Creationism

In recent years, creationism has made considerable gains in the United States and Australia where it has been heavily promoted by fundamentalist and other evangelical Christians. It has had made few inroads in Canada and Europe.

Creationism was a major point of conflict between the scientific and religious world-views of creation that arose in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. In its concern to uphold the truth of the bible, the Churches felt obliged to argue for the literal truth of the first three chapters of the book of Genesis. In the light of our understanding today of the different literary genres in the bible, we can see that the creation accounts in these chapters of Genesis were not meant to be scientific accounts of how the world was created.

There is a great diversity of belief concerning the age of the Earth and the rest of the universe.

"Young Earth" creationism

Most estimates based on a literal interpretation of the bible cluster around 6,000 years for both the age of the Earth and of the rest of the universe.

Bishop James Ussher, a 17th Century Irish archbishop from Armagh, Ireland, calculated that God had created the Earth in 4004 BC. He calculated this date by using a base date of 1020 BC for Saul's accession to the throne of Israel, and working back through the biblical genealogies.

However, some theologians have pointed out that there may be missing generations in bible chronologies. The entire family tree may not be fully listed. Some "sons" are actually grandsons. For example, in Matthew 1:1-17, the Gospel writer deliberately omits four kings, namely Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah (1 Chron. 3:11-12) and Jehoiakim (1 Chron. 3:15-16), in order to illustrate the theological point he is making, a point that depends upon a generational pattern. (However, even in Ezra 7:1-5, six generations of the priesthood are omitted, compared to 1 Chron. 6:3-15; thus such an omission in Hebrew genealogies is not peculiar to Matthew.)

Belief in a "young Earth" continued among scientists until the early 18th Century, when it became obvious to most researchers that geological processes were exceedingly slow, and must have been accomplished over incredibly long periods of time. A 5,800 year old Earth simply was not possible.

Most estimates of the Earth's age, based on actual measurements and calculations, are clustered around 4.5 billion years. Scientists further believe that the Earth's crust solidified about 3.9 billion years ago. Parts of the universe itself are much older, dating back to the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago.

Scientific measurements of the Earth's age

How do geologists actually measure the age of the Earth? Well, they use the fact that radioactive elements, such as uranium, tend to become concentrated in the residual melt that forms during the crystallization of volcanic rocks. Now, radioactive decay occurs at a constant exponential rate and the rate of decay is proportional to the number of uranium atoms that are still present in the rock. ²³⁸U decays into ²⁰⁶Pb with a half-life of 4.47 billion years. This means, for example, that if there are equal amounts of ²³⁸U and ²⁰⁶Pb in a rock, then that rock is 4.47 billion years old. Interestingly, the oldest known meteorites are almost exactly that age (4.56 billion years old), as are most of the rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts, indicating that the Solar System must be that old, but the oldest known Earth rocks are a mere 3.82 billion years old and were found on the shores of the Hudson Bay in Canada in 2002.

There are several other indications that our world is very old:

• Some bristlecone pine trees in the White-Inyo mountain range of California date back beyond 2000 BC. One, labelled "Methuselah" germinated in 2726 BC. But their tree rings have been matched with those of dead trees; these show that the latter germinated about 6000 BC, which pre-dates the year 4004 BC by 2 millennia.
• Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice.
• The Sun is one of countless numbers of stars in our galaxy. The galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. This means that light from some stars in our galaxy has taken many tens of thousands of years to reach Earth. This would indicate that our galaxy is much older than 10 millennia.
• It is thought that the chalk that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover was deposited very slowly, from the skeletons of tiny algae called coccoliths, probably only at half a millimetre a year. In spite of this, up to 500 metres of chalk were deposited in places. This process must therefore have taken about 1 million years.
• Some rivers are known to have millions of annual layers of sediment laid down over the past 20 million years or so.
• The rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 100 million years old. In addition, magnetic anomalies in the rocks of the Atlantic Ocean sea-floor show that the Earth has reversed its magnetic field hundreds of times since Africa and S. America were joined together. Since these reversals don't happen every few decades, the Earth must be much older than 6,000 years.
• The Human Genome Project reveals that humanity carries clumps of genes which show we are descended from bacteria. There is no other way to explain the nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development. The species must have taken billions of years to evolve from bacteria to humans, so the Earth must be very old.
• The Andromeda galaxy is 2 million light years away; others, only recently made visible by the Hubble Space Telescope, are up to 12 billion light years away. If the light has taken 12 billion years to reach us then the universe must be at least 12 billion years old.

Most scientists accept these indicators, and many more like them, as proof of an old Earth and universe. However, those scientists are forced to make a basic assumption: that naturally occurring processes and fundamental constants in the past behaved in the same way as they do today. For example:

• The speed of light has remained more or less constant.
• The number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth has not changed much over time.
• Space dust has accumulated at about the same rate over many thousands of years.
• The rate of growth of coral was similar in the past to what it is today.
• etc.

The main weakness of the old Earth indicators is that they all make assumptions about the uniform nature of certain fundamental factors: the speed of light, mass of the electron, gravitational constant, decay rates of radioactive substances, etc. These various parameters do seem constant today. However, there is no proof, acceptable to young-Earth creationists, that these factors have remained constant over long periods of time in the past. If one assumes that young-Earth creationists' interpretation of the bible's creation stories is correct, and that the Earth and the rest of the universe was created between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, then one can estimate roughly how these "constants" have varied over the past millennia.

However, in order for the Earth to be less than 6,000 years old, some of these constants would have had to have changed quite drastically over that period. Since there is no evidence that they have changed at all over the past 150 years or so, since proper scientific measurements were first made on these constants, it is unlikely that they have changed very much in 6,000 years either!

6-day creationism

The bible says God created the universe in six days and indicates the passage of only about 6,000 years since then. Science currently estimates the visible universe to be about 14 billion years old, give or take a few billion. Some people have tried to reconcile the two, explaining that the six "days" of the bible refer to a different measure of time.

That is because of the ambiguity associated with the Hebrew word "yom" which appears frequently in the Genesis creation stories. It is translated as "day" in all versions of the bible, but, in addition to its interpretation as a 24-hour day, "yom" can also mean an indeterminate interval of time, like the English words "epoch", "era" or "period". Thus, a "yom" could represent many millions, or even billions, of years.

But, you may say, Genesis chapter 1 mentions "the evening and the morning" (vv. 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31), so "yom" must surely refer to a 24-hour period. However, you may also notice that sunlight does not appear until Day 4 (v. 14-19), and there can be no evenings and mornings, and no measure of the length of the day without this. The author of Genesis is not stupid - he knows this! Also, why does he refer to "the evening and the morning" in that particular order? The meaning must be symbolic: the "evening" representing darkness, or absence of good, and the "morning" representing the coming of light or goodness (see Ex. 12:12; Ps. 30:5; Is. 33:2; Lam. 3:22-23; Mic. 3:6; Mt. 26:31,34; Lk. 12:20; Jn. 9:4, 12:35-36, 13:26,30; ; Rom. 13:12; Eph. 5:8-9,11; 1 Thes. 5:5,7; 2 Pet. 1:19; 1 Jn. 2:8-11; Rev. 21:25, 22:16,25). "Evening" is also a symbol for the time when labour ceases, and could therefore be a poetic representation of a pause in God's work. Thus, the symbolic sentence "The evening and the morning were the n'th day" could then be translated "There was a transition between 'badness' and 'goodness' as God paused at the end of the n'th 'yom' ", or, more simply, "In the n'th epoch, things got better" - which is not a very poetic turn of phrase; I'm sure you will agree that the author's original choice was much better - but it needs to be understood that it is poetic; it is symbolic, not literal.

Thus, "yom" could be a poetic device to represent an unspecified period of time (because the author did not know how long God's creative acts would have taken). However, with our present scientific knowledge, we are able to assign specific lengths of time to each "yom":

1. Under this view, Cosmic day one, described in Gen. 1:1-5 as the creation followed by light separating from the darkness, covers the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, the "breaking free" of light as electrons bind to atomic nuclei, and the beginning of galaxy formation.
2. During Cosmic day two, corresponding to Gen. 1:6-8 (the formation of the heavenly firmament), the stars and galaxies are born. This period starts 13.6 billion years ago, when matter first began to collect into (dark) galactic clusters. The first stars within those galaxies began to shine 13.3 billion years ago, and our own solar system was formed 4.6 billion years ago.
3. During Cosmic day three, the Earth cools, water appears, and the first life forms appear 3.5 billion years ago. The first plants appear 1.3 billion years ago. In Gen. 1:9-13, vegetation first appears during the third day.
4. Cosmic day four lasts 600 million years. The Earth's atmosphere becomes transparent and photosynthesis produces an oxygen-rich atmosphere. This corresponds to Gen. 1:14-19 when "the Sun, Moon, and stars become visible in the heavens". (There is a discrepancy here, in that, in reality, the Earth's atmosphere had to become transparent well before the first plants could appear, and indeed it did so at around the time that life first appeared, about 3.5 billion years ago; oxygen had reached its present abundance of 21% in the atmosphere by about 2.5 billion years ago.)
5. Cosmic day five starts 700 million years ago and lasts 550 million years. During this period, the first animals appear 670 million years ago and the oceans swarm with life after the first fish appear 510 million years ago. Gen. 1:20-23 says the waters brought forth swarms of living creatures and "birds that fly above the Earth". The first birds appeared 150 million years ago.
6. Cosmic day six starts with the first placental mammals 145 million years ago and ends at the beginning of the Neolithic period. During this period we have the extinction of the dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago and then the repopulation of the Earth with mammals, primates and eventually humans. Homo sapiens first appeared 130,000 years ago. This corresponds to what is described in Gen. 1:24-31. Humans began to change from being hunter-gatherers (like Adam and Eve, Gen. 1:29) to an agrarian culture, as farming first began about 4500 BC, and Gen. 4:2 tells us that "Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil".
7. Cosmic day seven, described in Gen. 2:1-3, then starts in (about) 4004 BC (according to Bishop Ussher) and ends exactly 4000 years later with the birth of Jesus in (about) 4 BC. Under this view, the whole of the Old Testament is one long "Sabbath day".
8. That also means, of course, that the New Testament belongs to Cosmic day eight, when God started to work again:

In the beginning was the Word. And God said, "Let there be Light"; and there was the Light of the world. And God saw the Light, that He was good. And God divided the Light from the darkness, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light. And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

(based on Gen. 1:1, John 1:1, Gen. 1:3, John 8:12, John 1:9, Gen.1:4, Matt. 3:17, John 3:19, John 1:5)

Perhaps this is why God decided to resurrect Christ on the day after the Sabbath, and why Paul describes Christians as a "new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17).

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