Position · 1814

Old Earth Creationism

The view that the earth and universe are billions of years old, as mainstream science holds, while God created life, and especially humans, by direct acts rather than through common descent.

History

Roots

Before modern geology, most Christians assumed an earth a few thousand years old, but the church never defined its age. Augustine in The Literal Meaning of Genesis (c. 401–415) argued that God created all things at once and that the six days are a teaching framework, not a stopwatch. Old-earth writers still cite him as proof that a non-literal reading of the days is not a modern invention (Reasons to Believe on the church fathers, advocacy source). Augustine did not, however, teach an old earth.

Causes

The pressure came from the rocks. By the early 1800s geologists such as Georges Cuvier had shown that the earth’s strata record a long series of past worlds, each with its own extinct animals. Christian scholars, many of them geologists themselves, had to fit Genesis to that evidence.

The Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers gave the first popular answer in 1814, the date this note uses for the position. Chalmers argued that Genesis 1:1 describes an original creation and “forms no part of the first day”; the ages of geology fit in the silent gap before Genesis 1:2 (quoted in Gap creationism, secondary). He credited the idea to the seventeenth-century Arminian Simon Episcopius. The Oxford geologist William Buckland took up the gap view, and it became the standard harmony of the period.

A second answer soon competed with it. Hugh Miller, a self-taught Scottish geologist and member of Chalmers’s Free Church, came to read the six days as six long geological periods. His The Testimony of the Rocks (1857, Archive.org) set out this day-age view. Miller also wrote against evolution in The Foot-prints of the Creator (1849, Archive.org): the fossil record showed progress, he said, but each kind was a fresh act of creation. In North America the geologists Arnold Guyot (Creation, 1884) and John William Dawson (The Origin of the World according to Revelation and Science, 1877) taught the same day-age harmony.

Influence

For about a century, an old earth was the normal conservative Protestant position. The gap view spread through G. H. Pember’s Earth’s Earliest Ages (1876, Archive.org), which tied the gap to the fall of Satan, and above all through the note on Genesis 1:2 in the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), the study Bible of American fundamentalism. Most contributors to The Fundamentals (1910–1915) accepted an old earth (NCSE, secondary and critical of creationism). At the Scopes trial in 1925, William Jennings Bryan, leading the case against evolution, told Clarence Darrow that the days of Genesis were “periods” (Douglas Linder’s trial account, secondary).

After the Second World War, evangelical scientists sharpened the case. J. Laurence Kulp’s “Deluge Geology” (JASA, 1950) argued that a recent global flood cannot explain the rock record. Bernard Ramm’s The Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954, Archive.org) dismissed flood geology and promoted “progressive creationism”: God creating in stages across long ages.

The reaction to Ramm reshaped the field. John Whitcomb and Henry Morris answered with The Genesis Flood (1961, Archive.org), which revived Young Earth Creationism and made it the majority view among American evangelicals within a generation. Old-earth creationists became a minority defending their ground on two fronts. In 1986 the astronomer Hugh Ross founded Reasons to Believe (about), now the leading old-earth ministry, with the stated aim “to open people to the gospel by revealing God in science.”

Key ideas and contributors

Two books, one author. The founding conviction is that nature and Scripture both come from God and cannot finally conflict. When the evidence for an ancient earth is strong, the right move is to re-examine how Genesis has been read, not to reject the evidence. Ross set out the modern case in Creation and Time (1994, Archive.org) and A Matter of Days (2004, Archive.org).

The days can be long. Day-age writers point out that the Hebrew yom can mean an age as well as a day, and that Genesis itself uses it for the whole creation week (Genesis 2:4). The seventh day has no “evening and morning,” and Hebrews treats God’s rest as still open (Hebrews 4:1–11). Too much happens on the sixth day, they add, for a single 24-hour span (Genesis 2:7–23).

Or there is a gap. Gap writers read Genesis 1:2 as “the earth became formless and void,” a ruin after an earlier creation, citing Isaiah 45:18 (“he did not create it empty”). The fullest defense is Arthur Custance’s Without Form and Void (1970, online text). The gap view has faded since the 1970s, and most current old-earth writers prefer day-age or literary readings.

Creation by direct acts. What separates old-earth creationism from Evolutionary Creation is its claim that God intervened repeatedly to make new kinds of life, and that Adam and Eve were specially created, not descended from earlier hominids. Ross and Fazale Rana’s Who Was Adam? (2005) offers a “testable creation model” that predicts these interventions should show up in the scientific record.

A local flood. Most old-earth creationists read Noah’s flood as regional, covering the world known to the narrator. Hugh Miller already held this, and it removes the need for flood geology.

Other contributors: the framework view of Meredith Kline (“Because It Had Not Rained,” 1958) and the analogical days of C. John Collins (Genesis 1–4, 2006), both literary readings that leave the earth’s age open; and John Lennox, whose Seven Days That Divide the World (2011) argues for long creation days in a short, popular book. Strictly, Kline and Collins defend readings of Genesis rather than old-earth creationism, but their work gives old-earth creationists room in confessional churches.

Key controversies

Death before the Fall. This is the young-earth objection with the most force. If the fossil record is millions of years old, animals died, suffered and went extinct long before Adam sinned. Young-earth writers say this contradicts a creation God called “very good” (Genesis 1:31) and Paul’s teaching that death came through sin (Romans 5:12; Romans 8:20–22). Ken Ham and Terry Mortenson argue that it undermines the atonement and God’s character (AiG, “Progressive Creation Problems”, young-earth source). Old-earth writers answer that Romans 5 speaks of human death, and that Scripture praises God for feeding predators (Psalm 104:21).

The plain sense of Genesis. Young-earth critics say “evening and morning” and numbered days mark ordinary days, and that the Sabbath command rests on a literal week (Exodus 20:11). Jonathan Sarfati’s Refuting Compromise (2004, Archive.org) is a book-length attack on Ross along these lines. The charge underneath is about authority: old-earth readings, in Answers in Genesis’s phrase, set “the words of sinful men” over the Word of God (AiG, young-earth source). Old-earth writers reply that they hold to Biblical Inerrancy as firmly as their critics, and that the 1982 ICBI summit, which followed the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, affirmed Genesis 1–11 as “factual” without settling the earth’s age (Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, art. XXII).

The order of creation. Day-age readings must match the days to the scientific sequence, and critics on both sides say the match fails: Genesis has plants before the sun and birds before land animals, while science reverses both orders. Day-age writers answer that day four marks when the sun became visible through a clearing atmosphere, not when it was made.

Exegesis of the gap. Hebrew scholars largely reject the gap reading. Weston Fields’s Unformed and Unfilled (1976) argued that Genesis 1:2 grammatically describes the first state of the creation in verse 1, not a later ruin, and that “became” is not the natural sense of the verb.

Common descent. From the other side, evolutionary creationists such as Francis Collins (The Language of God, 2006) argue that old-earth creationism accepts the scientists’ clock but rejects their strongest evidence. Shared genetic markers between humans and other primates, they say, point to common ancestry as clearly as the strata point to an old earth. To them, a God who creates each kind separately while leaving the traces of descent is hard to defend. Old-earth creationists answer that common design explains shared features, and that the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion show the gaps their model predicts.

Confessional limits. Reformed churches have argued over whether officers may hold non-literal views of the days. The Presbyterian Church in America’s Creation Study Committee report (presented to the 28th General Assembly, 2000) named the 24-hour, day-age, framework and analogical-day views as “the four most prominent views of the creation days in the PCA,” listed “in no particular order.” Some congregations and seminaries still require a young-earth view.

What remains unresolved

Old-earth creationism occupies the middle and draws fire from both ends. Its young-earth critics think it gives away too much to science; its evolutionary critics think it stops arbitrarily. The question it has to answer is how to accept geology’s evidence for deep time while treating biology’s evidence for common descent as weaker. Its defenders say the line follows the evidence. Their critics say it follows the needs of a reading of Adam.