The Great Contention

If you want to see a bunch of allies start treating each other like enemies, simply get some Christians together and ask: "How old is the earth?"

On this topic, the difference of opinion between Christians runs so deep that it sparks passions similar to those between Christians and atheists. Witnessing an intramural debate about it for the first time is eye-opening, for it brings out the worst in people and illuminates more about human nature than it does about the actual subject.

At the crux of the matter is a divide between two schools of thought that are colloquially known as Old Earth Creationism and Young Earth Creationism.

Old Earth Creationists generally believe that Earth and the universe are billions of years old. The number may differ depending on how a person interprets evidence and how much stock he puts in various kinds of analysis; but either way, most OEC'ers hold that Earth is in the neighborhood of 4 to 5 billion years old, and that the universe is 13 to 16 billion years old.

On the other hand, Young Earth Creationists generally believe that Earth and the universe were formed at the same time (or approximately the same time) and are only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. Some accept the possibility of everything being a little older -- a few say Creation could have occurred up to 50,000 years ago, and fewer still say up to 100,000 -- but they often find their voices drowned out even in their own caucus. A sizable majority of YEC'ers are in the 6,000 to 10,000 camp; and even within that camp, the number of people proclaiming a six thousand year-old Earth far outstrips the number of people proclaiming seven, eight, nine, or ten thousand.

It must be stressed here, and stressed repeatedly, that Old Earth Creationists and Young Earth Creationists all believe in God and all believe the Bible is inerrant. They are all Christians. Their disagreement on this particular issue -- and on closely related ones, such as the extent of Noah's flood -- is based on things like how to interpret the words of Genesis in their original language, what the author of Genesis was trying to communicate to his immediate audience, etc.

Thrown inevitably into the mix is the question of how to interpret what we see in nature, namely mountains, oceans, forests, etc. "down here" and stars, planets, comets, etc. "out there."

There is nothing unholy about science, whether you are talking about astronomy to study stars, meteorology to study weather, geology to study rocks, or whatever. Psalm 19 says "the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands," so humans should study these things and should not be afraid of what they find.

Yet this is precisely where a fault line appears and divides people in ways it should not.

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If you are not religious, you almost certainly agree with OEC'ers on the age of the earth. After all, their viewpoint is consistent with what gets said in newspapers and magazines and what has been taught for years in schools.

If you are religious, you might be an OEC'er yourself. For the record, that is what I am. Really, the only thing separating us from most "secularists" on this issue is that we believe the universe was created by God, whereas they believe either that it has existed eternally or that it was created by something other than God.

Contrary to what many people assume, there is some evidence to support the Young Earth Creationist view, and it's too bad that it never gets a fair hearing in the mainstream media and never gets acknowledged in schools. The natural impulse of "the culture" is to simply ridicule anybody who entertains the possibility of a young earth, and as a result YEC'ers find a lot of ridicule coming their way.

As sure as night follows day, this ridicule has hardened many of them to the point that they instinctively use vinegar rather than honey when they address the topic. Is it not human nature to wonder why you should extend your hand to somebody who you think is going to chop it off? Can we really ask a person to play nice with somebody he expects to play dirty?

Having already said that I believe in an old earth while acknowledging that those who disagree do have evidence they can cite, I am not going to rehash the scientific battles here: Suffice it to say that I think YEC arguments sound good in isolation, but rarely hold up when exposed to OEC counterarguments. Both sides have non-kooky data they can cite, but I find the OEC data to be stronger, more voluminous, and less ideologically pigeonholed.

If you want to read the arguments over evidence, feel free to search the Internet and you will find more material than you'll ever have time to read. This topic is like the Kennedy assassination, in that whoever has the mic to himself will be able to sound convincing.

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Somewhere along the way, Young Earth Creationists' understandable desire to defend their intelligence crossed a line. It became strident, and from there it warped into something resembling a religion unto itself.

Most people who subscribe to YEC do not think it has "religion unto itself" significance, of course, but when it comes to those who regard it as being important enough to write and speak about in public forums, those who regard it as being important enough to be a major part of their ministry... well, most of them grant vastly outsize significance to the issue, and because it is they who bring the issue up, it is they who are the public face for their side. This is where the problem lies.

When pressed, leaders of the YEC movement will admit that a person's opinion about the age of the earth has nothing to do with salvation or faithfulness. But they usually say this after having gone off on a tirade in which their aggressive demeanor suggests that they do think it's a salvational issue.

What's more, even when conceding that the matter is not salvational, YEC leaders are quick to say it is nonetheless foundational -- that if you don't agree with them about the six creation days of Genesis being 24-hour increments, and if you therefore don't agree with them about the age of the earth being 6,000 to 10,000 years, your faith must be less than theirs because you begin your relationship with God by "not trusting in his word."

Any non-believers watching an OEC-YEC debate will be quick to notice that the YEC representative behaves the way people with the weaker argument typically behave. And more importantly, they will be even quicker to notice that the YEC rep behaves boorishly -- which puts Christianity in a bad light from which it's not easy to recover.

Worse, by consistently portraying themselves as the truer Christians, YEC leaders have managed to position themselves as the public face of Christianity at large. The mainstream media, ever hostile to the faith and ever eager to make Christians look bad, happily play along because they know that YEC being front and center is, so to speak, damaging to Christianity's brand.

Exhibit A in this debacle is Ken Ham, the 69-year-old Aussie transplant to Kentucky whose verbal fire and brimstone bring Elmer Gantry to mind. Part of me is pained to say the things I am about to say because I know they'll make it sound like I am flunking my own "We Should All Be Respectful" test. Another part of me is pained because I know people who think the world of Ham. But I have to call it as I see it, and I simply do not see him contributing anything positive to public discourse.

To be sure, Ken Ham's zest for defending the Bible is admirable and I wish it was more common. But his way of defending it is crass, combative, shallow, and sure to repel.

He interrupts people and talks over them instead of allowing them to finish making their point.

Not content to merely quote the Bible, he brings one onto the set and flaps it in the air, which looks silly when everybody on the other side is calmly and respectfully citing Scripture without gesticulating for effect.

He routinely makes his case not by making it, but by telling his perceived foes that they "don't know everything about ____" or that they "are accepting the atheists' worldview" or that they "are accommodating the evolutionists' arguments."

He plays the pugilist by scoffing when people give deference to what scholars of ancient Hebrew say about a certain translation of text -- never mind that ancient Hebrew was the original language, never mind that ancient Hebrews were the immediate and original audience, and never mind that Ham himself is quick to cite scholars of ancient Hebrew when it suits his purposes.

Keep in mind, this is how he treats fellow Christians, and he has by far the biggest profile of any Young Earth Creationist on the planet. Whenever the mainstream media or even Christian media want to get someone to speak for YEC, Ken Ham is who they call and he eagerly answers the bell.

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It is near-tragic that because of Ham's frequent appearances on TV and radio, and his Answers in Genesis web site getting powered to the fore of Internet search returns, and his high-profile opening of the immodestly named Creation Museum, the modifiers "YE" and "OE" have all but disappeared from the secular lexicon.

Ham gets all the attention whenever "Creationism" is a topic, and, largely because of that, many non-Christians now assume that YEC is all there is.

In reality, despite Christianity existing for 2,000 years -- and despite it being a direct offspring of Judaism, which had been around for more than 2,000 years before that -- it is only in the last six decades that Young Earth Creationism has become a major thing.

Like John Lennox explains in this speech, the Bible doesn't really say anything about the age of the earth or universe. The topic did come up a number of times over the ages because it is interesting but not because it is essential, and practically nobody -- including church fathers such as Augustine and Aquinas -- believed that the Bible spoke to the issue.

Yes, there were some claims that we would now ascribe to the YEC category. Such as in the 1650's, when Irish bishop James Ussher counted the genealogies backwards and vouched for a precise creation date of October 22, 4004 B.C. Or in the 1850's, when English naturalist Philip Gosse theorized that God made the world look older than it really is (for example, by creating fully grown trees right at the beginning rather than starting with seeds and saplings). Ellen White, co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, held what would now be called a YEC view.

But for the most part, the twentieth century began with most church people believing the earth was old rather than young and with there being no existential, church-wide fracas about it.

In a sermon in 1925, William Goodell Frost said  "the Bible tells us that God made the world, and the universe, and that he sustains it continually, but it does not tell us how he did it or how long was the process." The famous fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, best known for testifying for the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial, argued that Genesis does not declare a young earth because the relevant verses do not identify "24 hours" as being the meaning of the word we see translated as "day" in our Bibles (that word is the Hebrew yom, and it had multiple usages during antiquity that pertained to the passage of time).

Get some Hebrew linguistic experts together and, naturally enough, some will argue that yom in Genesis One was treated in a way that demonstrates a 24-hour definition was intended, while others will argue that yom in Genesis One was not treated in that way at all. You get the picture: They are the linguistics experts and they can't come to a consensus, so why should we draw daggers and claim to know the truth based on linguistics?

Unfortunately, however, drawing daggers is what we do. This is especially true on the young earth side, where a not-small number of adherents treat belief in YEC as a kind of litmus test for Christian authenticity. But human nature is human nature and I'm sure there are haughty OEC'ers out there as well.

The problem with drawing daggers over a non-salvational (dare I say unimportant?) issue is not merely that it's bad form. The problem is that it obstructs our ability to carry out the Great Commission, which is another way of saying it diminishes our faith. This is not a small matter.

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If you are reading this you are probably a Christian, which means you probably know what the Great Commission is. But if you don't, it is Christ's call to us -- his command, actually -- that we share the word about him with others and invite them to put their lives in his hands. This is discussed in all four gospels and also in the Book of Acts. Preceding references to the spreading of God's word are also found in the Old Testament books of Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, and Isaiah (and probably in other places as well, seeing as how I am no theologian). 

People are watching. When they see us flailing at each other, why would they want to join our ranks? When they see us ripping each other apart, why should they believe us when we turn around and claim to be following a god who extends love unconditionally?

When they see us being so disagreeable over something so trivial, why should they believe that we have anything insightful to say about the salvation of their eternal soul?

With the media's proclivity to portray Young Earth Creationism as being representative of Christianity as a whole -- and YEC leaders' proclivity to loudly endorse that portrayal -- what are skeptics and undecideds supposed to think of Christianity when they see a Young Earth Creationist perform poorly in an "age of the earth" debate against a knowledgeable non-believer?

What are skeptics and undecideds supposed to think when Young Earth Creationists continuously change the subject and start talking about evolution, which is an entirely different topic?

It should not be difficult to discuss the (possible) age of the earth and universe amicably, respectfully, and rationally. It should not be difficult to do it without insulting the other person's intelligence, faithfulness, or honesty. Yet we rarely pull that off when the klieg lights are on.

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The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of 66 different books (73 if you're Catholic) written at different times in different eras by more than 30 different authors, some of whom may have been memorializing what was passed down orally from long before.... Many if not all of those books were divinely inspired, and/or divinely revealed, however they were not written by God... They were written by humans and for humans. They were rooted in the cultures in which those humans lived, the worldviews with which they were familiar, and the knowledge they possessed... Some of those books were written as historical accounts and others as laws or instructions. Others were written to transmit wisdom, or to give prophecy, or simply to express sentiments such as joy, sorrow, and wonder in the context of a divinely created world... None of those books were written in English or to a modern audience; instead they were written to Near Eastern Jews who lived at various times between 1,900 and 3,200 years ago, and who were expected to know what those books were talking about.

And all of those books need to be taken into account when thinking about a topic. For example, Creation is discussed not only in Genesis but also in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 1 Samuel, 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Nehemiah, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, Jonah, Zechariah, Malachi, Matthew, Mark, John, Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and Revelation (something you would never know from listening to Ken Ham). 

When we read the Bible without taking these things into account, we do it a disservice by hamstringing our ability to understand and appreciate it.

We need to take them into account, and we need to do so openly and honestly, which means we must be humble rather than hubristic when we talk. Is that really too much to ask?

If so many Christians keep acting like the age of the earth is the Great Contention, we will never be able to carry out the Great Commission. To impair ourselves that way would be a calamity, so let's not do it.