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Seven Reasons Why We Should Not Accept Millions of Years

There is an intensifying controversy in the church all over the world regarding the age of the earth. For the first 18 centuries of church history, the almost universal belief of Christians was that God created the world in six literal days, roughly 4,000 years before Christ, and destroyed the world with a global Flood at the time of Noah.

ABOUT 200 YEARS AGO SOME SCIENTISTS DEVELOPED NEW THEORIES OF EARTH HISTORY, WHICH PROPOSED THAT THE EARTH AND UNIVERSE ARE MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD.

But about 200 years ago some scientists developed new theories of earth history, which proposed that the earth and universe are millions of years old. Over the past 200 years Christian leaders have made various attempts to fit the millions of years into the Bible. These include the day-age view, gap theory, local flood view, framework hypothesis, theistic evolution, progressive creation, and so on.

A growing number of Christians (now called young-earth creationists), including many scientists, hold to the traditional view, believing it to be the only view that is truly faithful to Scripture and that fits the scientific evidence far better than the reigning old-earth evolutionary theory.

Many Christians say that the age of the earth is an unimportant and divisive side-issue that hinders the proclamation of the gospel. But is that really the case? AiG and many other creationist organizations think not.

In this short article (which can be purchased as a booklet to share with others), we want to introduce you to some of the reasons we think that Christians cannot accept the millions of years, without doing great damage to the church and her witness in the world. We hope that it will help you think more carefully about this subject and will motivate you to dig deeper into the excellent resources recommended at the end, which thoroughly defend the points made here.

1. The Bible clearly teaches that God created in six literal, 24-hour days a few thousand years ago.

The Hebrew word for day in Genesis 1 is yôm. In the vast majority of its uses in the Old Testament (OT), it means a literal day; and where it doesn’t the context makes this clear.

Similarly, the context of Genesis 1 clearly shows that the days of creation were literal days. First, yôm is defined the first time it is used in the Bible (Genesis 1:4–5) in its two literal senses: the light portion of the light/dark cycle and the whole light/dark cycle. Second, yôm is used with “evening” and “morning.” Everywhere these two words are used in the OT, either together or separately and with or without yôm in the context, they always mean a literal evening or morning of a literal day. Third, yôm is modified with a number: one day, second day, third day, and so on, which everywhere else in the Old Testament indicates literal days. Fourth, yôm is defined literally in Genesis 1:14 in relation to the heavenly bodies.

That these creation days happened only about 6,000 years ago is clear from the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 (which give very detailed chronological information, unlike the clearly abbreviated genealogy in Matthew 1) and other chronological information in the Bible.

2. Exodus 20:11 blocks all attempts to fit millions of years into Genesis 1.
This verse gives the reason for God’s command to Israel to work six days and then take a Sabbath rest. Yôm is used in both parts of the commandment. If God meant that the Jews were to work six days because He created over six long periods of time, He could have said that using one of three indefinite Hebrew time words. He chose the only word that means a literal day and the Jews understood it literally (until the idea of million of years developed in the early 19th century). For this reason, the day-age view or framework hypothesis must be rejected. The gap theory or any other attempt to put millions of years before the six days are also false, because God says that in six days He made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. So He made everything in those six literal days and nothing before the first day.

3. Noah’s Flood washes away millions of years.

The evidence in Genesis 6–9 for a global catastrophic flood is overwhelming. For example, the Flood was intended to destroy not only all sinful people but also all land animals and birds and the surface of the earth, which only a global flood could accomplish. The Ark’s purpose was to save two of every kind of land animal and bird to repopulate the earth after the flood. The Ark was totally unnecessary, if the Flood was local. People, animals, and birds could have migrated out of the flood zone before it occurred, or the zone could have been populated from creatures outside the area after the Flood. The catastrophic nature is seen in the nonstop rain for at least 40 days, which would have produced massive erosion, mud slides, hurricanes, and so on. The Hebrew words translated “the fountains of the great deep burst open” (Genesis 7:11) clearly point to tectonic rupturing of the earth’s surface in many places for 150 days, resulting in volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Noah’s Flood would produce exactly the kind of complex geological record we see today worldwide: thousands of feet of sediments clearly deposited by water and later hardened into rock and containing billions of fossils. If the year-long Flood is responsible for most of the rock layers and fossils, then those rocks and fossils cannot represent the history of the earth over millions of years, as evolutionists claim.

4. Jesus was a young-earth creationist.

Jesus consistently treated the miracle accounts of the Old Testament as straightforward, truthful, historical accounts (e.g., creation of Adam, Noah and the Flood, Lot and his wife in Sodom, Moses and the manna, and Jonah in the fish). He continually affirmed the authority of Scripture over men’s ideas and traditions (Matthew 15:1–9). In Mark 10:6 we have the clearest (but not the only) statement showing that Jesus was a young-earth creationist. He states that Adam and Eve were at the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning, as would be the case if the universe was really billions of years old. So, if Jesus was a young-earth creationist, then how can His faithful followers have any other view?

5. Belief in millions of years undermines the Bible’s teaching on death and on the character of God.

Genesis 1 says six times that God called the creation “good,” and when He finished creation on Day Six He called everything “very good.” Man and animals and birds were originally vegetarian (Genesis 1:29–30, plants are not “living creatures,” as people and animals are, according Scripture). But Adam and Eve sinned, resulting in the judgment of God on the whole creation. Instantly Adam and Eve died spiritually, and after God’s curse they began to die physically. The serpent and Eve were changed physically and the ground itself was cursed (Genesis 3:14–19). The whole creation now groans in bondage to corruption, waiting for the final redemption of Christians (Rom. 8:19–25) when we will see the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21, Col. 1:20) to a state similar to the pre-Fall world, when there will be no more carnivore behavior (Isaiah 11:6–9) and no disease, suffering, or death (Revelation 21:3–5) because there will be no more Curse (Revelation 22:3). To accept millions of years of animal death before the creation and Fall of man contradicts and destroys the Bible’s teaching on death and the full redemptive work of Christ. It also makes God into a bumbling, cruel creator who uses (or can’t prevent) disease, natural disasters, and extinctions to mar His creative work, without any moral cause, but calls it all “very good.”

6. The idea of millions of years did not come from the scientific facts.

It was developed by deistic and atheistic geologists in the late 18th and early 19th century. These men used anti-biblical philosophical and religious assumptions to interpret the geological observations in a way that plainly contradicted the biblical account of Creation, the Flood, and the age of the earth. Most church leaders and scholars quickly compromised using the gap theory, day-age view, local flood view, and so on. to try to fit “deep time” into the Bible. But they did not understand the geological arguments, nor did they defend their views by careful Bible study. The “deep time” idea flows out of naturalistic assumptions, not scientific observations.

7. Radiometric dating methods do not prove millions of years.

Radiometric dating was not developed until the early 20th century, by which time the whole world had already accepted the millions of years. For many years creation scientists have cited many examples in the published scientific literature of these dating methods clearly giving erroneous dates (e.g., a date of millions of years for lava flows that occurred in the past few hundred years or even decades). In recent years creationists in the “RATE project” have done experimental, theoretical and field research to uncover more such evidence (e.g., diamonds and coal, which the evolutionists say are millions of years old, were dated by carbon-14 to be only thousands of years old) and to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years dates to thousands of years, confirming the Bible.

Conclusion
These are just some of the reasons why we believe that the Bible is giving us the true history of the creation. God’s Word must be the final authority on all matters about which it speaks: not just the moral and spiritual matters, but also its teachings that bear on history, archeology, and science.

What is at stake here is the authority of Scripture, the character of God, the doctrine of death, and the very foundation of the gospel. If the early chapters of Genesis are not true literal history, then faith in the rest of the Bible is undermined, including its teaching about salvation and morality. I urge you to examine carefully the resources at the bottom of this article. The health of the church, the effectiveness of her mission to a lost world and the glory of God are at stake.

This article is available in an attractive booklet to share with Christian friends, your pastor, or anyone who is compromised or unsure about the age of the earth and who is not willing (or sufficiently motivated to take the time) to read a book or watch an hour-long DVD that would change their thinking. This booklet could be a stepping-stone to encourage them to study this matter further. Together, let’s keep calling Christians—and especially Christian leaders—back to the truth of Genesis.

When a false god is called upon to solve gaps in knowledge, this is sometimes referred to as “god of the gaps.” For example, if someone did not know that ice is formed when water freezes and proposed that there was an “ice god” that occasionally causes ice to spontaneously appear, then they would be guilty of using a god-of-the-gaps explanation.
Biblical Creation Is Not a God of the Gaps

Atheists have often accused Christians of invoking God to fill in a gap in scientific knowledge. Even the great scientist Isaac Newton has been accused by atheists of using a god-of-the-gaps explanation when he said that the universe reveals evidence of design.1 But creationists like Newton do not believe in a god of gaps, but a God of absolute necessity. Newton recognized that the universe could not exist without the supernatural creative power of an almighty Creator.

Newton and most of the other founding fathers of science could see that the universe can only be fully explained with a combination of natural and supernatural explanations. Creationists only invoke God in origins when a supernatural action is necessary according to the laws of science. For example, according to the conservation of matter and energy (the first law of thermodynamics), it is impossible for a universe to come into existence without the supernatural intervention of an all-powerful being.

The Bible is scientifically correct when it states that divine supernatural power is required to create the universe (Genesis 1:1) and life (Genesis 2:7) and different kinds of creatures (Genesis 1:24). The Bible is also scientifically accurate that divine supernatural power is required to uphold all things (Colossians 1:17). Rather than being accused of superstition, the Bible should be commended for correctly identifying the areas of origins where a supernatural Creator is necessary.
Biblical Creation Is Not Anti-Science

Creationists are sometimes accused of ignoring scientific evidence and being anti-science. But belief in God in no way diminishes zeal for how life works. The great pioneer scientists of the 17th to 20th centuries were inspired by their belief in God. Likewise, modern-day scientists who are biblical creationists find their belief in a purposeful universe to be a help in their work.

Biblical creationists are always eager to learn from real scientific discoveries in every area of science. I personally have designed rockets and spacecraft for the European Space Agency and NASA using the latest scientific knowledge in physics and engineering. I have a patent on a special gearbox that was used on the world’s largest civilian spacecraft and have been awarded three national prizes for the development of technology for spacecraft.

The only “science” that creationists do not use is the speculative science of evolution that has nothing to do with useful operational science. Evolutionary ideas like “monkey-to-man charts” that supposedly chart human evolution are based on pure speculation and not useful to science and technology in any way.
Evolution Is Guilty of God-of-the-Gaps Explanations

Ironically, it is actually evolution that is blatantly guilty of god-of-the-gaps explanations. When secular biology books attempt to explain why creatures or plants have a certain design, the answer is almost always “evolution did it” or “natural selection did it” without any explanation as to how the design feature could evolve by chance.

This is what Dawkins has written about the origin of life:

We have no evidence about what the first step in making life was, but we do know the kind of step it must have been. It must have been whatever it took to get natural selection started . . . by some process as yet unknown.2

The above quote is a classic example of evolution being a god-of-the-gaps explanation. There is a total gap in what evolution can explain about the origin of life, and Dawkins invokes the god of evolution to fill in the gap and asserts that natural selection “must” have gotten started somehow. But natural selection by itself cannot create anything; it can only select from things already created.

When my daughters did a two-year advanced biology course at high school in the UK, the teachers kept saying that “evolution did this” and “natural selection did that” for the origin of features like fins and wings and hearts and lungs. Near the end of the course, one of my daughters challenged the teacher and said, “Miss, you keep saying ‘evolution did it,’ but you never actually explain how evolution did it.” The teacher had to confess that my daughter made a valid criticism, and the rest of class agreed.

Since evolution has no credible evidence, biology books use examples of adaptation as supposed examples of evolution. Darwin’s finches and resistant bacteria are held up as classic examples of evolution even though they are not evolution at all. These adaptations involve no new information, but simply a shuffling of existing genes.
Evolution Is Guilty of Being Anti-Science

Ironically, it is evolutionists, not creationists, who are guilty of ignoring scientific evidence.3 Over the last 70 years there have been many thousands of experiments with sophisticated equipment trying to create life in the laboratory from dead matter and energy.4 However, all of these experiments have clearly demonstrated that life cannot come about by chance. Evolutionists have a choice. Either they accept the laboratory experiments or ignore them and put faith in the god of evolution. They have chosen to ignore the evidence and exercise blind faith in chance.

Evolutionary philosophy holds back scientific progress by seeking false evolutionary explanations of origins. If you refuse to believe that a jumbo jet was designed, it will affect the way you investigate the complexity of the aircraft. If you believe that the aircraft evolved by chance, you will not have your mind open to possibilities of coordinated design. When the human genome was discovered to have far more information than expected, evolutionists immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was “junk” DNA because evolution predicts bad design not sophisticated design. However, subsequent work showed that the junk DNA was not junk at all, but highly coordinated information with important functions. That example shows how evolution holds back science.

A few years ago I spoke to a senior professor of microbiology at my university (who is an agnostic) and asked what he thought of the theory of abiogenesis—the theory that life can evolve from dead matter. He said the concept was a type of superstitious black magic. The biology professor had no religious bias and had been taught the dogma of evolution for decades, but he could still see that abiogenesis was not real science but so speculative that it could be called black magic.
The Missing Link: Yet Another Gap in Evolution’s Knowledge

When Darwin published his Origin of Species more than 150 years ago, one of the problems with his theory was that there was a missing link between man and apes. That missing link is still missing today despite extensive searches for fossil evidence of evolution all over the world. Fossil evidence shows that humans have always been strikingly different from apes. Humans walk on two legs, whereas apes walk on all four limbs. Humans have an arched foot, whereas apes have a flexible foot like a hand. Fossil evidence shows that no ape-like creature has ever had an arched foot for walking upright. As with every other aspect of evolution, the evolutionist ignores the gaps and encourages everyone to put their faith in the god of evolution.
Evolution Is Like a Magic Wand

I recently talked with another senior professor of microbiology at my university (another agnostic), and he made a surprisingly frank admission about evolution being a “god of the gaps.” He is not a creationist but like many biologists can see the serious weaknesses in the theory of evolution (although he keeps his views discreet for fear of losing his job). This microbiologist told me that evolution can be described as a “magic wand.” He said that he has noticed how even the experts say “evolution did this” and “natural selection did that” without any actual explanation being given and no demonstration in the laboratory. He said that the evolutionist can explain any aspect of origins by simply waving a magic wand and saying “evolution did it.”
Paying Homage to the God of Evolution

Evolution makes no useful contribution to scientific and technological advances. However, there is an unwritten rule in the modern secular biology community that after completing a scientific study (on a topic not linked to evolution), evolution is mentioned in the write-up as being the explanation for the origin of features of design. In the same way that a religious essay is finished by paying homage to a particular god, so in modern secular biology essays are finished by paying homage to evolution. I have personally worked on biology-related projects where this is exactly what has happened. The end result is that the community blindly believes that the god of evolution must be true.
A Battle of Worldviews

Biblical creation versus evolution is not “faith versus science,” but a worldview that includes God versus a worldview that has excluded God. Evolution is not a scientific theory because it has an unjustified assumption that God was not involved in origins. It is wrong for Christians to be accused of having a hidden religious agenda because biblical creation openly declares its worldview. Ironically, it is actually evolution that hides its atheistic agenda by pretending to be just science. If Isaac Newton and the other great scientists were here today, they would be astonished and saddened at the atheistic bias in modern secular science.
Giving Credit to the Creator

In modern society, a scientist is not allowed to say “God did it” for any aspect of creation, whether it is ultimate origins or the origin of any detailed design feature. The phrase “God did it” is seen as anti-scientific. But if God is the author of creation, then He deserves acknowledgement and credit for His work. And if God is the author of creation, then scientific investigation can only be helped by recognizing God as Creator.

If you refused to believe that a jumbo jet had been designed, then that would be dishonoring to the designers. How much more dishonoring it is when secular science and the secular media refuse to acknowledge that creation has a Designer. Thankfully there are many scientists today who are prepared to acknowledge the Creator despite the risk to their jobs and careers. Such scientists can have the satisfaction of knowing they stand shoulder to shoulder with the greatest scientists that ever lived such as Newton, Kepler, Pascal, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, and Flemming. And by the way, the last three great scientists in this list knew of Darwin’s theory and rejected it—a fact that secular science has never publicized.