I’ve been trying to determine where the young earth creation interpretation originally came from.
In the second century AD, St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote a book responding to gnostic heretics. Irenaeus thought each day of creation was 1000 years, meaning in his view, the earth would be roughly 12,000 years. Technically speaking, he would not qualify as a young earth creationist, since he states the age of the earth was over 10,000 years, but only in a technical sense. However, the important point to take away from this is St. Irenaeus didn’t think one had to interpret the days of Genesis 1 as literal 24-hour days, meaning the chapter was open to interpretation in the 2nd century AD and doesn’t necessarily have to mean the earth is only 6000 years old.
Apart from this many Christians from this time period also began promoting something similar to the Gap interpretation of Genesis. When Genesis reads “the earth was without form and void,” many saw this as an unspecific amount of time of chaos that was created by God, while the earth existed. Then God reworked the chaos on the earth into the creation in six days. Some suggested this period of chaos was millions of years. Some, like Thomas Burnett, even added that the six days of creation were periods of one thousand years, rather than literal days. William Hobbs suggests the days of creation could have been unspecified times. This was known as the Chaos-Restitution Interpretation of Genesis and it was a dominant view of the time, even accepted by men such as Immanuel Kant, John Wesley, and John Milton. Roberts says “The chaos-restitution interpretation was adopted by most commentators in the eighteenth century.”
https://peacefulscience.org/prints/origns-yec/
Young Earth creationism (YEC) is a form of creationism that holds as a central tenet that the Earth and its lifeforms were created by supernatural acts of the Abrahamic God between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.[1][2] In its most widespread version, YEC is based on the religious belief in the inerrancy of certain literal interpretations of the Book of Genesis.[3][4] Its primary adherents are Christians and Jews who believe that God created the Earth in six literal days,[5][6] in contrast with old Earth creationism (OEC), which holds literal interpretations of Genesis that are compatible with the scientifically determined ages of the Earth[7][8] and the universe and theistic evolution, which posits that the scientific principles of evolution, the Big Bang, abiogenesis, solar nebular theory, age of the universe, and age of Earth are compatible with a metaphorical interpretation of Genesis.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism
Henry Madison Morris (October 6, 1918 – February 25, 2006) was an American young Earth creationist, Christian apologist, and engineer. He was one of the founders of the Creation Research Society and the Institute for Creation Research. He is considered by many to be “the father of modern creation science”.[2] He co-authored The Genesis Flood with John C. Whitcomb in 1961.[2][3][4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Morris
Early Christians obviously promoted many different interpretations of Genesis opening up the idea that the universe was not necessarily 6000 years old.
Is the universe 13.8 billion years old? There is reason to doubt that.
Astronomical Journal No. 108 1994 calculating the distance the moon is moving from the earth indicates a billion years as a maximal timeframe of such change. In other words, based on this calculation the earth and moon cannot be more than a billion years old. As the moon and earth were closer and due to the inverse square law the magnetic attraction becomes much stronger to the point that if you go past the billion years the magnetic attraction would distort the earth into a flat disc and eventually the moon and earth would collide.
Looking at the magnetic field of the earth which is getting weaker you can trace that back about 25,000 years.
The oldest written history by men is less than 6000 years.
In 1997 scientists working on female mitochondrial came up with 6500 years as how old mitochondrial Eve was.
Personally, when it comes to the age of the universe I’m agnostic. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. The way I read Genesis it could be 13.8 billion years or maybe 1 billion years or maybe something a little greater than 20 million years. But the Bible deftly does not say the universe is 6000 years. The way that the 6000-year figure came up: Bishop Ussher (in the seventeenth century) calculated the genealogies listed in Genesis and came up with 6000 years.
https://biologos.org/series/how-should-we-interpret-biblical-genealogies/articles/the-genealogies-in-genesis-part-i
But really all of that tells us is how long ago it was from Adam. So that means the first humans were around 6000 years ago which is consistent with the 1997 calculations concerning mitochondrial Eve.
In 1997 science came out with an age of mitochondrial Eve studying the unique DNA of mitochondria which is unique between men and women they traced back the apparent first woman based on current human mutation rates. There appears to be only one line of mitochondrial DNA in females which would make sense if we started out with one female. If we started out with multiple females as evolutionists theorize, there should be more than one type of mitochondrial DNA in females, apparently, there is not.
Plus given the mutation rate, if there’s a claim that mitochondrial Eve is 157,000 years old there should be roughly around 535-1000 DNA differences today. But if she was about 6000 years old there would be between 20-79 differences. When we look at mitochondrial DNA databases we only find 77 actual differences. This would be more consistent with Eve being around 6000 years ago not 157,000 or 500,000 as some evolutionist guesstimate.
The reason why there’s such a large range of possible dates is trying to fit it into evolutionary theory. Back in 1997 scientists who were working with the mitochondrial DNA in women came up with mitochondrial Eve being 6500 years ago but of course, that sounded too biblical so in 2009 they guesstimated 108,000 but in 2012 incorporating assumptions of human and chimp ancestry they came up with 250-300,000 years ago and then in 2013 they came up with 157,000 years ago but the original 6500 years was based only on human ancestry without the theoretical human-chimp ancestry.
The bottom line is with current mutation rates the original couple was around 6000 years ago. Based on the genealogies in the bible from Adam, that would put Adam around 6000 years ago.
Now how do we go about determining what the Bible says? It’s like how scientists determine what the data says. Scientists interpret things wrong all the time that’s why science is in a state of constant change. So when someone gets the data wrong in Scripture it has more to do with the person than the data. So let’s just look at the data one verse at a time.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The day that materialistic naturalism was destroyed by science was when Hubble presented his evidence yet few seemed not to be paying attention.
Over the past hundred-plus years the foundation of atheism has been systematically eroded by science. The two competing worldviews consist of theism and atheism. Science was supposed to be the tool that atheists would use to destroy theism yet the gun was turned on them and they didn’t realize it. https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/2021/06/19/the-creation-of-life-versus-abiogenesis/
The very first verse in Scripture, Genesis 1:1, was one of the targets atheism set out to destroy. Then one day the Hubble telescope started destroying atheists’ materialistic foundations. It turns out the universe did have a beginning and it is now no longer a theory but it has become a theorem, a proof.
The Borde-Vilenkin-Guth Theorem proves that any universe, that has, on average, a rate of expansion greater than one must have a finite beginning. Vilenkin had this to say regarding the beginning of the universe, “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.” (Many Worlds in One [New York: Hill and Wang, 2006], p.176) Emphatically, then, the feeling that the universe is infinitely old, beginningless, or eternal has no basis in any respected mainstream scientific theories of the universe.
the·o·ry-/ˈTHirē/ noun a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained.
the·o·rem -/ˈTHēərəm,ˈTHirəm/ noun PHYSICS•MATHEMATICS a general proposition not self-evident but proved by a chain of reasoning; a truth established by means of accepted truths.
Now looking at Genesis 1:1 we find the universe created in that one verse. The sun the moon and the stars were created in Genesis 1:1. So the sun was not created on day 4 of the 6 days of Genesis it was just revealed by removing debris from the atmosphere from the catastrophic event of Genesis 1:2 where the earth “became” without form and void.
Genesis 1:2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness [a]was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
The word translated “was” is hayah, and denotes a condition different than a former.
1961. hayah ► Strong’s Concordance hayah: to fall out, come to pass, become, be.
Isaiah 45:18
New King James Version
18 For thus says the Lord,
Who created the heavens,
Who is God,
Who formed the earth and made it,
Who has established it,
Who did not create it [a]in vain,
Who formed it to be inhabited:
“I am the Lord, and there is no other.
The Hebrew describing the earth in Genesis 1:2 calling it without form and void is similar in Hebrew to findings in Isaiah 45:18 where it says God did not create it uninhabitable.
Without going into further detail let’s look at the first day of the 6 days of Genesis. Genesis 1: 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
What do morning and evening represent? It represents a rotating earth in relationship to the sun from a given place on earth. So simply put we have an intact solar system on the first day of the 6 days of Genesis.
And I don’t want all of you atheists to get a headache so I am trying to make this short. But honestly, these 6 days were not the original creation but a restoration process due to the catastrophic event of Genesis 1:2.
So just from the plain reading of Genesis and considering the Hebrew the Bible doesn’t say the universe was created in 6 days. The Bible doesn’t say how long Genesis 1:1 was. We don’t know how long it took or in what order things took place. The only thing that the first chapter of Genesis tells us is how things were restored and they were tied to given days i.e. morning and evening or as a commenter indicated it’s evening and morning because that’s the way the Jews marked today.
After studying Scripture for 50-plus years I find it never contradicts objective science. It’s true that Scripture has issues with certain theoretical science (and I think we all know what that one theoretical science is) but so does reality in some cases.
R&I ~ TUS
John Keefe
Article URL : https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/discuss/