Why I Believe In An Old Earth (Part 1): The Text Itself

One of the apologetic issues that is closest to my heart is that of what the Bible has to say about the nature of creation history. Over my years of study of the Christian faith and its defense, the reconciliation of science and faith has been one of my primary areas from the very beginning. Some of you will have heard of my experience facing coworkers that were hostile towards Christianity and many of their objections had to do with the obvious and irreconcilable conflict between the resolute testimony of science and the comparatively “naive” claims made by the Bible regarding Earth’s history. When I found myself unable to answer those compelling objections, I found myself deep in doubt and eager for answers.

But this debate is not one restricted to that of skeptics and believers. The reconciliation between the scientific and Biblical record is an often hot topic amongst believers themselves. Believers who hold to a Young Earth Creation (YEC) and those who hold to an Old Earth Creation (OEC) position square off every day and, all too often, this disagreement turns into fatal, fellowship-destroying conflict. But, while I can’t personally prevent this from ever happening again, I can model a gracious and Christ-honoring apologetic for my own position. So, since I’ve yet to do so, I hereby offer the first of what will inevitably be more articles on why I believe the Bible supports the Old Earth view.

The Two Books of Revelation and the Belgic Confession

It is worth discussing here, at the outset, why we should bother to offer any sort of specific Biblical argument regarding creation at all. Since at least the 19th century, Christians of all stripes have offered countless different responses to criticism of its creation accounts including both Young and Old Earth arguments, thestic evolutionary arguments (the attempted reconciliation of Scripture and standard evolutionary models), Gap Theory arguments, and everything in between. Perhaps even more tragically, many well-meaning Christians have attempted to defuse the conflict altogether by allegorizing or spiritualizing the entire account, potetntially negating the need to reconcile science and Scripture at all.

But to disconnect ourselves completely from the Genesis narrative presents some potentially harmful downstream effects. Old and Young Earth creationists both tend to agree that Scripture, properly understood, should ultimately complement the reality of the physical world around us. The Belgic Confession, adopted in 1566, affirms that humanity indeed knows God, “by the creation, perservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. All these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”

This view of nature, along with Scripture itself, make up what is sometimes called the “two books doctrine” of revelation. This doctrine considers general and special revelation as two distinct yet complementary sources of truth that both point to the glory of God. This doctrine undergirds both Young and Old Earth creationism. If, indeed, Scripture and nature provide us truth about God and the natural world, we should expect them to be complementary to one another. 

So then, the fundamental split between YEC and OEC proponents is not primarily one of the nature of revelation itself but, rather, the interpretation of that revelation. For many, the hermeneutic that would allow an OEC interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative is often seen as explicitly undercutting the inherent reliability and inerrancy of Scripture. This brings us to the fundamental question that rightly acts as the basis for so many elements of Christian doctrine: what constitutes sound exegesis of the Scripture itself regarding the age of the Earth and creation history? 

In the Beginning, God Created

We begin where the Bible itself begins. From the very first sentence of Genesis, we begin to answer questions about the natural world around us. Most Christians are familiar with the opening phrase of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This is a universal and unequivocal truth that all Orthodox Christians hold and can doubtless unite upon. Note, however, that this phrase is descriptive of God’s creation process as a whole, not relating to length of days or any particular timeframe at all. In fact, there is reason to believe that this act is temporally prior to any of the remaining creative work described within the chapter.

As Hugh Ross relates, regarding the grammar of the first verses of Genesis, “Hebrew linguists have determined that those texts proclaim that the creation of the universe and the formation of Earth must predate the events described in the six creation days by an unspecified but finite duration of time.” C. John Collins also weighs in on the grammar, stating that, “The verb created in Genesis 1:1 is in the perfect [tense], and the normal use of the perfect at the very beginning of a pericope is to denote an event that took place before the storyline gets under way.”

As well, Rodney Whitefield explains that in Hebrew grammar the verbs themselves do not specify or inform as to the duration of the action or the order in which the action took place relative to others; that this is typically done via the word order itself. As it turns out, the word order in Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 happens to include the verb as the second word of the clause, thus cementing the idea that the actions they are describing have already come to completion. The resulting phrases describing the events of each creation, “And God said…”, then further describe creative actions that are subsequent and completed in their own time.

These Scriptural and grammatical observations are important for two reasons. One, they establish that the initial creation state and each creation day are, indeed, cumulative and not parallel, thus potentially stemming off other interpretations of Genesis such as the Framework view or Evolutionary models which would posit an ongoing and parallel timeframe for the creation days themselves. But two, and more importantly for this article, the very first verses of Genesis 1 already establish that the initial creation of the heavens and the cosmos predate the creation days themselves, thus at the very least leaving quite a bit of wiggle room for existing scientific models that posit long time spans prior to the history of life on Earth. As Hugh Ross summarizes: “The completed nature of the creation of the universe and the formation of the primordial Earth implies that an unspecified duration of time transpired between the creation of the universe…Earth’s initial formation and the events of creation day one.”

Yom, Yom, Yom

Which brings us to the creation days themselves. Many a well-meaning Christian will readily attest that a straight-forward, or “literal”, reading of the Biblical text would lead one unequivocally to an understanding of each creation day as a plain, 24-hour, solar day. However, as we observed in the preceding section regarding Hebrew grammar, our frequent use and reference of English translations for Biblical study can deprive us of important details and context necessary for proper interpretation. So, we must ask ourselves, what can the Hebrew text tell us regarding the actual creation days themselves?

As it turns out, the Hebrew language vocabulary size is quite a bit smaller than English, only about three thousand words. In this case, the Hebrew word translated into the English “day” in Genesis 1 is “yom.” Given the small vocabulary size of Hebrew, yom actually has four possible distinct, yet literal, definitions: part of the daylight hours, all of the daylight hours, a 24-hour period, or a long but finite period of time.

The keen reader will deduce that YEC and OEC proponents will be particularly interested in the latter two definitions. Regarding the last use, that of a longer but finite period of time, William Wilson offers the insight that yom is “frequently put for time in general, or for a long time; a whole period under consideration,” or that yom “is also put for a particular season or time when any extraordinary event happens.” Some examples external to Genesis are the use of yom in referencing the “day of the Lord” which would appear to indicate a period of time of many months or more and the use of yom to describe seasonal periods or the “day” of harvest.

So Which Is It?

So, if it is at least possible that the use of yom in Genesis 1 could be understood as referring to a non-24-hour period, are there reasons why we should understand it as such?
One pertinent question to ask is whether there existed another better-fitting Hebrew word to communicate such a concept. Some OEC opponents have proposed that the Hebrew term olam would have been a more apt word to describe the long periods of time assumed in the OEC model. However, it appears that olam, sometimes used in Hebrew scholarship to denote a long age or period, did not support such a meaning during Biblical times; the word only came to bear this meaning in post-Biblical Hebrew writings. In Biblical Hebrew, olam was reserved for long, indefinite or even perpetual periods of time, most commonly, more than 300 times, into the future with only around 20 usages that refer to the past. Again, Hugh Ross surmises that “Yom remains the only Biblical Hebrew word that can refer to a long time period with a definite start and end point.”

There are also a number of cases of Hebrew grammar and phraseology that come into play in supporting the long time horizons of yom in Genesis 1. For one, typical Biblical Hebrew denotation of 24-hour days was most commonly done using “evening to evening” phraseology, not the repeated “there was evening and there was morning” usage found in Genesis 1. This exception certainly allows for an alternate understanding. Along these lines, the Hebrew terms for “morning” and “evening” used here, “boqer” and “ereb“, respectively, also possess a similarly flexible usage as yom itself, with boqer being used to denote the dawn, the end of darkness, beginning of day, or even all day and ereb to denote sunset, night, a time at evening, or even the time between two evenings. For our usage, it is most important that these terms could at least be used to denote the ending and beginning of the long-form use of yom and, given the breadth of possible Biblical interpretations, at least allows us this much.

But there have also been numerous attempts to undermine this understanding of yom by Scriptural means so we would do well to touch on those criticisms a big here. One such critique is that the “evening and morning” phrase is used something like 38 times outside of Genesis 1 and that, in all of these examples, a clear 24-hour day period is in view. However, upon examining the proposed examples, yom itself actually appears in none of them; the exact expression used in Genesis 1 is found nowhere else. It has also been proposed that in cases where ordinals have been used (first, second, etc) in conjunction with yom, that this always refers to a 24-hour period. However, out of 358 instances of yom in the Bible attached to an ordinal, Hugh Ross notes that “only 249 of these usages are the singular form of yom, and all 249 are in the context of human activity or human history.” A very relevant example contrary to this critique is Hosea 6:2, which declares that “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up.” This example of yom in the Hebrew, used in conjunction with ordinal language, is generally accepted as referring to a non-24-hour day.

Other Scriptural Accommodation For A Long “Day”

There is also, of course, textual evidence within the Genesis narrative itself which would lead us to doubt the 24-hour view on its face. One such notable example is the problem of the fourth day. Those familiar with the Genesis creation days will recall that the text does not explicitly mention the creation or the existence of the sun, moon, or stars until the fourth creation day. The early church father Origen famously made this observation, noting that “what man of intelligence will believe that the first, the second and the third day, and the evening and morning existed without the sun, moon and stars?” There are multiple ways that one can attempt to square this presumed contradiction but, at the very least, such an observation lends additional credence and support to an interpretation of yomother than that of a simple 24-hour day.

Another example is found later in the sixth day. Again, the observant reader will note that the sixth creation day is a particularly busy one, with God creating every beast of the Earth, every “creeping thing”, along with humanity itself. Particularly, we read in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Now, if we consult the very next chapter of Genesis 2, and we rightly assume that it provides a more detailed account of the creation of mankind in day 6, we find that, prior to the creation of the first woman, Adam had been tasked with working the garden and naming every living creature. Given this simple testimony of Scripture, it is unfathomable that a single 24-hour period could contain such an enormous amount of activity, both human and divine. Indeed, if we are to depend on the “straight-forward” reading of the text, the conclusion drawn would be quite different than that of a single solar day. As Gleason Archer concludes from this comparison, “it has become very apparent that Genesis 1 was never intended to teach that the sixth creative day, when Adam and Eve were both created, lasted a mere twenty-four hours.”

Lastly, as we have discussed before in our treatment of Genesis 2, there is reason to believe that creation day 7 stands unique among the other days. Notably, the seventh creation day lacks the familiar, “and there was evening and there was morning,” pattern of the prior six days. There is some Scriptural support to believe that the seventh day extends much longer than the other days, quite possibly extending to the present day, in stark contrast to the remainder of the text. We do not want to stretch the text too far; it certainly is possible to reconcile day 7 as truly distinct and thus unrepresentative in regards to the duration of the prior six days. However, if we consider the testimony of passages often cited in defense of 24-hour interpretation, such as Exodus 20:11, “for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day,” we will see that Scripture potentially supports this consistency across all seven days. If, indeed, there is consistency between the creation days, and the seventh day represents the “long but finite period of time” view of yom, then it could be reasoned that this also equally applies to the prior six days.

The Bottom Line

Now, as one would expect, this is only a “35,000 foot view” of the issue thus far and there is certainly more that could be said regarding criticism and support for Scriptural evidence for an Old Earth. Indeed, the case for an Old Earth, or any Genesis interpretation for that matter, is best made cumulatively, based upon a wide variety of Scriptural and natural observations that collectively support each other and the given view. But hopefully we have established that an Old Earth interpretation of Scripture not only honors the text well, perhaps even better than other views in some ways, but is also an absolutely viable option for those seeking to understand and reconcile the Genesis creation narrative to the world around them in general and sound, modern scientific discoveries in particular.