No doubt which is why I never bothered to read it. But I need to start at Ground Zero; I can skim through it as I'm not studying for a grade now.
I did take a course in Anthropology years ago, don't have good long-term recall but remember some of it. It was unsettling to my faith at the time, but I have to come to terms with it.
It’s online. You can read it that way instead of getting it out of the library, if you can find one that way.
You know, there’s lots of theories and explanations out there about this whole creation thing. There’s the evolutionist no God needed explanation, the God needed, ID, you earth Christian, old earth Christian, Gap Theory people, and probably some I missed.
Seems like everyone has an opinion and everyone is sure that there’s is right. And yet with most of them, even the ones with the strongest arguments to support them, there are complications. There are interpretations of the evidence which fit better with some positions and weaken others.
The YEC for 6,000 just doesn’t leave enough time for recorded history from the time of the Flood. So some make it 6,000 to 10,000 years, but if you’re going to reject the 6,000 year age which many have used the Bible to support, then 10,000 isn’t any better. It might as well be 10 billion.
The old earth people have the complication of *days* in Genesis being distinguished with *there was evening and there was morning, day ___*, indicating that it was 24 hour days.
The Gap Theory, that I’d heard a LONG time ago, that there is a gap between verse 1 and 2 in Genesis 1 is rejected by most parties. It fits OK to some extent, but does not have a lot of Scriptural support.
The IDers just have a lot of unanswered questions, although the basic premise of their position is just that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” (definition from wikipedia, for convenience sake). Both sides have a field day with that one.
The evolutionists, who claim that God used evolution, are forced into a position of denying the plain meaning of a lot of Scripture.
The no God needed people have the weakest argument. They scoff at the idea that *Goddidit* and then expect us to believe that it just happened with NO impetus. More unreasonable that *Godiddit* and I doubt many people are solidly in that camp.
The explanation that I find that fits the best, which is rejected pretty much uniformly amongst the different groups, is this one.....
The Age of the Universe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576941/posts
It seems to corroborate the evidence with Scripture the best, but the young earthers don’t like it and most of the comments by the evolutionists are not complimentary.
All that said, God tried to explain something extremely complex and intricate, in as concise a way as possible. Even if He had gone into great detail in the Bible, the Bible would still be considered wrong by many if it didn’t line up with the current, but still very limited, state of knowledge about our world and universe.
The long and short of it is that I essentially don’t think that ANYONE is completely right, and we won’t find out until we see God face to face, if it’s even a priority anymore after meeting Him.
To me, the age of the earth is completely irrelevant in terms of the practical working out of my day to day living. Whether the earth is 6,000 years old or 6 billion, since I’ve been around only a few decades, it doesn’t really matter.
The thing to remember for all college professors and scientists is that they really believe that they’re right and teach it as fact, but it’s just their interpretation of what happened. It doesn’t mean that it really did happen that way. They can’t be sure because nobody was there to see it, and honestly, some of the presumptions that anthropologists and archaeologists make are, umm, quite a stretch.
Keeping that in mind helps.