This article was originally authored by Dr. Hugh Ross and is republished here with permission from Reasons to Believe , a ministry dedicated to integrating science and faith. All rights reserved by the original publisher. To explore more resources, visit their website Reasons to Believe .
Ever since the well-publicized Scopes Trial in 1925, evangelical Christians have engaged in vigorous, often heated debates over the age of the universe and Earth. On one side are Christians who are convinced that there is overwhelming, consistent, accurate scientific evidence that the universe is 13.79 billion years old and that Earth is 4.5662 billion years old. On the other side are Christians who are convinced that a literal interpretation of the Bible constrains both the age of the universe and Earth to be less than 10,000 years.
The four most significant factors persuading many Christians that the universe and Earth must be younger than 10,000 years old are:
1. concern that conceding a 4.5662-billion-year age for Earth will enable naturalistic evolutionary processes alone to explain the origin and history of all life;
2. certainty that the only possible literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is that in which the creation days are six consecutive 24-hour periods;
3. belief that there was no animal or human death until after Adam had sinned in the Garden of Eden; and
4. belief that an atheistic bias explains the scientific community’s united-front conclusion that Earth and the universe are billions of years old.
Both young-earth and old-earth creationist Christians uphold the biblical doctrine of dual revelation but they apply the doctrine in different ways. I’ve written a full-length book on dual revelation that will be released later this year.[1] In that book I define dual revelation as the doctrine that God has revealed himself and his personal attributes through two wholly reliable and trustworthy expressions: the book of Scripture (the Bible) and the book of nature. I know of no young-earth creationist scholar or leader who would disagree with this definition. The disagreement is over the application of a corollary doctrine—sola Scriptura.
The doctrine of sola Scriptura, codified during the Protestant Reformation, states that the Bible is the supreme authoritative source of information on all the subjects it addresses. The framers of this doctrine understood that for God’s revelation to be clearly authoritative, direct (verbal, propositional) rather than indirect communication is required.
Young-earth creationists interpret sola Scriptura as implying that the Bible is the only completely trustworthy, reliable, inerrant revelation from God. They acknowledge that the book of nature can be a reliable, trustworthy, inerrant revelation but only if it is interpreted through the lens of Scripture.
1. Unchanging physical laws: According to the Bible, the laws of physics are unchanging. In Jeremiah 33, God, speaking through the prophet, contrasts human wavering with his own immutability by referring to the “laws governing the heavens and Earth.” Just as they remain “fixed,” as in constant and unchanging, so does God.
The New Testament sheds decisive light on what resulted from Adam’s sin. In Romans 5:12, Paul writes, “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.”
In Genesis 1:1–2:4, the Hebrew word yôm, translated “day,” is used with three distinct definitions. Each of the first six creation days is accompanied by the statement “and there was evening, and there was morning.”
There are more than 12,000 professional research astronomers in the world and about ten times as many professional research geologists. To claim they all conspired to deceive the public about the age of the universe defies logic.
The Bible is unique among the books undergirding the world’s major religions in the number and extent of its creation passages. There are over two dozen chapter-length creation texts in the Bible. They appear in over 10 of the 66 books that comprise the Old and New Testaments.