Young Earth,Old Earth Which Is It?

[James Is Back]

If there is one conflicting belief that's been haunting me for years it's how old the earth is in relation to scripture. I don't know what to believe anymore because I see evidence of fossils being pulled out from the ground but there are some that have convincing arguments that suggested earth is very young.

Help this poor believer because down the road I want to minister and I want to make sure I preach the truth.

 

[miamited]

If there is one conflicting belief that's been haunting me for years it's how old the earth is in relation to scripture. I don't know what to believe anymore because I see evidence of fossils being pulled out from the ground but there are some that have convincing arguments that suggested earth is very young.

Help this poor believer because down the road I want to minister and I want to make sure I preach the truth.

Hi reborn,

Well, if one desires to preach the truth than one can't go wrong in just preaching what God's word says.

For in six days God created the heavens and the earth. Then have your fellowship take out a caclulator, pen or pencil and have them add up the years of the genealogical records. It gets a bit difficult after the account of the exodus from Egypt and Israel's reaching the land of promise, but we honestly have some fairly accurate extrabiblical verifications from that point.

Secondly, I know for myself, that I wholeheartedly believe that God established the nation of Israel to be His witnesses in those days. The Jewish calendar, supposed to be established from their understanding of the day of creation, stands just shy of 6,000 years. So, I'm not so dogmatic in teaching that it has to be exactly 5,733 years or 6, 314 years, but I'm confident that the existence of our planet earth and the universe of stars and planets and asteroids and comets, etc, that make up this realm created by God for the life of man to endure, are not anything over 7,000 years.

However, I will assure you that when you leave this thread you will probably be no closer to any assurance of these things than when you arrived. My encouragement is that you follow James advice. If you feel like you lack wisdom in this thing, as God. He's really the only one who was there and knows with any absolute certainty the truth in these things.

God bless you.
In Christ, Ted

 

[Colter]

The gospel taught by Jesus didn't derive its authority from the writings of the Hebrews. When pressed by the so called "religious authority" of his day about where Jesus got his "authority" to teach, he said "tear down this temple (his body) and in three days I will raise it up". He did and that's all the authority one needs.

Radioactive decay rates prove to us that the earth is quite old, 4+ billion years old. The fragmented story of creation and Adam and Eves incarnation on a populated earth was much older than 6,000 years. It was preserved in oral tradition which lead people of biblical times to assume that they were the first humans.

 

[James Is Back]

The gospel taught by Jesus didn't derive its authority from the writings of the Hebrews. When pressed by the so called "religious authority" of his day about where Jesus got his "authority" to teach, he said "tear down this temple (his body) and in three days I will raise it up". He did and that's all the authority one needs.

Radioactive decay rates prove to us that the earth is quite old, 4+ billion years old. The fragmented story of creation and Adam and Eves incarnation on a populated earth was much older than 6,000 years. It was preserved in oral tradition which lead people of biblical times to assume that they were the first humans.

In your opinion when was Adam and Eve created if the earth is billions of years old?

 

[Colter]

In your opinion when was Adam and Eve created if the earth is billions of years old?

In my opinion Adam and Eve incarnated or materialized on a previously populated, evolved earth about 38,000 years ago. This is the age where the Microcephalin gene was introduced into the gene pool.

In the story of A & E we can see a number of interesting and contradictory elements which don't support the commonly accepted story. But it reads as if those ancient stories were preserved and the authors of Genesis wanted to be true to them.

 

[James Is Back]

Another question. Does your salvation depend on whether you are OEC or YEC?

 

[Colter]

Another question. Does your salvation depend on whether you are OEC or YEC?

Of coarse not, salvation is by faith in the Father. Part of the many joys of life that God has created for us is the pursuit of understanding of our world.

 

[James Is Back]

Of coarse not, salvation is by faith in the Father. Part of the many joys of life that God has created for us is the pursuit of understanding of our world.

Thanks just didn't want to go to hell for believing on either belief.

I'm actually studying both sides of the equation to better understand each others point of view. I've always believed in old earth,dinosaurs but now it's called into question so I have to do more research and come up with my own conclusion.

 

[Johnnz]

Old

John
NZ

 

[seeingeyes]

If there is one conflicting belief that's been haunting me for years it's how old the earth is in relation to scripture. I don't know what to believe anymore because I see evidence of fossils being pulled out from the ground but there are some that have convincing arguments that suggested earth is very young.

Help this poor believer because down the road I want to minister and I want to make sure I preach the truth.

I'm malleable. I see no reason to argue with people who date the planet for a living.

 

[AmericanChristian91]

If your interested in being a Christian while also accepting the scientific evidence for a 4.5 billion yr old earth and the theory of evolution (also known as theistic evolution/evolution creationism), this site is a good place to start.

BioLogos: Science and faith in harmony

And although this website is not a Christian website, they still make some valid points.

Evidence against a recent creation - RationalWiki

This is another interesting website.

TalkOrigins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy

And like biologs, another Christian perspective, on how dating the earth works, and why the methods and calculations that arise from it are valid.

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html

And here is one of the websites dedicated to the YEC cause

https://answersingenesis.org/

There are many more websites you can find.

For Christians who accept Old Earth Creationism (several kinds of OEC, all accept the age of the earth, though not all accept evolution, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Earth_creationism )

here is two of their websites, and of course there are more out there.


http://www.oldearth.org/index.htm

http://www.reasons.org/

Also if your interested.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism

 

[James Is Back]

This is what I believed in for a while. God created the universe and the earth and everything else according to Genesis 1.1. During this time animals ruled the earth including the dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs became extinct than God created the rest of the earth including Adam and Eve.

This believe system wasn't based on something that I read or learned it was just something that I believed in.

Would this be considered Gap Theory though?

 

[gluadys]

If there is one conflicting belief that's been haunting me for years it's how old the earth is in relation to scripture. I don't know what to believe anymore because I see evidence of fossils being pulled out from the ground but there are some that have convincing arguments that suggested earth is very young.

Help this poor believer because down the road I want to minister and I want to make sure I preach the truth.

The evidence that the earth is much older than 6,000 years was known a century before Darwin was born, and suspected even longer ago than that. Christians who studied geology in the 18th and 19th century were almost all old-earth creationists. Among these were scientists like Baron Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz and theologians like Charles Hodge. William Jennings Bryan, who was the prosecutor in the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial in the 1920's was an old-earth creationist. In fact, acceptance of an old-earth (with or without acceptance of evolution) was pretty much a Christian standard for well over a century. Young-earth creationism was almost unknown, even among evangelicals, until the 1950s when Whitcombe & Morris published The Genesis Flood.

Yet there really is no convincing argument that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Only arguments that seem convincing to people who don't know much about geology.

In any case, it is certainly not a salvation issue. You stand with many saints whichever stance you take, but you also stand with the testimony of the creation itself when you accept that the earth (and the universe) is very old.

 

[Papias]

Reborn wrote:

Help this poor believer because down the road I want to minister and I want to make sure I preach the truth.

American gave you lots of good links. Here is one reason that I can add that is narrowly focussed on the question of the age of the earth - the fact that multiple dating methods confirm each other, showing an old earth. The question of Adam has a lot of good answers too. Both of those - the age and Adam - have plenty of room for discussion, since one's salvation doesn't depend on them (salvation depends on accepting Jesus).

It's important to realize that it's not just one dating method, or even just U-Th dating. There are literally dozens of methods with overlapping regions of time that they test. These different methods are often based on different phenomena, and thus if something (like sunlight) threw one off, it would throw it off differently than another method, which, if effected at all, wouldn't be affected the same. Scientists have tested literally hundreds of samples by thousands of tests, with multiple tests on the same sample again and again giving the same age.

So the question perhaps more relevant than C-14 dating is:

"why do the various dating methods (including C14, K-Ar, varves, dendrochronology, ice cores, obsidian, protein racecimization, speleotherms, superposition, geologic event dating, geomagnetic polarity, Pb/U, association, Rb/St, and others), agree with each other when more than one can be used on the same sample?"


If methods are wrong, they'll give wrong answers. It seems odd to suggest that they'll happen to all give the same "wrong" answer, especially since a foundation of my faith is that God is honest and truthful with us, both in special revelation (scripture) and general revelation (His creation).

In Christ-

Papias

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

The evidence that the earth is much older than 6,000 years was known a century before Darwin was born, and suspected even longer ago than that. Christians who studied geology in the 18th and 19th century were almost all old-earth creationists. Among these were scientists like Baron Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz and theologians like Charles Hodge. William Jennings Bryan, who was the prosecutor in the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial in the 1920's was an old-earth creationist. In fact, acceptance of an old-earth (with or without acceptance of evolution) was pretty much a Christian standard for well over a century. Young-earth creationism was almost unknown, even among evangelicals, until the 1950s when Whitcombe & Morris published The Genesis Flood.

Yet there really is no convincing argument that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Only arguments that seem convincing to people who don't know much about geology.

In any case, it is certainly not a salvation issue. You stand with many saints whichever stance you take, but you also stand with the testimony of the creation itself when you accept that the earth (and the universe) is very old.

^ This is the correct answer. ^

 

[troodon]

Thanks just didn't want to go to hell for believing on either belief.

I'm actually studying both sides of the equation to better understand each others point of view. I've always believed in old earth,dinosaurs but now it's called into question so I have to do more research and come up with my own conclusion.

There's nothing incompatible about Christianity and acceptance of an old earth, and I think everyone would agree God would never hold it against someone if they landed on the wrong side of the debate, one way or another.

The only interpretation of the evidence that works is that of an old earth. If someone wants to say the earth is young in spite of the evidence then I have nothing to say against that, but the evidence only supports an old earth.

 

[PrincetonGuy]

If there is one conflicting belief that's been haunting me for years it's how old the earth is in relation to scripture. I don't know what to believe anymore because I see evidence of fossils being pulled out from the ground but there are some that have convincing arguments that suggested earth is very young.

Help this poor believer because down the road I want to minister and I want to make sure I preach the truth.

The age of the earth is very well established to be 4.56 billion years old. For example, from a Christian perspective, see here:

Radiometric Dating

 

[mark kennedy]

If there is one conflicting belief that's been haunting me for years it's how old the earth is in relation to scripture. I don't know what to believe anymore because I see evidence of fossils being pulled out from the ground but there are some that have convincing arguments that suggested earth is very young.

For one thing the age of the earth is irrelevant, all the Scriptures say about that is God created the heavens and the earth. The creation of life and the creation of man are another story entirely, especially the creation of man.

Created = 'bara', (Strong's 1254 בָּרָא bä·rä') to create, shape, form (Qal) to shape, fashion, create (always with God as subject) of heaven and earth (Gen 1:1), life (Gen 1:21) and Man (used 3 times in Gen 1:27)

Creation is essential doctrine, the opening stanzas of the Nicene Creed are clear on that as well as John 1, Hebrews 1 and Romans 1 where God being Creator isn't suggested, it's simply proclaimed. What you believe about the age of the earth is your opinion, nothing more. If you believe Darwinism has made it's case for human/chimp common ancestry I say go in peace I have no problem with you. I do want to warn you in the strongest possible terms, beware of Darwinism because it's nothing more then atheistic materialism.

"all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition." (Darwin, On the Origin of Species)​

If your a Christian your a creationist, to worship Jesus as Savior and Lord is to worship him as creator. Creationism is an evidential apologetics argument mostly focused on biology and geology. Don't get it twisted, the doctrinal issues are cut and dried and this natural history philosophy isn't going to make that much difference, unless you let it get into your theology.

Help this poor believer because down the road I want to minister and I want to make sure I preach the truth.

Then you will want to study the Scriptures so you'll probably end up at a Bible College somewhere. There is a lot of Liberal Theology out there and the fact is that many, if not all, of those colleges reject the historicity of most of the Bible.

I've studied and I can tell you one thing for certain, The genealogies are an unbroken timeline. It starts with the creation of Adam and the chronology goes all the way up to the birth of Christ, no gaps.

Here is the New Testament witness regarding Adam (Jude 1:14, 1Ti 2:13, 14; 1Co 15:45; Rom 5:14; Luke3:38). You want to be a minister, I suggest you look these verses up, be in prayer and make piece with whatever opinion you decide on.

If there is anything I can do to help you along the way just let me know. Oh and BTW, if your interested in fossils I love the topic, fascinating stuff. If you have that kind of an interest I think archaeology would be a better subject to pursue.

Grace and peace,
Mark

 

[Johnnz]

"I've studied and I can tell you one thing for certain, The genealogies are an unbroken timeline. It starts with the creation of Adam and the chronology goes all the way up to the birth of Christ, no gaps."

That presupposes a deliberately chronological timeline. But that is not necessarily true of ancient geneologies, which often had quite a different purpose.

John
NZ

 

[mark kennedy]

"I've studied and I can tell you one thing for certain, The genealogies are an unbroken timeline. It starts with the creation of Adam and the chronology goes all the way up to the birth of Christ, no gaps."

That presupposes a deliberately chronological timeline. But that is not necessarily true of ancient geneologies, which often had quite a different purpose.

John
NZ

That presupposes nothing, relative dates are used throughout. The use of genealogies had a specific purposes and the most important is to establish lineage. The whole problem with dates is that the ones in Scriptures are invariably relative, from one event to another. We use absolute dating, this year is 2014 but nowhere in Nehemiah does it say the covenant renewal was 445 BC. They can be tricky, sometimes even contradictory but invariably historical type books link dates by years.

You can determine dates but you have to take it step by step, if you do you will find an unbroken timeline that may or may not give you an absolute Gregorian date.

Grace and peace,
Mark