Young-earth scientists, Christian intellectuals and the reliability of the Bible

A beloved Christian professor of chemistry at a well-known university wrote in 2007, “A large body of scientific evidence has established that the earth is ~4.5 billion years old. This is so well established that it should not be controversial.” He was worried that if Christians interpreted “…Scripture in a manner that contradicts well-established facts known about the natural world,” then unbelievers would not take seriously what the Bible says about the spiritual world. That worry is understandable, since St. Augustine and Francis Bacon expressed similar worries.

In 2011 John Lennox, well-known Christian professor of mathematics at Oxford University, similarly wrote about “the current scientific evidence for an ancient earth,” and concluded, “we would be very unwise to ignore science through obscurantism or fear, and present to the world an image of Christianity that is anti-intellectual.”

History professor Mark Noll carried the “anti-intellectual” argument further in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In the Afterword of its 2022 printing Noll wrote, “Visitors by the tens of thousands come every year for enlightenment on these questions to Ark Encounter, ‘a Christian religious and creationist theme park’ in Kentucky.  Although its picture of early human history has no standing among formally credentialed scientists…” No standing? Really? Noll wrote that he had studied the rise of the modern creationist movement. If he had really done his homework, he could easily have found at one creationist website, www.creation.com for example, a partial list with over 100 PhD scientists who hold a young-earth view.^[1]

What, indeed, have such formally credentialed scientists been doing? For example, consider the efforts of seven PhD scientists who worked together from 1997 to 2004 on radioisotopes and the age of the earth (the “RATE” project). Their work was well summarized in Thousands…not Billions published by Master Books in 2005. Workers in the “RATE” project made predictions based on the presupposition that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Detailed measurements in the course of their work verified those predictions. One worker on that project had also made predictions in the 1980s about the magnetic fields of the planets that were verified later by spacecraft flybys. Another worker on that project had made predictions about coal formation that were later verified in the aftermath of the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. All these verifications directly contradicted what was expected from old-earth paradigms. And all this work was done much before the above quotes, whose authors could have checked it out had they been interested.

We can conclude that Christians who hold to old-earth views are ignoring, if not suppressing, “well-established facts about the natural world.” These facts are not “well-established” in the sense of being accepted by mainstream non-Christian scientists, but they were established from careful research and have withstood the criticisms directed at them. Consequently, one should consider whether Christians with old-earth views are the ones misinterpreting Scripture.

Messianic Jewish radio broadcaster Michael Brown is more honorable on this subject than Noll, Lennox, and the chemistry professor mentioned above, because he did not dismiss young-earth views out of hand. He is well-known for presenting strong opinions carefully and respectfully. In a YouTube video dated October 4, 2019, entitled “Why I’m Not Dogmatic on the Creation Account,” he mentioned that he had had both old-earth and young-earth people on his radio show. He cited Exodus 20:11 in support of the young-earth position and 2 Peter 3:8 in support of the old-earth position. He then mentioned that the Hebrew word “yom” in Genesis can mean time other than a literal 24-hour day. He said he couldn’t debate the issue because “I don’t have the scientific acumen.” But Dr. Brown is a Hebrew scholar! He surely knows, as almost all Hebrew scholars admit, that “yom” in the context of Genesis 1 can only mean a 24-hour day.

The problem here is that Christian intellectuals have been influenced by the claims of Spinoza, a 17th-century apostate Jewish philosopher. Spinoza claimed that while the Bible is good for promoting “piety,” it is “…faulty, mutilated, adulterated, and inconsistent” and “may have been corrupted by human malice.” His views were the source of much of the thought in the Enlightenment. In particular, he claimed that philosophy and science must be separated from theology and the Bible. If so, it follows that only scientists could know the truth about the physical origins of the heavens and the earth.

Hence many Christian intellectuals assume that they have to defer to the speculations of mainstream scientists who claim the earth is billions of years old. In particular, many theologians have been revising the traditional view of Genesis because of what they suppose are “all the evidences of great age of the earth and universe” (John Walton, 2009). In doing so, they ignore or suppress the first-rate work of Christian scientists who provide evidence for a young earth and they continually develop novel ways to try to get around the plain meaning of the Hebrew text.

Misinterpreting Scripture to insert billions of years into Genesis 1 dramatically affects the perceived reliability of the Bible. If it doesn’t mean what it plainly says there, why should anyone take seriously what the Bible plainly says about the spiritual world?

[1] Of course, the relative number of adherents doesn’t necessarily indicate the truth of an idea. The history of science contains many instances where the proponent of a new paradigm was initially ridiculed, such as Semmelweis in medicine, Alfred Wegener in geophysics and J Harlan Bretz in geology. Further, even non-Christian geologist Derek Ager recognized in 1993 that geologists had been “brainwashed” since the 1830s by Charles Lyell’s doctrine of uniformitarianism. Lyell based that doctrine on his antipathy to the Flood account in Genesis. As indicated elsewhere, similar antipathy to the accounts in Genesis is an expression of pantheism among intellectuals who do not tolerate creation scientists in academia.