The Junction of the Young Earth with the Old

James Ussher>(sometimes spelled Usher) (4 January 1581–21 March 1656) was Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625–1656 and a prolific religious scholar who most famously published a chronology which calculated the date of Creation as October 22, 4004 BC. ~ wikipedia


Young Earth creationism is a religious doctrine which teaches that the Earth and life on Earth were created by a direct action of the God Elohim relatively recently (about 6,000 years ago). It is held by Christians and Jews who believe that the Hebrew text of Genesis can only mean a literal six (24-Hour) day account of creation, that evidence for a strictly factual interpretation of the text is present in the world today, and that scientific evidence does not support Darwinian evolution or geological uniformitarianism. ~ wikipedia


Since I wrote a book called 7K, I think I need to try to clear something up. 47% of Americans believe in a young earth because they take the Old Testament, and especially Genesis, literally. If you do this, as James Ussher proved, you come up with an earth that was created in 6 literal, 24-hour days almost 6,000 years ago. You can calculate this using the chronologies given in the Bible. So, taken literally, the Bible tells us that creation took place about 6K ago.

But that is not what we hear from archaeologists and geologists who tend to leave the Bible out of their calculations. For them, the picture is very different. Earth and mankind are very old ~ multiple millions of years are dealt with in these scenarios, and the origin of our planet details a very extensive story.

Hence, there is a definite tension between those who hold these differing approaches to history. Biblical literalists feel that evolution challenges the validity of the Bible while scientific realists are embarassed that so many still hold to the naive ideas put forth by Ussher.

These days I am trying to pull the two poles together in my thinking. I think it is interesting that the Bible seems to paint this beautiful 7-millennium picture and then backs it up with "facts" and figures. But why do nature and ruins seem to give us a very different picture?

A few months ago I saw a geological / astronomical timetable for the construction of the cosmos that fits the scientific data being daily compiled. The scientific case gets stronger while the literal biblical picture gets weaker under the weight of evidence. But the timetable itself, the events of this elongated pre-history, fit the first chapter of the Genesis chronology pretty nicely ~ even, to me, startlingly.

Yes, the Genesis account has to be seen differently, if that is the case. It becomes more of an allegorical account, like all the accounts of the ancients. Yet it still comes off as "inspired." It is a thing of beauty and it still rings true.

So how do we bridge this chasm in our American thinking? One answer is in "theistic evolution," which I won't discuss here. That is the idea that God created through the evolutionary process.

The trickiest problem winds up to be the first man, Adam. He can't be first if he was made 6 millennia ago and there is this long evolutionary ancestry behind him.

But there is still, to me, a beauty and accuracy in the 7K story, as presented by the Bible, that takes in the larger picture of the whole story of God and man, His creation. It does not deconstruct the scientific picture, it complements it. Science does not threaten to undo the Bible, nor vice-versa. The picture God gives is mystical, like a poem full of mystery and beauty, that simply doesn't yield entirely to literalism. It reduces something large and incomprehensible into the sound-byte of human history.

Somehow the biblical revelation and the scientific evidence actually fit together; they are not contrary. They splice into one continuum. And they all conjoin at the cross, about 4 millennia after Adam, when the second Adam secured a whole new covenant with God.