Myth 2: “The Bible’s account of Creation is only metaphorical, the six creation days are not ordinary days, and creation really unfolded over millions of years”

The Bible clearly says that God created in six days just thousands of years ago. However, the secular narrative (based on radiometric dating), claims the earth is billions of years old. Does radiometric dating debunk the Bible’s timeline? Does it really make any difference what someone believes about the age of the earth? We’ll answer these important questions in this chapter.

Significance of Believing in a “Young Earth”

Most students who have graduated from Christian colleges can name at least four different views of the Genesis Creation account: the literal/historical “young earth” view, the Day-age view, Progressive Creation, and the Gap Theory. Unfortunately, many of these same students would also likely say “we don’t really know because we weren’t there” and/or “it doesn’t really matter what you believe.”

Sadly, these couldn’t be further from the truth. First, as we will see below, we can reliably know when God created because He’s clearly told us in His Word. Second, it really does matter what we believe because our beliefs shape our actions, attitudes, and choices.

How we regard God’s Word (authoritatively or just as a guidebook) has direct implications on how we live our lives. Today’s students want to know: If truth doesn’t start on the first page, then how many pages do I need to turn in the Bible until I run into truth?” If truth doesn’t start on the first page, the rest is up for grabs.

Honest readers will admit that the text clearly means what it says in Genesis 1: God created in six normal days. Readers who spend time investigating the genealogies listed in Genesis 5, 10, and 11 will also admit that it’s a historical narrative with real people, real dates, and real lifespans that lead directly back to Adam, the first human who was miraculously created out of the dust by God. In fact, in just the first 11 chapters of Genesis, 87 patriarchs are given along with their birth, lifespan, or death years! Sounds like a history book, doesn’t it?

Why would God give us these genealogies? Certainly, He knew that people today would read them and ponder the historicity of these early accounts. Let’s face it: people who regard the historicity of these accounts and their implications (a recent creation made “out of nothing” by God) develop a much different worldview about life, origins, and our purpose than those who do not believe these accounts. These beliefs shape our choices, attitudes, and behaviors. Indeed, the Bible lays out the foundation for understanding all of life with a much different story than the world does!

Readers will also notice that there’s certainly no way to insert millions of years within or between these genealogies. While scholars may quibble about hundreds of years and the ancient texts upon which our modern bibles are based may differ by a couple thousand years, honest readers will admit there’s certainly no room for millions of years. Without filtering what’s clearly written in Genesis through secular science textbooks, the reader is left with a young earth.

If one submits to the authority of Scripture, relying on Scripture to tell them about the basic framework of the history of the world, their origins, and their purpose, their lives will radiate outward from these understandings. Their entire worldview will be different from someone who does not believe. For example, to a Christian who holds that Genesis 1 is literal history:

• God is the all-powerful Creator who spoke Creation into existence (Psalm 33:9, Hebrews 11). Each person will give an account to this all-powerful Creator.
• God started out everything “very good” without bloodshed and disease, but man’s sins brought death, corruption, bloodshed and disease. Cancer is man’s fault, not God’s.
• God did not use a slow, random, murderous process of natural selection and survival of the fittest to bring the many types of life on earth into existence.
• The fossil record reflects God’s judgement on a world turned corrupt after the Fall.
• Racism has no foundation because there aren’t millions of years for the human line to splinter off into various “races.” A recent dispersion at the Tower of Babel means all people groups are closely related, separated by only hundreds of generations.

Submitting to biblical truth—beginning in Genesis—results in all these benefits and more. A person whose worldview is anchored to biblical foundations will also be constantly reminded that they are in the world but not of the world, and that the world has fallen into the deception of the enemy (1 John 5:19). They will see the lie of “deep time” espoused in the majority of secular schools, media outlets, and state parks. These two perspectives are very different: It’s either death and suffering over millions of years before Adam or a perfect creation marred by original sin just thousands of years ago. Scripturally, death does not come before sin—it was sin that brought death to God’s perfect creation—a curse in which we are still living (Romans 8).

Despite the stark contrast between these two viewpoints, many Christians attempt to reconcile them, accepting one of the “hybrid” perspectives mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. To be clear, a person can be saved by the blood of Jesus and still believe in deep time, so we’re not making belief in a recent creation the test of one’s salvation. But if they believe in long ages, they will not likely grow fully in their faith because their roots may be prevented from penetrating into the deepest parts of Scripture—the parts that happened when we weren’t there to see them. These are the parts that require the most faith and trust in His Word to believe.

Replacing the obvious history of Scripture with the millions-of-years narrative from the world undermines the authority of Scripture and erases the logical foundation for the Gospel of Christ because it places death (the consequence of sin) before sin. Just try to explain the Gospel to someone without referring to a historical view of Genesis. It is a difficult (if not impossible) task.

Many who buy into the idea of long ages have not thought about the consequences, the worst of which is simply this: it undermines the gospel. Understanding how does not take long and can be done by asking a few questions:  

1. Were death, suffering, and disease part of God’s “very good” creation for billions of years? (Genesis 1:27–30).
2. If there was no first man Adam to bring sin into the world, then why do we need the last Adam to free us from the penalty and curse of sin? (Romans 5:12–21)
3. If God made Adam and Eve “from the beginning of creation,” then how are we to account for billions of years before man’s supposed emergence through evolution? (Mark 10:2–9)
4. The Bible records that Adam was created in the image of God (Genesis 1:28) and that this image was passed down to his descendants (Genesis 5:3). If we do not all descend from Adam, how can we bear the image of God? Only those who bear the image of God can be saved (1 Corinthians 15:49), and thus only descendants of Adam can be saved.

Many Christians feel pressured to be accepted by the mainstream and thus buy into the idea of millions of years. Some just haven’t fully thought through why they believe the way they do. Most of the time they really don’t know how much it’s costing them and their families.

Because I “converted” to a Biblical Creationist late in life, my two older children were raised by Christian parents who had “undeclared” positions on origins. Their questions about the dinosaurs and cavemen were always prefaced with “if the earth is young, the answer is… but if the earth is old, the answer is…” With this type of conditional answer to many of life’s very basic questions, what they were really hearing was “maybe dad doesn’t know,” or (even worse) “maybe the Bible, which is supposed to be the most definitive book for me to build my life upon, doesn’t have an answer, or perhaps it even doesn’t even have the correct answer.” Fortunately, I had the opportunity to re-solidify their faith before they went to college.

Blessings will come to those who completely embrace the whole Scripture. For example, Jesus said, “For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels” (Luke 9:26).

The Book of Psalms is likely one of the most frequently read books of the Bible. The very beginning of this book starts out by stating those who believe in and meditate on the Torah (the first five books of Bible, led by Genesis) will be blessed in every way:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; But his delight is in the law [Torah] of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall prosper. (Psalms 1:1–3).

The Bible presents the unchangeable, perfect, and true Words of God Himself, including what God says about the history of our world—history that occurred before the Great Flood of Noah’s time thousands of years ago. Since the Bible says that God cannot lie and that He even honors His Word along with His own name, we ought to treat Scripture with the reverence it deserves.¹

How does Scripture Teach a “Young Earth”?

Determining the age of the earth using the Bible is a straightforward, two-step process: (1) Determine whether the six days in Creation Week were ordinary days. This leads us to Adam, who was supernaturally created by God (i.e., he didn’t evolve) on the Sixth Day of Creation; (2) Determine how long ago Adam lived using the genealogies in Genesis.

We know that the six days in Genesis 1 were ordinary days (not six long ages) because the Hebrew word for day (yom) is qualified with “evening,” “morning,” and a number for each of the six days in the Creation Week. When yom is used with any of these qualifiers throughout Scripture, it always means an ordinary day. We’ll take an in-depth look at this topic in this section.

Determining how long ago Adam lived is a straightforward process because Genesis records the fathering age and total lifespan of Adam’s descendants all the way to Abraham and his sons (most directly; in some cases indirectly).² Summing the lifespans in these genealogies leads to Creation Week either about 6,000 or 7,600 years ago (based on the Masoretic or Septuagint texts, respectively³). We’ll take a closer look at these genealogies below.

In addition to these interlinking and overlapping genealogies, the Genesis account itself provides two clues that lead to our understanding that Adam and Eve were the first humans who were created immediately after God had created everything else. The first clue is God’s commission given to humans to take dominion over (that is, to wisely manage) everything God made during Creation Week. The second is God bringing the animals to Adam “to see what he would call them” (the kinds of animals, not every species) (Genesis 2:20). Thus, the Genesis account itself forbids inserting millions of years of animal death and life (e.g., some “dinosaur era”) before Adam and Eve were present to take dominion over Creation and name the animal kinds.

The Days in Genesis 1

The Hebrew word for “day” (yom) is used over 2,000 times in the Old Testament. In some instances, it means a period of time or an era, but in the vast majority of instances it means an ordinary day.

In the first chapter of Genesis, it’s clear that yom means an ordinary day. The first time yom is used in the Bible is Genesis 1:5: “God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day” (v. 5). Notice that in marking the end of the First Day of Creation Week, the word day (yom) is qualified by “evening,” “morning,” and a number (day one). This pattern—evening/morning/number—repeats for each of the six days in Genesis 1, so the entire Creation Week is described by days that are qualified as ordinary days.

The word yom is used over 400 times in the Old Testament along with a number, like “first day.”  In every case, it always means an ordinary day. Yom is used with the word “evening” or “morning” 23 times, and “evening” and “morning” appear together without yom 38 times, and in all 61 instances the text refers to an ordinary day. It seems God wanted to make it clear to us. He said “evening” and “morning,” then a day with a number.

Because God is all-powerful, He could have just created everything in an instant, but He didn’t. He chose to take six days because He was setting up a system of days and a context for our lives and how the world works.

Genesis 1:14 states that God established “lights in the firmament of the Heavens to divide the day from the night” and that they would be used for “signs and seasons, and for days and years.” Here, two of the most basic units of time—days and years—are linked, their duration being determined by the fixed movements of the earth in reference to the sun.

Need further convincing? Consider that God wrote the Ten Commandments with His own hand (Exodus 31:18, “He gave Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.”). When God wrote the Fourth Commandment, He stated:

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. (Exodus 20:11).

Here are the six days again—this time in the Ten Commandments no less—and written by the hand of God. What do you think God wanted the Israelites to believe when He said this? Long ages or real days? God was talking about the Sabbath, which is one day a week. If God meant “thousands of years” when He said “day,” then that would make for a really long work week! It seems from this passage that God told us what to believe, and how to model our lives: six days of work followed by a day of rest.

Our weeks have been like this ever since the beginning. After all, we don’t have a five-day week, do we? Back in the 1920’s the Soviets tried a five-day week and a six-day week, but it was a major failure. So, they went back to a seven-day week. The seven-day week seems to be hardwired into human existence—as if God designed us to work six days and take a rest on the seventh.

Taking a careful look at the context of the Ten Commandments, it wouldn’t make much sense if nine out of the Ten Commandments were literal and one was figurative. How could lying, adultery, and stealing be figures of speech? They were all rather black and white—just like the days of Creation. We certainly don’t work for six long ages, but six days, then we rest. God gave us a day of rest to reset our internal clocks. God didn’t have to give us that seventh day, but He knew we needed it.

When fending off scholars who were developing the idea that God really didn’t create everything in six days (but rather only a single day), the famous reformer Martin Luther warned: “When Moses writes that God created heaven and earth and whatever is in them in six days, then let this period continue to have been six days, and do not venture to devise any comment according to which six days were one day. But if you cannot understand how this could have been done in six days, then grant the Holy Spirit the honor of being more learned than you are.”⁴

Doesn’t the Bible Say That “a Day to the Lord Can Be like a Thousand Years”?

Many Christians ask, “Doesn’t the Bible say that ‘a day to the Lord can be like a thousand years.’” Second Peter 3:8 actually says that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” This passage is talking about God’s judgment and His patience with man’s rebellion. It’s not talking about Creation Week.

Notice that the verse says one day is as a thousand years. It’s a simile showing that God is outside of time, because He is the Creator of time. We know that those who use this verse to say that one day in Creation Week took one thousand years are forcing that view onto the Bible since they never assert the last part of the verse: that a thousand years of Old Testament history all happened in one day.

This passage is saying that God is outside of time and is unaffected by it, but to man, a day is still a day. It’s not defining a day, because it doesn’t say, “a day is a thousand years.” It’s not even talking about the days of Creation. Rather, both times—a day and a thousand years—are described from God’s perspective because “with the Lord” these times are the same. The verse is saying that with God, time has no meaning, because He is eternal, outside of the dimension of time that He created. So a thousand years, a day, and a second all are the same to Him. He sees all of history simultaneously.

Because yom is used over 2,000 times in the Old Testament, it’s important to look at the context in which it is used. In the passage in Peter, the writer is referring to Psalm 90:4, which says, “For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night,” yet a night watch does not last 1,000 years, does it? Here, 1,000 years is just a figure of speech, a comparison to make something more vivid. In context, 2 Peter 3 is saying that although it may seem like a long time to us, the Lord still keeps His promises.

If the days in Genesis 1 were thousand-year periods (or longer), then we are presented with a major logistical problem involving plants and pollinators. Genesis 1 says that God made the plants on day three, while flying insects like bees were created on the fifth day. How could the plants created during the third thousand-year time period survive and reproduce without pollinators until the fifth thousand-year time period? It really makes the most sense to interpret the days in Genesis 1 as literal, approximately 24-hour days, with all of the inter-dependent parts of Creation working as a whole.

How Do We Get a 6,000-Year-old Earth from the Bible?

Genesis 5 lists ten patriarchs that lived before Noah’s Flood. For each of these patriarchs, their age before having the son named, the years they lived after having a son, and their total years are listed:

Genesis 5: The Family of Adam

And Adam lived 130 years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. After he begot Seth, the days of Adam were 800 years; and he had sons and daughters. So all the days that Adam lived were 930; and he died. Seth lived 105, and begot Enosh. After he begot Enosh, Seth lived 807, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Seth were 912; and he died. Enosh lived 90 years, and begot Cainan. After he begot Cainan, Enosh lived 815 years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Enosh were 905 years; and he died. Cainan lived 70 years, and begot Mahalalel. After he begot Mahalalel, Cainan lived 840 years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Cainan were 910 years; and he died. Mahalalel lived 65 years, and begot Jared. After he begot Jared, Mahalalel lived 830 years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Mahalalel were 895 years; and he died. Jared lived 162 years, and begot Enoch. After he begot Enoch, Jared lived 800 years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Jared were 962 years; and he died. Enoch lived 65 years, and begot Methuselah. After he begot Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Enoch were 365 years. And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him. Methuselah lived 187 years, and begot Lamech. After he begot Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Methuselah were 969 years; and he died. Lamech lived 182 years, and had a son. And he called his name Noah, saying, “This one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.” After he begot Noah, Lamech lived 595 years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Lamech were 777 years; and he died. And Noah was 500 years old, and Noah begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Let’s take a closer look at this passage focusing on Adam, the first one listed in Genesis 5:

Notice that three numbers are given for Adam: his age before having Seth (130), the years he lived after fathering Seth (800), and his total lifespan (930 years). Because these three sets of numbers are provided for all ten patriarchs before the Flood, it’s easy to assemble an inter-connected, overlapping chain that goes straight back to Adam, the very first man created:

Table 5. Genesis 5 Genealogies.

Notice that adding the ages in the “age at birth of named son” column sums to a total of 1,556 years (as shown in the far-right column). Because Noah was 600 years old when the Flood came (Genesis 7:6), adding 100 years to Noah’s age in the table (500) places the Flood at 1,656 years after Creation. Genesis 10 and 11 provide the next set of genealogies that allow us to move up the timescale to Abraham who lived about 2,000 BC, as shown in the chart below.

Figure 2. The First 20 Patriarchs since Creation.

Notice that the lifespans of the pre-Flood patriarchs overlapped. Their lifespans also declined in a systematic way over time. These give us confidence that Genesis records an accurate timeline (see our FAQ: Lifespans Before the Flood: How Did People Live to Be 900 Years Old Before the Flood?⁵). The time that elapsed from Adam, the first man created on the Sixth Day of Creation Week, to Abraham was about 2,000 years. The time from Abraham to the time of Christ is about another 2,000 years. The time from Christ until now is another 2,000 years. So, the straight chronology from the Bible places Creation about 6,000 years ago.

Scholars have debated possible gaps in these genealogies for years, but even if there were gaps in these genealogies, we cannot insert them without basically rewriting the text to fit our own preferences. Further, such gaps may allow for hundreds of additional years, but certainly not thousands or millions!

Even many secular historians would agree with Christian scholars that Abraham lived about 2,000 BC, or about 4,000 years ago. If that’s true, with Abraham being the 20^th patriarch after Adam listed in the line-up provided in Genesis, we can’t have multiple thousands of years’ worth of missing genealogies based on the (evolutionary) idea that “modern” humans emerged from other hominid species tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago!

For example, some creation views (e.g., Progressive Creation) agree with the evolutionary timeline that places the evolution of modern humans at least 50,000 years ago (most estimates are higher).⁶ But even with this conservative position, there would be 44,000 years of “missing” genealogies in Genesis (4,000 genealogy years from Genesis, plus the 2,000 years from Christ to present)! Just how can one fit an extra 40,000+ years into the 4,000 years shown on Figure 2 (ten times the number of years accounted for in the Bible)? Under this model, the Bible’s genealogies would not be a reliable record.

An additional consideration with the lifespans in Genesis is that many of them overlap, so there’s not a lot of room for gaps. Further, the Genesis genealogies are repeated or referenced in other parts of the Bible, including the books of 1 Chronicles, Jude, Matthew, and Luke. This shows that the New Testament and Old Testament’s human authors also believed in the Genesis genealogies as real history.

Finally, consider the fact that Jesus referred to the Old Testament over 40 times. Every single time He treated the Old Testament literally and historically. For instance, in Mark 10:6 Jesus mentioned that God created man and woman at the “beginning of Creation”—not long ages after Creation. Jesus also references other Old Testament accounts as true events,

such as Noah’s Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Jonah and the great fish, and many others.

Despite what some would say, the Bible’s Creation account is not so vague that it’s subject to each person’s unique spin. The Bible clearly narrates how God created everything over a six-day period. What else could God have meant when He wrote with His own hands—and in the 10 commandments no less—that He created in six days, and even wanted us to model our lives after the same weekly cycle? Did Jesus or any of the New Testament writers “update” what God said? Certainly not—He wanted us to believe—back then and still today—that He created in six days.

Wait a Minute! Doesn’t “Science” Prove the Earth is Billions of Years Old?

Secular scientists date the Earth to about 4.5 billion years old by using selected radiometric dating results. Ultimately, what they call “deep time” serves as the very foundation of evolution theory. High school biology books openly acknowledge this necessary connection:

Evolution takes a long time. If life has evolved, then Earth must be very old. Geologists now use radioactivity to establish the age of certain rocks and fossils. This kind of data could have shown that the Earth is young. If that had happened, Darwin’s ideas would have been refuted and abandoned. Instead, radioactive dating indicates that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old—plenty of time for evolution and natural selection to take place.⁷ But as we show here, geologists do not use radioactivity to establish the age of certain rocks. They instead use selected radioactivity results to confirm what they need to see. As discussed in previous chapters, this viewpoint, being secular, contradicts God’s stated Word in Genesis and even the Ten Commandments, where He wrote with His own hand that He created the heavens, Earth, sea, and all that is in them in six days (Exodus 20:11).

Belief in deep time rests upon evolution’s required time. That’s sure putting a lot of faith in something that can’t be tested through direct observation. After all, plenty of assumptions go into the calculations.

The Technical Appendix provides a section that reviews the details behind radiometric dating, but keep in mind that only two key “fatal flaws” are necessary to debunk the inferences made by radiometric dating.

The first fatal flaw is that it relies upon untestable assumptions. The entire practice of radiometric dating stands or falls on the veracity of four untestable assumptions. The assumptions are untestable because we cannot go back millions of years to verify the findings done today in a laboratory, and we cannot go back in time to test the original conditions in which the rocks were formed. If these assumptions that underlie radiometric dating are not true, then the entire theory falls flat, like a chair without its four legs.

The second fatal flaw clearly reveals that at least one of those assumptions must actually be wrong because radiometric dating fails to correctly date rocks of known ages. For example, in the case of Mount St. Helens, we watched rocks being formed in the 1980s, but when sent to a laboratory 10 years later for dating, the 10-year-old rocks returned ages of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Similarly, some rocks return radiometric “ages” twice as old as the accepted age for earth. Most rocks return conflicting radiometric “ages.” In these cases, researchers select results that match what they already believe about earth’s age (see the Technical Appendix for details of this study and several others like it).

Footnotes

1. See: https://genesisapologetics.com/faqs/lifespans-before-the-flood-how-did-people-live-to-be-900-years-old-before-the-flood/
2. Progressive Creationist, Dr. Hugh Ross, places the emergence of the human race via Adam and Eve about 50,000 years ago: Fazale Rana with Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam? (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005), 45. See also: www.reasons.org/articles/new-date-for-first-aussies (January 26, 2017). While this is the view of Dr. Ross, the time period in which Homo sapiens supposedly branched off varies widely in the secular literature, but is typically represented as going back even further (see for example: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-sapiens).
3. Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph S. Levine, Biology. (Boston, MA.: Pearson, 2006), p. 466.
4. See 2 Peter 1:31; 2 Timothy 3:16; Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2; Matthew 24:35; Psalm 12:6–7; Proverbs 30:5; and Psalm 138:2.
5. Linking from the present to Abraham’s day is well established historically based on correlations between inscriptions and the biblical chronology of the Kings.
6. The Biblical timelines that rely on the 17th-century chronology formulated by Bishop James Ussher place Creation at 4,004 BC and the Flood at 2,348 BC. Some recent research into the copyist differences in the early Masoretic and early Septuagint texts place the Flood around 2,518 BC based on the Masoretic text and between 3,168 BC and 3,298 BC based on the Septuagint (and other early texts), with Creation as early as 5,554 BC. These differences, however, can be settled by comparing multiple texts to reveal the perfect nature of the original writings which were “written through man by God” without error. These issues have been discussed in papers from three leading creation ministries. See, for example: Brian Thomas, “Two date range options for Noah’s Flood,” Journal of Creation 31(1) (2017); Henry B. Smith Jr., “Methuselah’s Begetting Age in Genesis 5:25 and the Primeval Chronology of the Septuagint: A Closer Look at the Textual and Historical Evidence,” Answers Research Journal 10 (2017): 169–179. Answers in Genesis: www.answersingenesis.org/arj/v10/methuselah-primeval-chronology-septuagint.pdf (November 5, 2018); and Lita Cosner and Robert Carter, “Textual Traditions and Biblical Chronology,” Journal of Creation 29 (2) 2015. Journal of Creation: https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j29_2/j29_2_99-105.pdf (November 5, 2018).
7. Ewald Plass. What Martin Luther Says: A Practical In-Home Anthology for the Active Christian, 1523.