Does the Bible Say the Earth is 6000 Years Old? 

This is probably the best explanation of this theological position I've ever heard. It's nice to grow up and find that, even though my perspectives have changed a lot since childhood, some Christian figures I grew up with (Phil Vischer) are still doing good work and being a good influence to fellow Christians.

Does a dinosaur fossil containing soft tissues like blood vessels, blood cells, collagen and sometime partial DNA say 65+ million years old?

What I like about Gen. 1 is it starts in the garden…. Then, we go to Rev. 22 and the garden is revealed again. God is good… all the time. Thank you.

"The Bible is written for us, not to us." Excellent. We'd solve so many interpretational problems if we kept this in mind.

EXCELLENT!! "down to earth" presentation for popular consumption. Unfortunately, the dear Christian brothers and sisters around me are so hung up on an extreme "literal" understanding of the Bible that our conversations cannot get past that. And unfortunately, any attempt to compare the Bible with other ancient literature is seen as a claim that the Bible simply copied from other nations and, therefore, is not from God. It is very difficult to bring people to a different understanding. But that being said, thanks for this presentation because it has given me some ideas for new approaches to this issue.

I dont think that God "brought order out of chaos." I would argue it's more the other way around. God created order, but sin introduced chaos.

"With the Lord, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day." GOD does not reckon time the way that we do. The six days of creation are not literal twenty-four-hour periods as we count time. They are periods of ordering the universe. They could easily be billions of years as we count time.

The older I get the more comfortable I am with "not knowing". I have my leanings but I don't understand the in-fighting over this stuff. Either God did it, or God didn't. If I agree that God started it and so does someone else that's the basis. I definitely lean toward the points in this video while also holding room in my brain that if God wanted to create all this in 6 days He could. I'm secure in God's way even if I don't know what it was ❤

Walton's analogy of building a "home" (immaterial) vs. building a "house" (material) is helpful here.

Great example of a video saying Genesis is allegorical rather than factual without using those words.

Skye's interview with Dr. Walton never addressed Exodus 20:11 where Moses says the Israelites should work 6 days (literal) and rest on 1 literal day, he states the REASON is because God worked 6 days to create the heavens and the earth (the "stuff") and then rested. Scripture itself seems to backup the Genesis 1 account of a 6 day creation.

I'm glad you chose a non-controversial topic this time.

Great video, before I gave it a like though I had to look over my shoulder to make sure Ken Ham wasn’t there 🤣

I've always thought that since God made animals, plants, and people fully grown, or at least that's what it seems like based on Genesis 1, then God would've made the earth already fully grown, seemingly an "adult" version of the earth like the adult people and animals. So, it makes sense to me that the earth would seem to be older than 6000 years even if it was created then. Just one perspective though.

I have a good friend that reads, and speaks Hebrew very well and his explanation about creation in the language of Hebrew is excellent. His definition answers a lot. Yet many fundies rail against learning Hebrew or even Greek. I have had those debates and the fundies are more than glad to assign me to hell.

I am reborn Christians but cringe when some of my fellow believers say the earth is only 6000 years old and even more so that the earth is flat because the word firmament is used...My Lord and savior have ALWAYS only pointed my afford to spend time with Him, to Worship Him and praise Him.

I'm a Gen X'er and this young earth stuff came out of left field to me. I grew up in a conservative church but never heard anything like it until I was an adult. A group from my church organized a field trip for the kids to the Ark Encounter and I did some research, and found that it contained explicit anti-science propaganda. In addition, I found some of our homeschool textbooks would also try to discredit things like carbon dating and attempting to justify the young earth position. And of course there was the pandemic and all the anti-vaccine sentiment. I'm disturbed at how many in the church want to pit religion against science, far more likely to drive people away from the church than towards it. It's a trend that needs to be reversed.

"In the beginning God created heaven and the earth. And the earth was void and without form." There it is. There is when he created all the stuff.

Question:- is the earth just the planet or is it the planet that supports life as we know it. My understanding is earth is the planet that supports life. If it cannot support life it is not earth. Has this planet always been earth?

Growing up I was forced by my parents to go to church and I’ve always been a free will independent person even as a child so since I was forced I resented their decision and never really developed a connection with God but I still believed in him. Years later into my late teen years I started to question and make fun of the church and how everyone pretty much denied modern science because it challenges and rejects scriptures in the Bible. Stuff like the earth is only 4,000 years old, dinosaurs aren’t real, earth is flat, evolution. And this would go on until I was 18 and graduated high school and left for the army and there without anyone forcing me to go to church or trying to shove their teachings down my throat I picked up the Bible probably for the first time in my life and said I’m gonna figure this stuff out on my own. Fast forward a few years later and I feel like I’m the closest with god I’ve ever been. I feel like this is why a lot of people dismiss the Bible because since it was written 3,000 years ago people take what it says too literally and deny any type of science that contradicts and challenges the Bible. But what I never hear anyone say is how cool it is that God made the universe so incomprehensibly big with billions of unexplored planets even though we will never even leave our own solar system. Science doesn’t contradict the Bible it makes it infinitely more badass.

The Chaos had transpired because of Satan's fall.

As an agnostic, I appreciate your willingness to own the fact that this is not a history of the world in so much as it is an allegory for the then contemporary ideas of what creation meant. At least that is the only real utility that text provides to us today. But I do think the people of the time really thought that this was an attempted accounting for the manifestation of the physical world as well. It was just the best they could do with the understanding they had and the perspectives they carried. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m sure most of them would’ve been wise enough to understand that this was not written by a witness, that this was not to be taken as a perfect literal story. It was the explanation that made sense from within their cultural line. Rationalizing away discrepancies in terms of days without the sun, etc. Amounts to a post hoc rationalization for why ancient peoples did not understand the origins of the universe. Rationally, they could not be expected to. And thus I think it’s clear that the entirety of Genesis is more there to tell us about ourselves than it is to tell us about the universe we find ourselves in. And that goes beyond just the initial creation story, the story from within the garden has the same tone. It’s an allegorical fable. Realizing the genre of the particular texts, you are reading within the Bible is an important component of interpretation. Without that, literalism becomes a trap That boxes and limit your idea of the potential divine.

Hebrew scholar Dr. Steven Boyd has conducted a statistical analysis of 522 Old Testament passages. He found that poetic and narrative passages could be categorized with a better than 99% accuracy based on the verb usage alone. Dr. Boyd’s analysis showed conclusively that Genesis 1 is narrative history, not poetry. This means the only way to interpret it properly is as history, looking for its straightforward, historical meaning. ‘… probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: 1. creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience 2. the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story 3. Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark.’ - James Barr, Regius Professor of Hebrew, Oxford University, England, in a letter to David C.C. Watson April 23, 1984. By the way, Dr. Barr is a hostile witness who does not believe the Genesis creation account took place as described by scripture. The word yom is used 410 times in relation to a number. Every time it means an ordinary day. "evening and morning" are used 38 times in the Old Testament and each time it means an ordinary day. "evening and morning" are used 23 times without the word yom and each time it means an ordinary day. "night" is used 52 times without yom and each time it means an ordinary day. Because of the context of the creation days, "evening and morning", if these days represented vast periods of time, the either God is a untrustworthy idiot because he has conveyed something untrue, or he is a liar because he has conveyed that the length of the days is equal to the coming and going of the sun, while they were in fact vast periods of time. If the days of creation in Genesis 1 represent thousands to millions of years,and Adam and Ever were created during day 6, then one would have to believe they were thousands to millions of years old by day 7 unless you believe God created them at the last moment before sunrise on day 6. Moreover, since the passages describe the coming and going of the sun, one would have to believe the earth orbited the sun at a rate exponentially slower during the days of creation than immediately after. If you don't hold to that idea, then you have to explain why the days of creation represent vast ages of time and an exponentially slower moving earth than for day 7 and all days afterward. In the context, the word day in Genesis 1 refers to six 24-hour days. Every time it appears with “evening and morning” or with a number like “sixth day,” which is over 200 times, it refers to a 24-hour day. If the days represent cast periods of time, then God would have had to supernaturally placed all plants into a frozen state of stasis to wait for the sun to arrive the next "day" so that they would have sunlight. Plants can survive a couple of literal days without sunlight, but they cannot survive hundreds, thousands, or millions of days without light. If the days represent vast periods of time, the sun would have charred the earth into a dessert on each day that the earth rotated. Otherwise, one would have to believe each day represents millions of actual days, but this contradicts the statements of "and the evening and the morning were the X day". Because of the statements regarding the workweek and sabbath in Exodus, the creation days cannot be longer than 24 hour. Since death entered the world because of sin (Romans 5:12), all of the animals God created would have had to live for vast ages of time until Adam sinned. This forces Day-Age theorists to arbitrarily decide how long the creation days must be to fit their concept. Furthermore, Jesus and the New Testament apostles read Genesis 1-11 as straightforward historical narrative. "The idea that humans lived before Adam was first put forth by a Roman Catholic named Isaich la Perere in a book titled Apologie de la Peyrere (Men before Adam) in 1655. He claimed that scientific data from Greenland and China proved humans lived as long ago as 50,000 B.C. This book was very influencial to Richard Simon, a Roman Catholic educated by the Jesuits, who is considered the father of textual criticism. Simon attacked protestant Christianity, saying, "The great changes that have taken palce in the manuscripts of the Bible since the first originals were lost completely destroy the principle of the protestants. If tradition joined not to scripture, there is hardly anything in religion that one can confidently affirm." - Boyd, specialist in biblical Hebrew, Semitic languages, and Old Testament studies. He has a BS and MS in Physics from Drexel University, a ThM in Old Testament and Semitics from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a PhD in Hebraic and Cognate Studies from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. The idea that the earth is older than the Bible tells us it is came into the modern era from the 18th century from Comte de Buffon, who thought the earth was at least 75,000 years old, and from Pièrre LaPlace, and from Jean Lamarck. The idea of millions of years came into being from secular geology through men like Abraham Werner, James Hutton, William Smith, Georges Cuvier, and Charles Lyell. Their ideas were in defiance of scripture and based upon uniformitarian, false interpretations of the physical characteristics of the lithosphere of the earth.

I first heard this idea in the 1970s. For some reason, the age of the earth doesn't change It never becomes 6001, 6002, and so on. It always remains six thousand years, year after year, decade after decade.

Time is man's invention. God doesn't need time. He's God.

I love you Phil. Your Holy Post on Racism is my #1 shared link on FB, when folks try to tell me "Race isn't an issue today; Dem's are just trying to make an issue out of nothing" -- then I share your Racism post. Nails it. Here I love your approach, and providing a GREAT Answer. The only thing I disagree with, factually at least, is your generosity that you give to Yahweh - as "The God who doesn't ask for things/service" -- oops. He's asking so much that it's impossible to do -- first 4 commandments are narcissistic -- Worship Me, Me, Me, and Me. Give me 1st born. Give me burnt flesh. Only worship me, love only me -- follow all of my commands with glee or I'll torture you to the point of starvation and eating your own babies (Deut 28). Yahweh is VERY demanding, very quick to anger, over small things -- and gives abominable genocidal commands -- and if like Saul, you don't kill ALL animals -- you are condemned, or as in Numbers 31 - if you spare the boys/women - you are chastised. I get that you are trying to package this message to be acceptable to Christians for good purpose -- to bring a tone of Unity, and settle some meaningless Creationism strife -- so Kudos to you for this. But I'm guessing you know the white-lies you are telling when you depict Yahweh in this gracious Light. All said - I'm a Universalist -- I firmly believe GOD IS -- and our purpose here is to "Become Love" through the same Divine Spirit that Lives in us all, and binds us together in Unity. This leaves us with a conundrum of the Biblical Condemnation messages -- which through Jesus condemns the vast majority of souls to eternal torment, mostly for the singular sin of "Wrong Belief"... "Worship me or Burn Forever" is Biblical Christianity in a nutshell... if you accept the Biblical teachings about Hell, and "Jesus as the ONLY Way", etc. I love you Phil! May God and Spirit continue to fill you and use you powerfully in our world today. Peace, Love, and Miracles to you.

When you’re an immortal being (like God), why couldn’t one day be the equivalent of 2.28 billion earth years?

Factual error at 3:50: There is no basis to think Genesis was written by one person. From the styles of text alone, it almost certainly was not.

Yes! The Bible that we know and love is not a 20th-21st century history and science text book. Insisting that it be does great injustice to God's word and to His creation, including ourselves.

I know a lot of Christians who get hung up on the old earth/young earth theories when in reality that discussion does nothing whatsoever. The discussion that MUST happen for all Christian believers (and yes, I am one of them) is regarding pre-sin death. If creatures were living and dying before the fall, then death is not, as Scripture claims, the punishment for sin. Extrapolate that out and you inevitably come to the result that the Gospel is no longer good news at all. If death is not the punishment for sin, Jesus could not die for the sins of the world and His death on the cross achieved nothing whatsoever. It is a nonsense to talk about how certain people wrote poetry a few thousand years ago as though that amounts to a hill of beans. It amounts to nothing whatsoever. If All Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, then the Bible is not about the people who wrote it or their poetic predilections, it is about the God who inspired men to write exactly what He wanted them to write, not only for people a couple of thousand years ago but for the people of the 21st century too. God is eternal and His Word is written from His perspective, not ours. It isn't about whether the Bible puts a date on when it all kicked off, it is about God getting His message across to His people throughout history. That is the Who and Why that really does matter :) Please note, I claim no scholarly insights here and I utterly respect all that is said in this video and the person saying it. I am not up for an argument, that is sheer folly. I simply believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and stand on the Word of God with this regard :)

"And how can we have day and night on day one . . when there's no Sun until day four"? Maybe God made some light on day one, as the Book says, to start a day count. (Maybe, just maybe, an Entity that could make the Sun, could also make some photons ; )

The ancients came to understand there world of history and experience through myth. This myth is not of the nature of how we understand fiction, but it is a living reality believed to have once occurred. For post enlightenment man to go back and make sense of what the ancients wrote, with our thought forms, leads to errors in understanding and meaning. Searching for an actual star of Bethlehem is an example of this.

That's why the days in the story go from Evening to Morning. The story is about moving from Chaos to Order.

I am neither a fundamentalist nor a creationist, but I do think you missed a very important point. Genesis 1:1 does not start with chaos; Genesis 1:2 does. The first verse is simply "In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth." It doesn't say anything about pre-existing chaos. The Genesis creation narrative is unique among creation stories in that it is creation ex nihilo, from nothing. No dead body of Tiamat or Ymir. No constantly breaking out of an egg, reforming, and collapsing back into the egg again. Creation is out of nothing at all--more befitting an omnipotent God than the rival creation stories, in my (admittedly parochial) view. I like the rest of it, and once given the chaos, your view proceeds logically. You might have mentioned, though, that the ancient Hebrews were surrounded by people who treated the Heavens, Sun, Moon, seas, animals, people, etc. as gods. The main point of the Genesis creation narrative (again, in my view) is to stress that all these things are mere creations, and therefore not to be worshipped. Worship God. This gets repeated a lot in the Bible (esp. Revelation) when people attempt to worship angels--"Do not do it. I am your fellow servant. Worship God."

The Creation Story in Genesis 1 reads like an account of the building of an ancient temple. It follows that format. And in the position, within that format, in which the image of an ancient deity would have been erected in the temple, we are made in the image of God. It tells of our purpose, which is to express the glory of God and thus, to promote worship. If we can take this understanding to heart, we can be motivated to do a better job of cherishing & protecting Creation. (It is God's temple, after all.) We can also see, more clearly, why human sin is so awful. (It's the exact opposite of our purpose, and it defiles the most sacred aspect of God's temple.) And we can sense, more clearly, the reason that God's values should be our own.

Time is not linear only here in the physical world. God created everything all at once

What's the purpose of the genealogy in Genesis 5?

I am stunned how many people in those days could read and write

Phil, our family loves your "What's in the Bible" DVDs.

Totally love this - thank you. Makes so much beautiful sense.

Thank-you for recording a short shareable video on this topic, Phil! Well said. Well done. It's a much better story to be told!

Thanks for telling the truth, I hope you don't get tossed out of your church for that! You know that happens right?

I'm sorry but this 12 minute video is heresy.

Yes, but Genesis does tell us that the Earth is far, far, far older than 6,000 years. In fact, it seems to tell us, * The Flood occurred 27,970 BC, and * Adam came to Earth 10,434,130 BC! Clues include: * Genesis 5.2 -- eponymous tribes. * "these are the generations of Adam" (not "years") * "...and the days of [xxx] were [nnn] years..." * The similarity of names in Genesis 4 and 5. * The marks put upon Cain and Lamech in Genesis 4. * The last 3 words of Genesis 3. * The age of man given in Genesis 6.3, and the patriarch who lived to that exact age. Plus, the generation defined by his life. 😎♥✝🇺🇸💯 References: *_The Holy Bible_* (hardcover, paperback, ebook, online) *_The Bible's Hidden Wisdom: God's Reason for Noah's Flood_* (hardcover, paperback, ebook)

Great video, thanks! I’m unsure if you answered the question of the age of the Earth. In my experience a YEC would look at what you said and reply “Yes, God did all that in 6 24hr days (‘cause that is what the Bible literally says!) and than those literal genealogies we have in 5-11 tell us 6000 years or so for the age of the Earth. You didn’t address the Yoms of creation or the nature of those genealogies, which I think is the foundation for the young earth position, not a material v. Functional creation. I hope that makes sense lol. Thanks!

Your outstanding communication skills are on full display again. Race in America made me cry, and now this! I’d love to talk with you about it one day, but one thing especially jumped out at me-the Bible was written for us, but not to us. When applied, that simple truth refutes the Calvinistic view of predestination. I’m almost a year older than you and have no desire to build a platform, but I know too many people who have been damaged by the teachings of Calvinism to stay quiet. Will you please consider reading the the intro to my book that provides exegetical analyses of TULIP with a little bit of memoir thrown in? You might find yourself wanting to read more. I’ll be happy to send you a PDF copy.

How long did it take to fall? How long does it take to realize that trying to date the works of a God, who is outside of time, is a fool's errand?

I appreciate that you explain the image of the ANE firmament. It is about who and why.

Thank you. Instead of a battle between religion and science, this view puts the emphasis back on the relationship between God and humanity, which is the ultimate story of all of Scripture.

It seems to me that you actually are compromising the authority of scripture. Here you are limiting God to the understanding of men. Not just any men either, but men who believed in false gods. What about all the prophecies that have since been fulfilled, or the ones yet to be fulfilled that we don't completelyunderstand? Should we reject Jesus because the ancient Israelites didn't understand the prophecies and rejected him? Did Jesus go off the understanding of the pharisees, or did he correct their understanding? I don't think it's just a coincidence that over the last 100+ years since christians started to reject a straightforward understanding of the bible that christianity has significantly declined.

Got to love the "A Sound of Thunder" reference with the Dinosaur and Butterfly. Don't know if it was intentional or not, but I liked it.

Even if you don't think the world is 6000 years old it does say that mankind is only 6000 years old. What actually happened 6000 years ago is the beginning of the Bronze age 🤔

Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” You are wrong from the jump.

This guy is more intelligent than fundamentalists, he realises that the Earth is much older than just 6000 years. (He mentions that people realised this by the end of the 18th century.) Since he does not want to admit that the Bible is not inerrant, he has to reinterpret Genesis 1. And actually what he says about how the ancient Israelites interpreted the creation story makes sense. He is also right that the creation starts from chaos. Interestingly, fundamentalists, who hold on to a literal interpretation of a six-day creation never address the point, that according to Gen 1:6 God created a solid firmament to separate the waters above from the waters below. Has any fundamentalist seen a solid firmament above the Earth, or waters above the "firmament"? They are cherrypicking, holding on tenaciously to those details that they have cherrypicked, while ignoring the details that they cannot explain away.

Ugh. Thank you for this. Believing in an old earth and believing in an inerrant, infallable Bible are NOT mutually exclusive. The thing that frustrates me about those who defend a young earth -- which everyone just took for granted was true in the churches I grew up in -- is the assumption that if one believes in an old earth, then they *must* then believe in macroevolution of humans. Why is it not considered a possibility that the universe could be very old, but humans a more recent capstone addition? The typical response that I get from others is, "because death couldn't have existed before the fall of man". But is that actually true? Is it not possible for one to interpret passages such as Romans 5:12 and 6:23 to mean that death came to *humans* after the fall, and that other things within creation could have been experiencing death before then? Humans were NOT the first beings to commit sin. Otherwise, how would one explain the presence of the serpent in Genesis 3? Wasn't he already committing sin by trying to deceive Eve into questioning what God had told her?

I get a similar picture reading older scholars such as Hermann Gunkel, John L. McKenzie, and others. The amazing thing is that you still have to explain this. Of course, there are a number of other creation texts in the Bible which provide different conceptions of creation.

What's really dumb are people that say they believe in a supernatural God that feel compelled to explain an example of His omnipotence (creation) through their infinitesimally small understanding of "science" as they know it.

The bible say a bat is a bird and the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, and the ant has no leader and a lion is strongest of all beasts, they forgot about the elephant.

He also didn’t create Adam and Eve as babies but as adults. God’s ability to create isn’t limited on time or point of development of His creation. Adam and Eve were created as adults and so were the animals that God created. So why do we think the earth was created as if without mature development?

I think you do a good job of describing how the creation story might have been more abstract in nature, but the 6000 year calculation is pulled from the Biblical genealogies. So it would be helpful to detail how the writers viewed family trees and whether there might be flexibility in interpretation there

It amazes me that in order to understand the bible, one has to constantly read between the lines. If God wants people to come to him, why make is so vague that it's open to so many different interpretations. That's why there are so many different Christian denominations in the world. This is what God wants?

Please, everyone... Don't lose sight of the purpose of this video. It is not as much about convincing you of his point of view, but rather to make it clear that young earth probably isnt true (and that most Christians in history have not believed in it), and MOST OF ALL, stop putting so much emphasis on it and fighting over it.

You also have to understand two factors of “science”. Christians are responsible for the study of this earth because they wanted to know more about God’s creation. 2. Current science has taken a different direction than originally intended and became its own religion with its own priests and converts. So why are we trying to explain Christianity through a religion that mostly denies it and God even though most of the facts they come across point to it being true?!

Plants can survive longer than 1 day without light. You can prove this for yourselves by covering lawn with a dark covering for 1 to 3 days. It will survive.

I love how Phil Vischer's works in VeggieTales ministered to me as a kid, and now these videos are ministering to me as an adult and are super healing for a lot of the fundamentalist upbringing I had. Phil truly knows how to minister to Gen Z lol

I never realized this was a “debate” among Christians. However I did recently conclude that many of us fail to understand scripture due to a lack understanding of the Jewish culture. So after a bit of research, I found that the current Jewish year is AM 5784. According to Jewish tradition, the Hebrew calendar started at the time of creation, placed at 3761 BCE. The current (2023/2024) Hebrew year is 5784. By this calculation, the start of the 6000th year would occur at nightfall of 29 September 2239. It is believed that six millennia of normal life will be followed by one millennium of rest.

Couldn’t God have created something that had the appearance of age? Jesus first miracle was him creating something that had the appearance of age, after all.

While there does appear an element of what he's saying is true - ie, Gen. 1 is talking a lot about order - it still says in Gen. 1:1 that GOD "created" the heavens and the earth, and then in Ex. 20:11 that GOD made everything in heaven and on earth within 6 days. That appears to me as a message about the material creation as well as its order.

I guess the question I still have, as someone who can be back and forth between young and old earth, if we are looking at genesis one this way, how do we see chapter two, three and four? Creation story is intertwined with Adam and Eve story, and I can take this story allegorically, but then what do I with Adam and Cain and Seth being included in genealogy? And then what do I do with the genealogy where people live multi-century? Maybe all of Genesis is non-literal, what do you think? It’s hard to wrap my mind around it.

I understand why it is that Answers in Genesis exists, and this video is a prime example of why. I am stunned by how many " Christians" are willing to be led astray by rhetoric such as exists in this video. Very sad.

The Bible does claim a 6,000 year old (or thereabouts) Earth. Luke 3:23-38 traces every single generation, name by name, from Adam down to Jesus. No gaps.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the author was also explaining to ancients who thought one god created one aspect of the world - one diety created the sun, another created the sea, yet another created man, etc. - that it was the other way around: one God created everything.

Thanks for this. My sole complaint: no mention of Michael S. Heiser.

It is crazy that some people think that god wrote the bible all in one go even though the bible is a collection of books its what the word bible means

Gap Theory: When you don't have a clue, fill in the gap from your imagination, which has no bounds.

I agree that the Genesis account describes how order arose from chaos but the order that was created is the physical world. Genesis does tell us how the universe was made without going into scientific details but Genesis clearly separates each creation event by days and uses “evening and morning” to define what is a day.

It does not, unless one treats it literarily and tries to patch up the inconsequences by adding up the years in an origin story that were never meant to be added up.

In my opinion Walton's discussion of function is valuable. But when he presses it to the exclusion of material creation he goes too far. Time is a thing. It didn't exist before God separates the light from the darkness, then it does. That's material creation to me. The stars, moon and sun would not have been balls of gas to ancient minds, but they would have been lights [like a lamp] in the sky- they would have seen that as a thing: material creation. Walton argues that because the text doesn't literally say God created land or plants or animals that that's not material creation. I disagreee. Just because the text describes the creative act saying God said: "Let the earth bring forth..." doesn't mean that is not God creating. It wouldn't have happened if God had not called it into being. And despite God literally being described as forming the Adam from the earth with his hands- Walton still says this is not an act of material creation. That's silly. Of course it's a description of material creation. Again, his discussion of function is valuable, but I think he presses his idea too far. Also, while the understanding of the other ancient creation stories is valuable to our understanding of Genesis, we have to remember that Genesis is not just another ancient story. It is in a sense an apologetic argument for Yahweh's Creation of the world and a polemic against the other stories- thus it will be similar, but different. It will share the idea of purpose and order, but it will also maintain the material creation- which is typically absent from the other ancient creation epics. Working backwards, it's quite important to establish God creating a material world in Gen 1&2, because it is a material world [kosmos-all creation] that Jesus, a flesh and blood [material] savior came to save.

What you said is true. But you missed most of it. Ge 1 is a Hebrew thought rhyme. While english poets rhyme words at the ends of phrases, ancient Hebrews rhymed thoughts. Each day is a stanza in the poem. What God formed on day n, he filled on day n + 3. Now read again. Next you missed the repetition of phrases in each stanza. At the end of each day is the phrase, "And there was evening and morning, day N". We read that phrase at the end of days 1 thru 6. But the phrase does not exist for day 7. Why? Because day 7 is still occurring. Day 7 continues to this moment, for even "now you can enter God's seventh day rest". Heb 7:4. (Therefore a Genesis day is not a 24 hour period.) You also missed the Hebrew language nuance that only days 1 and 6 are "first" and "sixth". The other days are "a day 2", "a day 3", etc. In other words, the days 2 thru 6 are not in chronological order. Now order the days as the rhyme goes: 1, 4, 2, 5, 3, 6. A scientist would even agree that order is indeed the cosmological and evolutionary record. You also missed that Ussher wrongly assumed that the generations in Bible genealogies are back to back. The genealogies are not back to back. Ancient Hebrews telescoped genealogies. They deliberately omitted unimportant generations. For example, Jesus son of David. You will find that the genealogies have multiples of 4, 7 or 10 generations. 4, 7 and 10 is a literary device meaning "fullness". Ussher was ignorant of this. Ussher did not study Hebrew or ancient Hebrew literature.

PROOF THAT THE EARTH WAS CREATED IN SIX LITERAL 24-HOUR DAYS. The first and last words of Genesis, "IN" and "DAY," occur in Genesis 1 of The King James Bible, exactly 24 times (24 hrs in a day)! The last Word of Genesis 1 is "DAY." The words "IN" and "DAY" occur exactly 14,406 times in the entire KJB. There are 144 hrs in 06 days, and God created the earth in 6 days.

Didn't even answer the click bait title question

Earth isn't even a globe. It's level, stationary and domed with the firmament just like scripture says.

This video needs to be retitled “How to not answer a question in 12 minutes “. Honestly man, 12 minutes!

I've heard this line of argumentation articulated several times recently, and admittedly it has a sort of self-authenticating appeal. I do feel though that we need to pause first and examine all of the presuppositions presented here - and the list is large - lest we fall into the trap of reading scripture exclusively through the lens of 21st century theologians from California or Illinois. There are other legitimate conservative views that deserve thorough consideration.

What happens to the meaning in the Bible if you start reading it all from a perspective of relationships?

You forgot to say the essential... Namely that genesis (actually the whole bible) reflects the level of understanding of the authors of the text. As the authors of the text believed that the sky is a kind of hard reservoir with water, from where it rains, that they did not know what the Sun and the stars are. They believed that light is not given to us by the Sun, but that light exists by itself and that the Sun just lets it pass.

Personally, I have always liked the "Gap theory". I think it could make for some good sci fi. Ken Ham's complaints about it struck me as not well considered. He said God could never call anything 'good' that had been built on top of death. Um, isn't that the whole point of our life in Christ? God calls us good even though we were once dead in our sins? Slight theological disconnect there, Ken.

Excellent video! I've said this many times before, but I'm going to say it again anyway, I find it sad to see the constant arguing over the age of the Earth between Christians. My own pastor and myself have butted heads about this many times, and while we now agree to differ, both of us still stubbornly refuse to compromise on our positions. But here's the thing, it doesn't actually matter who's right on this issue, it has nothing to do with how we find Salvation and Eternal Life. For that, the only thing that matters is our trust, faith and belief in Jesus, asking him for the forgiveness of our sins, and earnestly repenting.

This whole hubbub seems to tap dance around calling a spade a spade - that is, that Genesis (and much of the Bible) is specifically NOT literal. Take the Flood story for instance. It's FILLED with hyperbole that most likely would have been recognized by its ancient audience as a figurative description of an event in order to produce an effect and make a theological point, and NOT an example of ancient journalism or accurate science.

Watching this I kept saying to myself what is the next verse. You focused on the first part to push pre-existing material from chaos narrative. So if God never made anything but just organized material around out of chaos, then why does verse 16 say "So God Made the two great lights... and also the stars..." it does not say he "form the two great lights from existing material". You have completely butchered the scripture to satisfy a position with science who dates earth even longer.. Here is some food for thought, When he crated man was Adam just a baby or an embryo? no, if he can create man as a full grown adult, then why couldn't he create everything with the appearance of age as well? For example not only did he create the stars but the light in between them as well. Further john 1:3 clearly says that everything was created, not arranged.

Thanks Phil

Never thought Bob was going to talk to me about this! jJust remember dear Christian folks, God tells us the truth in His Law. This video starts with the question "how would they [Israel] have thought" to interpret the Bible but I submit that this is the wrong starting point! Remember the commandments God gave to the Israelites (those whom Genesis was written for, right?) in Exodus 20... 8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: 10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Here God explains that the creation account WAS about material stuff, He told His people in Exodus 20 how long it took Him and what He made. Start there, then read the Bible, you're left with believing genuinely that the earth is 6000ish years old. As for the origins of evolutionary thought, it wasn't Darwin. Charles Lyell is the man who influenced Darwin and he wrote about his desire to "free the science from Moses" with his evolutionary thinking. The doctrines of evolution begins with an anti-biblical perspective. I'll leave these two origins stories with you (the one of God's testimony of His creation and the one of man's desire to remove God from their world), and let you dear Christian decide which is a doctrine of God, and which is a doctrine of the devil.

God created Adam & Eve as fully mature humans, without having to have gone through all the stages of life (fetus, infant, toddler, …. late adulthood) that subsequent generations since then had to go through. Likewise God created the Universe, including the lifeforms therein, in a fully mature state, without having to have gone through evolution. The Earth is a little over 6,000 years old. The fallacy of evolution is that it makes the assumption that reverse engineering can be used for gauging the age of the Earth.

The earth is clearly more than 6000 years old. I'm not saying it's impossible for God to have created it 6000 years ago, but if he did he also built creation backwards in time as he was building it forwards in time, creating billions of years of history prior to the beginning of the universe.

Kind of feel like this could also be called “How to talk around truth, so you can still fit in with your secular friends.”

Order from chaos may explain an ancient mindset. But the speaker avoids discussing whether man is a unique creation of God or a product of evolution.

Great video! Well Holy Post, get ready for the AiG response that you have “compromised.”

I think we have more important things to worry about like the salvation of souls

Great video! Keep em coming!!

I love it. God is order not chaos. As followers we need to love order and bring it.