World View Dichotomy
With the growing successes of biblical creation ministries, a world view dichotomy is beginning to form: young earth creationism starting with the 6-day biblical account of origins and naturalism requiring billions of years of evolution. The dichotomy is becoming more clear as young earth creationists assert that belief in long ages is by default a part of the naturalism paradigm. The belief in biblically valid long age origin theories is common among Bible believing scientists who try to get along with God denying secular scientists.
The Bible is very clear about one thing, the wages of sin is death (Genesis 3:3, Romans 6:23, I Corinthians 15:56, James 1:15 to name but a few). Since the fossil record is a record of death, the fossils and rocks which contain them must have been formed after sin to agree with the Bible. So where could we put billions of years into the Bible and not violate this biblical truth?
The Bible does not tell us how long the earth was devoid and dark. Could the lifeless and unformed earth have existed for billions of years in God’s created universe. Yes, but why would a creator God need that time? Could each of the days of creation week be 100s of millions of years. Yes, as long as there was no death but why would God need that time? He only needed to speak to create (Genesis 1). We are not told how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden. Could they have lived there for millions or billions of years? Yes, but there was no death in Eden and therefore no fossils. At this point, it would seem that the Bible allows some wiggle room for billions of years to be inserted into the Bible. It doesn’t.
The dates in the Bible are not disputed from our modern day back to roughly Abraham. The first disagreement really starts with Noah’s Flood occurring around 4,600 years ago. Where could we place the 1 billion years (as dated by secular scientists) of rock containing dead life that Dr. Nelson wants inserted into the Bible? The years could only be placed between Adam and Eve leaving the garden and Noah’s Flood. But then, many global floods across millions of years would be required to create the layers we see in the fossil record. The Bible tells us there was a single global flood. So, we can’t put the time there either.
The naturalism paradigm is built on the idea of natural selection, chance and time causing goo to human evolution. Natural selection at its very core requires death. Therefore, death is required by any version of this the naturalism paradigm which completely contradicts the record of Creation in the Bible. The Bible tells us that life and humans were created before any death came to world. Naturalism tells us that humans are the result of billions of years of chance and death, from moment one!
Adding millions of years to the Bible violates the human lineages recorded in the Bible. Adding these long ages to the Bible further violates the concept of a 6-day Creation leading to the Sabbath, God speaking and fully formed things appearing and requires more than one global flood. This is a lot of biblical violation to accept just to get along with those that deny God and the Bible.