“My former pastor used to state in church that the earth was only 6,000 years old, based on adding up the “begats”. I never agreed with that but a lot of fundamentalist types do.”
Perhaps you can do that to date back to Adam. I believe there was an earth long before Adam - maybe eons before. The Bible does not date the earth. I believe there was a flood in the time of Noah, and if my additions are correct, Methusealah died the same year as the flood.
There is a reason in Genesis Chapter 5 for the geneology from Adam to Noah - it is to establish that Noah’s seed was pure. Much of man’s seed had been corrupted by the nephalim. Noah’s had not. The flood was intended to rid the earth of the corrupt seed.
I believe there was a creation before Adam, before the present creation that we are a part of - I think that this earlier creation was wiped out when Lucifer was thrown out of heaven, destroyed by a flood, perhaps eons before the present creation.
Unexplainable fossil evidence can be explained if we accept that there was an earlier creation. Lucifer, before his fall, was given dominion over the earth. For him to have dominion, I believe there had to be a creation that was subject to Lucifer - he was not given dominion over a sphere floating in space with nothing here.
You haven’t spent much time on the Intelligent Design and Evolution threads have you? LOL
As you are a believer in Noah’s Flood, please explain how water 15 cubits deep covered Mt Ararat which is about 16,000 feet at the peak? A cubit is the length of the forearm with fingers extended, about 18 inches. Thus 15 cubits is water about 22 feet deep. Obviously then it was the storm surge from a hurricane/cyclone(the dirty NE quadrant as they say along the Gulf Coast, from low pressure/CCW rotation)that swept Noah’s RAFT out to sea.
His descendents then jazzed up this old, but true, family story of sea survival into a MYTH, to counter all the other creation myths floating around in iraq at the time. One of THEIR descendents was a young boy named ABRAM....does the TRUTH hurt?