The Bible, Rocks and Time. Davis A. Young and Ralph F. Stearley make a definitive and exhaustive case for Old Earth Creationism, from a geologist perspective.
I remember the day I stumbled across Davis A. Young’s, Christianity and the Age of the Earth, tucked away on the “new books” shelf of my college library, in the spring of 1983. Friends had invited me to attend a Wednesday night Bible study, studying the Book of Genesis, in the home of a local pastor. My head was swirling with confusion, as I learned all about the idea that the earth was only 6,000 years old. But in my science classes, ever since falling in love with science as a first-grader, I was learning a quite different story, of the modern scientific consensus, that the earth was 4.54 billion years old.
My college pastor was (and I am sure, still is) one of the sweetest and kindest of men I have ever met, a genuine, sincere and godly person. He did not have much of a science background, but he was passionate about the truthfulness of God’s Word, and I was eager to learn. He just “knew” that the “days” of Genesis were literal 24-hour periods, which for him, implied a Young Earth.
My science professors at college, on the other hand, several of whom told me that they were Christians, had relatively little knowledge of the Bible, as compared to my pastor. But they assured me that the great antiquity of the earth was well established, beyond a reasonable doubt, a reality that I had known at least something about since elementary school.
So, who was right? My pastor? My science professors? How was I to sort this whole thing out?
My questions had landed me into having a full-blown crisis of faith. I had not grown up in an evangelical church, so I had no background in skepticism about radiometric dating methods, that so many kids today in home-schooled families regularly ingest, from their online science curriculums. But I had also become a follower of Jesus in high school, having realized that my nominal church upbringing was pretty weak when it came to understanding the Bible and its authority. So, here I was in college, confused as to whom to believe. Do I trust my pastor? Do I trust the scientists? Is the truth of Christianity tied to a belief in a 6,000 year old earth, contradicting the modern, scientific consensus? Continue reading
Several churches in our community have been working through Explore God, a series of questions that seek to spark conversations about God. This past week’s question has been: “Is the Bible Reliable?” Lurking behind this question is often a different question, “Should we really take the Bible literally?”
My typical response is to ask a person, “What do you mean by literally?” Often, to take something “literally” means to read something in a very “plain” sense way. But “plain” according to whom?
Here is the problem with that: It concedes the point that getting at the “plain” sense of the Bible is at least sometimes easier said than done. But it does not follow that Bible interpretation is always simply up for grabs, and therefore the Bible is necessarily unreliable.
What we need to be able to do is to understand the original context in which a particular text was written. It is the purpose and meaning that the original author had in mind, and not our own context, that should govern the interpretation of the Bible. As a result, the possibilities of how to interpret a text are necessarily limited to a certain range of potential meanings: a singular sense for a very clear text, and multiple senses for a difficult text. But with hard work and study, we can come to even a much clearer understanding of the most difficult texts.
Here is a good example of a difficult text, that cause some people to question the reliability of the Bible:
For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. (Matthew 12:40 ESV).
Here Jesus is drawing upon the story of Jonah and the great fish to explain His future crucifixion and ultimate resurrection. A plain, supposedly “literal” reading of the text reveals a problem. If you take “three days and three nights” in a “plain” sense, it gives you 72 hours. But the standard understanding of Jesus’ death and resurrection is that He died on Good Friday and then rose on Sunday, about a 36 hour time period. Measured in hours, that timing is way off!
Well, there you go. The Bible is wrong here, and therefore is unreliable, and can not be trusted…. But is that a correct interpretation?
There is a much simpler solution to consider: Some scholars, like Andreas Köstenberger, suggest that we have evidence to demonstrate that the phrase “three days and three nights” is actually an old Semitic idiomatic expression, that is simply unfamiliar to modern English readers. Any portion of a 24-hour period of time could constitute “a day and a night.” So if Jesus died on a Friday and then rose from the grave on Sunday, that would give you “three days and three nights:” part of Friday, all of Saturday, and part of Sunday. Just because this idiom would be unusual to us does not rule out the possibility that Jesus and/or the biblical writers would have known about such idioms, or metaphors, and used them freely in the Bible.
In other words, when the original Scriptural writer employed so-called “literal” language to describe something, without metaphor or embellishment, we today should cling to interpreting the Bible in the same manner. But when the writer does intentionally use metaphorical or figurative language, to express God’s truth in Scripture, we should cling to interpreting the Bible, again, in the same manner, as in the original.
So, to say that “the Bible is reliable,” is not just a pious excuse for appealing to one’s own interpretation of the Bible. We can appeal to the evidence to build a strong case that the Bible, rightly interpreted, is indeed reliable…. and therefore, trustworthy.
Additional Resources:
Some say that the Bible is unreliable, because they argue that the copying process of the New Testament had so many errors, that we really do not know what the original New Testament even said! The following clip from the documentary “Fragments of Truth,” shows that such claims are wildly exaggerated, as one learns the story of one famous, 3rd century New Testament fragment, P45, which was discovered in Egypt, and currently now on display in Dublin, Ireland (Go here for a critical, yet fair review of the documentary).
Can you defend your faith, when skeptics ask you the tough questions?
I work at a state-run university, so as we get geared up for a new class of entering freshmen this week, I have a recommended new resource (or more) that can help equip anyone… and particularly students … with good answers.
Was there a real Adam, the sole progenitor of the human race? Is the text of Genesis 1-11 historical or mytho-historical? Did snakes talk? Did the apostle Paul regard Adam as an historical person? What is at stake with the raging debate over the historical Adam?
Veracity readers may wish to plug in and follow the work of Dr. William Lane Craig, who is beginning a new, expanded study on this topic.
Humans existing side-by-side with dinosaurs, at Answers in Genesis’ Creation Museum, in Kentucky, in stark contrast with the narrative every public school educated child learns from the modern scientific consensus, namely, that the dinosaurs died out millions of years before modern humans entered the scene.
When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day, I opened a children’s Bible and found an illustration on its first page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old I may have been, but of one thing – to my regret – I was rock-solid certain: no human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been brought to darken my Christian faith.
But years later, after researching the grand history of civilization, he comes to a very different conclusion. While still not embracing the faith, Holland takes on a profound appreciation for the Apostle Paul:
It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.
On the Unbelievable podcast/radio program, Tom Holland sits down with New Testament scholar N.T. Wright and show host Justin Brierley, to talk about how his mind changed. Unbelievable, perhaps my top, favorite podcast, has a new series, entitled The Big Conversation, featuring some of the top world thinkers, including Jordan B. Peterson, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett. Tom Holland is the author of various books, such as the In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire and The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West. N.T. Wright is one of the world’s most influential, New Testament historians, and author of the recent Paul: A Biography:
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Interested in the whole discussion? Listen to the whole Unbelievable episode below, having the title “How St. Paul Changed the World.”
Veracity 