I'm a "Who Knows" Earther

 

What has been is remote and exceedingly mysterious. Who can discover it?

  Ecclesiastes 7:24

 

A man walks out to his front lawn and notices that his grass is wet.  He thinks to himself, “It must have rained recently” and then heads back inside.  He is fairly confident that this is the case, but does he have any way of knowing simply based on the wetness of his lawn that this condition was irrefutably caused by precipitation? We would have to say that the answer to this is No.  A wet lawn could be the result of rain but it could also be the result of a new sprinkler system that his wife had secretly installed for him as a father’s day gift.  It could be the result of a water-gun fight that took place between the neighboring kids.  The dampness might have been caused by a water-mane break that occurred half a mile up the road, his son deciding to wash their car with a hose or local firefighters using a nearby hydrant to put out a fire a couple of houses across the way.  The possibilities go on and on.

And on just the state of his lawn alone – without any external clues as to what may have been the true reason for the puddles in his driveway – he would have no way of discerning what really took place.  His lawn is wet but as to how it happened, he wouldn’t really be able to know.  He would only be left with speculation that he would likely base on his previous experiences to arrive at a “best guess” as it came to piecing together what had occurred.

The conundrum that this man faced is actually the same problem that faces all those who attempt to piece together natural history.  One sees certain things in the world and then wonders how it all came together to make it so that this phenomena came to be.  All the different branches of natural history have started with a philosopher or scientist of some kind setting forth an idea to explain how a certain aspect of the world came about. This proposal is always met by another who challenges his findings with a different idea. A dialectical struggle emerges - new theories are created that challenge old perspectives, innovative methodologies arise to challenge past paradigms. From this struggle arise schools of thought – as some side with the establishment old school while others join the emergent new school. And this rugby-like scrum eventually pushes the scientific community to a new consensus, but does it lead us any closer to being able to indutibly discern the distant past?

These perspectives are really just ideas that have won the socio-academic struggle but they remain heavily-hyped estimates. Educated guesses based on what people think seems right at the time and as such should not be given the same level of validity that one would give to a finding that had come about through experimentation and was able to be reproduced in a lab.  This basically rounds out my feelings of natural history as a whole – which is to say that it is really more of the scientific community’s best guess based on a mixture of new findings and whatever philosophical approach is in vogue at that time. And should be regarded as such rather than being thought of as a proven fact that is beyond reproach.

Up until this point one who may have read what I have written in previous entries - about how I think that we have no reason to believe that the 6 creation days in Genesis 1 are equivalent to our days as we experience them on earth along with what I wrote about how the purposeful vagueness that God used in describing how He created plants, animals and people opens the door for the possibility of God using an intermediary material process as His means for creating life  - could possibly see me as either a Theistic Evolutionist or an Old-Earth Creationist.  The reason I think I may have been perceived this way is because the idea that the earth is billions of years old is so deeply embedded into our culture that for me to say that the Bible doesn’t really say how old the earth is (which I really do believe) perhaps could cause someone to think that I would accept an old earth by default.

Uniformitarianism

The main problem with this is that for the first 35 years of my life I was a young-earther and I was (and still am) well-versed in the logical jumps¹ that one has to make to ascribe an age to the earth at all.  This is evidenced in the field of Geology – which is divided into different camps that use different underlying assumptions to interpret what they see in the rocks.  The Old Earth camp was largely shaped by the thinking of Charles Lyell, who pioneered the idea of Uniformitarianism – which is the concept that the factors and processes that are observably at work in our present day are the key to understanding the past.  An adherent of Uniformitarianism would see the Grand Canyon as the result of processes that are currently in play today – namely that it was shaped by the gradual erosion of flowing rivers over millions of years.  And within this framework such a claim makes sense because we are able to observe today that rivers cause erosion at a very slow rate.

Why I Don’t Trust Radiometric Dating

Radiometric Dating is often posited as a validation of this approach, but I am not convinced that Radiometric Dating is reliable.  On the surface there seems to be something to it – one looks at the number of unstable “parent” isotopes (for example Uranium) within a rock and compares that with the number of stable “daughter” atoms (for example Lead) and then considers the time it takes for Uranium to decay into Lead alongside with the number of Lead atoms in the rock to project the rock’s age.

Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, however, critiques this method by stating “When a geologist tests a rock sample, he assumes all the daughter atoms were produced by the decay of the parent since the rock formed. So, if he knows the rate at which the parent decays, he can calculate how long it took for the daughter (measured in the rock today) to form.  But what if those assumptions are wrong?”

He goes on to state that the 3 assumptions that are made in Radiometric Dating are:

1) That the original number of unstable isotopes (in this case Uranium) as compared with stable atoms (in this case Lead) is able to be known.

2) The rate of change from an isotope into a stable atom has remained constant over time.

3) The daughter stable atoms were all produced by radioactive decay.

In short how does one know that when whatever mechanism occurred to create that rock took place, that it started with only Uranium isotopes and not with some mix of Uranium and Lead?  There is no way to know what the mixture was when the rock was originated and because this is the case Radiometric Dating doesn’t have the ability to tell us a conclusive age.  Do unstable isotopes decay into stable atoms?  Yes.  But can the starting ratio between Uranium and Lead be known for rocks that were formed a long time ago?  I would say No and would be suspicious of anyone who acted as if we could actually know that.

Catastrophism

The other camp would be the Catastrophists who believe that much of the geological record has been formed by Catastrophic events – things like floods or comet strikes.  A Catastrophist could perceive the Grand Canyon as being the result of a cataclysmic event that happened over a very short period of time (for a Christian catastrophist – Noah’s Flood) rather than taking millions of years to accomplish.

As I have read the literature of both of these camps I must admit that I believe both perspectives to be possible but neither to be conclusive.  The question to levy at the uniformitarianist is – how do you know that there haven’t been catastrophic events that shaped the geological record?  And the answer to this is always going to be the same – you can’t really know.  And when that same question is turned on the Catastrophist – how do you know that the Catastrophic events have impacted the geological record as much as you think they did?  The response will be that you also can’t really know by the rocks alone.

Young Earth Creationism

This matters in our discussion of how science integrates with Scripture in 2 ways.  First, I haven’t yet gotten a chance to examine the Young Earth Catastrophist Perspective – which is one that I profoundly respect and that may in fact be correct.  What is admirable about Young Earthers is that they start from Scripture and use the Word as their guide for interpreting the scientific data.  This will obviously keep one from embracing false doctrine and on that note, I confess that it causes me to deeply admire this camp.  I am very un-impressed by those within the Church who are willing to lay down the Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture for something as trivial as pop-geology.  

Let's be honest.  The Second Person of the Trinity - the very God of the universe - put on flesh so He could reveal Himself to the world.  This Eternal, Self-Existent Being allowed Himself to be brutally tortured on the Cross to make a way for sinful man to be restored into Communion with God.   He then rises from the dead and shows Himself to many witnesses and in so doing established a body of people who would face the world with a hope that there is more than just this life and that for those in Christ that death is merely a graduation ceremony into a fuller, more real relationship with our Creator.  This group of people suffered greatly to spread this message with many accepting scorn, persecution and in some cases death so that we could have the Holy Bible and then there are leaders in the Church who are willing to diminish it just because some geologists say so?  What level of sheep-like, group-thinking, lemming heart does it take for someone to throw something so precious away because of something so trivial?  I praise God for Ken Hamm and the Creation Museum.  Let the secular tech and media world say whatever they want about him.  Anybody who steps up and puts forth a defense of the truth is a friend of mine.

As far as I understand it, the Answers in Genesis team believe in a 6 day Creation week where the days are defined by how we experience time today on earth (24 hours per day).  They believe that plants, animals and people were supernaturally created by God apart from any kind of material process.  And pressing further into Genesis they see much of the Geological record as being understood through the worldwide flood of Genesis 6-9.  Whereas the Old Earth Creationists and the Theistic Evolutionists would likely view the different layers of rock in the earth as being formed slowly over time and the fossils in them records of the animals that were present on earth during different ages, young earthers see them as being different spacial/geographic regions of animals (a good explanation for this can be found here) being buried together during the catastrophe of the flood. 

In regards to what the AIG team believes I may have misrepresented them in some way and if I have please let me know so I can correct this but I also want to note that not all young earthers believe that the Flood was the only impetus for the fossil record – some have also noted that other catastrophes either before or after the flood could be the explanation for some of the fossil layers and as far as I understand it there isn’t entire agreement as to what degree the Flood impacted the geological record with some thinking it had a larger impact than others.

Some Thoughts about the Catastrophist Perspective

There are some interesting notes to a having a Catastrophist perspective on the geological record that sees it as being largely shaped by the Flood.  For starters this doesn't necessarily mean that one has to be a young-earther.  One could still believe in the Big Bang, in both an old universe and even an old earth and still hold this understanding of the fossil record.  If one were to do that you could see Genesis 1:1 as when the universe and earth were created and then see large swaths of time passing by and then God picking it back up in Genesis 1:2 for the start of the 6 24-hour earth days.  In this perspective the earth and the universe can be viewed as “old” but one would reject the dates from Radiometric Dating as a means of establishing the age of the different geological layers.  Since the fossils are the result of the Flood it would mean that they are relatively young layers on an old earth.

And strangely enough this perspective on the fossil record could actually be a better alternative for those who believe in evolution.  I say this because the way uniformitarianists view the different geological layers make it so that there are giant gaps in the fossil record that are a very big problem for evolution.  A problem so big in fact that many evolutionists refrain from speaking about the fossil record in an in-depth way (I talk about my critique of this in the Lost Glory of the Earth) and tend to give different arguments to base a belief in evolution off of (with the most common being an appeal to a biological family tree).  But if in fact the fossil record is the reflection of a cataclysmic event rather than a history of successive generations then the problem of the missing transitional forms is gone, and they don’t have to venture into things like punctuated equilibrium to try to explain all of the gaps. But while it makes sense to me that they would seek to adopt this approach, I would be shocked if this was adopted by the mainstream scientific community.  Charles Darwin formed his theory after reading Lyell so the idea that Lyell may have been wrong seems to go against the grain of how the theory of evolution itself “evolved” into what it is today.  So even though it would seem that an attempt to get past the gaps in the fossil record would be appealing to Darwinists, I would be thoroughly shocked if this ever became the mainstream evolutionist understanding of the geological record.

Integrating the Flood with Different Scientific Perspectives

The second way that the Catostrophism vs Uniformitarianism debate matters to our understanding of the integration between Scripture and science is the question of how the different scientific perspectives would understand a worldwide flood.  For me since neither approach can really be proven conclusively, I think it gives us the intellectual space to recognize that the Word of God is 100% true in saying that a massive flood that covered the entire earth actually did happen, while acknowledging that how that affected the geological record is up in the air.  I say this because even though there have been floods and landslides that have produced canyons we still are unable to know for sure what would happen in the case that the entire earth was covered in water.  Do I think that the flood affected the geological record.  Yes.  Do I know the degree to which it impacted it?  No.

As such in my view one can still hold a Uniformitarian perspective on the different layers of the geological record and believe in a global, earth-covering flood and do so because one can’t really know to what degree the flood may or may not have shook things up in the ground.  I say this because in the same way that we can’t confirm that uniformitarianism is true because we don’t know the role that catastrophic events may have played in shaping the ground so we also can’t know for sure the impact that a catastrophic event had on the geological record in a definitive way.

I feel that I have already explained the young earth perspective as it relates to the Flood, but I think there is a certain piece of explanation that would need explaining should one embrace a uniformitarian perspective of geology but still believe in the Flood.  I say this because old-earthers believe that the continents split apart long before the Flood occurred².  If that is true (who knows if it is or isn’t), then I think some explanation would be needed for us to understand how God was able to bring all of the animals on the earth to Noah’s Ark. 

The Flood from a Uniformitarianist Perspective

I think we would start a discussion like this by first realizing that we are dealing with God and that if He wants to do something then He is going to figure out a way to do it.  So regardless of if any of my explanations are satisfactory, at the end of the day He was able to gather a sample of every kind of animal in the entire world in some way or another because He is God and He is literally able to figure out how to do anything.

My first explanation would be that perhaps the uniformitarian geologists don’t have the picture perfectly pieced together.  For one who believes in the old-earth uniformitarian perspective maybe there was a gradual moving apart of the continents that took large swaths of time to accomplish but perhaps there was still a slight land bridge between the continents that linked them together that allowed the animals to migrate by land to get to Noah’s Ark.  These land bridges would have been pushed aside or finally split after the Flood and after the animals had repopulated these continents.

My second explanation is for the total uniformitarian who does not allow for the possibility of land bridges between the continents before the Flood.  This explanation requires some imagination on my part, but I think it’s within the realm of possibility.  It revolves around the idea of the pre-flood earth being more technologically advanced than we might think.  If in fact the continents were separated, then it’s possible that in the 1.5 to 2 thousand years that society had formed from Adam to Noah that men had learned how to create boats and were openly sailing the seas.  Some may think this far-fetched but we know that they had the technology to build a massive boat – see Noah’s Ark – and that men were living for large periods of time³.  So, imagine what it would be like if some of the great inventors of ages past (think Da Vinci and Edison) were able to live 800 years? Consider also what they could have done without any language barriers. We know that they had iron (Genesis 4:22) – which is a relatively advanced metal that would have enabled them to work with wood.  We also know that they were commanded to not eat meat (Genesis 1:29) but that there were people who kept livestock (Genesis 4:20).  There was also a strange dimension where angels and women were procreating and produced Nephilim that were a kind of hybrid between man and fallen angel that were incredibly strong (Genesis 6:4).

So, we are presented with a world that was very different from our own and that perhaps would have provided the ability for men to both create ships and travel between the continents.  Should that have occurred then the Lord could have caused the men to take some of the animals with them on their voyages back and forth and could have provided these animals for the Ark in that way.  Would these ships have survived the flood then?  The answer is that even if there were other boats other than the Ark that God was judging the world for its sin so He would have made sure that they wouldn’t have made it out of the Flood alive.  After the Flood the earth would have been populated both by man and animals via some kind of post-flood ice age that would have provided land bridges between the continents.

Like I said earlier, regardless of how well we are able to explain it at the end of the day we are dealing with God who is more than able to figure out a way to get what He wants done even if there are obstacles in His way.

〰🌍〰

So, in conclusion is the earth 6 thousand or 4 billion years old?  I don’t trust Radiometric dating and I don’t believe the Bible speaks to the definite age of the earth so where does that leave me?  How old is the earth really?  I have no idea.  I’m a Who-Knows-Earther.  I believe 100% of what Scripture says about the origin of the earth and the flood but I don’t know how long it took in earth time or to what degree the Flood affected the geological record.  I am content to not know but I will admit because I’ve put so much thought into this subject it will indeed be one of the first questions I ask Him when I see Him in Heaven.

 

Lord help us to be content with not having all the answers all the time and to trust Your Word completely.  Amen.

 

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¹ Young earthers are very honest about the assumptions they make when interpreting the geological record whereas old earthers generally aren’t.  This is likely due to the fact that the popular perspective at any given point in time never seems to have to explain itself like the opposition viewpoint does.  This makes sense when considered from a sociological perspective.  A lot of things must transpire in social circles for something to be accepted by the mainstream as “knowledge” and as such there is an uphill battle for anyone who would arise to challenge the established view.

² Conversely they used to not believe that they had split apart at all until about 40 years ago – now they believe that everything was joined together in a continent they call Pangaea.

³ The length of life for people before the Flood can be explained in 2 ways.  One could say that perhaps the atmosphere and conditions on the earth were different and more conducive to long life than they are now.  I’ve heard it said that it was possible that the earth was covered by a layer of water that resulted in a very different environment than our own.  This explanation works best I think within a young earth framework - which sees the possibility of a pre-flood world as being markedly different than our own - than in an old earth uniformitarian framework.  Alternatively, one could say that since man had so recently departed from the Presence of God in Eden that there was some kind of post-Eden residual life-force within man that kept him alive longer than we experience now.  If this was the case then one could say that God ended this by decree in Genesis 6:3.  So interestingly enough if one believes in a young earth that was supernaturally formed without any natural processes in play then they would believe that the abnormal length of life (at least as it seems to us) would be best explained by a natural explanation (different atmosphere/earth conditions) but conversely if one believes that God guided natural processes in forming the universe and animals then the length of life for those first 2 thousand years of Biblical history would be best explained by supernatural processes (something to do with the remnants of the Presence of God enhancing one’s lifespan).  It makes for an interesting observation. Which is that depending on the scientific framework that one is working with, that some explanations for departures from our common experience today may be natural and others supernatural.  Either explanation obviously is within the wheelhouse of God who can do anything in any way that He chooses. But its fascinating to me that those who believe in six 24 hour days with every act being completely supernatural in the first 2 chapters of Genesis have a natural explanation for the lifespan of pre-flood humanity whereas those who believe in six God-days that are undefinable by our current measure for a day where God used either material processes, supernaturally created or did some kind of hybrid of the two would give a supernatural explanation for the long lifespan.  To me it doesn’t really matter how or why people lived so long before the Flood – I know that they did because the Bible says they did.