Does the Bible support any particular age of Earth?

[McCulloch]

The world is not flat, the world was not "made in 7 days", the world is not 6000 years old etcetera, all this is fiction, WE KNOW THIS.

Where does it say the world is 6,000 years old?

Question for debate: Is there a Biblical Basis for a Young Earth (between 6,000 - 10,000 years old) ?

[McCulloch]

I seem to be missing what you guys are seeing. "There was evening and there was morning the nth day". This formula shouts out, "Hey, these are literal days, with evenings and mornings."

Then Moses delivers a message directly from God stating that God created the world in six days and God rested on the seventh, therefore the children of Israel should work a literal six days and rest every literal seventh.

If you have a good reason for believing that it means something other than days when it says days, evenings when it says evenings and mornings when it says mornings, please present your reasons.

Getting back to the issue in the OP, so far we have sixdays of creation, which some seem to think could mean just about anything. Then detailed genealogies which show that Noah according to the Bible, became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth 1556 years after Adam started living, with a margin of error of 10.

[Openmind]

If you have a good reason for believing that it means something other than days when it says days, evenings when it says evenings and mornings when it says mornings, please present your reasons.

McCulloch - I fear you are fighting a losing battle. The fact is, 1000 years ago I don't think many christians would have existed that thought that "six days" was anything but "six days" in the literal sense. That is because they had no reason to believe otherwise. 6500 years was a perfectly reasonable age - no one could test or deny it, and the scripture pointed that way.

More recently, science has irrefutably placed the age of the earth at about 4.5 billion years old. Christian faithfuls who don't want to admit to any truth apart from biblical truth will still believe the earth is 6500 years old, and that the six days are literal, but those who are more open to suggestion see how there is a need for metaphorics to explain the apparent discrepancy.

Even if someone has been raised on the idea of "1 day = possibly millions of years" someone originally would have seen the idea as necessary in order to preserve any true degree of respectability.

Fact is...they can argue the metaphorical day, but they only do so in order to fit in with accepted and irrefutable scientific evidence.

Put it this way, if science placed the age of the earth at 6500 years, do you really think any christians would be eagerly jumping up and down exclaiming "Wait a minute - there is no need to stick to the more obvious explanation! Perhaps 1 day in creation was actually millions of years! Perhaps the earth is older than the bible would have us believe?"

I don't think you would see the above, because there would be no need for it. Contrast this to our current position.

[McCulloch]

If you have a good reason for believing that it means something other than days when it says days, evenings when it says evenings and mornings when it says mornings, please present your reasons.

McCulloch - I fear you are fighting a losing battle. The fact is, 1000 years ago I don't think many Christians would have existed that thought that "six days" was anything but "six days" in the literal sense. That is because they had no reason to believe otherwise. 6500 years was a perfectly reasonable age - no one could test or deny it, and the scripture pointed that way.

More recently, science has irrefutably placed the age of the earth at about 4.5 billion years old. Christian faithfuls who don't want to admit to any truth apart from biblical truth will still believe the earth is 6500 years old, and that the six days are literal, but those who are more open to suggestion see how there is a need for metaphorics to explain the apparent discrepancy.

And now that scripture has been proven wrong, they must revise their understanding and their hermeneutic methods.

Even if someone has been raised on the idea of "1 day = possibly millions of years" someone originally would have seen the idea as necessary in order to preserve any true degree of respectability.

Fact is...they can argue the metaphorical day, but they only do so in order to fit in with accepted and irrefutable scientific evidence.

Is this honest? Is this intellectually valid? Doesn't this kind of thinking lead to Spong-like denial of even the resurrection?

Put it this way, if science placed the age of the earth at 6500 years, do you really think any Christians would be eagerly jumping up and down exclaiming "Wait a minute - there is no need to stick to the more obvious explanation! Perhaps 1 day in creation was actually millions of years! Perhaps the earth is older than the bible would have us believe?"

I don't think you would see the above, because there would be no need for it. Contrast this to our current position.

So true.

[MagusYanam]

I seem to be missing what you guys are seeing. "There was evening and there was morning the nth day". This formula shouts out, "Hey, these are literal days, with evenings and mornings."

You may be missing that Genesis 1 and 2 read like poetry (at least in the original Hebrew). This repetitive formula - 'there was evening and there was morning' - is a literary device used in classical Hebrew. The Psalms are full of such repetitive formulae - read any Psalm, and you will find places where the author writes something, and then repeats it in a slightly different fashion. Translation obviously doesn't do Genesis justice this way, but you wouldn't go around saying that you can prove Robert Frost wrong because those two roads diverging in a wood didn't really exist, or that he didn't actually take the one less-travelled.

Even if someone has been raised on the idea of "1 day = possibly millions of years" someone originally would have seen the idea as necessary in order to preserve any true degree of respectability.

Fact is...they can argue the metaphorical day, but they only do so in order to fit in with accepted and irrefutable scientific evidence.

Is this honest? Is this intellectually valid? Doesn't this kind of thinking lead to Spong-like denial of even the resurrection?

I think that this sort of thinking is the only way that a Christian can be intellectually honest. A person's faith should not lead one to deny empirical fact - otherwise it is simply self-delusion. The age of the earth can be demonstrated to be 4.5 billion years old, and most of the people in the Judeo-Christian tradition acknowledge the fact - and most of the people in the Judeo-Christian tradition see no need to throw away scriptures that are clearly metaphorical, either.

Again, you seem to be grafting Scripture onto an interpretive framework that the ancient Hebrews and Greeks would not have held. Francis Bacon didn't come along until the 17th century, and the bloom of scientific thought he began and the Enlightenment that came to popularise it constituted a radical paradigm shift in the way people thought about the world. I'm sure that the early Christians would have been amused by the fundamentalists' insistence on Biblical inerrancy and literalism, if they weren't scandalised and offended by what they may have seen as a heresy of trivialism.

The creation story is a poem, but more than that, it is a myth, one that has been recognised by millenia of Jewish scriptural scholarship as myth - an attempt to explain through symbolism and imagery the order of the universe and the nature of man. That the creation story would be remembered in a tradition in which the Hebrews would work for a literal six days and rest on a literal seventh seems to me to be a non-sequitur to what they actually believed about it.

While you're at it, consider how prevalent creationist beliefs actually are among Jews. As far as I remember, the only ones positing a six-thousand-year-old universe were the extremist Haredi sect, and they were heavily influenced by Christian fundamentalism. Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews pretty much all accept evolution and a 4.5-billion-year-old earth.

[McCulloch]

The creation story is a poem, but more than that, it is a myth, one that has been recognised by millenia of Jewish scriptural scholarship as myth - an attempt to explain through symbolism and imagery the order of the universe and the nature of man. That the creation story would be remembered in a tradition in which the Hebrews would work for a literal six days and rest on a literal seventh seems to me to be a non-sequitur to what they actually believed about it.

Exactly the point that Bishop Spong and Tom Harper keep making. The resurrection story is a myth, one that attempts to explain through symbolism and imagery, the eternal relationship of humans to God through God's son.

[MagusYanam]

Exactly the point that Bishop Spong and Tom Harper keep making. The resurrection story is a myth, one that attempts to explain through symbolism and imagery, the eternal relationship of humans to God through God's son.

I don't know about Spong and Harper, but I'll take my tack from Niebuhr and Borg on this one. Though the creation story and the resurrection may be myths, while they may not be factual or literal, they are not therefore devoid of meaning or significance. In other words, myths can be true even if they are not factual. When Jesus defeated death and demonstrated an overpowering and transformative sacrificial love even as he was wrongly executed, it gave many people - Jew and Greek - hope for a world in which Jesus' Kingdom would be realised. In that sense, he truly was raised from the dead.

[Fisherking]

If you have a good reason for believing that it means something other than days when it says days, evenings when it says evenings and mornings when it says mornings, please present your reasons.

I still haven't seen a valid reason scripturally to believe that it means something other than days when it says days or evenings when it says evenings, ect.

McCulloch - I fear you are fighting a losing battle. The fact is, 1000 years ago I don't think many christians would have existed that thought that "six days" was anything but "six days" in the literal sense. That is because they had no reason to believe otherwise. 6500 years was a perfectly reasonable age - no one could test or deny it, and the scripture pointed that way.

I agree, there is no scriptural reason to believe otherwise.

More recently, science has irrefutably placed the age of the earth at about 4.5 billion years old. Christian faithfuls who don't want to admit to any truth apart from biblical truth will still believe the earth is 6500 years old, and that the six days are literal, but those who are more open to suggestion see how there is a need for metaphorics to explain the apparent discrepancy.

We are not arguing what science says the age of the earth is:

Question for debate: Is there a Biblical Basis for a Young Earth (between 6,000 - 10,000 years old) ?

This is the reason I said earlier:

Scripture should be interpreted in light of other scripture, not in light of science.

Fact is...they can argue the metaphorical day, but they only do so in order to fit in with accepted and irrefutable scientific evidence.

I agree they do argue the metaphorical day and that many times the reason is to fit in with the accepted [refutable old earth presupposition]-- not scripture.

[Fisherking]

I seem to be missing what you guys are seeing. "There was evening and there was morning the nth day". This formula shouts out, "Hey, these are literal days, with evenings and mornings."

You may be missing that Genesis 1 and 2 read like poetry (at least in the original Hebrew). This repetitive formula - 'there was evening and there was morning' - is a literary device used in classical Hebrew. The Psalms are full of such repetitive formulae - read any Psalm, and you will find places where the author writes something, and then repeats it in a slightly different fashion. Translation obviously doesn't do Genesis justice this way, but you wouldn't go around saying that you can prove Robert Frost wrong because those two roads diverging in a wood didn't really exist, or that he didn't actually take the one less-travelled.

Even if someone has been raised on the idea of "1 day = possibly millions of years" someone originally would have seen the idea as necessary in order to preserve any true degree of respectability.

Fact is...they can argue the metaphorical day, but they only do so in order to fit in with accepted and irrefutable scientific evidence.

Is this honest? Is this intellectually valid? Doesn't this kind of thinking lead to Spong-like denial of even the resurrection?

I think that this sort of thinking is the only way that a Christian can be intellectually honest. A person's faith should not lead one to deny empirical fact - otherwise it is simply self-delusion. The age of the earth can be demonstrated to be 4.5 billion years old, and most of the people in the Judeo-Christian tradition acknowledge the fact - and most of the people in the Judeo-Christian tradition see no need to throw away scriptures that are clearly metaphorical, either.

Again, you seem to be grafting Scripture onto an interpretive framework that the ancient Hebrews and Greeks would not have held. Francis Bacon didn't come along until the 17th century, and the bloom of scientific thought he began and the Enlightenment that came to popularise it constituted a radical paradigm shift in the way people thought about the world. I'm sure that the early Christians would have been amused by the fundamentalists' insistence on Biblical inerrancy and literalism, if they weren't scandalised and offended by what they may have seen as a heresy of trivialism.

The creation story is a poem, but more than that, it is a myth, one that has been recognised by millenia of Jewish scriptural scholarship as myth - an attempt to explain through symbolism and imagery the order of the universe and the nature of man. That the creation story would be remembered in a tradition in which the Hebrews would work for a literal six days and rest on a literal seventh seems to me to be a non-sequitur to what they actually believed about it.

While you're at it, consider how prevalent creationist beliefs actually are among Jews. As far as I remember, the only ones positing a six-thousand-year-old universe were the extremist Haredi sect, and they were heavily influenced by Christian fundamentalism. Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews pretty much all accept evolution and a 4.5-billion-year-old earth.

Question for debate: Is there a Biblical Basis for a Young Earth (between 6,000 - 10,000 years old) ?

[MagusYanam]

I believe I did address (albeit indirectly) the question for debate. The Biblical basis for a young earth is only there if you use a fundamentalist, post-Enlightenment hermeneutic bent on taking myth literally. (And yes, the creation story is myth.) The fact that traditional Jewish interpretations of Scripture have not been radically changed by the empirical evidence in favour of evolutionary science and an old earth, and that pretty much all of Jewry favours a 4.5 billion year old earth over a 6000-10000 year old one, speaks to this argument.

[McCulloch]

I believe I did address (albeit indirectly) the question for debate. The Biblical basis for a young earth is only there if you use a fundamentalist, post-Enlightenment hermeneutic bent on taking myth literally. (And yes, the creation story is myth.) The fact that traditional Jewish interpretations of Scripture have not been radically changed by the empirical evidence in favour of evolutionary science and an old earth, and that pretty much all of Jewry favours a 4.5 billion year old earth over a 6000-10000 year old one, speaks to this argument.

That would be modern Jews. When it was written, when it was referred to by the writers of the New Testament, did they believe that it was real or a myth? Should Christians bend their interpretation of God's Holy Word because of relatively recent discoveries of science?