Can we trust God and His Word when it comes to information in the Bible about the age of the earth, or the duration of the week of creation? Or is this just information for a prescientific phase of humanity? Are these questions too hot of a potato to burn our fingers on? I think not.
Limitations of Science
I have always found it curious that we, as a church, invite natural scientists for lectures on the age of the earth and the duration of the creation process. Sometimes they’re biologists, sometimes physicists. With all due respect to scientists, though, a scientist is limited to describing what already exists in nature, not its origins. Scientists are taught to think within the frame of reference of nature and to argue according to the laws of nature—the laws whose effect and validity God set in motion in the first place with creation. This means that scientists generally come to the right conclusions when it comes to describing nature itself, but not when it comes to describing the origin of nature.
Further, by definition, natural science does not recognize “God” and “divine omnipotence” as factors. God is larger than nature and therefore outside the frame of reference of the natural sciences. To explain things that it cannot explain with its methods, science has developed (godless) theories and hypotheses in attempts to explain the inexplicable. Very long periods of time and the “chance” factor are often used for this purpose, as in the theory of evolution. For many nowadays this theory has become scientific truth. Natural scientists, however, in their capacity as natural scientists, cannot, because of three constraints, generally make correct statements about the age of the earth or the duration of the week of creation. First, no natural scientist personally witnessed creation. Second, the process of creation cannot be repeated under scientific conditions. And third, according to the biblical description, creation is a supernatural event that brings about the existence of nature as we know it.
The perspective needed in a discussion about origins is more philosophical than (natural) scientific. We need familiarity with the theory of science combined with a theological and philosophically educated outlook mingled with faith to look at the system from the outside. It needs to be clear in our minds what the natural sciences can and cannot do. In other words, we need to define the frame of reference of the natural sciences.
A Literal Day
Biblical chronology places creation week around 6,000 years ago, but according to natural science the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. According to the biblical account, the creation week took place in six literal days. Science says it took millions or even billions of years. How do we deal with these contradictions? Are they even relevant? Can’t we just ignore this hot potato? It’s not that simple.
Questions about the age of the earth touch the credibility of God and the Bible. If the Bible does not tell us the truth on this point, where else is it fibbing? And is it then the Word of God at all? What about the promises and prophecies of the Bible, which also cannot be verified outside of the testimony of Scripture—the return of Christ, the resurrection, and eternal life, for example? Even the promise of forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ cannot be verified and must be believed. If the Bible is not true from its very first narrative, can we rely on the rest being true?
In the creation account God defines days as being literal, consisting of day and night (“evening and morning” in Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). This is equivalent to what we today define as a 24-hour period. When the Ten Commandments were codified at Sinai, the Sabbath commandment affirmed that the individual days of creation were literal days—made of 24 hours. The Sabbath commandment states: “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day” (Ex. 20:11). This is precisely the basis for us also resting on this one day. To assume that God meant something other than a literal day would be abstruse. Of course, God must have been referring to such days as were known at the time of the Israelites wandering in the desert. The fact that God wrote the justification for the Sabbath commandment with His own finger* limits the scope for interpretation.
The uniqueness of the divine act of creation overrides our experience and knowledge.
One question that arises in this context is: Does God need more time for complex tasks? If so, He would not be omnipotent. And if we don’t trust God to create a human being, an animal, or a tree in a fraction of a second, how could He suddenly raise millions of people on resurrection day? How could He reconstruct them from millions of tiny components in a fraction of a second?
And what about the transformation of the believers still alive at the Second Coming? Paul writes: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51, 52). The change will not happen over a period of 1,000 years, but “in the twinkling of an eye.”
There are some who say, regarding the age of the earth: “We don’t know how much time passed between creation and the fall of man. Maybe it was a few thousand years.” But that cannot be.
There is no need to speculate on the age of Adam at the generation of Seth, because the Bible tells us plainly: “And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth” (Gen. 5:3). To expel any doubt about Adam’s full life span, from his creation, the Bible tells us, “So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died (verse 5). Adam, therefore, could not have been around for thousands of years before sinning (or before fathering Seth), bringing us back to a literal creation week around 6,000 years ago.
Fog Banks
Believers face two “fog banks” when attempting to determine the age of the earth by investigating geological phenomena that necessarily obstruct our view. These so-called fog banks are events that falsify our otherwise correct findings or scientific research results. They are the supernatural act of creation and the global flood.
Allow me to use a working hypothesis to illustrate the uniqueness of creation. Let’s assume that there is a time machine. We know it doesn’t exist, except in fictional movies or novels, but the concept may be helpful as a working hypothesis.
So we get into the time machine and beam ourselves back to the first Sabbath in history. We meet God and Adam in the Garden of Eden. Now, God might ask us: “How old do you think Adam is?” We may look at Adam and estimate him to be perhaps 20 or 30 years old, because according to our experience and our scientific knowledge, a fully grown young man is about that age.
But God would then say: “Wrong! He’s less than a day old. I created him yesterday afternoon.” This would throw us completely off course. According to our experience and scientific knowledge (and both would be correct after the completion of creation), a human being who is one day old would be an infant.
The uniqueness of the divine act of creation overrides our experience and knowledge. According to the Bible, God created finished creatures. He did not set an evolutionary process in motion. The chicken or the egg causality dilemma is easy to answer for a person who believes in the Bible. Of course the chicken came first. Why? Because the Bible teaches that God created finished creatures; He did not initiate an evolutionary process.
Here is the second case of my working hypothesis: Suppose we were to set our time machine to the fourth day of the creation week. There are already trees. God created them on the third day. We are standing in front of a stately oak tree. Again, God would ask us: “What do you think? How old is this tree?”
Again, we would use our experience and scientific knowledge as a basis and perhaps estimate the tree to be 100 years old. And again, God would say: “Wrong. I created it yesterday. It’s only one day old.” But the tree would have all the characteristics of a tree that is about 100 years old. It might even have annual rings. Because these are probably not only an aid to determining the age of trees, but also an element of statics in the structure of the trunk.
Our experience and scientific knowledge reach their limits when it comes to the divine act of creation. Our determination of the age of created things is based on laws that were initiated at creation, the laws of nature. But our otherwise correct methods are no good when it comes to determining or describing the act of creation itself.
So from our thought experiment we deduce that God created a full-grown man and a full-grown tree. God created finished things that would therefore appear older than we would estimate them to be based on the natural processes of generation and ageing. This makes it clear why science cannot make conclusive statements about when the earth was created. Science does not know and does not consider the “divine omnipotence” factor (this is different for a believing scientist). So the pure logic of science can lead to errors when it comes to the subject of “creation.”
Let’s briefly address the second “fog bank”: the flood. Even if the number of scientists who see evidence of several large regional floods is increasing, conventional science generally does not speak of a worldwide flood as described in the Bible. The fossil record, however, provides important evidence for the occurrence of large-scale catastrophic mass mortality in the past.
Moreover, since the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State in 1980, we have known that sediment deposits in layers can be formed not only by very long periods of time but also by volcanic eruptions and associated flooding. These eruptions caused huge flows of lava and mud, creating layers within a few days that conventional science explains in a similar way in other places by processes lasting millions of years. If the geological effects of volcanic eruptions and mega floods are not considered, then we may reach incorrect age-of-earth determinations.
To believe in a recent (6,000 years ago) creation in six literal days, as reported in the Bible, you don’t have to be uneducated. Likewise, natural science is not inherently evil or anti-God; only that it does not account for an omnipotent God who inspired the Bible, which contains an authoritative account of origins. This omission means natural science comes to necessarily wrong conclusions on some topics, including, among other things, the age of the earth and the duration of the creation process. We can trust that God has told us the truth in His Word: “Your word is truth” (John 17:17). Including the truth about the age of the earth and the duration of the creation week.
* Ellen White saw, in vision, the Ten Commandments, written with God’s own finger, in the ark of the covenant in the holy of holies in heaven. “The four on the first table shone brighter than the other six,” she writes. “But the fourth, the Sabbath commandment, shone above them all; for the Sabbath was set apart to be kept in honor of God’s holy name. The holy Sabbath looked glorious—a halo of glory was all around it” (Ellen G. White, Early Writings [Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1882, 1945], pp. 32, 33).