Where Did a Young-earth Worldview Come From?
Simply put, it came from the Bible. Of course, the Bible doesn’t say explicitly anywhere, “The earth is 6,000 years old.” Good thing it doesn’t; otherwise it would be out of date the following year. But we wouldn’t expect an all-knowing God to make that kind of a mistake.
God gave us something better. In essence, He gave us a “birth certificate.” For example, using a personal birth certificate, a person can calculate how old he is at any point. It is similar with the earth. Genesis 1 says that the earth was created on the first day of creation (Genesis 1:1–5). From there, we can begin to calculate the age of the earth.
Let’s do a rough calculation to show how this works. The age of the earth can be estimated by taking the first five days of creation (from earth’s creation to Adam), then following the genealogies from Adam to Abraham in Genesis 5 and 11, then adding in the time from Abraham to today.
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When we start our thinking with God’s Word, we see that the world is about 6,000 years old. When we rely on man’s fallible (and often demonstrably false) dating methods, we can get a confusing range of ages from a few thousand to billions of years, though the vast majority of methods do not give dates even close to billions.
Cultures around the world give an age of the earth that confirms what the Bible teaches. Radiometric dates, on the other hand, have been shown to be wildly in error.
The age of the earth ultimately comes down to a matter of trust—it’s a worldview issue. Will you trust what an all-knowing God says on the subject, or will you trust imperfect man’s assumptions and imaginations about the past that regularly are changing?
— Bodie Hodge, Answers in Genesis, How Old is the Earth?, September 2, 2019
Ughhhh. This gets so old. They should be embarrassed. They trust scientists to cure their cancer, engineer buildings, design a plane, advance technology, yet not to carbon date and other accepted scientific methods.
“Trust” again? Oh my, I trust ( based on science) the NHC about Dorian, so I am getting the hell out of dodge to my kid’s place in Cola, SC (live in Charleston).
Be safe, oldbroad1. My daughter is assistant manager of a hotel in Columbia and she said they were gearing up for refugees from the Coast.
An old friend of mine had neighbors that had moved from Greenville to the Battery. They decided that their house had ridden out hurricanes and an earthquake before so they were staying put for Hugo. They’d just go to the upper floors. Well, they made if through the storm ok as did the house, but when they checked the first floor, there were dolphins swimming around.
It is embarrassing. Even the amount of time it takes for light from distant stars to reach earth is millions of years based on physics, and I remember being told in Christian school that it’s just that God made everything with the APPEARANCE of age – but they couldn’t explain WHY. No, one should just believe God wanted to make everything look old, shut up and believe it, and don’t believe findings in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, archaeology, etc., that show otherwise. Dinosaur, Neanderthal, Denisovan fossils in the earth? They were put there by Satan to deceive us. No, wait, they were all creatures destroyed in the Flood which was a worldwide catastrophe. Shut up and believe it, or go to hell.
THIS is what I hate about religion!!
The age of the earth is a measurement, not an opinion!
You can’t just say, “I don’t believe the distance of 239.1 miles between Houston and Dallas…I think it’s 100 miles!”
I teach 4th grade science, and my students instinctively realize the earth has to be very old, just because of the dinosaurs!
Xtianity’s contempt for science is amazing!