back your point up further by saying I've seen it as I moved from church to church (i.e. when a small church I was in shut down, when a friend of mine got ordained and started a church needing help, when I found a church I was going to put offering money into abortion lobby and I tried to have that changed and wound up getting kicked out of doing the volunteer things, etc.). Plus there were the years I regularly attended a Baptist church while also regularly attending an at home Bible study put on by Charismatics. :)

Obviously the age of the earth wasn't the most important theme in each of those churches/denominations. But whenever the age of the earth came up, if I was in a church that believed heavily in God's miracles they were young earth believing. While if I was in a church that was pretty big about avoiding talk of miracles and stuff (without outright saying God no longer does miracles), they tended to be old earthers.

I tend to think of myself as a miracle believer (even believing in the miraculous spiritual gifts described in 1st Corinthians 12-14), but I'm an old earther. To be honest, I'm a little weird in other beliefs too. Take the miraculous spiritual gifts. Those of us with a bit of a Pentecostal bent usually believe that the initial evidence of spirit baptism is speaking in tongues, right? Not me. I've often taught people to pray for the Holy Spirit to come onto you and change you and teach you and lead you and give you spiritual gifts and whatever else, as long as in the end it's to advance Jesus' message of salvation (my Cliff notes version of Paul's teaching in 1st Corinthians 14 where he details why to desire prophesying over tongues -- edifying the church is better than just the individual). While at the same time I teach that there's a danger in trying to peg the Holy Spirit into an itinerary of gifts because 1st Corinthians 12 says that the Holy Spirit gives different gifts to different people as He darn well sees fit. That's an example where I can believe what one group believes (i.e. Pentecostals believing the Holy Spirit still gives us miraculous spiritual gifts) w/o necessarily believing all the details taught with tradition (i.e. almost all Pentecostals believing speaking in tongues is the first gift). (That might not be a good example and may be wrong for me to call it just a traditional belief, since the Book of Acts records at least anecdotal evidence for tongues being the first gift.)

Can't the same be applied to beliefs in the age of the earth? Can't one believe in the miraculous creation of God without having to also believe Usser's teaching from 500 years ago that the earth was created 4,000 years before Christ? There were a few people who taught that before Usser, but it didn't gain any traction until Usser. And even then it wasn't a big topic.

Here in the U.S. most Christians were old earthers until 1959. Again, not a major point of belief, just how someone would respond if asked. This includes even the people who believe heavily in miracles. Only the 7th Day church was pushing a young earth belief and talking about scientific evidence like we're familiar with today. But in 1959 that changed when the atheists were celebrating the 100th anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species: The Case for Favoured Races. So they were pushing natural selection and such to be taught heavily in schools. Which prompted churches to decide they needed a response. Since the 7th Day church seemed to already be knowledgeable on Christian apologetics, most churches adopted their position on a young earth.

Because I know that, it makes me think twice before assuming that miraculous creation necessitates a young earth. The same with the overall clash between Christianity and science. I know that the clash wasn't always there, and that it's been brought to the forefront only since 1959 (though it's had on-again off-again points of conflict in the past). That might make the clash having been going on since before I was born, but in the big scheme of things our 2,000 year old church hasn't had a long lasting position of thinking learning of science means to disbelieve miracles.