Young Earth Creationism Debunked Biblically

Pastor-Scholar Tackles Young Earth Creationism’s Bible Interpretation

About how I came to write a refutation of Young Earth Creationism

For the academic article, click: The Beginning of Days: A Response to Jeremy Lyon’s “Genesis 1:1-3 and the Literary Boundary of Day One

I sought to challenge Young Creationism’s Biblical basis because of a crisis in our church. In 2015 a couple committed to Young Earth Creationism (YEC) came to our church. They were divisive about their beliefs, the man even standing up, in a Sunday School class, declaring that Hugh Ross, whose video I had just shown, “doesn’t believe the Bible.” He wouldn’t stop agitating about it. I was looking for sound material to give him to show that what he had been taught was the “clear teaching of scripture” actually wasn’t taught in scripture at all.

Then I discovered that there’s very little substantial Biblical scholarship examining the claims of Young Earth Creationism. The secular and liberal scholars, don’t take it seriously enough to engage. They might use verses for their causes but they begin with an assumption that the Bible is not God’s Word and so don’t bother to investigate what it really says. Evangelicals are either YECists, or beholden to them, or intimidated by them or simply not interested. YECists often bludgeon anyone who criticizes their position that the earth is only about 6,000 to 10,000 years old as compromisers or liberals, opening the door to atheistic Darwinism. They use YEC as the litmus test for being a Bible-believer. So, I found precious little to help me mount a critique of their teachings from the scholars. So I decided to write an article myself.

Writing my own academic article was challenging because, while I have a Ph.D., I’m not an Old Testament specialist. I had to reprise my Hebrew. But I had the advantage of having one of the best Hebrew scholars in the world as one of my former professors: Dr. Leslie Allen of Fuller Theological Seminary. In the crafting of my article, I inquired with him about points of Hebrew grammar and he was helpful.

Once my article was written, then I faced the challenge of having it published. Few journals are open to publishing an article critiquing YEC. As before, the secular or liberal ones don’t take the subject seriously. The evangelical ones don’t want to alienate their YEC readers. I had one well-known evangelical journal turn my article down in an hour – typically it takes months to finish a review; the editor exclaimed that many of their subscribers believe in young earth creationism. Finally, in 2019, Jeremy D. Lyon, a professor at Truett McConnell University, published “Genesis 1:1–3 and the Literary Boundary of Day One” which argued for a YECist interpretation of Genesis 1. That allowed me to hone my article to respond to his and opened the door to having my article published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies. It came out last year (2021).

In “The Beginning of Days”, I show that the Bible does not teach Young Earth Creationism because it doesn't establish a dateable chain of events back to the original creation. YECists claim that we can date the age of the earth by tracing the genealogies back to Adam and then adding 6 days for when Adam was created, assuming that the earth was created on day one. But I show that each day of Genesis 1 begins with “and God said.” So day one begins in Genesis 1:3, not the very first verse. The original creation and the Spirit of God hovering over the water in 1:1-2 is before day one. The Bible doesn’t tell us how long prior to day one that the earth was created. That’s left up to science.

On November 11, 2021, Hugh Ross, head of Reasons to Believe, tweeted “I highly recommend this article.”

If you’d prefer to watch (and illustrated version) or listen to this article on YouTube:
The Beginning of Days by John B. Carpenter

John B. Carpenter is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church near Danville, Virginia.