Insisting that the earth and the universe are young, only 6,000 years old or so, does not make the biblical view popular in today’s enlightened “scientific” culture. It would be so easy just to go along with the view believed and followed by the overwhelming majority of scientists—and taught in nearly all universities and museums around the world—that the universe is 13–14 billion years old and the earth 4.5 billion years old.

grandcanyon Young Earth or Old Earth
 

After all, many Christians and most scientists who are Christians believe in such a vast antiquity for the earth and universe. Consequently, they even insist the days in Genesis 1 were not literal days, but were countless millions of years long. Also, they claim the Genesis account of creation by God is just poetic and/or figurative, so it is not meant to be read as history.

Of course, the reason for insisting on a young earth and universe is because other biblical authors took Genesis as literal history and an eyewitness account provided and guaranteed accurate by the Creator Himself (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21). Jesus also took Genesis as literal history (Mark 10:6–9; Matthew 19:4–5; Luke 17:27). So, the outcome of letting Scripture interpret Scripture is a young earth and universe.

The Hebrew language and context used in Genesis 1 can only mean literal (24 hour) days.1 Furthermore, as history, the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 provide an accurate chronology, so that from the creation of the first man Adam to the present day is only about 6,000 years. Since the earth was only created five literal days before Adam, then on the authority of God’s Word the earth is only about 6,000 years old.

Peter, the Flood and Modern Day Scoffers
 

In 2 Peter 3, we read a prediction that Peter made around AD 62 that scoffers would arise who would challenge and deny that God created the earth and subsequently destroyed the earth by the cataclysmic global Flood. Peter says they would be willingly ignorant and deliberately reject the evidence for a created earth and the year-long global Flood. They would claim instead that the present is the key to the past, that present-day geological processes have always operated at today’s snail’s pace and that they alone are necessary to explain how rock layers and fossils formed and how old the earth is.

Secular museum display teaching the uniformitarian concept that understating the present is the key to understanding the past

This prediction was actually fulfilled about 200 years ago—about 1750 years after the prediction was made. James Hutton, a doctor and farmer-turned-geologist, claimed in his 1785 Royal Society of Edinburgh paper and 1795 book Theory of the Earth that he saw “no vestige of a beginning” for the earth because present-day geological processes have slowly recycled rock materials over vast eons of time. This was a deliberate rejection of the biblical account of the recent, global catastrophic Flood, up until that time accepted by most scholars to be the explanation for fossil-bearing rock layers. Indeed, Hutton insisted that “the past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen happening now” (emphasis mine).5

It was Charles Lyell, a lawyer-turned-geologist, with his three volume 1830–33 Principles of Geology who eventually convinced the geological establishment to abandon the biblical Flood in favor of this “principle” he called uniformitarianism. Lyell openly declared that he wanted to remove the influence of Moses (the human author of Genesis) from geology, revealing his motivation was spiritual, not scientific.6 He insisted on the uniformity through time of natural processes only at today’s rates, a belief that was later encapsulated in the phrase “the present is the key to the past.”

This is the belief that now underpins virtually all modern geological explanations about the earth and its rock layers. And it is a belief, because it cannot be proved that only today’s geological processes can explain the earth’s history and determine its age. No one has ever observed past geological processes, except for God—and Noah and his family—during the Flood when these processes were definitely catastrophic on a global scale. Yet most people today, even Christians, have unwittingly imbibed this uniformitarian belief, having been brainwashed by the constant barrage of teaching globally over many decades by the world’s education systems (schools, colleges, and universities), museums and media (newspapers, magazines, television, and even Hollywood).

Indeed, most people automatically see the earth as old because they have accepted it is a proven scientific fact that it is old!

Looking Through the Right Pair of Glasses
 

However, based on the authority of God’s Word, we can dogmatically say they are absolutely wrong. Looking at the world through “glasses” that are based on human reasoning alone (man’s word) makes people wrongly think the earth looks really old. On the other hand, when we as Christians see the world through the biblical “glasses” provided by God’s inerrant Word—so that we see the world as God sees it—we can assert unashamedly that the earth does not really look that old at all, being only about 6,000 years old (which, of course, is young). Indeed, the earth we see today is the way it looks because it is the destroyed remains of the original earth God created, still marred by the subsequent Curse.

Furthermore, not only should we understand that the Bible provides the true history of the earth, but that history tells us the earth only looks the way it does today because of what happened in the past. In other words, the past is the key to the present!

Conclusion
 

Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:3 warns us about the way Satan subtly beguiled the mind of Eve in the Garden of Eden by questioning and twisting God’s Word. Today, Satan has subtly beguiled so many people, including Christians, by twisting the clear testimony of God’s Word that “the past is the key to the present” into “the present is the key to the past.” And just as he used the appealing look of the fruit on that tree to entice Eve, so he uses the snail’s pace of geological processes today to make people doubt or deny what God has told us about the young age of the earth and His eyewitness account of the formation of the rock layers and fossils.

It also must be emphasized that even though we must trust God and His Word by faith alone (Hebrews 11:3), it is neither an unreasonable nor a subjective faith. This is because God is not a man that He should lie, so the evidence we see in God’s world will always ultimately be consistent with what we read in God’s Word. Thus, when we put on our biblical “glasses,” we should be able to immediately see and recognize the overwhelming evidence that the earth looks and is young and that the earth’s fossil-bearing rock layers are a product of the global catastrophic Flood.

After all, if the Genesis Flood really did occur, what evidence would we look for? Genesis 7 says all the high hills and mountains under the whole heaven were covered by the water from the fountains of the great deep and the global torrential rainfall so that all land-dwelling, air-breathing creatures not on the Ark perished. Wouldn’t we, therefore, expect to find the remains of billions of plants and creatures buried in rock layers rapidly laid down by water all around the earth? Yes, of course! And that’s exactly what we find—billions of rapidly buried fossils in rock layers up on the continents, rapidly deposited by the ocean waters rising up and over the continents all around the earth. This confirms that the rocks and fossils aren’t millions of years old—and neither is the earth.

So how old does the earth look? If we look at the earth through the “glasses” of human reasoning—that only snail-paced present geological processes can explain the past—then the earth does indeed look old. However, that autonomous human reasoning blatantly denies what God’s Word clearly tells us about the true age of the God-created earth and about what happened in the recent past during the global cataclysmic Flood, which is the key to understanding why the earth looks the way it does today

Read the full article here: Dr. Andrew Snelling, Answers in Genesis

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