In the past couple of months I have been asked very pointed questions by believers—some who have been believers for decades. So I feel the need to answer those questions directly and in writing. The question goes something like, “So, according to the Bible, how old is the Earth?” Despite some efforts of well-intentioned writers of the past, I don’t think that the Bible gives us a day and hour in which God formed Adam and then Eve, but I do think that a plain reading of the Word of God gives us enough of an answer to be comfortable.
The Bible clearly teaches that God the Creator made Earth in six literal days, not six periods of time or eras, but days. I believe the Bible clearly teaches that on the sixth literal day after the creation of the universe, God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, formed a man “Adam” out of the dust of the earth and that some time shortly after that (hours, days, maybe weeks—after all Genesis 2:19 tells us that God the Creator of life made all animals to pass by Adam in order for Adam to name the animals, and so that Adam would recognize that none of them were suited as a mate to him), the Father caused Adam to fall asleep, removed one of his ribs (No, men do not have one fewer rib than women. Don’t laugh—I’ve heard professors chide a student for such a statement) and formed for him Eve.
The Bible clearly teaches that Adam and Eve bore and raised children (Cain, Abel, and Seth to name only a few), and that all of us are descended directly from them. If we were not the direct children of Adam and Eve, then we would have no part in their guilt in the Garden and worse yet, no part in the salvation that Christ purchased on the cross.
The Bible clearly names the generations from Adam to Noah, giving their life spans and their ages at the time of birth of the next generation. The Bible clearly names the generations from Noah to Abram (who was later called Abraham) giving their life spans and their ages at the time of birth of the next generation. If the 4.5 billion year age of Earth that “scientists” declare were true, and the Bible did name all of the generations and the fathers’ ages at the time of the birth of the next generations, then there would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 128 million generations from Adam to us, which would require roughly 2.3 million pages in about 2300 volumes of text just to list the genealogies. And you think that Numbers 1 is hard to read!
Therefore, the Bible clearly teaches that Earth is “Thousands—Not Billions” of years old (to borrow a phrase from the name of a wonderful piece of scholarship on the age of Earth.
There is no gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. I have been told by men whom I respect greatly that the Gap Theory—the theory that there is a gap of time between these two verses which allows for all of the fossils thus far discovered—explains all of the problems that theology has with science today. They justify the theory by saying something like, “Well, there’s nothing in the Bible that says that it couldn’t have happened that way.” But that argument sounds a lot like the missing link theory of evolution. All that I have to do is suppose that there is a missing link that has no physical reality yet and I can have a new explanation for all of my troubles. This would be akin to me telling you that I have a missing pet dragon that no one else has ever been able to see and then asking you to go looking for it; just because I say that something is missing doesn’t make it real.
But in the end, I’m usually asked, “So how old do you think that the Earth is?” To be honest I don’t know the age of Earth, but a plain reading of the Bible makes it out to be less than 10,000 years in age.
Posted on August 8th, 2007 by Dallas
Filed under: Commenting on Creation
