Some understand these days as six consecutive 24-hour periods, a view known as young-earth creationism. Others read the same text and conclude that the word “day” (the Hebrew word yôm) represents longer periods of God’s creative activity. This approach is often called old-earth creationism.

Both perspectives begin with Scripture and seek to honor its authority. The difference lies in how each interprets the language and structure of the creation account, not in their commitment to God or his Word.

For Christians who wonder how scientific evidence for an ancient universe fits with a faithful reading of Genesis, old-earth creationism represents a historical understanding of God’s two revelations. It holds that God is both the Author of Scripture and the Creator of the natural world. Therefore, the two won’t ultimately contradict each other. God’s “two books”—the Bible and the created world—work together to reveal the same Creator.

Old-earth creationists recognize that while God’s two books are wholly reliable, human interpretations of both are not. Theology is our attempt to interpret Scripture; science is our attempt to interpret the natural world. No one has complete knowledge of either, and our assumptions can lead us astray. So when our theology and our science seem to conflict, old-earth creationists see that tension not as a reason to dismiss one or the other, but as a call from God to study both more carefully.

In the following sections, we’ll explore what old-earth creationists believe, how they interpret the creation days in Genesis, how their view compares to other creation perspectives, and why this discussion matters for Christians who want to take both the Bible and the evidence of nature seriously.

What Is Old-Earth Creationism?

Old-earth creationism is the view that God created the universe, Earth, and all life over long periods of time—billions rather than thousands of years.

Where it differs from young-earth creationism (YEC) is in timing. The old-earth creation view asserts that the “days” of Genesis are not 24 hours each, but rather long spans of God’s creative activity.

From an old-earth creationism perspective, scientific evidence for an ancient universe and Earth—including radiometric dating, geological records, expansion of the universe, and the light from distant stars and galaxies—is consistent with God’s creative work and with Scripture.

Current scientific measurements place the age of the universe at roughly 13.8 billion years and the age of the Earth at about 4.6 billion years.

This idea that the six creation days may not be six 24-hour periods has deep historical roots. Early Jewish and Christian thinkers, including Philo, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil, and Augustine, allowed for creation time periods other than 144 hours. This means the idea of long creation days is not a modern compromise with science. It predates modern science by more than a thousand years

What Do Old-Earth Creationists Believe?

Old-earth creationists like those at Reasons to Believe see the universe as ancient—billions of years old—yet shaped and designed by a personal, purposeful God. Their core convictions include that God reveals himself through both Scripture and the natural world (dual revelation); that the “days” of Genesis represent long, consecutive time periods (the day-age view); that God directly created new forms of life at key moments in Earth’s history; and that Adam and Eve were real, historical individuals from whom all humanity descends. We explore these more fully below.

Is Old-Earth Creationism Biblical?

How can we assess if old-earth creationism is biblical? For many, this is less a question of “Could God create in six days?” but “What does Genesis mean by ‘day’?”

This matters because our answer shapes whether Christians see science as a threat to their faith or as a witness to the same God who inspired Scripture.

The Hebrew word translated as day, yôm, has four literal definitions: part of the daylight hours, all the daylight hours, a 24-hour calendar day, or a long, finite time period. Old-earth creationists hold that the context of Genesis 1 supports the fourth meaning. (For a deeper look at what the Bible says about Earth’s age, see this blog post.)

Core Tenets of Old-Earth Creationism

If Scripture and creation truly speak in harmony, what does that look like in practice? Old-earth creationists ground their view in several core convictions:

Dual Revelation

Old-earth creationists hold to the historic Christian teaching, often called dual revelation, that God reveals himself through both Scripture and the natural world. Because both come from a God for whom it is impossible to lie (Hebrews 6:18), they work together in harmony. This is not a modern idea—the Belgic Confession (1561) describes creation as “a beautiful book” through which God makes himself known, alongside his written Word (drawn from Psalm 19:1–9 and Romans 1:20). Reasons to Believe (RTB), founded in 1986 by astrophysicist Hugh Ross, has been a leading voice for this view, showing how science and Scripture function as two independent witnesses that corroborate one another where they overlap.

A Universe Both Ancient and Faithful

Multiple independent lines of evidence, from astronomy to geology to nuclear physics, converge on the same picture: an ancient cosmos, roughly 13.8 billion years old, on an Earth about 4.6 billion years old. The prophet Jeremiah reminds us why we can trust these measurements: God made the laws that govern heaven and earth fixed and unchanging (Jeremiah 33:25). The constancy of natural laws over billions of years reflects the faithfulness of the God who set them in place.

Day-Age View

Why do we interpret the Genesis 1 creation days as consecutive long time periods?

One of the literal definitions for yôm (day) is a long, finite time period. The Hebrew words for evening (‘ereb) and morning (boqer) can likewise mean ending and beginning. The first six creation days all conclude with an “evening was, morning was” phrase—but the seventh day has no such marker. This implies God’s seventh day has not yet ended, a reading confirmed by both Psalm 95:11 and Hebrews 4:1–11, which state that we are still in God’s seventh day.

If the seventh day has lasted thousands of years at minimum, it is not a 24-hour day. The scientific evidence confirms this pattern. The fossil record documents the appearance of new species throughout Earth’s pre-human history, but no new species have appeared since humans arrived on the scene. This is exactly what we’d expect if God ceased his creation work on the seventh day, as Genesis 2 describes.

Genesis 1:27 says God created humans, male and female, during the sixth day. Genesis 2 details what happened within that day: God created Adam, placed him in Eden, had him tend the garden, observe all the animals, and name each one. Only after all this did God create Eve. When Adam first saw her, the word he spoke—happa’am—means “at long last.” Both the number of events and Adam’s own response suggest the sixth day, like the seventh, was far longer than 24 hours.

Some assert that the fourth of the ten commandments implies 24-hour creation days. However, the Bible addresses Sabbath periods of different durations.

Direct Creation

Old-earth creationists accept that species adapt within their kind—what scientists call microevolution. But they hold that natural processes alone cannot explain the sudden appearance of new, complex life-forms in the fossil record or the unique capacities of human beings. These transitions in the fossil record reflect moments of direct divine action, with God introducing new forms of life at different points in Earth’s history, consistent with the pattern presented in Genesis 1.

This view rejects macroevolution—the idea that all life descends from a single common ancestor through undirected processes. Instead, the complexity of living organisms, the fine-tuning of their systems, and the gaps in the fossil record point to a God who actively and purposefully created life throughout Earth’s long history.

Historical Adam and Eve

Old-earth creationists affirm that Adam and Eve were real, historical individuals specially created by God, from whom all human beings are descended. Adam was formed from the dust of the ground and given life when God breathed into him; Eve was created directly by God from Adam’s side.

This sets humanity apart from all other creatures and establishes humans as bearers of God’s image. Because Adam and Eve are historical, the doctrines that depend on them—the fall, original sin, and Christ’s redemption of a fallen humanity—stand on historical ground, not metaphor.

The Flood That Swept Humanity

According to the old-earth creationism view, the Genesis flood destroyed all humans outside the ark and their domesticated animals—but not the entire planet. It was worldwide in the sense that the whole world of ungodly people was wiped out (2 Peter 2:5). Noah and his family were the only survivors.

Regions not occupied by humans were not flooded. The Hebrew supports this reading. The word used throughout the flood account, eretz, often translated “earth,” can also mean “land” or “region.” The second most common word, ‘adama, refers to land inhabited or tilled by humans—which makes sense, since only land inhabited by humans can be damaged by human sin. In Genesis 8, haraba is used for the flooded land, a Hebrew word that never refers to the entirety of Earth’s land surface. The purpose of the flood was to rid the world of human wickedness and prevent humanity’s self-destruction. This reading affirms the authority of Scripture and the historicity of the flood while remaining consistent with evidence from geology, genetics, and archaeology.

Death Before the Fall

How could death exist before the rebellion in Eden? Paul tells us, “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people” (Romans 5:12). Of all Earth’s creatures, only humans sin. By saying death came to all people, rather than all life, Paul implies that microbial, plant, and animal death occurred before Adam and Eve.

Scripture reinforces this picture. Job describes a world where lions hunt and feed by God’s design (Job 38:39), and the psalmist says lions “seek their food from God” (Psalm 104:21). Animal death is not a punishment for human sin but part of the ecosystem God established. The scientific evidence agrees. The fossil record shows that animal death and extinction occurred long before modern humans appeared. The enormous abundance of biodeposits—coal, oil, natural gas, limestone, marble, gypsum—testifies to ages of life and death before humans were created.

A common concern is that death before the fall undermines the gospel. But this view preserves the doctrines that matter most: the uniqueness of humanity as God’s image-bearers, the reality of Adam’s fall, and the necessity of Christ’s redemptive work. Human death—spiritual separation from God—entered through Adam’s sin. That is the death Christ came to conquer.

Animal death before the fall does not undermine that promise. In this view, human spiritual death and separation from God are the direct results of Adam’s sin, while nonhuman death reflects the normal functioning of the natural world God made.

How Does Old-Earth Creationism Compare to Other Creation Views?

Other Creation Perspectives

The table below compares four widely discussed creation views. Two points of detail worth noting: Evolutionary creationism is sometimes called theistic evolution, but there is a distinction. Unlike some theistic evolutionists, evolutionary creationists hold that God directly intervened in miraculous ways to shape the universe, solar system, and Earth so it could support a great abundance and diversity of life.

Where evolutionary creationism parts company with old-earth creationism is on the question of life’s development: evolutionary creationism accepts macroevolution and common descent, while old-earth creationism holds that God directly created new forms of life at key points in history.

Intelligent design (ID) is not a creation model based on a particular reading of Genesis but an apologetic framework. It argues that features of the natural world—such as biological complexity and the fine-tuning of the universe—are best explained by an intelligent cause. Because ID does not specify the age of the earth or identify the Designer in biblical terms, Christians, Jews, Muslims, or even nontheists may affirm it. Many old-earth creationists draw on ID arguments as scientific support for the claim that life shows marks of purposeful design.

Popular Creation Views

What Unites Us in the Creation Conversation

Christians hold different views on creation, but old-earth creationism offers something distinctive: a reading of Genesis that takes the Hebrew text seriously and seeks alignment with what God has revealed through the natural world. It affirms that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) and that “through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3)—while also embracing the full weight of the evidence he left for us to find.

Thoughtful Christians reach different conclusions on these questions, and the conversation is worth having. But if the same God who authored Scripture also made the heavens and the earth, we should expect his two works to tell a consistent story. Old-earth creationism says they do.

The post Old-Earth Creationism: Is It Biblical? appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

Christians have asked these same questions for centuries. Some picture the Creator working within six literal 24-hour days; others see him creating through long but finite periods of time.

These aren’t arguments that should divide the family of faith. They’re the kind of conversations that happen when brothers and sisters in Christ ask together, “What might God be showing us here?”

Let’s explore what the Bible says about the creation days, what the Hebrew text reveals, and how what we see in nature echoes what we read in Scripture.

Were the Creation Days 24-Hour Days?

When we hear the word day, we think of sunrise to sunset or a 24-hour calendar day. So when Genesis says, “There was evening, and there was morning—the first day” (Genesis 1:5), it’s natural to assume God completed each day’s work within a 12- or 24-hour period.

But that isn’t the only way to read the Genesis creation account.

The story of creation isn’t confined to Genesis. It’s reflected across Scripture — in Job, Psalms, Isaiah, Hebrews, and many other books.

Each passage adds to our understanding of what God started “in the beginning.” Together they reveal the creation days as a story unfolding over time in perfect order and purpose.

Christians have long understood the “days” of biblical creation in different ways, including:

• The Calendar-Day View, which sees the six days of creation as six consecutive 24-hour days; each one part of a historical week followed by a Sabbath rest of 24 hours.
  
• The Framework View, which understands the creation week as a literary device or framework that groups creation events thematically rather than strictly chronologically.
  
• The Analogical-Day View, which sees the creation days as God’s workdays—periods of divine activity of unspecified duration that set the pattern for our own rhythm of work and rest.
  
• The Day-Age View, which understands each “day” in Genesis as a long but finite span of time. These days are chronological, sequential, and correspond to real periods in history, marking the unfolding of God’s creative work from the formation of the earth to the origin of humanity.

At Reasons to Believe, we hold that the day-age view best honors both what Scripture says and what God reveals through nature. Scripture and nature are God’s two books, written by the same hand and telling the same story.

How Long Were the Days of Creation?

At Reasons to Believe, we hold that the days of creation were not 24-hour calendar days but long, finite periods of time. The Hebrew word yôm has four literal meanings: a full 24-hour day, the daylight hours, part of the daylight hours, or a long but finite span of time.

Days 1–6 each had a definite “evening” and “morning”—a clear ending and beginning. But Scripture (Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4) tells us we are still living in day 7, God’s Sabbath rest. That’s why Genesis 2 attaches no “evening was, morning was” to the seventh day—it hasn’t ended yet. And because these days are not defined by Earth’s rotation, they need not be equal in length. Some may have lasted hundreds of millions of years.

What about that repeated phrase, “evening was, morning was”? In English it sounds like a clock—sunset, sunrise, done. But in Hebrew, the phrase can mark the completion of a creation phase rather than describe a 24-hour period. It signals an ending and a new beginning, not a tick on a calendar.

The Days of Creation in Genesis

Before there was a single sunrise on earth’s surface, there was the beginning described in Genesis 1:1. In those first moments, time, space, matter, and energy came into existence at God’s command, bringing forth the universe. Biblical Hebrew has no single word for “the universe.” Instead, it uses the phrase “the heavens and the earth”—found thirteen times in the Old Testament, and always meaning the whole of matter, energy, space, and time.

The Sun, the Moon, and the other planets in our solar system were already in existence before the creation narrative turns its focus to Earth.

In Genesis 1:2, the point of view shifts. We’re no longer looking at the universe from the outside—we’re on the surface of the early Earth, seeing what the Spirit of God sees as he hovers over the deep. Everything that follows in Genesis 1 unfolds from this vantage point.

Scripture describes that surface as “formless and empty,” wrapped in darkness and covered by water. Job 38:8–9 fills in the picture: God made the early Earth’s clouds a garment for the surface waters, wrapping them in thick darkness. And there, hovering over the deep, the Spirit of God begins the ordered work of shaping Earth and filling it with life.

From here, Genesis unfolds the story day by day. In the day-age view, each day represents a long but purposeful span of time — a distinct era in God’s creative plan. Let’s look at each one.

Day 1: Light Pierces the Darkness

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). With a word, darkness broke. Visible light reached Earth’s surface for the first time.

Earth’s early atmosphere was roughly 200 times thicker than today’s — dense enough to block all visible sunlight. Then a Mars-sized body struck the young Earth, stripping away most of that atmosphere and blasting debris into orbit that eventually formed the Moon. For the first time, sunlight broke through.

That light made life possible. RTB scholars read the Spirit’s hovering over the surface waters as showing that God created life on Earth at the very start of this first day.

Early photosynthetic life used that sunlight to produce oxygen, laying the groundwork for every complex creature that would follow.

Day 2: Waters Above and Waters Below

The description of day 2 is the briefest and most cryptic of the six, but Genesis doesn’t stand alone. Job—the oldest book in the Bible—devotes much of chapters 37 and 38 to the same event. There God describes establishing a water cycle on Earth: snow, hail, frost, rain, mist, and dew.

The result was a stable water cycle—liquid water moving from oceans, lakes, and rivers into the atmosphere and back again, distributing nutrients and shaping the land. Without this balance, Earth would be barren and dry, like Mars or Venus.

Day 3: Land Appears and Life Takes Root

At God’s command, the seas withdrew and continents rose to their appointed places. “And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear’” (Genesis 1:9).

The psalmist captures it vividly: “You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth” (Psalm 104:7–9).

Earth’s crust shifted and folded, mountains formed, valleys deepened, and continents found their place. Scientists call this plate tectonics—and geophysical research places the main burst of continental growth at roughly the time Genesis assigns to day 3.

Then God spoke again: “Let the land produce vegetation” (Genesis 1:11). The Hebrew word deshe covers all green vegetation, and Genesis breaks it into four components: seed, plant life, woody growth, and fruit. Life like this had existed in the oceans. Now it would spread across the newly formed land.

Skeptics once argued the fossil record placed ocean animals before land vegetation—the opposite of Genesis. But more recent fossil and isotope evidence has reversed that conclusion: land vegetation predates the first ocean animals by at least 600 million years.

Early photosynthetic vegetation transformed the atmosphere—drawing energy from sunlight, releasing oxygen, and preparing the air for creatures yet to come.

By the close of creation day 3, the world had contours and color. Waters had found their boundaries, the land its shape, and life had begun to flourish.

Day 4: Lights in the Sky

Like the first day, creation’s fourth day is a story of light—not its beginning, but its governance.

On day 1, light from the Sun and Moon pierced through Earth’s atmosphere. On day 4, the atmosphere shifted from translucent to transparent — from a thick haze to a clear sky where the Sun, Moon, and stars became visible as distinct objects for the first time.

From that point on, the celestial lights became timekeepers. Advanced animals would need these cosmic clocks to manage their migrations, life cycles, and daily rhythms.

Day 5: Life Fills the Waters and the Skies

At God’s word, the waters stirred with an explosion of life unlike anything before. The fossil record confirms it—the sudden, simultaneous appearance of entirely new and diverse forms of marine life.

Later, God created birds and sea mammals—creatures with what RTB scholars call “soulish” qualities: emotion, will, curiosity, attachment to their offspring, and the ability to bond with humans. RTB also holds that dinosaurs, though not named in Scripture, lived and died during day 5.

Extinction and new creation are part of God’s plan. As the psalmist writes: “All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. . . . when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground” (Psalm 104:27, 29b–30).

Day 6: The Crown of Creation

Genesis 1 is silent on when God created the first land mammals. Day 6 describes the arrival of three categories of advanced land mammals—the ones crucial for humans to launch and sustain civilization.

These three categories—small fur-bearing animals, large domesticated herd animals, and large carnivores that could be tamed—represent exactly the creatures humanity would need to build and sustain civilization.

Then came the crown of creation.

Day 6 holds such importance that Genesis 2 pauses to tell the story again in even greater detail:

Here we see the Creator’s closeness. God stooped to the dust and breathed.

Unlike any other creatures before them, humans were made to reflect God’s nature. Like God, humans are spiritual beings who reason, communicate, create, and recognize beauty. They are aware of a moral code, of grace, and of eternity. They were made to rule over what God entrusted to them.

Day 7: God Rested

And then, on creation day 7, came rest.

Day 7 is the only day without the phrase “There was evening and there was morning.” That’s no accident. Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4:1–11 tell us that God’s seventh day never ended — he is still resting from creation.

God’s rest was not marked by inactivity, but satisfaction—the pause of an Artist who delights in his finished work. He still upholds what he made—and he is doing the most important work of all: redeeming the people he created from sin and death.

The Sabbath principle runs through all seven days: God worked, then turned to what mattered most—redeeming the people he made. We are called to the same rhythm. Six days for the work of living; one day set apart to ask the deeper questions—who we need, who we are becoming, and what God made us to do.

Every step of creation, every word God spoke, fits within an order bigger than any clock can measure. When Scripture speaks of “days,” it isn’t binding the Almighty to our calendars—it’s revealing the rhythm of his work.

Creation Timeline

The diagram above traces God’s creative work from the universe’s first moment to the arrival of humanity. A few key markers:

No other ancient text on creation gets all the science correct.

Why Is a Biblical Timeline for Creation Important?

The creation timeline is ultimately about who made the world and why it matters that we get the story right.

Many readers assume “day” in Genesis can only mean 24 hours. But as we saw earlier, the Hebrew word yôm carries a range of literal meanings—including a long but finite span of time.

That range of meaning isn’t something scholars invented to reconcile Genesis with science—it was always there in the Hebrew. It’s a feature of the language Moses used, and it matters for how we read the whole account.

The verbs of Genesis matter too. Each one reveals something about how God worked—not just the sequence of events, but his manner: deliberate, patient, precise. A few of the most telling ones are worth pausing on:

Hebrew Creation Verbs in Genesis

Together, these verbs tell a story of power and patience—a God who creates, forms, and sustains with purpose.

That’s what gives this conversation weight. The biblical creation timeline doesn’t soften the tension between faith and science—it resolves it. When the Bible’s account of creation matches the world it describes—in sequence, in detail, in direction—that’s not coincidence. It’s confirmation that truth belongs to God, whether written in Scripture or traced in the stars.

Every detail, from galaxies to genomes, speaks of intention. Paul saw it clearly: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20).

Creation itself is God’s testimony. It has been speaking since the beginning.

The God Who Spoke Then Still Speaks Now

The God whose voice set that story in motion has not gone silent. He knows the names of over a hundred billion trillion stars (Psalm 147:4, Isaiah 40:26), numbers our days, and knows each of our names.

The creation account was always about more than sequence and timing. It was about who made the world, and what he intended for the creatures he placed in it.

The God who created everything from nothing is the same God who entered his creation to save it. The One who said, “Let there be light,” would later walk among us and declare, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

When we trace the timeline of creation, we don’t just see how long it took; we see the patience of God.

Designs in nature reflect the heart of a Designer who still holds all things together. He shapes galaxies and souls alike.

And his creative work continues—not in creating new kinds of life, but in transforming the people he made in his image. He saw his creation and called it good. He sees us and calls us his.

If the story of creation stirs new wonder in you, you’re not alone. Faith welcomes questions, not because it’s fragile, but because truth is strong enough to face them.

The same God who thoughtfully designed our world delights to reveal his truth to those who seek him: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings” (Proverbs 25:2).

So keep looking up. Keep reading. Keep asking.

The post What Are the Days of Creation? appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

For decades, scientists have wrestled with these questions. Many who look for purely natural explanations believe every living thing can be traced back to a single-celled organism, often called the “Last Universal Common Ancestor,” or LUCA. But this just creates another question: how did that first living cell even come into existence?

Figuring out how life on Earth began—specifically, how a barren planet became filled with microscopic life—isn’t just a point of scientific concern; it has huge implications for each person’s belief system. The evidence points in one of two directions. Either:

1. Life is the result of an unguided, natural process, 
2. Or, it was designed by a Creator.

Many people assume that science and the biblical account in Genesis are at odds. But are they? And do they have to be? Can Christian Scripture and origin-of-life research fit together?

At Reasons to Believe, we hold that both science and Scripture affirm that the origin of life on earth was the result of God’s creative work. To lay out the evidence for this view, we first need to clarify a few key questions:

• What exactly is life?
• What kind of life was first present on Earth?
• What does the latest origin-of-life research tell us?

A thoughtful Christian approach will seriously consider the viewpoints of non-Christian scientists and all relevant scientific facts. While much of the scientific community leans toward a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life on Earth, we’ll see that the evidence presents some major problems for this view. Instead, the history of life points powerfully toward purposeful design and, therefore, a Designer.

How Did Life Begin?

To understand how life began, we first need to agree on what life actually is. While that might sound simple, when we look at the details, it becomes a complex issue.

What Is Life?

Scientists have identified several key characteristics that all life on Earth shares. Life is:

• Organized: It has a defined structure.
• Chemically distinct: It’s different from its nonliving surroundings.
• Homeostatic: It maintains a stable internal balance.

In addition to these traits, living things also:

• Take in and use energy from their environment.
• Respond and adapt to their surroundings.
• Reproduce and experience small-scale changes, or microevolution.

Every living thing reproduces and evolves. Even if you don’t believe that all life evolved from a single common ancestor (macroevolution), it’s clear that all life changes in small ways in response to its environment (microevolution)..

What Does Life Need to Get Started?

For life to exist, it needs the right ingredients and environment. Think of it like building a house—you can’t just dump lumber, nails, and bricks on a lot and expect a home to appear. You need specific materials, a solid foundation, and a carefully ordered plan to bring it all together. In the same way, three of the most critical ingredients for most life on Earth are:

1. water
2. carbon dioxide
3. oxygen

More Than Just Water and Air

While water, CO₂, and oxygen are vital, they’re not the whole story. To build the complex organic compounds found in most or all living organisms, you need other essential elements. These include hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur–and, of course, carbon. Other elements like potassium, sodium, and calcium are also important, even if they’re not as abundant.

Abiogenesis: Can Life Arise from Non-Life?

For the first living cells to form, all these elements had to be present in the right amounts and under the right conditions. Many origin-of-life scientists believe that the presence of these key chemical elements provides all the means for the natural development of the first life on Earth. This theory—that life can evolve from nonliving, inorganic matter—is called abiogenesis.

But is it really that simple? Let’s look at what the fossil record tells us about the history of life on our planet.

When Did Life Begin on Earth?

Understanding the timeline of life’s origin can help us appreciate the complexity of Earth’s history. Scientists have uncovered remarkable evidence that reveals just how early—and suddenly—life appeared.

Timeline of Major Life Events

• ~4.566 billion years ago: Earth forms.
• ~4.5 billion years ago: The Moon forms.
• ~3.85 billion years ago: Isotopic evidence for life appears.
• ~3.8 billion years ago: Oceans become permanent, and a stable water cycle is established.
• ~3.5 billion years ago: Stromatolites and microfossils provide evidence of early microbial life.
• ~2.5 billion years ago: Cyanobacteria and other phototrophs contribute to the oxidation of Earth’s atmosphere.
• ~1.9 billion years ago: Microscopic eukaryotes (complex cells) appear.
• ~650 million years ago: Some scientists believe the first land plants arrive.
• ~543 million years ago: The Cambrian explosion occurs, introducing fish and shell-like invertebrates.
• ~444 million years ago: End-Ordovician extinction event occurs, eliminating an estimated 85% of marine species.
• ~372–359 million years ago: Late Devonian extinction events take place in multiple pulses, reshaping marine ecosystems.
• ~520 million years ago: Fossil land plant spores are discovered.
• ~425 million years ago: Vascular plant fossils appear.
• ~346 million years ago: The earliest terrestrial animal fossils are found.
• ~252 million years ago: End-Permian extinction event (“The Great Dying”), the most severe extinction in Earth’s history.
• ~230 million years ago: Dinosaurs emerge.
• ~201 million years ago: End-Triassic extinction event clears ecological space for dinosaur dominance.
• ~155 million years ago: The earliest winged birds appear.
• ~66 million years ago: End-Cretaceous extinction event occurs, most famously wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs.
• ~125 million years ago: The earliest mammal fossils are discovered.
• ~130,000 years ago: Modern humans emerge.

Findings highlight how the discovery of ancient fossils has perplexed origin-of-life researchers and cast doubt on classic evolutionary timelines. While 3.85 billion years of life history might sound like ample time for gradual evolution, the evidence tells a different story: life appears rapidly, stabilizes for long periods, and then new waves of life arise suddenly—often immediately following catastrophic extinction events.

From an old-earth creation perspective, this pattern reflects purposeful stages in Earth’s history, with ecosystems being reset and prepared for increasingly complex life, ultimately culminating in humanity. This progression aligns far more naturally with a biblical explanation of life’s origins than with older naturalistic models that require long, uninterrupted stretches of slow evolutionary change.

Where Did Life Begin?

Where life began on Earth is just as fascinating as when it began. The fossil record points to two especially significant locations: shorelines  and hydrothermal vents.

• Shorelines: Some of the oldest fossils on Earth are found along shorelines and shallow seas in the form of stromatolites.These layered bacterial mats show that microbial communities thrived in the planet’s primeval days and their global distribution reveals that early life was already surprisingly diverse.
• Hydrothermal Vents: Deep-sea vents provided a unique sanctuary for life sheltered from harsh surface conditions and asteroid bombardment. Microfossils in these environments show that complex biological activity was present around the same time as stromatolites.

Recent research highlights just how quickly and widely microbial communities spread, even in Earth’s most inhospitable conditions. As discussed in “What Does the Discovery of Earth’s Oldest Fossils Mean for Evolutionary Models?,” these findings challenge the timeline and expectations of naturalistic evolution, suggesting that the abrupt appearance and variety of early life on Earth isn’t easily explained by the classic models.

With so much evidence pointing to a rapid and global emergence of life, the question remains: how did such complex life begin so early?

How Scientists Study the Origin of Life

Beyond the puzzle of when life appeared, scientists are also trying to figure out how it appeared. A major focus of origin-of-life research is understanding how nonliving (prebiotic) compounds could have assembled  to form the first living cells.

To do this, researchers have developed a three-step experimental approach.

1. Proof of Principle: These experiments aim to demonstrate that a particular chemical or physical process could contribute to one of the steps needed to create life. It’s about showing what’s possible in a lab setting.
2. Mechanism Studies: Once a process is shown to be possible, researchers dive deeper. They study the specific mechanisms behind these chemical changes to understand exactly how they work.
3. Geochemical Relevance: This is the most critical step. Here, scientists try to determine if the processes they’ve demonstrated in the lab could have actually happened on early Earth. In effect, seeing if the processes still work when the lab conditions match the real-world conditions from billions of years ago.

So far, scientists have had success with the first two steps. They’ve identified reliable processes that could, in principle, generate the building blocks of life. They’ve also explored the mechanisms behind these processes.

But here’s the big question: Could any of these carefully controlled lab experiments have occurred naturally on the chaotic, early earth? While we can show that certain chemical reactions are possible, demonstrating that they are relevant to the origin of life on Earth is a much greater challenge.

The Primordial Soup Theory

You’ve probably heard the classic “primordial soup” explanation for how life began. It’s the story many of us learned in school. The idea is that life didn’t just appear all at once but developed through a step-by-step process.

According to this theory, the oceans of early Earth were like a warm, chemical-rich soup. In this primordial soup, simple organic compounds randomly bumped into each other, forming more and more complex molecules. Over vast stretches of time, these nonliving but organic compounds combined in just the right way to create the very first, simple, single-celled organism.

From this initial spark of life, the theory goes, LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor) eventually evolved. This is the single-celled organism from which all other life is thought to have descended.

Does the “Primordial Soup” Theory Hold Up to Science?

While the primordial soup idea is popular, scientists have run into major problems with it. These issues challenge whether this well-known story for how life began could have actually happened.

For example, the classic model assumes Earth’s early atmosphere was “reducing”—meaning rich in hydrogen-based gases that would have helped prebiotic compounds form. However, we now have strong evidence that the early atmosphere was neutral, full of water vapor, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. This type of atmosphere would have prevented many of the necessary organic compounds from ever forming.

The soup theory itself has other issues. Many of the chemical reactions needed to create the building blocks of life also produce byproducts. These extra chemicals could have stopped later reactions in their tracks or even destroyed the very compounds that had just been made.

Searching for Alternative Routes

Because of these challenges, scientists have proposed alternative theories for the origin of life on Earth.

• Extraterrestrial Delivery: Some suggest that comets or asteroids crashed into Earth, seeding it with the necessary compounds for life—a theory known as panspermia.
• Unique Environments: Others propose that life began in specific locations with unique energy sources, like volcanoes or deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These scenarios aim to find a plausible natural mechanism for creating prebiotic compounds.

The Problem of the Scientist in the Lab

A major hurdle for all origin-of-life experiments is researcher intervention. For a naturalistic origin of life to be plausible, the process must have happened in an unguided way , without any intelligent interference. Scientists trying to recreate these conditions have to prove their experiments could work on the chaotic, messy early earth.

However, researchers often don’t account for their own role. Simple things, like using purified chemicals, temperature control, or removing contaminating byproducts, are standard lab practice. But these actions represent a level of control and foresight that wouldn’t have existed in nature. This kind of tinkering couldn’t happen on early Earth without an intelligent designer.

In their quest to show how life could arise naturally, researchers guide the process toward a desired outcome and unwittingly play the role of a creator.

This leads us to an intriguing question: If creating even the simplest building blocks of a cell requires careful lab conditions and intelligent intervention, is it reasonable to think life began on Earth without a designer?

Why Is There Life on Earth?

After exploring all these scientific puzzles, what are we left with? How did life begin on Earth? While researchers have shown that certain chemical steps toward life are possible in a lab, they haven’t been able to show how these steps could happen in the real world without a scientist’s help. The gap between nonliving chemicals and a living cell remains huge.

The incredible complexity of even the simplest cell, the stunning diversity of the first fossils, and what we know about the hostile early earth all point toward a different conclusion. Both theistic and atheistic scientists acknowledge that complex life appeared suddenly and early in our planet’s history. This sudden arrival demands an explanation that goes beyond simple, unguided processes.

Science and Scripture in Harmony

At Reasons to Believe (RTB), we see overwhelming evidence for design in the history of life. The unexplained complexity and sudden diversity of the first living things point powerfully to God as the Creator. The answer to how life on Earth began seems to require an intentional, intelligent agent—much like origin-of-life experiments require an intelligent scientist.

We hold that the creation accounts in Genesis are historical and can be tested against the record of nature. Part of our testable creation model is to show Christians how the creation account fits with research on the early Earth and origins of life.

Far from contradicting the Bible, modern science gives us more reason to see the evidence for design all around us. Studying how life began actually gives us more reason to believe that God is the Creator and Sustainer of everything that lives.

The post How Did Life Begin on Earth? appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

There are many different interpretations of the Genesis flood account. Some anthropologists and historians view the flood of Noah as one of many flood myths from the ancient Near East—legends that may have been inspired by a real natural disaster or developed as part of ancient religious storytelling and ritual practice. Some Bible scholars interpret the flood as more of an allegory—filled with important theological themes of judgment, redemption, and covenant—but not necessarily history.

Many Christians, however, believe the flood was a real event and Noah a historical figure. And among this group there is debate about the extent of the flood—whether it was global (covering the whole planet) or local (covering a large but limited region).  

This article will provide an overview of flood views and Reasons to Believe’s (RTB’s) position (known as the universal view), with emphasis on scientific support. 

Let’s start with a review of this iconic Bible story.

Noah’s Ark in the Bible: The Genesis Flood Account

To say the people of Noah’s time were corrupt and violent is an understatement. The Hebrew words used to describe them paint a picture of absolute and total moral depravity. The taint of evil had infected the people’s animals, possessions, and even the land they occupied. As a result, God declared he would send a flood to wipe out humanity and cleanse the land.

In the Genesis story of Noah’s ark, Noah is introduced as a righteous man who walked faithfully with God. God warned Noah of the coming judgment and told him to build an ark to save himself, his family, and pairs of animal species (one pair of unclean animals and seven pairs of clean animals and birds). Noah, along with his wife, their three sons, and their three daughters-in-law, built the ark according to God’s instructions and stocked it with provisions.

Yet even as Noah built the ark in obedience to God, the people around him ignored his example of righteousness and refused to honor God—further evidence of the depravity of his time. In contrast, Genesis 7:8–9 states the animals came to Noah just as God commanded, ready to be taken aboard.

How Did God Flood the Earth?

Genesis describes rain and underground springs contributing to the deluging water:

Scientific research also suggests that melting ice and a surge of water in the Indian Ocean could have contributed to the floodwaters. More on this later.

How Long Did the Flood Last?

From the first day of rain to disembarkation, the flood of Noah lasted a little over one year. Genesis describes the event occurring in stages.

• In Noah’s 600th year, the flood began with rain for 40 days and nights (Genesis 7:11–12).
• The waters rose, covering mountains and killing all life outside the ark (Genesis 7:18–23).
• After 150 days, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat as the waters receded (Genesis 8:1–4).
• Seven and a half months later, Noah could see the tops of mountains (Genesis 8:5).
• After 40 more days, Noah released a raven and a dove to check for dry land. Eventually the dove returned with a fresh olive leaf and then later did not return at all (Genesis 8:6–12).
• About 375 days after the flood started, Noah saw that the ground was dry (Genesis 8:13).
• God instructed Noah to leave the ark with his family and the animals (Genesis 8:14–19).

After disembarking, Noah offered sacrifices to God. God blessed Noah and his family and commanded them to be fruitful and fill the earth, just as he had commanded Adam and Eve to do (Genesis 1:26–31). God also established a covenant with Noah and all living creatures, promising never again to destroy the earth with a flood. The rainbow is the symbol of this promise.

So, what purpose did the flood of Noah serve?

Why Did God Flood the Earth?

A common criticism of the flood story is that God’s wrathful judgment seems to contradict biblical claims that God is all-loving and all-merciful. Such critiques forget that God is also all-holy and all-just. Since God is loving and just in his nature, everything that God does is both loving and just—all of God’s attributes go together and cannot be separated from each other.

Sin violates justice and holiness—and God’s love necessitates violators be held accountable. Scripture emphasizes the seriousness and pervasiveness of sin. It infects human thoughts, actions, and words. And breaking just one of God’s commandments is like breaking them all (James 2:10). Without Jesus’s atoning sacrifice on the cross, no one could escape sin’s penalty.

All sins harm the perpetrator and others, but some sins cause deeper and more enduring harm. Moreover, sin’s effects can ripple outward—impacting families, communities, and even the creation entrusted to human care. Such was the case in Noah’s time. For that reason, the punishment God dealt Noah’s generation was just and purposeful.

If the flood’s purpose was to judge wicked people, then how big of a flood was necessary?

Was Noah’s Flood a Local or Global Flood?

As stated, many Christians believe the flood of Noah was a historical event, but they debate passionately over the extent of the flooding. This debate is relatively new in Christian history, beginning during the Enlightenment but greatly escalating to current levels over the last 100 years in the wake of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

Global Flood Views

In this view, the flood of Noah covered the entire planet, even up to the highest peaks. This interpretation usually goes hand-in-hand with young-earth creationism and places the time of the flood just a few thousand years ago (no more than 10,000) based on calculations drawn from the Genesis genealogies. Proponents often cite a global flood as the cause of most geological features (e.g., sedimentary layers, canyons, mountains, fossil deposits, etc.). Some also propose that the animals on the ark were representatives of their kind (e.g., cat kind, dog kind, etc.) and later diversified into the many species seen around Earth today.

The Local Flood Views

Also called the regional view, this interpretation suggests that the Genesis flood covered the entire Persian Gulf and the surrounding regions, including Mesopotamia, southern Arabia, coastal Iran, and possibly the lowlands of Egypt, Turkey, and the Levant (the area along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea—where Asia, Africa, and Europe meet). The event was huge and devastating, but certainly not global.

Proponents argue that the ancients did not view the world in global terms. So, it’s likely that when Genesis says the flood was “worldwide,” it’s referring to the region known to the original audience—that region would have been their whole world. This interpretation is consistent with other biblical passages (such as Genesis 41:56–42:2, 1 Kings 4:34, Acts 2:5, and Romans 1:8) where mentions of “the whole world” clearly do not mean the entire planet.

Universal Flood View

RTB’s position on the Genesis flood is called the universal view. It’s a variation of the local view. In this interpretation, the flood was “universal” in that it wiped out all humanity and associated animals, save those on Noah’s ark, without covering the globe. Put another way, the flood account focuses on a historical and theologically significant instance of God’s judgment of humanity. The geographic scope is not the central concern of the text.

Christians who hold differing views have written extensively on the biblical details of the flood accounts and how they should be interpreted. But here we will look at what science contributes to this hot topic.

The Flood Explained Through Science

Great care should be exercised when examining claims of scientific evidence for the flood of Noah.

Many dubious reports have circulated over the years. For example, a “boat-shaped” geological formation in Durupınar, Turkey, has been promoted as the remains and resting place of Noah’s ark. This and similar claims (such as finding wood or animal remains from the ark) have been met with strong skepticism and criticism from scientists and theologians.

What Scientific Evidence of Noah’s Flood Exists Today?

Excavations and research in the flood region have not yielded ironclad proof of flood deposits that match the Genesis account. Though the flood of Noah was a massive natural disaster, it was short-lived. RTB founder Hugh Ross points out, “Even a major flood of such a brief duration will not leave a deposit enduring and substantial enough to be indisputably identified by geologists many thousands of years later.”

Twentieth-century examples of major floods in the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys demonstrated this point. All geological and geographical evidence of these events was erased within decades.

There’s no scientific silver-bullet proof of Noah’s flood. Nevertheless, scientific fields like geology, geography, and climatology, as well as archaeology and anthropology, provide important insight into where and when a universal-but-not-global flood could have reasonably occurred.

Where Did the Flood of Noah Take Place?

Based on geographic descriptions in Genesis, Noah’s ark was likely floating in a region of the Persian Gulf or Mesopotamian Plain. From this position, the surrounding highlands of Arabia and Persia, which are less than 500 meters in elevation, would have been too far away to see from the ark. It would appear to Noah and his family that the floodwaters covered everything from horizon to horizon.

Genesis suggests that humanity did not disperse around the globe until after the flood and the attempt to build the tower of Babel (Genesis 11). Research into early human migration fits with this biblical description. The best scientific data from archaeology, anthropology, and genetics puts humans in Europe, far-east Asia, and Australia at roughly the same time—implying an “aggressive, nearly simultaneous scattering” that matches the post-Babel dispersion described in Genesis.

When Was the Flood of Noah?

Hugh Ross asserts, “It is not possible to assign an accurate date for Noah’s flood. However, a reasonable estimate can be assigned to the event.” Global flood proponents usually argue that the flood could have happened roughly around 5000 BC. Some who take the local view estimate a range of 7,000–13,000 years ago. RTB suggests a local-but-universal flood could have been possible if it took place during the last ice age, roughly 50,000–40,000 years ago, when humanity had not yet migrated much beyond the warm, lowland areas of eastern Africa, the Near and Middle East, and possibly the Persian Gulf region.

During the last ice age, temperature fluctuations caused ice sheets to undergo freezing and melting cycles. In response to these cycles, human settlements would have expanded and contracted, leading people to retreat to warmer, low-lying regions when ice formed. Melting ice, combined with copious rain plus water from underground springs (which were plentiful in the Persian Gulf and surrounding regions), would have been a perfect source for widespread flooding. A possible surge of sea water from the Indian Ocean could have also contributed to the deluge.

Is There Scientific Evidence for a Global Flood?

Geology is especially helpful in evaluating the global and local views of Noah’s flood. Relevant data includes things like sedimentary layers, fossils (e.g., the order in which they’re found in the layers), tectonic plate movements, and erosion patterns.

A flood of global proportions would have left behind distinct geological markers, such as rapid deposition of all sedimentary layers (with little-to-no igneous mixing) and wide-spread mixing of fossils from different geological periods. And, as stated, the global flood view includes the claim that the Genesis flood catastrophe, rather than long-term gradual processes, was responsible for shaping Earth’s physical geography. But the data simply does not support a global flood.

• Geological evidence shows clear signs of gradual deposition over millions of years, such as distinct layers with varying fossils, ripple marks, and mud cracks, which indicate periods of drying between layers.
• The order of fossils in the geologic column (simpler organisms at the bottom, more complex organisms at the top) is largely consistent. Anomalies in the fossil record are better explained as localized phenomena in special circumstances, not because of a global flood.
• The formation of coal, oil, and diamonds takes millions of years under specific heat and pressure conditions, which a flood cannot create.
• Plate tectonics involves movements at rates of only a few centimeters per year. Tectonic uplift also best explains the presence of marine fossils on mountains.
• Major erosional features, such as the Grand Canyon, display complex layering, with evidence of long periods of erosion and river activity. Though floods can carve large landscapes, these are localized events, not global.
• Beyond all this, numerous dating techniques demonstrate that the geological data around the world formed over a wide variety of times spanning millions and billions of years.

Hugh sums it up: “The overwhelming consensus among geologists is that there is no evidence to support the occurrence of a global flood.”

Does Earth Have Enough Water to Cover the Planet?

Another major problem for the global view is the source of the floodwaters. Though the planet surface is 71% water, Earth has less than a quarter of the water needed to cover the entire planet, including Mount Everest. Overcoming this problem often requires global flood advocates to propose or accept implausible claims.

One such claim is that Earth’s crust was completely flat at the beginning of the flood and then experienced massive uplift during the flood to generate all the mountain ranges we know today. RTB scholar Jeff Zweerink and Scholar Community member Kirby Hansen observe that this uplift proposal is unrealistic:

Accepting a global flood would require implausible claims, such as water being hidden or that significant topographic changes are not detectable. It’s more prudent to view the flood as a universal judgment for humanity, but not global in extent.

What Is the Meaning Behind Noah’s Ark?

Hebrews 11 and 2 Peter 2 describe Noah as a prophet and preacher to his generation—and to all who read his story—who warned of sin’s consequences and called people to repent.

The ark served not only as a rescue vessel for Noah and his family but also as a means for Noah to fulfill his role as a prophet. The conspicuous act of the ark’s construction and Noah’s constant presence were part of God’s warning strategy, providing a visual and practical message to those around him.

What It Means for the Bible

A universal-but-not-global flood allows Christians to view Genesis 6–11 as historical accounts, rather than as purely mythical or allegorical. It also removes a common objection—the implausibility of a global flood—that skeptics raise about the Bible’s reliability.

But more than anything, Hugh notes, “The doctrine of God’s judgment is a much more crucial doctrine than the extent of the flood. We need to put the interpretation of the geography of the flood in the context of that more significant doctrine.”

What It Means for People Today

Far from a storybook fable, the flood of Noah is a sobering warning of the ultimate judgment to come. And yet the ark itself serves as a picture of hope and salvation. Yes, God will judge the sins of the world—but he has also graciously provided a path of redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If the flood foreshadows judgment, then the ark foreshadows victory over sin and death.

Dig Deeper

We only skimmed the surface here. For even more biblical details and scientific evidence behind Noah’s flood, grab your copy of Noah’s Flood Revisited by Hugh Ross.

The post The Flood of Noah: What Does Science Say? appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

As Christians, we can expect that what we see in nature (God’s creation) will be in harmony with what we read in Scripture (God’s Word; Psalm 19:1–4, Psalm 19:7, Romans 1:20). So why is there such a vast difference in beliefs about the age of the earth? Let’s explore what the Bible and science have to say on the topic.

Is the Bible a Reliable Source for the Age of the Earth?

While Genesis 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” it doesn’t say when this monumental event took place. Fortunately, to help us understand his creation, God has revealed himself to us in two significant ways:

1. Special Revelation: The Bible

The Bible is God’s Word, given through the Holy Spirit—guiding human authors so that Scripture reflects both divine truth and human style. Inerrant in its original writings, it is authoritative in all it affirms and, when rightly interpreted, never contradicts the truths revealed in nature. Scripture reveals God’s character, creation, and saving will in Christ, and provides wise guidance for the issues we face in daily life.

2. General Revelation: Nature

In addition to God’s Word, we have the privilege of witnessing his amazing power, creativity, and meticulous order revealed to us in nature. The natural world reflects God’s glory and allows us to understand more about him, including his character attributes (Romans 1:20). Nature stands as evidence of a creator, similar to how a painting in an art gallery is evidence of an artist.

When we consider the age of the earth from a Christian perspective, it’s important to take both of these revelations seriously. Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Psalm 19:4 says of the heavens, “Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” Psalm 19:4 says, “The law of the LORD is perfect, restoring the soul.”

These verses, among others, remind us that we can trust both Scripture and nature to discover more about God and his creation, including the earth’s age.

These two forms of revelation—the Bible and creation—can be understood through the “two-books” metaphor. God is the author of both the book of Scripture and the “book” of nature. Through these two sources, we can learn about the power, character, and works of God.

What If the Physical Universe Seems in Conflict with the Bible?

The Christian worldview holds that all truth comes from God. However, conflicts and confusion can arise when there seems to be a disconnect between God’s two books (Scripture and nature). It’s especially common for Christians to sense this disconnect when thinking about the age of the earth.

It’s important to keep in mind that neither of these “books” singularly addresses every detail of life. For example, we can’t observe the human soul scientifically, but we can read about it in Scripture.

Similarly, the Bible doesn’t explicitly say how old the earth is, mention bacteria, or describe galaxies—but we can learn of these things through science.

Each book—Scripture and nature—should encourage and inspire us to explore the other more deeply. It’s through proper examination of both sources that we come to a right understanding of God’s creation. Both books speak the truth because they come from the Source of all truth.

While holding Scripture as our ultimate authority, we can trust that studying the created realm will help us to make sense of our world. Though human interpretation may err, we can know that God’s Word and world are consistently reliable.

Let’s keep this in mind as we dig deeper into how old the earth is according to the Bible. First, let’s explore two prominent viewpoints—young earth and old earth.

Defining Young-Earth vs. Old-Earth Views

Two common creation viewpoints among Christians are young-earth creationism (YEC) and old earth-creationism (OEC). (Evolutionary creationism is another viewpoint that we explore in other articles.)

In general, YEC believes the earth is 6,000 to 10,000 years old and OEC believes the earth is 4.6 billion years old.

This major difference often leads to a lot of confusion and important questions. You might wonder if Christians have always held a young-earth perspective. It’s a common assumption, and it’s understandable to be concerned that an old-earth view might just be a modern attempt to make the Bible fit with science, particularly with evolutionary theories that exclude a creator.

However, Jewish and Christian leaders have been wrestling with the details of the Genesis 1 creation account for centuries.. Prominent figures like Philo (BC 13–AD 50), Clement of Alexandria (AD 150–215), Origen (185–254), and Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) noted how difficult it was to determine the true nature of the creation “days” in Genesis.

This long history of discussion brings us to the key questions that Christians are still asking today. These questions deserve careful thought as we seek to understand how old the earth is according to the Bible.

• Does the Bible actually demand a young-earth interpretation?
• How much time transpired between God creating the universe (Genesis 1:1) and God permitting visible light to reach Earth’s surface (Genesis 1:3).
• Why does Genesis use the words “day,” “evening,” and “morning” if the creation periods were longer than 24 hours?
• Why is there no closure of God’s seventh day?
• How much time transpired between God creating Adam and God creating Eve?
• Can’t we just add up the years in the biblical genealogies to figure out the age of the earth?
• If the earth is billions of years old, then does an old-earth view mean that biological evolution must have happened?
• Is the old-earth perspective simply a case of allowing science to trump the Bible?
• And what about death? Doesn’t an old-earth view mean God is responsible for animals dying years ago, long before humanity’s fall into sin?

These are the very questions we need to explore. As we dig into the details in the next section, we’ll unpack what Scripture says and see how the two books of God’s revelation—Scripture and nature—can help us find the answers.

How Old Is the Earth According to the Bible?

The Bible doesn’t give us an exact age for either the universe or Earth. It is important to recognize that God inspired the Bible authors to communicate to all generations of readers. Only during the last century or two have the actual ages of the universe and Earth become issues of interest for Bible readers, just like only during the past 180 years have Bible readers known or cared about dinosaurs, Neanderthals, or molecules. The Bible naturally is silent on issues for which only modern-day readers would have any knowledge. 

As a thought to consider, perhaps God didn’t specify details about atoms, molecules, or the ages of the universe and Earth in Scripture to encourage us to study his creation so that we might know him more.

Case for Old Earth Creationism

Does the Bible Demand a Young-Earth Interpretation?

Not at all. Not only does the Bible not demand we embrace young-earth creationism, a careful, literal reading of all the Bible’s creation texts refutes young-earth creationism. Here are three reasons that explain why a young-earth interpretation is inconsistent with a literal reading of all the Bible’s creation texts.

1. Original Language: Meaning of “Day,” “Evening,” “Morning”

One of the most helpful ways to understand Scripture is to consider the original context and language in which it was written. Let’s consider the word “day” in the Genesis 1 creation account in its original Hebrew.

The Hebrew word for day is yôm. It’s important to understand that nearly all biblical Hebrew nouns have literal definitions. Yôm has four distinct literal definitions:

1. The daylight hours (from sunrise to sundown)
2. Part of the daylight hours 
3. A 24-hour calendar day
4. A long stretch of time finite in duration

Three of these definitions are used in Genesis 1:3–2:4. In Genesis 1:3–5, yôm refers to the daylight hours. In Genesis 1:14, yôm refers to 24-hour calendar days. In Genesis 2:4, yôm refers to the duration of all God’s works of creation, clearly a time period much longer than 24 hours. So, yôm does not inherently imply only 24-hour time windows.

Genesis 1 appends the terms “evening was, morning was” to each of the first six creation days. The Hebrew words for evening and morning are ‘ereb and boqer, which can also be translated as “ending” and “beginning,” respectively. So, no matter which literal definitions of ‘ereb and boqer one chooses, the repeated use of the “evening was, morning was” phrase implies that each of the first six creation days are completed time periods. When it comes to God’s seventh creation day (Genesis 2:1-4), the “evening was, morning was” phrase is missing. This absence implies that God’s seventh day is not yet completed. Both Psalm 95:10–11 and Hebrews 4:1–11 explicitly state that we are still in God’s seventh day, a day that is continuing into the future.

What is God doing during his seventh day? He is resting/ceasing from his work of creation (Genesis 2:2–3) and bringing about his work of redemption (John 5:16–47). God’s time of resting/ceasing from his work of creation explains the fossil record enigma: why we see so much evidence for the appearance of new phyla, classes, orders, and families of life before the creation of the first humans (the six creation days) and no such evidence during the human era (the seventh day). God’s ongoing rest also explains why, unlike astronomers and geologists, field biologists and sociologists see no evidence for creation miracles in their research. Since their research is limited to when God has ceased from his creation work, evidence for creation miracles will be absent from their research findings. The ongoing nature of God’s seventh day establishes that the Genesis creation days must be much longer than 168 hours. An old-earth perspective definitely fits a literal interpretation of the days in Genesis.

2. Contextual Clues

We can also consider the contextual clues we see in Genesis 1 and 2, which describe the creation of Adam and Eve. Genesis 1:27 states that God created man, male and female, during the sixth creation day.

Genesis 2 states that God created Adam first, then later he created Eve and that Adam and Eve were the first humans. Genesis 2 further states that God created Adam outside the Garden of Eden, later placed him in Eden where Adam watched the trees in Eden grow. God then assigned to Adam the task of tending the garden. Anyone familiar with gardening knows that it takes considerable labor and time. Later, God assigned Adam the task of examining the different species of nephesh (soulish) animals in Eden and assigning appropriate names to the different species. Later, God observed that Adam was alone. Though Adam was experiencing diverse relationships with the soulish animals he had named, none were able to relate to him in a completely satisfying and fulfilling way. Then God put Adam into a deep sleep, took part of the man’s side, and made Eve from it. God brought Eve to Adam and Adam exclaimed happa ‘am. This Hebrew word’s most frequent translation is “at long last.” The sequence of events alone — Adam’s placement in Eden, the growth of the trees, the tending of the garden, the naming of the animals, and finally the creation of Eve — points to a sixth day far longer than 24 hours. Adam’s exclamation, best translated ‘at long last,’ fits that reading.

3. Events Before the First Creation Day

In biblical Hebrew verbs by themselves do not specify the duration of actions or the time ordering of actions. However, the verb order relative to the subject of the verb does. The verb order in Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 imply the completed nature of the creation of the universe and the completed nature of the formation of the primordial Earth. Thus, Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 imply an unspecified duration of time transpired between the creation of the universe and the formation of Earth and another unspecified duration of time transpired between the formation of Earth and the events of the first creation day. Thus, Genesis 1:1–3 allow for a lot of time, even billions of years, to transpire between God creating the universe (Genesis 1:1) and God transforming Earth’s atmosphere/clouds to permit visible light to reach Earth’s surface (Genesis 1:3, Job 38:8–9).

4. God Is Constant (and So Are the Laws of Nature)

One of God’s most beautiful promises is his constancy. He is always faithful, always all-knowing, always loving, and always just. He is not fickle like we humans are; we can rely on him to be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

God blessed us by designing his creation to reflect his constant character. In Jeremiah 33, God specifically addresses his faithfulness and the constant continuity he set forth in creation.

He compares his covenant with his people to his covenant with day and night and the fixed laws that govern heaven and earth:

“If I have not made my covenant with day and night and established the fixed laws of heaven and earth, then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant.”

The beauty of this passage is that we know that God’s covenants cannot and will not be broken. His promises to his people stand true.

This promise gives us confidence that we can study the creation around us and know it to be a reliable source of information about God. We don’t have to worry that the laws of nature that exist one day will be different the next.

We can trust that the processes and rules in place at the creation of the earth hold true today. This confidence allows us to use scientific means to understand the world around us and discover answers to questions like “How old is the earth?” As both young-earth and old-earth creationists acknowledge, if the laws of physics indeed are immutable (unchanging) then the ages of the universe and earth must be 13.8 and 4.6 billion years respectively.

Animal Death: Not a Problem Biblically or Scientifically

In Romans 5:12, Paul explains, “Sin entered the world through one man . . . and in this way death came to all people.” Some Christians take this to mean that no death of any kind existed on Earth until after Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit.

However, a closer look at this passage reveals that Adam’s sin brought death to all humans—not to all life. Only one species on Earth can experience sin, namely humans. Paul explicitly stated that Adam’s sin brought death to all people. In 1 Corinthians 15:20–22, Paul again clarifies that Adam’s sin brought death to all humans. 

And when we look at Job 38–41 and Psalm 104, we can see God’s relationship with animal death. These passages show that animal death does not ascribe evil or cruelty to God—it’s simply a part of his creation plan for which Job and the psalmist praise God. These passages declare that God provides prey for lions and ravens so that their young lack not for food. Field biology shows that removing carnivores from an ecosystem ultimately leads to more herbivore death, not less.

Can We Use Genealogies to Determine the Age of the Earth?

Genealogies provide us with details about biblical family lines and make important theological points, especially about whom God will bless and whom God will judge. They can help us understand the connections between multiple biblical characters, and they reveal God’s faithfulness as he fulfills his promises across generations.

Genealogies were primarily intended to relay important family relationships and don’t necessarily outline every generation in the family line.

For example, 1 Chronicles 24 and Ezra 7 outline the genealogy of Aaron. Though each account ends at a different point in the family line, you can see that a middle portion of the Chronicles genealogy is missing from the Ezra account.

Some people might be concerned about this apparent inconsistency, but we have to remember the intention behind the genealogy. Again, it wasn’t to show every single generation that existed in someone’s bloodline. A genealogy highlights prominent figures so that we, as readers of the Scripture, can gain a fuller understanding of God’s work in history and salvation.

Let’s take another Hebrew term into consideration: yalad. Yalad is typically translated as “begat” in our modern English Bibles. Most readers are quick to assume that begat means “bore this child” (i.e., “the parent begat/bore a child”).

However, yalad can be used in multiple ways. It sometimes outlines a direct parent-child relationship, but it also sometimes spans multiple generations—think a great-grandmother and her many great-grandchildren.

Ultimately, there are significant gaps in the genealogies that prevent us from outlining a complete family line. For these reasons, relying on biblical genealogies to determine when God created Adam and Eve or the age of the earth proves unreliable.

What About Biological  Evolution?

While old-earth creationism does hold that Earth is billions of years old, this view doesn’t necessarily imply that humans or animals originated via macroevolution. In fact, the topics of evolution and the age of the earth are separate issues entirely. A 4.6-billion-year-old Earth is far too young for any conceivable natural-process scenario to yield even the simplest living organism.

We at Reasons to Believe do not endorse macroevolution and are skeptical that it can account for either the origin or the history of life on Earth. Our creation view holds that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve who were specially created by God—Adam formed from the dust and given life through God’s breath (Genesis 2:7), and Eve fashioned from Adam’s side (Genesis 2:21–22). Through this unique creative act, humanity was endowed with the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27). In this way, RTB affirms the ex nihilo (out-of-nothing) creation of Adam and Eve. (If you’re curious how we can affirm an ancient earth that’s billions of years old while rejecting macroevolution, you might enjoy our scholars’ thorough explanation in Thinking About Evolution.)

Young-earth creationists believe there were no carnivores previous to Adam’s first sin. They also believe all land animals are descended from the several hundred animal pairs on board Noah’s ark. In each case, they invoke extremely rapid and aggressive “diversification” to explain all the carnivores and land animals existing today. The diversification rates their model requires are orders of magnitude faster than standard evolutionary theory proposes — a striking irony for a framework built on rejecting evolution.

Doesn’t Old-Earth Creationism Place Science as a Higher Authority Than Scripture?

Not at all—the role of science should be to support God’s Word and try to understand his creation. Scripture is, and must be, the ultimate authority in all that it addresses for all Christians. And as we’ve discussed throughout this post, there are many biblical reasons to believe the earth is old.

Scripture doesn’t give us a clear and simple answer to every question that life brings. When it doesn’t, we must examine the full message of the Bible as well as the creation around us to help make sense of what we’re trying to understand. It’s through the lens of the two books (the book of Scripture and the book of nature), both of which are perfectly inerrant, that we can come to a more thorough view and appreciation of God.

Charity in All Things

No matter what, we’ll always have brothers and sisters in Christ who have different views. This is true when it comes to the age of the earth, as well as other biblical teachings and beliefs. Despite holding differing views, we must always remember to prioritize charity in such discussions. Here, for example, is a charitable debate on the age of the earth between a young-earth creationist and an old-earth creationist.

Let’s not forget what we’re called to do in James 1:19b:

Everyone should be quick to listen, 
slow to speak, and slow to become angry.

Too often, discussions on the age of the earth become argumentative and unloving. But Christ has called us to listen attentively and respond with love—even to those we might strongly disagree with.

Continue Learning

As followers of Christ, let’s continue learning about God and loving one another well. May any conversation we have on the age of the earth according to the Bible remind us, ultimately, that God is the Creator of all things and is worthy of our praise and devotion.

To explore this topic in more depth, be sure to check out A Matter of Days, 2nd edition; Navigating Genesis; Rescuing Inerrancy by Hugh Ross.

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After your family opens some presents and enjoys a nice brunch, you head into the rest of your day. Stepping outside, the blistering 100^°F temps remind you of what people used to describe as summer, but Christmas in the year 2523 is a different time. The lawn is dry, the sun intense, and the air conditioning bills high. No, global warming is not the culprit. This is life without leap year! Don’t like this situation? Give it a few more centuries and Christmas will once again occur during the part of the year we in the northern hemisphere call winter. 

What Is a Year?
To understand why we need leap years, a little background on years and seasons is required. The cyclical nature of years (summer, fall, winter, spring) and the existence of seasons are not arbitrary or random. Rather, the motion of Earth around the Sun determines the length of the cycle—defined as a year—and the tilt of Earth’s axis determines the seasons. As shown in the figure below, Earth’s axis is tipped relative to the plane of Earth’s orbit. This means that as Earth moves around the Sun, the amount of sunlight received at a given location will change. When the North Pole points away from the Sun, the northern hemisphere experiences winter and the southern hemisphere summer. Conversely, when the North Pole points toward the Sun, the northern hemisphere experiences summer and the southern hemisphere winter. 

Figure 1: Earth’s positions as it revolves around the Sun, with seasonal dates and configurations.

We define a year as the time it takes for the Sun to return to the same spot in Earth’s sky, and we call this quantity a tropical year.¹ Although the precise length of a tropical year can vary by about 30 minutes, it averages 365.2422 days, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds. Since we only have 365 days in a calendar year, the calendar year will slowly drift out of phase with the tropical years at a rate of about 6 hours/year. Since the location of Earth in its orbit determines the season, when a calendar year only has 365 days, the seasons will slowly drift through the calendar. 

How Does Leap Year Work?
Throughout most of human history seasonal occurrences like the beginning of harvest and other natural agricultural-related events drove much of life, and different cultures adopted various approaches to keep the calendar years synced with the tropical year. It was a common occurrence that calendar years varied from year to year. For example, the Hebrew calendar had 12 months with a total of 354 days. To compensate for seasonal drift, a thirteenth lunar month was added every 2–3 years. Starting in 45 BC, Julius Caesar sought to remove any reason to modify the year since it was often done for political motivations. Caesar modified the Roman calendar so that each month had 30–31 days (except February) because a superstitious previous king thought months with even numbers were unlucky. Additionally, Caesar instituted a policy of adding one day to the calendar every four years, placing that day before March 1. Thus, the average year in a Julian calendar is 365.25 days, which is much closer to the average tropical year of 365.2422 days. 

This Julian calendar aligned with the tropical years quite well, but the average Julian year is slightly longer than the average tropical year. By the 1500s, the Julian calendar had drifted by ~10 days relative to the tropical year. Thus, in October 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the calendar that now bears his name. The most significant difference between the two is that the Gregorian calendar has only 97 leap years every 400 years but the Julian calendar has 100. With this change, the average Gregorian year is 365.2425 days, and the drift between the Gregorian calendar and tropical years is about 1 day every 3,000 years!

The rule for determining which years are leap years is this: 

According to the Gregorian calendar, which is the civil calendar in use today, years evenly divisible by 4 are leap years, with the exception of centurial years that are not evenly divisible by 400. Therefore, the years 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2100 are not leap years, but 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years.

Leap Year Reflects Order
I’ve always thought leap years were cool. Specifically, the year I finally had more birthdays than my mom (born on February 29) was memorable. And that’s something that most of her grandkids remembered as well! More importantly, the need for leap year reflects the incredible order in our universe. Think about it for a minute. Earth travels nearly 600 million miles each year in its orbit around the Sun, and that journey takes 525,948  +/- 15 minutes! And scientists can calculate those variations for each year by accounting for the gravitational influences of the Moon and other planets in the solar system. This knowledge allows us to adjust calendars accordingly. 

Scripture makes it clear that God has the power to create the universe, but it also reveals another attribute: God’s immutability. God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. If God were to withdraw his hand from upholding the universe, it would tumble into nonexistence. In other words, God’s immutability results in the universe behaving reliably because God sustains it at every place, all the time. In fact, God sustains the universe so reliably that we can describe its behavior using terms like the “laws of physics” and, for science to function properly, that reliability is an absolute necessity.

Endnotes

1. There are other ways to define a year, such as a sidereal year, which is the time it takes for Earth to complete one revolution of its orbit around the Sun. However, for calendar purposes, we’re most interested in aligning the seasons (primarily determined by equinoxes) so the tropical year is used to define the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

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Research has revealed, for example, that a strategically designed and strategically timed encounter with a smaller planet dispersed proto-Earth’s thick atmosphere and thousands-of-kilometers-deep ocean, increased the mass and density of proto-Earth, and resulted in the formation of Earth’s large moon.² The collision between (and consequent merger of) the two planets resulted in Earth’s possessing a large, hot, and dynamic core. This unique core gave rise to Earth’s Goldilocks crust. Earth’s crust is not too thick, nor is it too thin. It is just the right thickness to make possible a long history of life on its uppermost surface and, eventually, global human civilization.³ Now a team of geophysicists has discovered that Earth’s crust is just right for life in several other marvelous ways. 

A Clever Analytical Approach
While several mysteries concerning Earth’s crust remain, just days before Christmas 2023, a team of geophysicists led by Zhen-Jie Zhang published a breakthrough paper unveiling what researchers had previously considered undecipherable details about Earth’s outer shell of rock.⁴ Their work brought to light fresh insights that are already yielding dramatic new evidence for design.

Igneous rocks are the product of the cooling and solidification of magma, or lava. Igneous rocks comprise about 15% of Earth’s continents and nearly all of Earth’s oceanic crust. Basalts are the most widespread and abundant of Earth’s igneous rocks. Basalts come from Earth’s asthenosphere.

The asthenosphere is the layer that lies between Earth’s crust and mantle. It is thicker than Earth’s crust but much thinner than Earth’s mantle. Earth’s asthenosphere has an exceptionally low viscosity. Viscosity refers to resistance to stirring. For example, peanut butter is more viscous than syrup and syrup is more viscous than water. The low viscosity of Earth’s asthenosphere lowers the melting point of minerals, explaining why basalts in the asthenosphere are in liquid form and why basaltic rocks are so abundant in Earth’s crust.

Zhang’s team noted that data from various petrologists’ experiments revealed that oxides in basalt primary melts (basalts that have suffered little or no chemical alteration since cooling and solidifying from their molten form) are sensitive to the pressure of melting but show little or no sensitivity to the chemical compositions in either the asthenosphere or the upper mantle. They then explained how this property of basalt primary melts combined with measurements of oxides in the basalt primary melts could be used to determine the thickness of Earth’s lithosphere at the location and age of the basalt sample. (The lithosphere constitutes Earth’s crust plus that part of Earth’s upper mantle that does not move, relative to the crust.) 

So, Zhang and his colleagues then supervised a machine-learning algorithm to analyze global geo-databases (e.g., EarthChem and GEOROC) of basalts. By this means they were able to determine ongoing, cyclical variations in the thickness of Earth’s crust throughout the past 3.8 billion years. 

Three Discoveries Come to Light
First, Zhang’s team’s analysis revealed that a supercontinent forms as Earth’s crust thickens, and it breaks apart when Earth’s crust thins. At its thickest, Earth’s crust averages a depth of 140 kilometers, while at its thinnest, a depth of about 70 kilometers, on average. Zhang’s team also observed a slight trend: the minimum thickness becomes thinner with each succeeding supercontinent cycle. During the most recent cycle, the average crust thickness declined to 60 kilometers. At present, the average thickness is 72 kilometers. 

Second, the team’s study revealed that five supercontinent cycles have occurred during the past 3 billion years, with a periodicity that averages about 0.6 billion years, and that the duration of each supercontinent decreases with each progressive cycle, shortening from 0.50 billion years to 0.12 billion years (see figure). 

Figure: Supercontinents in Earth’s Past History
The bars indicate the varying durations of Earth’s supercontinents.
Data credit: Zhang et al.; Figure credit: Hugh Ross

Third, and most importantly, Zhang’s team established that there has never been a “stagnant lid” regime in Earth’s history—a time when the crust was a single stationary plate. Zhang and his colleagues determined that Earth’s crust has always consisted of multiple plates constantly moving relative to one another. In other words, during the entire time in which stable solid rock features have existed on Earth’s surface, plate tectonic activity has been ongoing. Plate tectonics has endured throughout the past 3.8 billion years. This research result thereby confirms the conclusions of a study, published in 2020, based on the buildup of argon isotopes in Earth’s atmosphere.⁵   

How Plate Tectonics Impact Life, and Vice Versa
What particularly caught my attention as I read the paper published by Zhang’s team is that the duration of plate tectonics on Earth appears identical to the duration of life on Earth. Both began at the same time and have continually persisted throughout the past 3.8 billion years.

This simultaneity is unsurprising when we recognize that life’s persistence on Earth requires sustained plate tectonic activity to recycle the nutrients life requires. At the same time, however, the persistence of plate tectonics at the level this recycling demands depends upon the existence of an abundance of iron- and sulfur-based anoxygenic photosynthetic life. These microbes play a crucial role in producing the black shales that facilitate the tectonic motion. 

Black shales are more buoyant than seafloor basalts. Black shales also contain high concentrations of heavy radioisotopes, especially uranium-235 and uranium-238. Radioisotope decay in the black shales generates heat. This heat combined with the shales’ greater buoyancy destabilizes the adjacent crust. This weakening facilitates the sliding of one tectonic plate past an adjacent plate or the sliding of one tectonic plate underneath an adjacent plate.

For advanced life to be possible, a long history of microbial life must precede it. For Earth’s surface environment to become chemically ready to support the flourishing of plants and animals requires at least 3 billion years of preparation by a huge abundance and diversity of microbial life. Even more time is required to permit the existence of human beings.⁶   

Thus, for humans to exist on Earth, life’s origin must have occurred no later than 3.8 billion years ago. Likewise, plate tectonics must have begun no later than 3.8 billion years ago, which means Earth must have cooled sufficiently from its merger with the rocky planet Theia⁷ no more recently than 3.8 billion years ago. This simultaneity and precise timing and design testifies of exquisite orchestration.

One More “Aha!”
Zhang and his colleagues add in the concluding paragraphs of their paper that “Earth was eventually primed for the arrival of a colorful Phanerozoic with the Cambrian explosion of metazoans.”⁸ In other words, the team noted that the sudden explosion of multiple animal phyla with intestinal tracts, circulatory systems, and complex internal and external organs—an event known as the Cambrian explosion—depended on a dramatic acceleration of the crustal thinning that initiated a supercontinent breakup. How so? 

The breakup of Gondwana generated massive landslides into the seas (the Great Unconformity), producing vast continental shelves that brought about the chemical transformation and oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere and seas. This relatively rapid sequence of events created for the first time in Earth’s history an environment fit for advanced life. Thus, it made possible the Avalon and Cambrian bursts of life just early enough to make way for the future existence of human beings. A more thorough explanation of these events and their meticulous orchestration can be found in Improbable Planet,⁹ Designed to the Core,¹⁰ and Rescuing Inerrancy.¹¹ Each new discovery points to the work of a supernatural, super-intelligent Creator who intended for us to be here and to recognize his handiwork.

Endnotes

1. Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2022), 207–220.
2. Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2016), 43–61.
3. Ross, Designed to the Core, 207–220.
4. Zhen-Jie Zhang et al., “Lithospheric Thickness Records Tectonic Evolution by Controlling Metamorphic Conditions,” Science Advances 9, no. 50 (December 15, 2023): id. eadi2134, doi:10.1126/sciadv.adi2134.
5. Meng Guo and Jun Korenaga, “Argon Constraints on the Early Growth of Felsic Continental Crust,” Science Advances 6, no. 21 (May 20, 2020): id. eaaqz6234, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz6234.
6. Ross, Improbable Planet, 119–142.
7. For details and documentation on the collision between proto-Earth and Theia, see Ross, Improbable Planet, chapter 5, pages 43–61.
8. Zhang et al., “Lithospheric Thickness Records,” page 8 of 13.
9. Ross, Improbable Planet, 143–197.
10. Ross, Designed to the Core, 183–223.
11. Hugh Ross, Rescuing Inerrancy: A Scientific Defense (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2023), 161–172.

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First Statement of Stage Setting
We know that Genesis 1:1–2 is stage setting—like arranging a stage before a play begins—for four reasons. First, the word “beginning” is not a title for the following account but God’s original creating act. Old Testament professor John Sailhamer noted it does not refer “to a point in time but to a period or duration of time which falls before a series of events.”¹ Second, the verbs in 1:1–2 are for stage-setting. Another Old Testament professor, John Collins notes that in typical Old Testament “discourse grammar,” the perfect tense (i.e., qatal verbs), such as bā·rā’ (בָּרָא) in 1:1, in the opening of a narrative describes an event that occurred prior to it.² Third, the refrain that begins each day—“and God said”—is in 1:3. Fourth, the waw consecutive that begins 1:3 moves the narrative forward.

There are four statements of stage setting. First, “In the beginning God created the heavens” (meaning the universe) “and the earth” (this planet). So, the first statement is that God created all things, all matter, all stars, galaxies, the solar system, everything.

By beginning with God we see God was already there in the beginning. The “beginning” in Genesis 1:1 is not the beginning of God but the beginning of creation, of us. God is the only One without a beginning. God, by definition, is the beginner. He is uncreated. Everything else is created. That makes God infinitely higher—transcendent—over everything else, including ourselves. This division between God and us can’t be erased. We will always be created beings and God will always be our uncreated Creator.

First Statement Refutes Myth, Materialism
When God first inspired Genesis 1, it was a bold statement that all things—the sky, seas, Sun, Moon, stars, etc.—were mere created things and not gods themselves. The pagans believed in a god-filled universe. The Egyptians, for example, sometimes worshipped the Sun. So here in Genesis we are told that the Sun is created; it isn’t a god. The Sun isn’t Apollo making his daily rounds in his chariot across the sky. The stars aren’t gods. Mercury isn’t the messenger of the gods. Venus isn’t the goddess of love and Mars isn’t the god of war. They’re all creations, like us. Except they’re just objects. We, however, have been created in the image of God. As theologian R. C. Sproul said, “Genesis is already demythologized.”

That God created the universe means that he created matter. There are two extreme errors people can fall into with regard to creation. First is materialism, the belief that matter is all there is. Popular science communicator Carl Sagan began his 1980 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage program by declaring that the cosmos—the material universe—“is all that is or was or ever will be.” That wasn’t a scientific statement because it’s not a claim he could prove. It was a statement of faith. It’s materialism and it tells us to live for money, for the stuff you can buy, for your body, what it can feel.

The second error is the pseudo-spirituality that matter doesn’t matter. Some people think that nothing “natural” is spiritual. The church has struggled with, and sometimes surrendered to, this problem since it was introduced into Greek culture in the ancient world. For nearly a millennium, the highest form of spirituality was seen in the monk or nun who fled from this world and sought God in secluded monasteries or convents. The idea was that truly spiritual people should escape from as many natural concerns as possible. Pseudo-spirituality holds that the spiritual and natural realms have no connection to each other, no Creator who made them both.

The Puritans didn’t believe that because they didn’t find such a separation in the Bible. Puritan pastor Increase Mather taught “the Works of God [i.e. nature] have a voice in them, as well as his Word.”³ Mather was president of Harvard and was the first person to write a book on comets. His son, Cotton Mather, also a Puritan pastor, was a pioneer in developing inoculations—he’s one of the fathers of vaccines.⁴ Biblical Christians are proscience because we believe God made nature and invites us to study and master it.

Three More Stage-Setting Statements
The second, third, and fourth scene-setting statements are contained, meaningfully, in fourteen Hebrew words in Genesis 1:2, after the seven in 1:1. That is, the purposeful numbers of words in the verses before “And God said” set them apart from the days that follow.

The second scene-setting statement (1:2) is “The earth was without form and void,” or “void and desolate.” It was disordered and uninhabited. Earth was not fit for living immediately after creation. To make it so, God worked on it. He made it.

There’s a distinction between two words we often confuse: creating and making. In verse 1, God created—out of nothing—everything. There’s a special word there in Hebrew for create: bā·rā’ (ברא). The Hebrew and English lexicon Brown-Driver-Briggs notes that bā·rā’ (ברא) is “always of divine activity.” In the Old Testament (OT), “create” (bā·rā’) is used exclusively with God as its subject. By contrast, “make” (‘ā·śāh, עָשָׂה) is not so specific.⁵ God is the only One who creates but humans can make. To “make” is to manufacture something out of preexisting material. Construction workers make a building out of wood, brick, glass, and other materials. A cook makes a meal out of rice, grain, meat, vegetables, water, etc. But only God can create out of nothing. In the beginning God created everything out of nothing and then started to make it fit for us. Exodus 20:11 describes God “making” the previously created world (“For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth. . .”), but not the initial creation of Genesis 1:1.

The third scene-setting statement (1:2), “And darkness was over the face of the deep,” implies that the earth was covered with water and, probably, had such thick clouds that light couldn’t penetrate. It was dark and watery.

The fourth scene-setting statement, concluding verse 2, “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” The verb here—hovering—is used in Deuteronomy 32:11, “Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters—or hovers—over its young . . .” It evokes the image of a hen brooding over her chicks. It suggests nurturing, care, attention. Nurturing, by definition, requires time. It is an activity transpiring over an unspecified length of time. In Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God is nurturing the earth. Now, the stage is set for the scene to begin. Earth is the stage for this divine drama.

Then day 1 starts in Genesis 1:3 with “and God said.” First, the phrase starts with a waw consecutive (which I discuss here, on pages 156–159). Weston Fields, in his seminal young-earth creationist book Unformed and Unfilled, labored to show that the waw disjunctive which begins 1:2 cannot allow for a gap.⁶ But, in so doing, he showed that the waw consecutive that begins 1:3 does allow that gap. Second, every day starts with this refrain. Consistency demands that day 1 starts in 1:3, not 1:1. So, the initial creation and the nurturing of the earth to prepare it for the six days happens before the first day.⁷ How long before? The text doesn’t say. Nevertheless, sound exegesis of Genesis 1—the biblical text alone—shows that it teaches that the earth was created and nurtured for an undisclosed time before day 1.

Endnotes

1. John Sailhamer, Genesis Unbound: A Provocative New Look at the Creation Account (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Books, 1996), 44.
2. C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4, A Linguistic, Literary and Theological Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006), 51.
3. Increase Mather, “The Latter Sign Discoursed of, in a Sermon Preached at the Lecture of Boston in New-England,” August 31, 1682, 22.
4. John B. Carpenter, “When Puritan Theology Helped Develop Immunology,” The Gospel Coalition, April 30, 2020.
5. Weston Fields, Unformed and Unfilled: A Critique of the Gap Theory (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1976), 81–83.
6. The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew and English Lexicon, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1979), 135, 793b.
7. For further exegesis establishing that Genesis 1:1–2 is the “scene setting” before the days start with “and God said,” see my essay “When Was Day One? An Exegetical Answer to the Key Issue with Young Earth Creationism,” in Sy Garte and Anikó Albert’s God and Nature online magazine (Fall 2023).

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The purpose of this two-part series is to show with proper, but nontechnical, exegesis what Genesis says about where we came from, without being guided in interpretation by science. The story of humanity, which begins in Genesis 1, is in harmony with science and dignifies human beings as creatures made in God’s image. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:1–3). First, we’ll explore the dominant myth of our culture.

A Dangerous Myth
Every culture likely has a creation story to explain where they came from and who they are. We normally think of myths as belonging to ancient, primitive cultures. But we have myths today also. When I lived in Ethiopia, the BBC World Service had a radio program (beamed into Africa) that asked its listeners to send in accounts of their native creation “myths.” So, I thought I’d send them one of the dominant myths of my native culture. Here’s what I wrote:

Once, an incredibly long time ago, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, but a speck of superdense matter. (Where the superdense matter came from is never explained in the myth.) Then, for some unexplained reason, it exploded. The material from this explosion spread out in all directions. Some of it, though, happened, by the work of Almighty Chance, to come together and form various bodies. Some of these bodies, again by the work of Almighty Chance, had the right composition to ignite into stars. Billions of these stars were created thus by Chance. Chance also fashioned planets, quite haphazardly, of course. Around one of Chance’s medium-sized stars was formed a medium-sized planet that just happened to have the right ingredients to cook up some water. Chance took a while stewing but finally out of the concoction sprung a set of randomly arranged chemicals that just happened to be able to replicate themselves. These chemicals, still stewing as if in a crockpot, were transformed, by the wonders of Chance, into cellular life which, in turn, through miracles no human mind could fathom, developed over eons into scientists to whom Chance randomly selected to be the bearers of this new myth.

This myth shapes our culture in profound and disastrous ways. The major problem with the myth is not how but who. Not how the universe came about—big bang, physics, whatever—but who caused it. My submission to the BBC was meant to mock the myth of Chance, not the mechanisms of nature. Christians too often want to argue about how it happened, but the real poison of the new secular myth is that it tells us our “creator” is chance only, and that we’re the ones—after billions of rolls of the dice—who finally got lucky. Accordingly, if enough monkeys dance on typewriters one of them will eventually write Hamlet.

People who buy into the myth of chance think we’re nothing more than animals that randomly developed complex brains rather than claws. They think that if it suits them, we can thin out the human herd by eliminating other “products” of chance who belong to a race they don’t like or that interfere with any lifestyle they want to enjoy. This myth produced the Holocaust, the “liquidation” of millions of people by the communists, and abortion clinics.

Genesis: A Better Story
Genesis 1 stands in opposition, not only to the ancient myths of constellations and planets being gods, but also to our secular, “sophisticated” myth of chance. Here we find about our origin. Rather than reducing human beings to the status of “naked ape,” Genesis 1 uplifts humanity. It tells us we’re much more than the lucky product of time and chance. But it simultaneously puts us in our place under God.

Genesis 1 begins by declaring that the universe had a beginning. Historically, many scientists didn’t believe that but now they do, especially in regard to the laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics shows that natural processes lead to homogeneity in a “closed system.” (Since the universe, by definition, is all matter/energy, then it is a closed system.) At present, matter and dark matter is concentrated in stars, galaxies, etc, and so the universe is not yet in thermodynamic equilibrium (the same temperature everywhere). It is moving toward that state. Further, there is no law for a decrease of entropy. Hence, there is no natural explanation for how the process from the universe’s original singularity state to the final state of thermodynamic equilibrium can be averted or reversed.

Hence, the universe is in the midst of a process from a beginning, in which there was little if no entropy, to an end, a final state of spatial homogeneity of matter/energy (which are forms of the same thing). It’s heading toward eventual “heat death.”

Thus, the second law tells us that matter and energy are not eternal; they were created. The first law says that the universe has no capacity to create matter and energy. Hence, the first cause cannot be part of the universe since it has no ability to create matter and energy. So, the universe is not eternal and cannot create itself. Therefore, there must be a Creator beyond the universe, by definition supernatural, by definition God. In this way, science confirms Genesis 1:1.

The Need for Careful Interpretation
For Christians, getting Genesis 1 right is vital. That’s why Hugh Ross wrote Navigating Genesis and why Reasons to Believe practices biblical scholarship alongside its science. Regrettably, not all Christians handle Genesis 1 rightly and some of those who mishandle it are the most vitriolic in their scorn for others. They typically are focused on the how of creation, not the who. They will scorn not just the god of Chance, as I did, but the theories about how the mechanisms of nature shaped the universe we know.

They do so because they make a simple, common mistake in interpreting Genesis 1. They assume that creation occurs on day one and that “in the beginning” and day one are the same; that Genesis 1:1 begins the seven days. But this interpretative mistake misses several clues in the first three verses of Genesis that would have been obvious to the original Hebrew-fluent readers. Some of those clues are hidden to us in the Hebrew language but some are obvious even in translation, namely the “and God said” refrain that signals when each day begins.

To show us who we are, Genesis 1 begins with stage setting, like arranging a stage before the play begins. It does this with particular vocabulary, notably “beginning,” a period of time prior to the main events. Genesis then gives us the verb “create,” bā·rā’ (בָּרָא) in 1:1 (importantly not “make” [‘ā·śāh, עָשָׂה] as in Exodus 20:11 referring to the days). Further stage setting occurs in the grammar and numerology (the seven Hebrew words in Genesis 1:1 and the fourteen words in 1:2) marking off Genesis 1:1–2 from the following narrative of the days. Then we see Genesis 1:3 beginning with the waw consecutive. Finally, the stage is set with the refrain “and God says” that marks the beginning of each day.

We’ll unpack these details in part 2. For now, it’s important to see that there’s a scientifically viable account of our origins that contrasts with the prevailing pessimistic cultural myth. This account of humanity’s origin—our true story—helps us to know ourselves as valuable creatures made in God’s image.

The post An Exposition of Genesis 1:1-3, Part 1: Replacing the Cultural Myth appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

I was with my family for a vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii. We happened upon an out-of-the-way swimming spot that was a natural pool free from waves because of the sand bars. We later learned from locals that sea turtles were attracted to this spot to feed due to the calm waters. As my family enjoyed a swim in the pool, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a large group of green sea turtles. We were of no concern to them as they munched algae off the rocks. They fed for well over an hour before swimming back to the open ocean. 

We could hardly believe what had happened.

Sea Turtles
The sea turtles found in Hawaii are green sea turtles. They are among seven species of sea turtles alive today that include: green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, olive ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and the flatback, which is found only in Australia.  

Sadly, all sea turtle species are endangered. If these animals are lost, not only would their absence result in the loss of beautiful and majestic creatures, but it would also harm ecosystems in the ocean organized around seagrass beds—part of the sea turtle diet.

Life scientists want to understand sea turtles to help them flourish. Part of this understanding involves learning about their natural history. Unfortunately, the fossil record is scant and offers little help. 

For this reason, the recent recovery of a fossilized carapace (shell) from the Chagres Formation of Panama by a research team from Colombia has generated excitement.¹ This formation dates to the Upper Miocene (11.5 to 5.3 million years ago). The newly discovered specimen is a member of the genus Leipochelys, which includes the Kemp’s ridley and olive ridley species. The carapace displays differences compared to extant members of Leipochelys, and may well represent an ancient species of sea turtle that no longer exists. 

Soft Tissue Finds
The Chagres Formation has also yielded fossil fish and cetaceans. These fossils are extremely well preserved. For this reason, the researchers decided to examine the carapace fossil for micro-anatomical features such as cells and blood vessels. 

Using EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) treatment, the researchers were able to remove the mineral component from a small piece of the fossil carapace.  

They could hardly believe what happened next.

They discovered preserved blood vessels, osteocytes, and collagen fibers. Some of the osteocytes have a small oval structure in their interiors that resembles the cell’s nucleus. And some of these oval structures stained when treated with a compound that detects DNA. 

Though not a first—the discovery of remnants of osteocytes and blood vessels, along with the possible preservation of DNA fragments, has been reported for only two dinosaur fossils—this find is still exciting. This turtle specimen gives researchers a window into the biodiversity that existed when the Isthmus of Panama formed about 3 million years ago. And it adds to the growing excitement about the potential of fossils to yield soft tissue remnants. 

Most paleontologists are thrilled at the prospects of retrieving soft tissue materials from fossil remains. These discoveries add another dimension to their understanding of the biology of Earth’s past life and the natural history of extant organisms. 

Soft Tissues in Fossils and Implications for the Age of the Earth
Most young-earth creationists (YECs) are also excited about the recovery of soft tissue remnants from fossil remains, but for a different reason. They argue that these discoveries are evidence that the fossil record can only be a few thousand years old—not millions of years. There’s no way that soft tissues and the biomolecules that comprise them could survive that long, they reason. If so, then it means the results of radiometric measurements must be flawed if they return an age date for fossils on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of years. They conclude that the best way to interpret the fossil record is that it’s the result of a global deluge that occurred a few thousand years ago. 

On the surface, this argument carries a bit of a punch. How can soft tissue materials survive for millions of years?

Means of Soft Tissue Preservation
As an old-earth creationist (OEC) who is persuaded that Earth is 4.5 billion years old and life has been present on Earth for nearly 4 billion years, this provocative question prompted me to write the book Dinosaur Blood and the Age of the Earth. It should be of no surprise that I demonstrate in the book that radiometric dating is reliable. The fossils yielding soft tissues are truly tens to hundreds of million years in age. Thus, there must be some means for soft tissue materials to endure. And there is. Before I describe the general mechanism for survival of these materials, it’s important to understand what’s been recovered from fossil remains. 

YECs give the impression that the soft tissue materials are not only original but intact and unaltered. This misrepresentation is unfortunate. Paleontologists have recovered remnants of soft tissue materials that have experienced diagenesis (physical and chemical changes that occur during the conversion of sediment to sedimentary rock) during the fossilization process. The remnants of cells and blood vessels discovered by paleontologists in the turtle carapace have retained their original physical shape, but during diagenesis they’ve been chemically altered—with the breakdown products of the original biomolecules still harbored in the cell-like and blood-vessel-like structures. 

YECs rightly argue that biomolecules (and the soft tissues that they form) readily undergo degradation by several distinct mechanisms. But life scientists have discovered several previously unrecognized protective mechanisms. These mechanisms extend the time that the diagenetically altered biomolecules survive. (For details of both types of mechanisms, see Dinosaur Blood and the Age of the Earth and the articles listed in the Resources section.) It’s a competition between degradation and preservation.

These protective mechanisms delay the complete disappearance of the biomolecules that form soft tissue structures long enough for them to be entombed by the mineralization process that occurs during fossilization. This entombment entraps any remaining organic materials. And, once entombed, the breakdown of these materials significantly slows down. In some instances, the degradation process might be altogether arrested. 

For this fossil, the race between disappearance and entombment appears to have been won by entombment for the biomolecules and microanatomical structures that made up the soft tissues of the fossil carapace. The researchers foresaw this victory because the carapace, along with other fossils from the Chagres Formation, are so well preserved. 

More Soft Tissue Protection from the Shell
The mineral components (hydroxyapatite) of the bone that contributes to the turtle’s shell structures offer protection from degradation. The mineral matrix surrounds osteocytes. These cells reside in spaces inside the bone called lacunae. These openings in the bone form when cells become trapped within the bone matrix that they help produce. (It is sort of like the person who paints themselves into a corner.) The blood vessels (which are remarkably durable structures designed to withstand high pressures as the heart pumps blood through them) that permeate the turtle shell bone are also protected by the mineral matrix during fossilization. In addition to hydroxyapatite, bone also contains the protein collagen. Collagen is a highly durable fibrous material. Like osteocytes and blood vessels, these tough protein fibers are protected from breakdown by their interactions with the hydroxyapatite of the matrix. 

The bottom line: There are good explanations for how collagen fragments, and the remnants of osteocytes, and blood vessels could endure for 5 to 10 million years in the fossil carapace. And with these explanations, no good reasons remain to think that soft tissue remnants evince a young Earth. It may be hard to believe what happened, but it looks like these majestic creatures were endowed with preservation properties that allow us to appreciate their design. 

Resources

Dinosaur Blood and the Age of the Earth by Fazale Rana (book)

Responding to Young-Earth Critics

“Does Dinosaur Tissue Challenge Evolutionary Timescales? A Response to Kevin Anderson, Part 1” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Does Dinosaur Tissue Challenge Evolutionary Timescales? A Response to Kevin Anderson, Part 2” by Fazale Rana (article)

Mechanism of Soft Tissue Preservation

“Soft Tissue Preservation Mechanism Stabilizes the Case for Earth’s Antiquity” by Fazale Rana (article)

“How Can DNA Survive for 75 Million Years? Implications for the Age of the Earth” by Fazale Rana (article)

Recovery of a Wide Range of Soft Tissue Materials in Fossils

“What Dinosaur Soft Tissue Says about the Earth’s Age” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Does the Recovery of Oils from a Fossilized Bird Evince a Young Earth?” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Ancient Mouse Fur Discovery with Mighty Implications” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Is Fossil-Associated Cholesterol a Biomarker for a Young Earth?” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Can Keratin in Feathers Survive for Millions of Years?” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Do Fossilized Ink Sacs Discolor the Case for an Old Earth?” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Science News Flash: An Old-Earth Perspective on Dinosaur Feathers Preserved in Amber” by Fazale Rana (article)

Detection of Carbon-14 in Fossils

“Does Radiocarbon Dating Prove a Young Earth? A Response to Vernon R. Cupps” by Fazale Rana (article)

Endnotes

1. Edwin-Alberto Cadena, Carlos De Gracia, and Diego A. Combita-Romero, “An Upper Miocene Marine Turtle from Panama that Preserves Osteocytes with Potential DNA,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 23, no.1 (September 28, 2023): e2254356, doi:10.1080/02724634.2023.2254356.

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