General Revelation, Six 24-hour-day Creation, and the Character of God

All my life I have been a six, 24 hour day, Creationist. I’ve been to both secular biology and astronomy college classes, and I’ve heard “creation science” speakers at different events. It never occurred to me that a literal interpretation of Scripture left any room for anything other than the 6 twenty-four hour creation point of view. Even though I’ve read numerous books on the subject, I’ve always thought of the evolution-creation debate as an either/or sort of thing. Either you believe in creation AND creation in six 24-hour days AND a young earth & universe … OR you believe in evolution (whether with or without God).

A theistic evolutionist believes that God simply used evolution for creation. Well, of course, God could have done that if He had wanted to. But the question there is whether He did?

I don’t believe so - mostly because of scientific evidence, partly because I believed that a literal interpretation of Scripture allowed no room for anything other that a less than 10,000 year old universe.

But, it has finally come to my attention that you can believe in an old earth and (a) still believe in a literal interpretation of an inerrant Scripture, and (b) still reject the theory of macro-evolution.

This honestly had never crossed my mind before.

In another try at building my defense of believing in 6-day creation, I’ve started to read a book lent me by a good friend. The book titled The Genesis Debate - Three Views on the Days of Creation, and it’s by six different authors in a debate type format. J. Ligon Duncan III & David W. Hall argue for the “24-Hour Day View.” Hugh Ross & Gleason L. Archer argue for the “Day-Age View.” And Lee Irons & Meredith G. Kline argue for the “Framework View.”

I’m still reading it right now, but I still can’t manage to take the “Framework” view seriously (essentially the idea that the story of creation in Genesis is a mythical fairy tale that is used in Scripture to illustrate Biblical truths). But, to my surprise, I’m being shell-shocked by the “Day-Age” viewpoint and finding the “24-Hour” viewpoint’s arguments strangely hollow.

Below I’m including some excerpts from the book written by the “Day-Age” proponents. These are all questions and arguments they make that I haven’t found sufficient counters for in my own mind or by reading Duncan & Hall’s responses. Here’s just some Ross & Archer quotes from the book for now, when I’ve had more time to think about it, I’ll either end up agreeing with them or write why out some articles on why I can’t.

(Note: these quotes are just focusing on one or two arguments. There is also a discussion about the actual wording of the creation account and the meanings of day, morning, and evening in Hebrew, but these quotes are what I've found the most interesting and new. Also putting the occasional sentence in bold is just me highlighting some of the more thought provoking statements.)
______________________________________________________________________________

Sadly, we see that [the Six Day Creationist’s] approach to Scripture leaves them with little appreciation for the growth in extent, quantity, variety, and accuracy of nature’s “canon.” Our understanding of the Creator’s revelation in nature continues to expand exponentially, especially in astronomy. The evidence for divine attributes and divine design has been doubling every four years in this discipline alone. We need humble hearts to respond to this evidence with faith (which is what we do in accepting the words of the Bible), but when we ignore it, we miss out on both a theological treasure and an evangelistic goldmine.

Extrabiblical evidences are not inconsequential. They are vital. Christianity’s uniqueness resides not only in its gospel message, but also in its testability. Paul exhorts Christ’s followers to “test everything,” and Moses appeals to fulfilled prophecy. Just as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy can attest and clarify biblical texts, so, too, the fulfillment of biblically predicated scientific discoveries help attest and elucidate Bible passages. The Proceedings of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, Summit II (1982), express our point:

It is sometimes argued that our exegesis should not be influenced by scientific observations. We believe this view is mistaken. While the Bible clearly gives more specific information about our relationship to God than one can possibly deduce from natural revelation, it does not necessarily follow that our understanding of the physical world, its origin, etc., will also be more clearly deduced from God’s revelation in His word than His revelation than His revelation in His world. Since both are revelations from God, and therefore, give a unified story, it seems quite permissible to consider all of the evidence (scientific as well as biblical) to be significant to the degree that each revelation can be clearly interpreted.

pg 73
______________________________________________________________________________

Scripture leads us to expect an unequivocal consistency between God’s written word and creation’s facts. Moreover, we are exhorted to use such concordance as a tool for spreading our faith in Christ. Of all the world’s religions, only Christianity can back its claims with established historical and scientific facts. It is the only faith that withstands objective testing and successfully predicts the future, including future scientific discovery.
pg 77
______________________________________________________________________________

The overarching hindrance is fear. People are afraid to integrate science and Scripture - some because they fear that science will shatter their confidence in Scripture, and others because they fear that science might shatter their excuse for ignoring Scripture. Who wants to talk about this fear? Most people would rather deny its existence or drown it out in noisy debate. But it lurks nonetheless, and its stranglehold keeps us from reasoning clearly and dialoguing calmly …
pg 124
______________________________________________________________________________

Young-earth creationists … have invested their efforts in fighting the wrong battle. What’s worse, they have been battling their ally: scientific advance on virtually all fronts, which increasingly supports a theistic, interventionist (that is, miraculous) view of life’s origin and development. Perhaps the most stunning irony of this decades-long controversy lies buried - but alive - in the creationist literature. Those who have leveled some of the most stinging criticism of old-earth creationists, accusing them of being theistic evolutionists (those who believe God did not supernaturally intervene but merely initiated and controlled the outcome of natural process evolution), are actually forced by their own interpretation to be hyperevolutionists. Their apparent faith in the efficiency of natural-process biological evolution actually exceeds that of nontheists.

The first chapter of Genesis and other Bible passages state that after the sixth creation day, God ceased to introduce new life forms on the earth. On this point, most interpreters agree. However, the young-earth creationists’ understanding of the Fall and the Flood requires that a huge number of new species of animal life appear on the earth in just a few hundreds to thousands of years. As they see it, animals ate only plants until the moment Adam and Eve rebelled against God’s authority. Because carnivorous activity involves animal death, they assume it must be one of the evil results of human sin. Therefore, they propose, all meat-eating creatures alive now and evident in the fossil record must have evolved rapidly from plant-eating creatures, and since God is no longer “creating,” they must have evolved strictly by natural processes.
pgs 126-127
______________________________________________________________________________

From the perspective of young-earth creationists, any concession that the earth or universe may be more than about 10,000 years old attacks the very foundation of their faith, the veracity of the Scripture. Is it any wonder, then, that they vehemently and incessantly oppose anyone, even fellow evangelicals, who propose an ancient universe and earth?
pg 128
______________________________________________________________________________

More after the jump -

The young-universe interpretation gives rise to a more subtle problem: it forces a gnostic-like theology - a belief that the physical realm is illusory and that only the spiritual realm is real. The universe by its sheer vastness testifies of a beginning much earlier than just a few or even several hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. That testimony comes from light, which takes a certain amount of time to travel a given distance. For example, a galaxy measured to be about 13 billion light-years away must have existed about 13 billion years ago. That’s when the light from that galaxy started on its way toward Earth’s telescopes.

If its light had existed for only a few thousand years, the visible universe would be very small indeed. The visible stars would be less numerous than is the observed case, and most of the Milky Way galaxy (as well as every other galaxy) would be invisible, since they are too far away for their light to have yet reached Earth. Adam wouldn’t have seen any stars, Noah only a few, and Moses, thousands fewer than either Augustine or Aquinas.

Many seem to have forgotten a lesson from elementary science. Light travel time gives astronomers a direct window to the past. Because of light travel time, we can observe in the present moment what God did to the cosmos in the past. Astronomers need only select a heavenly body the appropriate distance away to see how it looked in the past. Evan as we look at the moon, we see it not as it is this second, but rather as it was 1.5 seconds ago when the sun’s light bounced off it on its way to us.

A few young-earth creationists explicitly concede that their view denies the reality of light travel. In his commentary on Genesis, for example, Gary North says,

The Bible’s account of the chronology of creation points to an illusion … The seeming age of the stars is an illusion … Either the constancy of the speed of light is an illusion, or the size of the universe is an illusion, or else the physical events that we hypothesize to explain the visible changes in light or radiation are false inferences.

Most young-earth/young-universe creationists … cite all the possible loopholes to the light-travel-time problem. They see six:

1. Astronomers are simply wrong about the distances.
2. God created the light already in transit.
3. Light traveled much faster in the past.
4. Light takes a shortcut through space.
5. The universe has the equivalent of more time than one time dimension.
6. Distant “clocks” run at different rates …

In a nutshell, God scattered astronomical “clocks” (time indicating astronomical phenomena such as cosmic expansion rates, background radiation cooling times, supernovae, Cepheid variable stars, neutron stars, and black holes) throughout the universe, and they all agree. They reflect no differences in time rate or dimensionality anywhere in the cosmos and thus at any epoch in cosmic history.

In embracing any of these supposed loopholes, the 24-hour creationists inadvertently and ultimately suggest that God, rather than the astronomical community, deceives us. Their interpretation implies that all the distant galaxies astronomers observe - nearly one trillion of them - are part of an elaborate mirage or misconstrued "mural" painted on a nearby background, which becomes visible nightly. On their view, stellar explosions such as the 1987 supernova eruption in our companion galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, did not really occur; they just appear to have occurred. According to 24-hour day creationists, what astronomers observe in the heavens must be a detailed history of events that never happened.

Supposed biblical support for the “appearance of age” rests primarily on Adam’s adult shoulders. Adam’s adult body seems, at first glance, to argue for appearance of age. But does it? An adult body speaks of age only if we incorrectly assume that this body entered the world through the womb of a woman. We must go on to ask whether or not Adam carried memories of his nonexistent childhood. To assume that he did would be to assume that God implanted falsehoods, a notion that virtually all believers would repudiate as a violation of God’s revealed character. The connection with the day-age interpretation is this: The universe carries a kind of “memory” of the past. That memory is the light emitted long ago by distant objects. This light shows us what was happening at those objects in the past, at the time the light was emitted. From the astronomer’s perspective, “appearance of age” implies that God filled the universe with the physical equivalent of false memories.

Although young-earth/young-universe creationists assume that they truly seek to defend the truth of God’s word and lead people to Jesus Christ, they fail to realize that these theological implications flow from their position. We think that they would repudiate the Gnostic notion that “there is no life, truth, or substance in matter,” though unfortunately that’s the direction in which their view leans …
pgs 128-130
______________________________________________________________________________

Many Christians see no possibility for integrating the record of nature with the words of Genesis. Writing nearly a hundred years ago, German theologian Friedrich Delitzsch described the schism in words that few would care to dispute to this day:

How absolutely futile all attempts are and will forever remain to harmonize our biblical story of creation with the results of natural science.

This defeatism is understandable given the widespread failure to apply the scientific method to the interpretation of Genesis. The great irony here is that the scientific method comes from the Bible and from biblical theology. The core of this method is an appeal to the interpreter to delay drawing conclusions until both the frame of reference and the initial conditions have been established. If we approach Genesis in this way, we discover that we can discern an account of creation that is scientifically plausible and defensible …

The frame of reference in Genesis 1:1 is the cosmos, the beginning of space, time, matter, and energy. God declares through His spokesman, Moses, that He brought into existence the entire physical cosmos. The Bible successfully predicts what has been called “the discovery of the century,” the observation of remnants from that initial creative burst. Einstein’s equations told us early in this century that the universe had a beginning in the finite past, but scientists subjected that notion to every test imaginable before acknowledging certainty about it. Einstein’s equations now tell us that the Cause of the universe created it independently of all matter, energy, and even the ten space-time dimensions along which all the matter and energy are distributed. The work on which the 1994 Nobel physics prize was based establishes this conclusion to better than 14-decimal-point precision. All this testing has done the Christian community a great service, providing support for our confidence in biblical revelation.
pgs 134-135
______________________________________________________________________________

As I keep reading this, I'll probably include a few more excerpts later this week.