Be sure to bring your brain, Pt. 1: Young Earth Creationism

Those of us that believe that the writers of the Bible were inspired in some way by God such that the Bible is in some way "inerrant" eventually have to consider the extreme distance between what is apparently described in the opening chapters of Genesis and what is known about cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology, etc.

The Young Earth Creationist (YEC) believes that Genesis 1-11 are literally true:

• God created the Earth in 6 days of 24 hours each (Gen 1-2),
• all of humanity descended from one couple named Adam and Eve (Gen 2-4),
• the Genesis patriarchs lived hundreds of years (Gen 5),
  
• there was a global flood that killed all of mankind except for Noah and his family (Gen 6-10),
• the various human languages had their origin at Babel (Gen 11).

The problem with this approach is this: None of the five things listed above has the slightest bit of factual support outside of the Bible. I'm not going to go into any detail about it (I assume you can use Google as well as I can) here. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Earth is merely thousands of years old rather than billions, while there is a great deal of independently corroborated evidence otherwise. The same goes for the other 4 points. These events simply did not occur.

Now, for most people in most walks of life this doesn't matter much. Unless you're a cosomologist, biologist, astronomer, geologist or anthropologist, it makes no practical difference in your life whether Genesis 1-11 is literal history or not. In the same manner, you can even believe in Ptolemaic astronomy if you want to; it won't make any difference in the way you approach any of your daily activities. Geocentrism worked fine, even for astronomers, for centuries.

But if you care about truth this should matter to you: none of these events happened literally as described in the Bible. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old; the notion of a literal Adam & Eve is unsupported except perhaps for a mitochondrial DNA study that placed Eve in Eastern Africa 140,000 years ago; there was no global flood that wiped out mankind except for a single family; there is no sign that human languages divided at a single point a few thousand years ago.

I'm not going to relate the YEC position or its lack of agreement with fact in detail. Again, I'm assuming you can use Google. If you are a YEC and consider yourself intellectually honest, I dare you to read this site. If you do so, you will have to choose between the two (for the record, I don't endorse Glenn's model but his collection of geological data that thoroughly refute the YEC/Flood model is impressive).

The YEC position eventually falls back to asserting one or both of two propositions. Either God created the Earth a short time ago with an appearance of great age, or did enough miracles to plug the gaps in Creation Science (e.g., cram billions of years of geological change into a single year of Noah's Flood without releasing so much heat the oceans boil off).

So, what if God created the Earth a few thousand years ago, but made it appear to be much older? What if God buried fossils in the ground of animals that never lived, instantly created geological structures that should have millenia to form, created light en route to Earth from supernovas millions of light years away that never really ignited, etc.?

We have to agree that an omnipotent God would be completely capable of doing all that. We even have to allow for the vanishingly slim possibility that He did. However, if we are said to be able to learn about God's character from observing nature (Romans 1), what would such sleight-of-hand say about Him?

The YEC wants to believe a "simple reading of God's Word." Let's ignore the time problem and just look at what Genesis 1 describes:

6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

Just where is this water that the sky separates from the surface of the Earth?

14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

Apparently, the sky contains the Sun and Moon and all the stars – and there is water above it.

The YEC wants to take everything about the Genesis 1 account literally when it describes what was made when. If you're going to go there, then you have to take the "waters above the firmament" with you (the "waters below," too).

This just doesn't add up. After years of trying to force these puzzle pieces together, I abandoned the quick and easy pat answer of YEC and moved on to Old-Earth Creationism.