When Was the World Created?

Why do I call Romans 8 the best chapter in the Bible?

Because it is. Christians for centuries, I think, have turned to Romans 8 because it gives us the gospel. In one chapter, it talks about the doctrine of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And I had a deacon one time saying to me that this was in some way calling into question the inspiration of all of Scripture. And isn't all of Scripture?

Great and the greatest. And I said, well, just answer this question. If you've got two minutes to live, do I read the first few chapters of Chronicles, which is a list of names, or do I read Romans 8? And I think the answer is always going to be Romans 8, because it says everything that needs to be said about the gospel in one chapter.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, the age of the earth. Why is it such a hot topic of debate among Christians? What is at stake in many people's minds is the credibility and trustworthiness of sacred Scripture. And there are those who believe that the authority of the Bible stands or falls with a young earth and with a recent date of creation.

Well, before we get to that controversial subject, we probably need to take a few steps back. Before we look at the creation account, we need to first establish what we believe about the Bible. And when I went out on the street and talked to people, I discovered there are plenty of opinions out there. I believe it has a lot of metaphors, and I believe that a lot of different people can read it in a different way. But I don't believe it's the same for everyone. And some things may a bit weird, and some things are not as accurate as I would have them believe. So I think that through life, you find different parts of the Bible to be more true to you than in other parts of your life. So that's how I believe in it.

I think it depends. I think when people... I think it's been modified a couple of times, but the most important parts, I think it's fine. But people did some changes in it, you know what I mean? But I still think it's fine. Do you read the Bible?

No, I don't. I'm skeptical of organized religions run by men, or human. So I think there are a lot of examples in history of people abusing that power and saying something is the Word of God when really it's more just doing what they want. And so I kind of try and keep a more open mind. You know, I think there's a lot of possibilities out there, and I try to explore all of them.

Well, how about you? Do you think the Bible is 100% accurate in all that it teaches? Let's explore what Scripture has to say about creation. Here's Dr. R.C.

Sproul. If we continue now with our study of the hard sayings, we're going to take one up today that is exceedingly controversial, not only between the church and secular thinkers, but one that has become a major point of division among professing Christians. And that has to do with whether the universe was created in six 24-hour days. Are we to believe that the world came into being in six literal days, or is there another option in understanding the timeframe of creation?

And closely related to this is the question of how recent is the origin of the universe and the appearance of human life on this planet? Initially, we will look at a text not in Genesis, but in Exodus, where we will look at Exodus 20 in the giving of the Ten Commandments, where in Exodus 20, verse 8, we read this account. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God.

In it you shall do no work, you nor your son nor your daughter nor your male servant nor your female servant, etc. In the salient verses, verse 11, 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. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Here we have the clear assertion that the universe was made in six days. Now, when we go back to the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, we find the more detailed outworking of this work of creation in terms of days.

For example, in verse 3 of chapter 1 of Genesis, we read, Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. So the evening and morning were the first day.

And in the rest of the account we hear what takes place on the second day and on the third day and the fourth day and so on. So, the question is, what is meant by the reference to the word day in the Genesis account? And I would say throughout the bulk of church history, it was normally understood traditionally that this verse and these verses of creation should be taken at face value.

And as the literature seems to suggest, that the work of creation was completed in six days or six twenty-four-hour periods. In the sixteenth century when the Copernican Revolution took place and the telescope was invented and our horizon for understanding planetary motion and other aspects of astronomy, there were those who began to challenge this concept of a literal six-day creation. It's interesting that some of the finest Christian scholars of the sixteenth century, including the magisterial reformers Luther and Calvin, both ridiculed the Copernican theory of heliocentricity, namely that the sun is the center of our solar system rather than the earth, and saw in this new view coming out of the scientific community an assault against the integrity of Scripture. So, it wasn't just the Roman Catholic Church who condemned Galileo and his associates for this view, but also the reformers took a very dim view on this question. However, though for the most part Christians have made their peace with the idea of geocentricity, namely that the earth is the center of the universe, there are few, very few Christians who still argue for geocentricity, though I got a letter just a couple of weeks ago from a man who was very passionate in his defense of the earth actually being the center of the solar system and was rebuking me for capitulating to Copernicus and others, and saw in this a surrender of the authority of the Bible. Now, as I said, within the Christian community there's a hotly contested debate regarding the age of the earth and the literal character of the six days of creation.

The two are not exactly the same issue, but they are closely related to each other. Again, part of the problem is if we see that the universe was created in six days and at the end of the sixth day Adam was created, and then we follow the rest of the biblical history of the generations of Adam, it doesn't seem to suggest a time span of human history that goes back millions of years. It seems that in the science of archaeology and anthropology, just about every six months there's a new discovery of remains of an older human ancestor, and it seems like the dawning of the advent of man goes back about a million years every time they dig up a new skull fragment or something. That's another question, by the way, but it always interests me that sometimes when they discover these fragments of one tooth or a partial piece of a skull, and they're able to reconstruct the whole body from it, that they will make distinctions between humans and humanoids, or apes, and they talk about this transitional character between the ape and the human that they will frequently call humanoid, that is human-like. And I've always wondered why they don't call this transitional creature an apoid, which would not be nearly as provocative for the discussion, and it's simply arbitrary to call it humanoid rather than apoid. It could be called either one.

Why the selection? But in any case, because of this aspect of science added to this, modern forms of dating the universe as we find it, including geological methods drawn in part from studying the stratification of the earth and so on, carbon-14 methods of dating, and perhaps most importantly, astrophysical methodologies that are used to date the earth. And where this gets quite technical and somewhat fascinating is when triangulation emerged as a means of discerning location and distances of stars from this universe of ours, and we take as a matter of law now that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. And through modern ways of measuring distances and time, and we find, for example, that the nearest star to planet earth, apart from the sun, which is 93 million miles away, the closest star in our solar system to planet earth is considered four and a half light years away. A light year refers to the time that it takes for the light from a distant planet to travel at the rate of 186,000 miles a second. Now, let me put it another way.

I've done this in other contexts, but let's do it afresh. The earth as we know it is 25,000 miles in circumference. Go around the world in 80 days is no difficult feat today. But light can travel around the world if it's moving at 186,000 miles a second over seven and a half times or about seven and a half times in one second. That's how fast light moves and how far it can travel in one second, seven times around the earth. Now, imagine something traveling that fast, how far it could go in one minute, obviously 60 times that distance, and then in one hour, a day, a week, a year, and we're saying here that this nearest star is so far away that the light traveling from it at this rate of 186,000 miles a second takes four and a half years to get here.

And that's the closest star. And we're told that that's the closest star in our solar system, in our galaxy, and that there are literally thousands of galaxies and multibillions and trillions of stars out there. And that we are receiving light today from more than one star, but from light that has originated millions of years ago. So it's more this astrophysical type of dating than any other thing, I think, that leads modern scientists to believe that the universe is far older than a few thousand years.

And it goes back 12 to 15 billion years to accommodate all of this movement of light and so on. Now, as I said, the controversy over this is fierce. One fellow wrote a book from a Christian perspective in which he advanced the theory of the old age of the earth from an astrophysical position, Hugh Ross. And many of you are familiar with Professor Ross's book, and he asked me to read the manuscript and write an endorsement for it. I did a somewhat innocuous endorsement saying that it was a fascinating and interesting study of the question.

And I thought one that was valuable for Christians to read and be engaged in, I didn't agree with a lot of things that were in that book. But I have never in my life received anything like the volume of mail in protest of an endorsement that I've made of anything than I did for endorsing that book, mainly prompted by the CRI, the Creation Research Group in California, who have argued so strenuously for a young earth. I saw a fascinating film that the Creation Research people put together once on Mount St. Helens and one of the interesting phenomena that came out of that, which was a cataclysmic catastrophic event in recent memory. When this volcanic eruption leveled so many thousands of acres of real estate and so on and turned gigantic trees into toothpicks, the scientists went in there afterwards and found something extremely interesting. They discovered a stratification of the earth's crust right around the base of that volcanic eruption that mirrored the stratification levels that we find elsewhere in the world that we have assumed from a uniformitarian geological perspective have taken millions if not billions of years to produce.

And here this film showed that the same phenomenon could be produced in moments in light of a catastrophic upheaval. And so you have that debate even within the secular geological community over catastrophic geological formations versus uniformitarianism. And I don't regard myself as an expert in that field.

I hardly even comment on it other than to say that the debate goes on. And that even before Mount St. Helens, people like Emanuel Velikovsky at Princeton, a friend of Einstein, challenged some of the assumptions of uniformitarian geology. But when we're talking about the age of the earth, we're not dealing simply with issues of deductions from stratification of the earth. But as I said, you have the carbon-14 phenomenon. You have the astrophysical dating phenomenon. And there are many different elements that would seem to argue an old earth.

Now obviously those who argue for a young earth have answers to each one of these, some of which are very carefully thought out in the early days of the debate. Some rather bizarre arguments were used to offset the evidence of fossils that would indicate a long period of time of decay and compression and so on. And I remember reading the theories 30 years ago that when God created the universe, the devil sprinkled fossils throughout the layers of the earth in order to fool people, to direct them from believing in the trustworthiness of Scripture. Now let me just respond to that bizarre attempt that took place years ago.

No. The problem with that argument is it is a possibility, hypothetically. I mean, it's possible that when God created the universe, the devil came down and sprinkled these fossils to fool us. But the problem with the argument is that it's a hypothetical argument that is incapable of being falsified. It's the kind of argument that you say, I believe in poltergeists, and somebody might say, but we've never had any scientific empirical verification of poltergeists, and I respond to that by saying, well, there's a reason for that. The reason is that poltergeists never appear in the presence of scientists.

They have a built-in allergy to scientists. Now how can you argue with an argument like that? You can't falsify it, you can't verify it, so that the argument is basically worthless. And to say that Satan could have planted fossils when the Bible gives us no indication that Satan ever did such a thing and we have no reason to believe that he did, it's an argument that is basically worthless. And so, again, we pause in the middle of this and say, well, what's the big deal? What is driving this debate?

Why are people so concerned about it? And again, it goes back to the trustworthiness of Scripture. When I first started teaching in college several years ago, I was teaching in one Christian college, and the classroom was so big it had to be held in the chapel, and the Bible that I used to teach the Old Testament was the pulpit Bible. And when I opened it up in the first day of class to Genesis 1-1, at the top of the page of this Bible, it said Genesis, and then in big letters, 4004 B.C. And I knew, of course, that that date was nowhere to be found in the text of Holy Scripture.

Why was it inscribed on the first page of this Bible? Well, back in the 19th century, Archbishop Ussher tried to calculate the day of creation by examining the genealogical tables that are found in the Bible, that is, the begatitude, so and so begat so and so who begat so and so, and allowing so many years for each generation, he approximated the date of creation just by tracking back through these genealogical tables and established the hypothesis that the universe was created in 4004 B.C. Now, unfortunately, a whole generation of people were persuaded that this was true, and when scientists started saying that the earth was older than 6000 years, people felt a moral obligation to refute that allegation in order to defend that date, which date appears nowhere in sacred Scripture. And because there is no date of creations established in Scripture, and every attempt to establish a date from Scripture is manifestly speculative, why do we spend all this energy trying to defend a particular date when the Bible doesn't give one?

You know, it seems to me to be a fool's errand. When you say, well, R.C., Archbishop Ussher could have been wrong, give or take a few thousand years, it still doesn't account for millions of years. And I say, well, first of all, we don't understand the function of Hebrew genealogies, that Hebrew genealogies, they could have gaps and gaps that are extensive and broad.

There's nothing in the Bible that tells us that they're giving us a complete history of the human race, and so it's still a moot question. But again, back to the question of six days. I see that my time is escaping me, and probably this debate is serious enough that I ought to defer the further examination of the day question and the structure of creation in six days until our next lecture. This happens to me frequently as I fail to budget my time appropriately for you, but let me quickly recapitulate here that, again, one of the major considerations is the question of the age of the earth. Again, what is at stake in many people's minds is the credibility and trustworthiness of sacred Scripture.

And there are those who believe that the authority of the Bible stands or falls with a young earth and with a recent date of creation. And we will explore more on this topic next Saturday here on Renewing Your Mind, and we do hope you'll make plans to join us. And we're glad you could be with us today.

I'm Lee Webb. This is one of those topics that causes division among believers. We find very strong opinions on both sides of the debate. I always appreciate Dr. Sproul's approach when it comes to controversial topics like this, and he has another warning about that for us in just a few moments.

I hope you'll stay with us. Each Saturday on the program, we return to Dr. Sproul's series, Hard Sayings of the Bible. In 15 messages, he tackles topics like what it means when we read in Exodus that God hardened Pharaoh's heart. We'll gladly provide a digital download of the series when you contact us today with a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. Perhaps you teach a Sunday school class or lead a small group in your home. The lessons in the series are about 23 minutes each, making them very useful in a classroom setting, and the topics R.C. covers are sure to result in some lively discussion. So again, request Hard Sayings of the Bible when you go online to renewingyourmind.org. And now before we go, here's R.C. with a final thought for us. As we look together at some of these controversial questions and difficult questions of the age of the earth, for example, I think it's very important for us to realize that the debate as it rages within the church among Christians is not simply a debate that is carried on between people who believe the Bible and people who don't believe the Bible.

Now that's partly true. Many of those who attack the age of the earth and the order of creation and all of that are doing so because they are trying to attack the basic credibility of sacred Scripture. But my point is this, that those who are conservative and orthodox in their view of Scripture, those who hold persistently to the inspiration of the Bible, to the infallibility of the Bible, and even to the inerrancy of the Bible, are divided on this question. Because here it's not a question for them as to, is the Bible true? But the question is, what does the Bible actually teach? And so as we continue to look together at some of these problems, let's try to keep that in mind so that we can understand that this division is a division among people who have a high view of Scripture. And as we mentioned, Dr. Sproul will dive more deeply into this controversial topic next Saturday. We hope you'll join us for Renewing Your Mind. .