I believe the Bible is God's Word, infallible and authoritative, pointing us to Christ, the Word of God incarnate, our only Lord and Savior. That's all pretty fundamentalist, orthodox, evangelical, and the rest. So why don't I also believe the world was created in six literal days about 6,000 years ago? Isn't that what the Bible says?
I used to believe that. When I was in high school and college I read The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris along with books by Ackerman, Austin, Gish and Ham. The ICR set. I took high school and college science classes and eagerly opposed the interpretation of long ages, uniformitarian geology, light travelling for billions of years, etc. But somewhere along the way I changed my mind. How did that happen?
The first event was reading Starlight and Time by D. Russell Humphreys which argued for an old universe (15 billion years) and a young earth (6,000 years). The trick was that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could explain time going fast everywhere else but on earth. But this struck me as a "just so" story, the same kind I had been trained to discern in every evolution book or article I had read. I recalled all those articles arguing that the universe wasn't old...I guess that wasn't so clear.
The last event was reading The Creationsts by Ronald L. Numbers. I saw the path from the psuedo-scientist George McCready Price to the university-trained geologist Henry Morris, along with the connection to Seventh Day Adventist literalism. I realized that I needed to re-ask all the questions I had been thinking and avoiding. My doubts had caught up to me and that I didn't believe it anymore.
The following points were and still are decisive for me:
The size of the universe
The most plain understanding of the heavens is that they are very large and therefore very old. If the galaxies are really spinning, if the starlight I see was actually emitted in space and time by those very stars, if the laws of physics here are the same as the laws of physics throughout the universe, then the universe must be very old.
I can come up with explanations that God created the light en route, or that the speed of light was faster in the past, or that General Relativity can do this or do that, but I have no good reason for it. It's just making stuff up to explain away the obvious.
In Psalm 19, the Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God. Night after night they pour forth speech. Well, can anyone understand it? Does God expect us to look up and figure out what we see? Or is it just an illusion? just an appearance of something?
Genesis 1 is poetic
Open your Bible and read Genesis 1. What are the words like? There is structure, multiple layers of repetition, and building drama. It is poetic. Poetry doesn't mean fiction. It means the writer is crafting his language in a deliberate way to convey his message. Readers of poetry must pay attention to that language, understanding the devices being used, takes clues from context, in order to hear that message. Even if I'm not a Hebrew scholar, I can see that arguments based on word counts of a certain Hebrew words throughout the Old Testament are not on the right track.
Also, once you see the poetry, you can also see the agreement between the progression of the creation story and the progression found in the standard, secular story of the universe. There is an amazing correspondence.
Noah's Flood can't explain worldwide geology
The most important piece to the young earth creationist puzzle is Noah's Flood. Does it really explain all of plate tectonics, the fossil record, the whole geologic column from the bottom up? If yes, everything else, including Humphreys' ingenious cosmology, can be made to fit. If no, then the earth is old.
There are the obvious targets - how can all of the millions of animal species fit on the ark? The answer is that all of the major groups were there, and God somehow provided for rapid "evolution" and distribution of those animals. It's an appeal to miracle with no warrant from the Bible, but it's a simple answer.
But the question that pressed me was - if Noah's Flood laid down all fossil bearing sediments in one massive catastrophic event, how is there a general progression of simpler, smaller invertebrates at the bottom up to larger, more complex mammals at the top? Some young earth books appeal to exceptions to this pattern, but even the appeal to an exception proves that it is rare. The explanation given by Morris is hydrologic sorting, or ecological zonation, or ability to escape.
But this is not the way nature works. Let's say all three of those explanations are true. What should we expect? There would be sorting of many, most, but not all fossils. We would find a percentage in the wrong spot. But even 1% means millions of fossils in the wrong spot. This is not what we see.
We can appeal to miracle again. Forget hydrologic sorting. God just made sure the mammals ended up on the top layers. But why? Nature becomes an illusion, a deceptive illusion.
But even in the young earth position, we see why this can't be...
Miracles are special, not normal
Why do young earth creationists spend so much time talking about catastrophic geology? Why try to explain the layers in the Grand Canyon? Why not just appeal to miracle, the appearance of age, and be done? The reason is that their understanding of who God is says it wouldn't be right. The Bible is full of miracles, but it does not teach us that all of life is one miracle after another. Miracles are the exception. They are the special times when God breaks in to reveal himself. The rest of the time, most of the time, we live in an orderly world created by God to work according to natural law.
This is not a Deistic view of life. We can know and trust that God is present and that he cares for us. But it is also not a superstitious view of life. We don't interpret every event that happens to us, from our car not starting to our coffee boiling over, as the unexplainable intervention of a spiritual realm. So we are to love God with all our hearts, souls and minds. Our minds may be fallen, but they still work.
Creation is a miracle. It is amazing what God has designed and brought into being. I believe our appreciation and wonder of this miracle will be even more profound if we use our minds to the best of our God-given abilities to understand what he has done.
