evolution

Billions of Years? Part 10: Summary and Conclusion

October 12, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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In this series I’ve sought to lay out my reasoning process in continuing to hold to a young-earth creationist position, despite the fact that a great many evangelical Christians have moved to an old-earth view.

I begin by determining the narrative genre of the biblical creation account in Genesis 1-2 and consequently committing to a straightforward (“grammatico-historical”) hermeneutic: I’m going to take it at face value, as I would any other literary work, but with the added recognition that unlike all other literary works, it is the inerrant and authoritative Word of God.

With that foundation laid, I can move to a careful reading of the text and determine its key literary themes. I find that it speaks of direct divine agency, through means of both voice and hands, built around a chronological framework of six days involving “mornings” and “evenings.” Further, I find that chronogenealogies later in the document place the Creation “week” just a few thousand years before the birth of Christ.

I then examine the claims of the popular secular version of the story, alongside the similar claims of its Christian cousin, old-earth creationism. I look for incompatibilities with the biblical presentation, and at precisely those points, I look at the quality of the evidence, since my thesis is that the evidence for a supernatural source behind the biblical account is very strong. To reject the biblical account, I’m going to hold competing accounts to a very high evidentiary standard.

I begin with the currently popular “Big-Bang” model of cosmic evolution. I find its basis to be weak in two ways: first, its proponents confess that the beginning of the model is beyond the reach of scientific investigation; and second—and less importantly, I concede—I have the anecdotal observation that most of its most vocal proponents don’t really understand the model themselves; they are essentially fideists.

Then I move to the Neo-Darwinian model of biological evolution. I find that it requires three things: mutation, natural selection, and eons of time. I find serious evidentiary weakness in all three of these requirements, specifically with the ability of the first two to deliver on the promise of the current complexity of life, and with the scientific basis for the third, given the broad range of ages produced by the many geochronometers available. There’s clearly a lot of room for disagreement in the current state of Darwinism.

Returning to my own academic area, I find two serious theological problems with all of the evolutionary models, including the accommodationist Christian ones: the necessity of Adam’s sin as the cause of biological death, and the repeated New Testament assignation of Christ’s redemptive work to the undoing of Adam’s specific sin and its consequences.

So where does that leave me?

Well.

The Book is divinely sourced.
I’m following all the exegetical and hermeneutical rules.
The alternative(s) don’t meet anything like the evidentiary standard required to set aside the first two points.
Six days.
Then a few thousand years.
Not gonna change. Wouldn’t be prudent.

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Billions of Years? Part 9: Theological Issues

October 9, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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So far I’ve laid out my thinking regarding the biblical creation account and the evidentiary weaknesses in the competing evolutionary account. There’s one more area to address: the theological one.

The Bible’s theology of sin is rooted squarely in Adam (not in Eve, despite the allegations of some feminists—but that’s a topic for another post, preferably in the far, far distant future). According to the Scripture, Adam was a real, historical figure, whose willful sin—disobedience to a specific divine command (Gen 3)—had three results. First, since he stood as the representative of the human race—their “first father” (Isa 43.27)—the guilt for his sin was imputed to all his descendants (Rom 5.12, 18-19). Second, his nature was corrupted by his choice, so that for the rest of his life he was inclined in the direction of sinfulness rather than righteousness. This change in nature has been inherited by all his descendants as well (Rom 3). And finally, as God had warned (Gen 2.16-17), Adam and his descendants became susceptible to death (Rom 5.12).

Consequently, any theory of origins that claims to be biblical must address two theological issues that arise from this biblical view. First, the theory must account for biological death in the way that Scripture does. And second, the theory must account for the redemptive work of Christ, the “second Adam” (1Cor 15.22, 45), in the way that Scripture does. Both of these issues deserve a deeper examination.

Scripture asserts that sin entered the world through human agency, specifically Adam’s, and that death is a consequence of that event (Rom 5.12). Any theory of origins, then, must date fossil evidence—the one thing you can say for certain about fossils is that they’re really most sincerely dead—after Adam’s sin, and thus, obviously, after Adam.

Old-earth creationists would respond that since the Romans 5 passage is clearly talking about only human death, then the fossils in the geologic column would not be included in that passage and thus were free to die millions of years before Adam. But that seems to mean that hominid fossils must not be related to Adam, since they died before he did. Further, it’s not so clear that the Romans 5 passage refers only to human death; Paul speaks elsewhere (Rom 8.18-22) of “all creation” groaning under the consequences of Adam’s sin. My colleague Kevin Bauder has artfully and soberly captured the problem of the old-earth creationist view on this matter.

[Sidebar: This question on the reference of the word death does present an interesting opportunity for meditation. We know that Adam and Eve were free to eat fruit; since digesting a mango would result in cellular death in the fruit, it seems that Paul’s use of “death” in Romans 5 would not include that. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that the tree survives the “death” of its fruit. How about root vegetables? Did Adam and Eve eat carrots before the fall? That would kill the plant, after all. Most young-earth creationists would draw the line not there, but at organisms “in which is the breath of life” (Gen 7.15), which God chose to protect through the flood, by which he decreed that “everything that is in the earth shall die” (Gen 6.17). I’m inclined to think that this definition of death should be considered in interpreting Romans 5. And if that’s valid, then nothing in the fossil record that respired could have died before Adam’s sin.]

The presence of fossils as evidence of death before sin, it seems to me, remains a problem for old-earth creationist.

The second problem is the meaning of the work of Christ. Paul finds the significance of Christ’s work in the undoing of what Adam did (Rom 5.17-19; 1Cor 15.22). If there was no historical Adam, then there’s nothing for Christ’s work to undo, and the evolutionary view simply cannot be squared with biblical theology. Suggesting that Adam is a symbolic everyman really doesn’t get you there; we’d think it was silly if Paul based the work of Christ in undoing the sin of the boy who cried wolf or some other fabulous figure. Nothing in the text of Scripture, in either Testament, inclines us to believe that Adam was merely symbolic. You don’t list symbols in genealogies.

So the significance of Christ’s redemptive work hangs on the question of whether a particular man disobeyed God, and whether we—all—are the biological descendants of that man. I can’t find any of the other choices appealing.

Next time, we’ll summarize and draw some conclusions.

Part 10

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Billions of Years? Part 8: The Geologic Time Scale

October 5, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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Having considered mutation and natural selection, I turn now to the third leg of the evolutionary stool: the time scales that are necessary for all of this naturally directed change to occur. Evolution needs billions of years, and that’s why we have old-earth and young-earth views.

So is there evidence for the geologic ages, or not?

Well, that’s an interesting question.

There are lots of geochronometers, or ways to calculate the age of the earth. I remember seeing a documentary years ago narrated by Donald Johanson, the paleontologist who discovered Lucy. He talked briefly about the age of the earth and cited 3 different geochronometers, completely unrelated to one another, that triangulated nicely on about 4.5 billion years. I remember thinking, “Wow. That’s really impressive!” So I started reading. And I found out that the geochronometers are all over the place. Lots of them point to 4.5 billion years, yes, but others point to widely differing ages—with a good many well within the range called for by a straightforward reading of Genesis.

Two questions, then. First, why is there so much variation? And second, which ones are you going to believe?

With that much variation, they can’t all be right. So what’s up? A look at a single method might help answer the question. As you know, there are lots of elements and compounds in sea water—most obviously salt, but lots of other stuff too. You can pick one of those—let’s say salt—and measure its concentration in sea water. Then you can try to calculate how much saltier the sea is getting every year—or you can just log your measurements over a period of several years—and you can run that number back to calculate how many years ago the sea would have had no salt in it. That gives you a presumed date for the beginning of the ocean, which is not necessarily the same as the age of the earth, but at least it’ll tell you whether you’re dealing with thousands or millions or billions of years.

[As usual, there’s more to this than what I’ve mentioned here. Salt settles out of sea water in sediment, and there are other variables as well. The method attempts to take all of this into account.]

Well, it turns out that when you run those numbers for different substances—salt, magnesium, calcium, whatever—you get different dates, sometimes widely varying dates. Why?

I think the answer is obvious. There’s an assumption behind the method. When you extrapolate the rate of increasing concentration back into previous years, you’re assuming that the rate was essentially constant over time. That seems to be a reasonable assumption, but it’s an assumption nonetheless; it’s uniformitarianism, which underlies pretty much all of evolutionary thinking.

But imagine another scenario. What would an unusual year—say, a year with a significant flood, even a global one—do to the numbers?

So our calculations are hostage to annual deviations in runoff to the oceans. And the very fact that our numbers differ from substance to substance tells us that the deposition has not been uniform. Our assumption is wrong, and our results are therefore invalid.

So we have dates, “measured” by geochronometers, that are all over the place.

Which ones do we pick?

Ah, there’s the rub. Our choices will be driven by our assumptions. If you’re Donald Johanson, and you’re confident that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, you’re going to select those indicators as examples of how science is done. After all, the ones that take us below 10,000 years can’t possibly be right. They’re statistical outliers. Obviously.

That’s called slanted selection of evidence, and like assuming your conclusion, it’ll get you an F on your freshman research paper.

(Now, this is a sword that cuts both ways. I’m strongly tempted to listen to just the geochronometers that indicate a young earth; I’ve even linked to several above. I need to do the best I can with the data myself, not letting my bias cloud my openness to hard facts.)

But my point is that the geochronometers don’t tell a single story, because we can demonstrate that a great many of them are based on illegitimate assumptions. So why do we insist that only one story can be told, and that the tellers of other stories are mythematicians? And where is the robustness in the evidence that seeks to turn me from the Scripture?

Next time, we’ll touch on a significant theological concern.

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Billions of Years? Part 7: Natural Selection

October 2, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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In the evolutionary system, mutations get you the possibility of change in living organisms. But the changes are random and thus are not directional; they’re not going to get you to anything that looks like a line of development, which is what the term evolution means. You need a mechanism to give the force of change some sort of direction. That mechanism, as proposed by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, is natural selection.

Much has been written on the topic, but perhaps the best known is Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Dawkins speaks reverently of the concept, divine in its simplicity: the many random changes that don’t work die out and are thus discarded, while the relatively few random changes that enhance the organism’s ability to survive and reproduce are preserved in future generations. What you end up with, then, is a whole bunch of stuff that works pretty much perfectly, giving the appearance that someone planned that way. But there is no Someone; he’s superfluous.

It’s indisputable that organisms are more likely to survive if they’re capable than if they’re not. So the idea works great in theory—and in practice, up to a certain point. As long as the changes are relatively simple, you can just work your way up the long slow ramp, after the fashion Dawkins suggests in Climbing Mount Improbable. But the data don’t seem to match the metaphor; as Michael Behe noted in his work Darwin’s Black Box, there are many structures in nature that would require multiple changes to occur simultaneously in the organism in order to confer any advantage for natural selection to, well, select. Behe coined the term irreducible complexity.

(And yes, I know that Behe is an old-earth creationist. I don’t think that invalidates his observations to the extent that they are observable and verifiable.)

Perhaps the example most often cited is the eye. To have any vision at all, the human needs an opening in the epidermis; an eyeball, containing a light opening (pupil), a translucent center (vitreous humor), and a light-sensitive retina; an optic nerve to carry the retinal output to the brain; and an area of the brain (the thalamus and, eventually, the visual cortex) to process what’s coming up the pipe. And all that needs to be tied into the circulatory system, or the whole kaboodle shuts down after a few seconds. If any one of those links in the chain is missing, you have no vision and hence nothing worth selecting by the blind watchmaker.

That’s a lot of stuff to evolve at once.

Dawkins has responded to this apparent problem by observing that there are ways to develop increasing vision over multiple generations in small, incremental steps. In what he seems to think is the coup de grace for Behe and his fellow benighted, he notes that some of those steps are observable in nature. But what he does not do is demonstrate that the examples from nature are in any way related to one another (though he does call them “relatives” in passing); he does not demonstrate a chain of development over time. He speculates that many different kinds of eyes developed independently, but again he does not demonstrate a sequence of development for each, or any, of them. In the standard college freshman English course, we call that assuming your conclusion, and it gets you an F on your research paper.

Some old-earth creationists have suggested a workaround for irreducible complexity. In his “progressive creationism,” Hugh Ross posits that at certain unbridgeable gaps in the process—say, the first life, or the first vertebrate, or the first human—God stepped in with an act of special creation. This is a concept referred to as “the God of the gaps,” and to my mind it seems far simpler, if you’re going to bring God into it, to bring him in in the way he described in the first place.

Recall that I’m expecting a high standard of evidence to draw me away from the evidentially supported elevated source of the Scripture. Showing how something might have happened is not showing that it did. And so irreducible complexity remains a problem for the process of natural selection and thus for the evolutionist.

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Billions of Years? Part 6: Mutation

September 28, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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My concerns with Big Bang cosmology are relatively vague, given my limited exposure to physics. On the matter of biological evolution, though, I have more specific concerns.

Those concerns begin with the origin of life from non-living material. I can recall in high school biology–which I took just shortly after life actually began–attempting to reenact the moment by zapping amino acids in grape juice with electrical current. I found the experience completely unconvincing. This single event remains the most difficult of the evolutionary problems.

Once you have a living organism, however simple, where do you go from there? I think every evolutionist would agree with me that Darwinian evolution—including whatever the current form of it is—absolutely requires 3 things: mutation, which is the mechanism by which organisms can change; natural selection, which is the mechanism by which deleterious mutations can be discarded and beneficial ones preserved; and time (LOTS of time), which is necessary because there are a lot of differences between an amoeba and, say, Pele. Since all 3 of these elements are necessary, raising significant doubt about just one of them would disable the theory. I have concerns with all three.

Let’s begin with mutation.

Of course mutation happens; the reason you are not short, bald, and brown-eyed like me is that you are a mutant. There are a bazillion mutations going on right around us all the time. But Darwin and his successors didn’t simply posit that change happens; they posited that positive changes occur that slowly, gradually enable an organism to become better at surviving in its environment, eventually culminating in organisms as diverse as the life we see on the planet today.

I have 3 questions about that.

First, how frequent are beneficial mutations? I’ve seen suggested examples here and there, mostly at the level of bacteria and viruses. But the great majority of mutations seem to be either harmful—Down syndrome, fragile X, sickle-cell anemia—or at best neutral (hair color, eye color). I know, blondes have more fun, and don’t it make my brown eyes blue, and all that. But since human sexual attraction is far more complex than eye color, it’s hard to argue that blue eye color makes the survival of the species more likely. Observational science seems to indicate that mutations are on balance not a good thing for the organism.

I realize that according to the view, natural selection will kindly weed out the negatives. But doesn’t the rarity of clearly beneficial mutations mean that the process will take even longer than a few billion years? I mean, Climbing Mount Improbable involves a lot of little tiny steps.

Second, and much more important, is the problem of what mutations actually do: jumble the genetic code, either by dropping “letters” (nucleobases) or rearranging them. What it can’t do is create genetic information that is simply not there. How would one rearrange the genetic code of an amoeba, regardless of the number of steps, to produce a spine, or a lung, or an ear, or a prefrontal cortex?

Third, what observational evidence do we have of mutations crossing all lines in the alleged family tree? That’s the old question of “missing links,” of which there are far more than just the one between Bonzo and Bono. Why do they seem to be missing from the phylogenetic tree with such irritating regularity? Shouldn’t the fossil record be full of them? And isn’t it assuming your conclusion to observe microchanges within species and extrapolate that to macrochanges across orders, classes, phyla, and even kingdoms?

These questions are enough to give me serious pause on the mutation leg of the stool. But there are 2 other legs to go.

As we’ll see next time, natural selection doesn’t seem to be the cure-all for these deficiencies.

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Billions of Years? Part 5: Cosmic Evolution

September 25, 2017 by Dan Olinger 5 Comments

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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According to the current popular view, cosmic evolution—the development of the universe—began just less than 14 billion years ago with a singularity: space and time did not yet exist, and all matter was infinitely dense. This singularity began a rapid expansion (the so-called “Big Bang”), with every particle—subatomic particles in the early stages—moving away from every other particle as the space containing them expanded. Eventually these particles began regathering—in space—to form nuclei, then atoms, then clouds of gas and dust, then stars, then galaxies.

The physics behind all this is not simple. Lots of really smart people have wrestled with the questions raised; there are names like Einstein and Planck involved, and not a few Nobel prizes. The Big Bang model has made predictions, perhaps most notably the expected presence of Cosmic Background Radiation, which have been confirmed by later experimentation. This is pretty serious stuff.

But any scientist—and lay person—should question his presuppositions, beginning with the very first ones. I have lots of questions; I’d like to focus on the singularity model for now.

Some—many—of my questions, I’m pretty sure, stem from the fact that I’m not a physicist and don’t understand the model. I wonder, for example, how the expansion occurred without being restrained by gravity, which at that time had to be practically infinite—that is, the most gravity possible in the universe. But for all I know, that’s not even a legitimate question. I’m going to leave the heavy lifting to people who have actual expertise in the field.

But I would like to raise a couple of considerations, one philosophical and one sociological (since my academic credentials are more right-brained than left).

What caused the expansion? It seems to me that this is the very first question to be asked of the model.

My first exposure to a serious answer to that question came in Stephen Hawking’s seminal work A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, where he addressed the question briefly. At singularity, he said, all the laws of physics are rendered inoperative; we have no scientific tools with which to investigate it.

In the decades since Hawking’s book, the model has been refined, but I’m not aware of any suggestion that Hawking’s observation is viewed as incorrect; physicists today still agree that the singularity is not open to investigation by the tools of science.

So the first premise of the entire worldview is outside the realm of scientific investigation. I’m OK with that—the existence of God in eternity past is outside the realm of scientific investigation too. But it seems ironic for adherents to the Big Bang model to ridicule supernaturalists on scientific grounds.

In his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams took a swipe at supernaturalism with his question, “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” But how do we grant veto power to the Big Bang model when its first question is beyond scientific examination? Isn’t that a mite overconfident?

My second question, the sociological one, has been generated by several decades of experience interacting with people who think I’m crazy—or hopelessly ignorant—to believe in a Creator God. When I ask them about their own model, their answers often indicate that they don’t understand it themselves. I recall several years ago, when I was still laboring under the misconception that the Big Bang was an explosion rather than a rapid expansion (and yes, the difference is significant to physicists), I asked an engineer how the explosion could overpower all the gravity in the universe. His reply was, “Hmm. I’ve never thought about that.” Now, to be fair, he’s an engineer, not a physicist, and yes, it’s a complex theory. But this is just on the surface of the model, and it astonished me that as an engineer, whose job it is to think through systems, he’d never even asked the question—literally the first question about his worldview, about which he was so confident. I, the religious guy, was the one asking the questions and seeking to understand the model.

Now, my question was ignorant, as I later learned; the Big Bang, according to the model, did not work like an explosion. But my engineer friend didn’t know that, and he further admitted that he hadn’t given the foundation of his worldview any serious consideration. Yet he was confident that I was deluded. That doesn’t discredit the model, of course; the engineer wasn’t one of its developers. But it does make me SMH.

I have other questions—the antimatter problem comes to mind—but my gravest concern is that by far the majority of fervent adherents to the Big Bang model—the people who most aggressively ridicule young-earth creationists—seem not to have asked and answered these questions for themselves, precisely because the model is so arcane. How are they on any firmer ground than those they ridicule? How is their position not, um, religious—based on faith in the High Priesthood, which understands these Very Complicated Doctrines? 

Given the apparent philosophical inconsistency, it seems presumptuous to ask me to discard hard evidence of a supernatural book in order to genuflect before the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Matter. And it seems grossly immoral for the many adherents who literally don’t know what they’re talking about to pass judgment on any who disagree.

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Billions of Years? Part 4: Approaching the Question

September 21, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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If the Bible’s account of creation is historical narrative and should be read straightforwardly, and if it says that creation occurred over a period of 6 “days” with “evenings and mornings,” and if the biblical genealogies place Adam a few thousand years ago, then we have a clear conflict between the biblical story and the broadly accepted modern evolutionary account. How do we respond to that conflict?

Assume that the science is settled, and the Bible is wrong?
Try to reconcile the two accounts by a creative reading of the biblical text?
Declare that Science Is Evil and move in next door to Simeon Stylites?

I see serious problems with all these approaches.

First, there is no statement more unscientific than that “the science is settled.” Science is never settled. Scientists regularly and correctly observe that errors are revealed and that models are constantly revised as new discoveries occur. Science, they tell us, is the ongoing, never-ending search for truth. I’m happy to accept their word on that. Question everything.

Second, my earlier posts (as linked above) have argued that there is no textual basis for getting hermeneutically creative with the biblical account. It is what it is.

Third, the fact that God is the Creator renders it impossible that genuine science could be in conflict with revealed truth. The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19.1), and the study of the heavens will not contradict God’s declarations about their origin. So I’m not going to live the rest of my life sitting cross-legged on my Luddite pillar. I’m going to study science as one more avenue toward increasing my knowledge of God.

As I’ve stated before, the demonstrated supernatural character of the Scripture requires that I give it the benefit of the doubt in any supposed conflict with science. That means that scientific “discoveries” that conflict with the biblical account have some serious burden of proof. I’m going to need more than consensus or, worse yet, allegation to bail on the biblical statements.

So I’m going to have to evaluate the evolutionary model to see just how rigorous it is. I recognize that that’s a risky business, since I’m not a scientist. In my graduate studies I learned what it means to acquire the specialized research skills necessary for a specific academic field, and I don’t take lightly the risk I’m taking on by evaluating a scientific model without those tools. I invite informed criticism. But I also note that name-calling is not rigorous rebuttal.

I’ve asked secular scientists about many of these things, and I haven’t gotten coherent, reasonable, validated answers—nothing even approaching the level of proof that I’m requiring if I’m going to reject the biblical account.

So the next few posts contain my thought process on evaluating the evolutionary model. Take it for what it’s worth, and refute it if you can.

To begin with, we need to note that there is no single “evolutionary model.” The modern secular view of cosmogeny requires at least 2 distinct phases: the beginning of the universe, and the beginning of life on earth. These phases require completely different mechanisms. The popular view is that the universe began with the so-called “Big Bang” more than 13 billion years ago, followed by material condensation into nebulae, stars, and galaxies, while biogenesis on Earth began about 4.5 billion years ago and has followed a mostly Darwinian process of mutation and natural selection since then.

How strong are the logical and observational bases of these processes? Strong enough to override the biblical account? We’ll begin by thinking about cosmic evolution, including both the Big Bang and the succeeding mechanism of star formation.

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Billions of Years? Part 3: Genesis Data on the Age of the Earth

September 18, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

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Last time we demonstrated that the Creation account in Genesis 1 is Hebrew narrative, which means that we should read it straightforwardly. We then demonstrated that it speaks of a personal agent who created the cosmos from nothing over a period described as 6 “days.” Before we begin to evaluate the claims of the old-earth position, however, we need to answer a second question from the text: how long ago did these 6 “days” occur?

The text reports that on the sixth “day” Elohim created a man, named Adam (“man”) (Gen 1.27; 2.19) and his wife, named Eve (“living”) (Gen 2.22; 3.20). Later in the narrative we’re given the same Adam as the starting point of a genealogy, including lifespans and progeny dates for everyone involved. Genesis 5 gives the data for every generation from Adam to Noah and his sons, and Genesis 11 gives the same data for every generation from Noah’s sons to Abraham. The lifespans and progeny dates from Abraham through David, whose life dates are generally agreed upon, appear throughout the biblical text up to the book of Samuel.

Thus we have numbers that can be manipulated to yield a calendar year, or thereabouts, for the creation of Adam. There are variations in this date for several reasons, including some textual variants in the Hebrew manuscripts and some interpretational questions. (For a detailed analysis of the interpretative history of that question, see the dissertation of my former PhD student Ben Shaw [free registration required].) The most restrictive date would yield a creation somewhere around 4000 BC, as calculated by James Ussher in the 1600s, while textual variants might allow a date 1000 years or so earlier.

Some have noted that it was traditional in ancient genealogies to omit generations that were considered unimportant; some interpreters have suggested, for example, that the genealogy of Jesus Christ in Matthew 1 has omitted some generations in order to yield 3 sets of 14 generations each (Mat 1.17), for easier memorization. It’s true that omitting generations did occur, but you’ll note that the Matthew list does not include the math; on the other hand, the Genesis genealogies include ages and sums that simply do not add up if generations are omitted. The omission suggestion introduces far more difficulties than it solves.

And of course, to get from 4000 or 5000 BC to 4.5 billion BC, you’d be omitting 1 million generations for every generation you mention. Some suggestions are just silly on their face.

So where does the text itself leave us? You have an earth and its contents created intentionally by a personal agent a few thousand years ago.

Given earlier evidence that the Bible exhibits characteristics of extraordinary origin, you’re going to need an extremely high level of proof to set that obvious declaration aside.

Does the old-earth view meet that level of evidence—something more substantial and logically compelling than “but everybody believes this!”?

On to that question next time.

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Billions of Years? Part 2: Genesis Data on the Creation Event

September 14, 2017 by Dan Olinger 5 Comments

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1

As noted in the last post, I’m starting with the demonstrated premise that the Bible is a supernatural book—the Word of God—and therefore authoritative. Further, it should be interpreted based on genre, like any other literature. In narratives, it should be read at face value unless the text itself give us reason to do otherwise. And once we’ve extracted its meaning, we shouldn’t torque it around unless we have a stronger reason to do so than “a whole bunch of people believe something else, and they’ll make fun of me if I don’t come around.”

It makes sense, then, to start our investigation into the age of the earth by taking a look at what the Bible actually says about the topic.

To begin with, the Creation narrative and the genealogies of the human race are clearly narrative, not poetry, as old-earth proponents used to suggest. The clearest indication of this is the style of the text itself; perhaps the most reliable predictor of Hebrew narrative is the waw consecutive, which is simply the use of and to connect verb clauses in a string. This form dominates Genesis 1; here’s a copy of the text with the waw-consecutive verbs highlighted in red. By contrast, a poetic description of the same Creation event appears in Psalm 104, and there’s hardly any red in it at all.

It’s no surprise, then, that a leading expert on Hebrew literature, Robert Alter, identifies the first poetic passage of the Bible as Adam’s description of his wife all the way at the end of Genesis 2.

Some old-earth proponents, facing this clear evidence that Genesis 1 is not poetry, have suggested that it is “exalted, semi-poetic prose.” I’ll observe that there’s no such genre recognized by Hebrew scholars. This is a whole new level of category error—ascribing a phenomenon to a category that not only is incorrect, but simply does not exist.

So Genesis 1 is narrative, not poetry. That means we’re going to take it straightforwardly, barring evidence in the text itself that the author intends us to read it otherwise. So what does it say?

- There is a Creator, named Elohim, who is the subject of most of the verbs. He speaks throughout the passage, and he thinks through a planned action (Gen 1.26-27). This means that he has intellect and will. And since he evaluates his work throughout the process, calling it “good” repeatedly (e.g. Gen 1.4)., he appears to have emotions as well. He’s a full-orbed person, not merely a natural force of some kind.

- His creative work takes place in stages. He begins by creating the heavens and the earth (Gen 1.1)—or perhaps this is a summary statement that encompasses the description that follows. Then he brings material objects into being by simply speaking, with no source material mentioned. Specifically, he speaks to create light (Gen 1.3); a “firmament” (Gen 1.6-7 KJV), which separates upper waters from surface waters; the sun and the moon (Gen 1.16); and marine and avian life (Gen 1.20).

- He apparently creates some things out of existing material; for example, perhaps land animals come from the dirt (Gen 1.24; note the verb “bring forth” here), and man certainly is fashioned from clay (Gen 2.7), while the woman is fashioned from one of the man’s ribs (Gen 2.22). It appears that the waters already exist in Gen 1.6 (does this mean that Gen 1.1 is not a summary statement after all?) and that dirt exists in Gen 1.9, before it appears after a gathering of the waters.

The periods during which Elohim performs these actions are described as “days,” with “evenings” and “mornings.” This language would lead us to assume diurnal, quotidian days, though we can’t be sure that all 6 creation days were precisely the same length, given that the sun does not exist until day 4. (I note, however, that the text gives no hint of a significant difference in length between day 3 and day 4. It seems obvious that there is a source of light for the first 3 days that would provide a definitional function similar to the sun. Note that the Bible ends with a new creation in which there is no sun, just as was the case in the very beginning. In that half of the inclusio, John reports that “the glory of God” and “the Lamb” are the light [Rev 21.23], and “the Lord God gives them light” [Rev 22.5]).

What we’re left with from a natural reading of the narrative, then, is that a supernatural rational being created the material universe from nothing originally, over a period of 6 days of roughly 24 hours each. Nothing in the text itself leads to any other conclusion. If another narrative requires a very long period of time, then reading that back into this text is going to call for an extraordinary level of evidence.

Before we can begin to evaluate that evidence, however, we need to answer one more question: how long ago did these Creation “days” occur? We’ll consider the evidence for that in the next post.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Billions of Years? Part 1

September 11, 2017 by Dan Olinger 6 Comments

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Once you’ve decided that the Bible is a supernatural book, I suppose the next step is to learn and evaluate the arc of its story. That’s especially important these days because the story starts with divine creation, and today’s culture completely rejects that idea. The peer pressure in academia is completely opposed to the biblical creation story, and believing it is pretty much suicide for a well-regarded academic career.

In the 1940s several leaders of evangelical Christianity made a considered decision to moderate their stance toward the academic community and to seek “a place at the table.” By the mid-1950s one leading evangelical scholar, Bernard Ramm, had publicly embraced old-earth creationism in his book The Christian View of Science and Scripture, and evangelical scholars quickly followed suit. Today it’s difficult to find anyone on the Bible or science faculties of the mainstream evangelical colleges and seminaries who takes the Genesis timeline at face value. Millard Erickson, a conservative Southern Baptist and the author of a standard systematic theology, views young-earth creationism as indefensible in the light of modern science; you get the idea he classes it with “lost cause” Southern sympathizers who are still saving their confederate money.

Even with the upswing in talk of “intelligent design” in recent years, academics are still overwhelmingly old-earth. The ID leadership such as Michael Behe and William Dembski hold to an old earth, as does the “progressive creationist” Hugh Ross and, most famously, Biologos founder Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Research Project.

For what it’s worth, while academia has embraced the geologic timescale, and while a great many conservative evangelical academics have as well (though they may quibble over the use of the term evolution), the American populace has not followed along. Evolutionists are generally dismayed to find that after decades of indoctrination through the public school system, according to Gallup, in 2017 twice as many Americans believe in direct divine creation as believe in atheistic evolution; and as recently as 1999, the ratio was more than 5:1.

But despite that, publicly embracing young-earth creationism is generally counter-productive to an academic career, and I find its ranks shrinking among my evangelical academic peers.

So what am I still doing in a rapidly emptying room?

I’ll observe, at the risk of sounding judgmental, that the primary reason for bailing on a natural reading of Genesis 1-11 seems to be peer pressure—or more precisely, the behemoth of “scientific consensus” that Darwinian evolution, or one of its descendants, has been demonstrated true in its basic propositions. (“The science is settled!”) After a while, you go along, or you feel like the guy on the street corner with the sandwich board announcing that The End Is Near. Nobody wants to be that guy.

I can’t judge motives. Ramm argued for his change of heart from the compelling scientific evidence—though I didn’t find his evidence compelling at all, and I finished his book thinking, “You bailed on Genesis for that?!” Perhaps some are just intimidated by the size of the crowd and the uniformity of the arguments. Perhaps others just don’t want to face the ostracism and go along for the sake of their salaries and their pension plans. And perhaps some of them work backwards from that to find the evolutionist arguments more compelling than they really are.

I can only speak for myself. But once I have determined that the Bible is a supernatural book, I’m going to take it as straightforwardly as I would any other literary work, fiction or non-fiction. I’m going to read history as history, and poetry as poetry, and visionary apocalypse as visionary apocalypse, and do my best to find out what the divine author of this remarkable book says.

And if something comes along that asks me to do a wholesale reinterpretation of what the book says, I’m going to need it to be seriously convincing, beyond the social penalty of Not Going Along With The Crowd.

So far, I just haven’t found the science, or the accommodating theology, compelling or even mildly believable. I’m not about to bail on The Book for a bunch of biased brains. Or a boondoggle.

So here I am, in the padded room our culture has graciously provided for young-earth creationist academics, watching the room get roomier by the academic year.

I’d like to take a series of posts to lay out my thought process, for what it’s worth. I’m not a scientist, but I talk to a lot of them, and I’ve skimmed a little cream off the brains of each. I’ll start explaining my reasoning in the next post. See you then.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10