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The Age of the Earth: Science and Scripture


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By Efbrazil, CC BY-SA 3.0,

Not everyone sees it that way. Jonathan Safarti of Creation Ministries International offers a different timeline:


For young-earth creationists the age of the earth is serious business. Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis website issues a grave warning to those who question the young-earth line.

When believers attempt to add evolution and millions of years to Genesis, they lay down a foundation of death and suffering on which to build their worldview. If Christians believe the lie that Genesis cannot be trusted, they are paving the way for the trustworthiness of the gospel message to be called into question.

Are his assumptions valid? Does a faithful reading of scripture demand a belief in a young earth? Can we acknowledge the findings of modern science and still trust the stories in Genesis?

What reason do we have, other than an attempt to retrofit the Bible into modern science, to imagine that the days of Genesis 1 might not refer to 24-hour periods of God's creation activity?

Ham or Safarti might be surprised to learn that these questions were answered by the church nearly 2000 years ago.

The early Christians didn't attempt to reconcile the Genesis creation stories with an old earth; nobody in ancient times could have imagined the universe was this old. But the earliest Bible readers did find clues suggesting the early chapters of Genesis should be read as something other than flat history.



He's talking about Genesis 2, which is a separate creation story. But already the seed has been planted that the days of Genesis may be longer than 24 hours.

Toward the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria asserted in Stromateis 6.16 that the creation did not take place in six days, or within time at all.



Origen of Alexandria, Clement's disciple, went further in De Principiis 4.16:


Even operating under a geocentric model of the universe, ancient people understood that "evening" and "morning" were meaningless without reference to the sun and moon. Origen interpreted Genesis in light of the scientific knowledge of his day, and assumed that all thinking people would do the same.

The influential 5th century scholar Augustine of Hippo, in The City of God 11.6, took up where Clement of Alexandria left off. Although claiming these were not 24-hour periods, he refused to speculate about what "day" meant in Genesis 1:


In The Literal Meaning of Genesis (PDF), 1.19, Augustine gave advice for interpreting the scriptures' statements about the physical world:


Lest he be misunderstood, Augustine continued:


More than a thousand years before the development of the modern scientific method, Augustine offered essentially the same warning that Ken Ham does: Misinterpreting Genesis will push people away from Christianity. But Augustine believed the real danger of misinterpretation lay in the type of tactics and reasoning employed by Answers in Genesis today.

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