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Lesson 17: Young Earth, Six-Day Creationism, Questions

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Greg Ho

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Summary

This passage teaches us to trust the Genesis account of six-day creation and equips us to answer common objections raised against it. We are reminded that Scripture is more reliable than ever-changing scientific consensus, and that assumptions underlying dating methods and cosmological models are often unverifiable. The lesson walks through seven frequently asked questions about young earth creationism, providing thoughtful responses grounded in Scripture and sound reasoning.

Key Lessons:

  1. The Bible’s reliability surpasses that of science textbooks, which are constantly revised and corrected, while God’s Word remains unchanged.
  2. Radiometric dating methods rest on unverifiable assumptions—including constant decay rates and known initial conditions—and have repeatedly failed when tested against rocks of known age.
  3. The distant starlight problem affects both creationist and Big Bang cosmologies equally; secular science uses untestable “inflation” to address it, while creationists have legitimate alternative frameworks.
  4. The absence of human and dinosaur fossils together does not prove they didn’t coexist, just as many living species today are never found together in the fossil record.

Application: We are called to be discerning consumers of scientific claims, distinguishing between observational science and dogma. We should trust God’s eyewitness account over human assumptions and be equipped to defend the Genesis account with confidence and grace.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How should we respond when someone says “no real scientist believes in six-day creation,” and what logical fallacy does that represent?
  2. What assumptions underlie radiometric dating, and how does understanding those assumptions change the way we evaluate age estimates for rocks and fossils?
  3. In what areas of your life have you uncritically accepted scientific claims without examining the underlying assumptions, and how can you become more discerning?

Scripture Focus: Genesis 1 (creation account), Exodus 20:11 (six-day creation as basis for Sabbath), Genesis 1:14 (purpose of heavenly bodies), Job 40 (behemoth description), 2 Peter 3:8 (a day as a thousand years in context), Matthew 10:16 (wise as serpents), and John 3:12 (believing earthly and heavenly things).

Outline

Introduction

It’s 9:00 am, so we’re going to get started. I do want to see if I can leave some time for live questions today. I know I tried yesterday or last week and failed miserably, but this time will be different because that’s what I always say.

Today we are talking about—last week we talked about six day creation, six day creationism, and I gave you a series of reasons why you, like me, should also be a six day creationist. Is this going to work? Oh wait, is it up or down? I always get this wrong. It’s down. Yeah, it’s not working.

Was that me? All right.

Review of Six-Day Creation Reasons

All right. I gave you a series of reasons why you should believe in young earth creationism or six day creationism and a young earth. By way of review, the first reason is that a plain reading of Genesis 1 doesn’t lend itself to any other interpretation. The word “yom” or day just means a plain 24-hour day unless you read into the text something different.

The fourth commandment is one of the most difficult verses to get past if you are trying to read long ages, because it is literally the justification for the Sabbath. If in six days God created the heavens and the earth and then he rested, and if that six days that God used to justify the fourth commandment of keeping the Sabbath holy wasn’t actually six days, what kind of model is that for Israel? What does this say about God’s truthfulness?

“A plain reading of Genesis 1 doesn’t lend itself to any other interpretation.”

Number three: the Genesis genealogies. There are two main genealogies in Genesis. The way it’s written in the original Hebrew language does not lend itself to sticking in millions of years in there. It doesn’t even really lend itself to sticking in extra generations. So you just can’t fit millions of years after Adam.

The fourth reason is you can’t fit millions of years before Adam. There’s testimony from Jesus and the apostles that simply doesn’t make any sense or is just wrong if you don’t believe in six day creation.

The last two we’ll see today in a few minutes are very important. If you believe in long ages, if you are looking at creation in terms of billions of years, then you basically cannot believe in a global flood, or the global flood simply does not make sense. All of the evidence that you’re interpreting in order to justify billions of years would have been washed away in the global flood. So you really can’t be consistent and believe in the global flood.

However, the problem is if you look at the scriptures, there are a lot of problems if you don’t believe in the global flood. One of which is God making a covenant that he would never flood the world again. Well, that makes him a liar, because if you’re just talking about that being a local flood, then he’s done that maybe thousands of times.

Death Before the Fall

The last reason is a theological reason why you need to believe in a six-day creation. If you believe in long ages or billions of years, you necessarily believe in death before the fall. There would be millions and billions of years of animal evolution happening before Adam, which means there’s death, thorns, cancer, and all sorts of things we would acknowledge as evil before the fall.

We know that when God created the heavens and the earth, he said each day that it was good. So you would have to say that all of those things were good. Death, cancer, thorns—and that simply does not jive with not only the creation account, but also the redemption story.

“Death, cancer, and thorns before the fall simply does not jive with the creation account or the redemption story.”

If death came before the fall, what do you mean? What do you make of Romans 5:12?

That’s just by way of review. Today I wanted to take some questions, and many of you have sent some really good questions. I did my best to come up with some good answers. But if I didn’t do well, you should let me know and we will discuss further.

Q1: The Bible Is Not a Science Textbook

All right. I have seven questions today that I’m going to go through, and then at the end if we have time, we can talk a little bit in this interactive format.

Question one: Somebody said, “The Bible is not a science textbook, so why should we expect it to be scientifically accurate?” This is obviously a very common question. I should say that I kind of massage the wording a little bit because sometimes the questions are long and have a lot of context.

So anyways, question one: Why should we believe the Bible being that it’s not written to be a science textbook? I think the best answer to this question, if you ever get it—which you will if you try to defend Young Earth creationism—is we’re very thankful that the Bible is not a science textbook because science textbooks are wrong all the time.

“We’re thankful the Bible is not a science textbook because science textbooks are wrong all the time.”

In fact, if you look back even in your physics textbook, what does it say at the bottom? It usually says third edition or fourth edition, right? Why? Because it keeps becoming outdated. Every 10 years you have to write a new science textbook because not only is the knowledge updated, but also the way that conventional wisdom presents things is outdated.

That doesn’t happen with the Bible. We don’t have a third edition of the Bible, and we don’t add verses and books—at least not that I’m aware of. The other thing is that the Bible must at least be as accurate as a science textbook. Now you have to understand that we’re not going to interpret it in a wooden literal sense, like Pastor Dave was telling us in the biblical hermeneutics class. We interpret it in the genre that is written. So you don’t look at poetry and try to make some sort of scientific deduction from poetry.

However, Genesis 1 through 3, as we talked briefly about last time, is not in a poetic genre. It is in a narrative genre.

If the Bible itself cannot be trusted to be accurate even in earthly things, then why should you trust God at all in any of the heavenly things, right? This is a verse that I think I brought up last time: “If I told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”

I submit to you that if you don’t believe in the Genesis account as accurate, then you have no reason to believe that anything else in the Bible is accurate, unless you have a very inconsistent way of interpreting the Bible.

Understanding How Science Actually Works

I really like this question actually because one of the things that I think I told you about last time was that I am obviously a scientist, or I do have a PhD. I didn’t tell you that to sort of play up my credentials.

Many of you, I’ve never said that. I almost never say that, right? Because nobody cares, right? But the reason I bring it up is because I want to know how the sausage is made. I have a friend from high school who worked at Denny’s as a line cook. We were sitting around one day and we’re like, “Hey, where should we go out to eat? We should go and grab a bite to eat.”

So I was like, “Well, why don’t we go to Denny’s?” And he’s like, “No, never go there. Never go to Denny’s.” And I’m like, “Why don’t you want to go to Denny’s? Don’t you work there?” He’s like, “Of course I know exactly what happens there, right? I know exactly what.”

Okay, no, Denny’s is fine probably. But back then, basically the point is that if you’re in the environment, you kind of know how the sausage is made and you never want to eat there, right? And that goes for science. I do believe that in having gone through a PhD, my understanding of science, or how the scientific process works and who scientists are, is forever transformed.

“If you’re in the environment, you kind of know how the sausage is made.”

Right? These are just human beings just like you and me. Sinners just like you and me with agendas a lot of times just like you and me. There’s nothing special. There’s nothing priestly about them. They’re not particularly more objective than anybody else in the world.

Okay. So if you are a person who really trusts science, I just want to bring up a few points to you. One is: Is the consensus of scientists ever wrong? Does anybody remember what this is over here?

It’s the food pyramid, right? I’m sorry. This is the food pyramid. From when I was growing up, this is what was taught, right? So you ought to eat like mostly bread and then maybe a few vegetables and fruit and then like butter and jam or whatever. I don’t know what that is on top, but anyways milk.

So now in the last 20 years or so, this has been completely debunked. Even scientists are like that was completely wrong. We shouldn’t have done that. And I don’t know what the pyramid is now. I saw like an inverted pyramid or something. I don’t know, but Khalif would know more than I would.

But here we see that science is wrong. Science is wrong in that instance, but it’s actually wrong a lot more than that. You have to understand that what you read in the newspapers or on the websites are generally going to be outdated.

And okay, okay, but you say that was like 20 years ago. What about now?

The Decline of Public Trust in Science

Right? Like obviously scientists today are different. They’re getting it right now, right? Well, you see, you guys have all lived through—you’re older than five years old. So you guys have all lived through COVID.

And whatever you think about everything that happened in COVID and all the masks and all the vaccines, all this stuff, whatever you think about that, it’s undeniable that public trust in science or medicine has really dipped to an all-time low.

It’s a little hard to see on this graph, but this is basically how much people trust as a function of time. This is the number of years over here, and this is from some sort of Harvard journal.

You see that it’s gone from like 70% to 30% in the span of about five years, right? And that’s because we all know that during COVID, whatever you think about all of these things, people were standing up and saying things that literally were proven wrong a year or two later, right?

“Public trust in science has dipped to an all-time low—from 70% to 30% in about five years.”

Or it was proven that what they said was maybe agenda driven. I don’t want to become any more political than that, but I’m just going to show you this slide. Who knows whether this is true or not, but there was in 2023 a house hearing about the lab leak hypothesis about how COVID came out of Wuhan, right? Did it come out of the lab or not?

And whatever you believe about that, the only thing I want to show you is that even the highest level scientists in the world have been at least accused of being agenda-driven, right? And not saying things that are objective because they have an agenda.

But my point here is not to tell you to distrust all scientists. It really isn’t. Some science is true and many scientists are people who are objective and try to be objective and try to do the right thing.

But here’s what you need to know as people who are consuming scientific information. One is most popular reports of scientific articles are sensationalized, right? So if you look on CNN or Fox News or New York Times or whatever and you say, “Hey, look, they just discovered this new fossil or whatever, or they just discovered like a new whatever,” that’s a sensationalized article.

Many times, as I said, I know how the sausage is made. You actually go into the scientist and you ask them, “Is this article accurate?” The scientists that they’re citing, and they go, “No, no, no. They shouldn’t have said that. This is like way too much conclusion to draw based on the data.”

But the people writing the news articles as science writers, they sell ads based on how sensational the articles are. So this has been going on for many, many years. All of these articles are sensationalized and they claim more than they really justify.

As I said before, scientists are just people. They’re not smarter than you and you shouldn’t automatically believe them, just like you would not automatically believe anybody else who tries to sell you something, right.

One red flag whenever you meet anybody, but especially science, is when they try to suppress your opinion or where they try to suppress debate or silence dissent. Because real scientists don’t do that, right? Well, at least good scientists don’t do that.

Good scientists in fact thrive on skepticism and they thrive on disagreement because that’s how progress is made. You look at your theory and somebody says, “I don’t think that’s right.” And you’re like, “Okay, well, now I can test that.” And if you’re right, then we can advance our knowledge.

But if somebody’s like, “Well, I’m going to cancel you and now I’m going to make sure nobody hears from you ever again. You’re never going to get a job in this industry again.” That’s not science. That’s basically politics, right? That’s inquisition.

Okay. So why the tension here?

Science vs. Dogma

Because as I said last time, we live in an explosion of technology. We live in an explosion of the technological age. Our eyes have demonstrated to us that much of science is almost magic, right? Just look at what AI has done. Look at what you hold in your hand with your mobile phone.

But you need to not overextrapolate from that. You need to understand the difference between science and dogma. Right?

We talked a little bit about this last time, but I really think it’s an important point that every Christian needs to be aware of the difference between science and dogma.

“You need to understand the difference between science and dogma.”

Okay.

The No True Scotsman Fallacy

So one tactic that you’ll see from old earthers that really tried to use this fallacy—and I’m just going to go through two fallacies I want to understand because I think we need a new vocabulary for this age that we live in. We live in an age with more information than ever, but it’s harder to tell the truth than ever, right?

If somebody ever comes and tells you no scientists believe in six-day creation, they’re using something called the no true Scotsman fallacy, right? Which is: no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. And Scotty says, “But my uncle is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge.” And then the person says, “Yeah, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.” You’ve defined scientists to be like the group of people who agree with you, right?

When people say no true scientist believes in six-day creation, well, I can tell you from firsthand experience, I’m a scientist who believes in six-day creation. I also know many other scientists who believe in six-day creation. And then some people may say, “Yeah, but they’re not real scientists.” Come on, right? You’ve defined scientists to a narrow group of people that agree with you.

This particular point has really been used to push this agenda relentlessly, to sort of browbeat Christians into thinking that if you believe in six-day creation you’re going against all of this agreement on the scientists’ part. That’s just simply not true. Of course, the majority of scientists who are secular and come from naturalistic presuppositions would agree with that, but there are a good amount of people who don’t.

“When people say no true scientist believes in six-day creation, they’ve defined scientists as only people who agree with them.”

This is another way of thinking about the world that we live in and how to evaluate science.

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

All right. There’s a popular term that was coined called Gellman’s amnesia. What is this? If you look at the comic, you’ll see a guy reading the newspaper saying, “This is nonsense. Who writes this stuff?” Let’s say something about accounting comes up, and Mike looks at the newspaper thinking, “That’s not right. They’re just completely lying about this.”

But we’ve all had this experience. We look at the newspaper and think, “That’s very biased. That’s completely slanted or completely wrong.” But then you read about something you don’t know, right? Maybe you don’t know much about creationism or some other topic. You read about that and think, “I didn’t know about that. I guess that must be true.”

We all have this bias to simply believe when somebody tells us something we don’t quite know about. But just like the last article we read where we thought, “That’s completely lying,” what’s more likely? That only the article you just read is wrong, or are they all wrong? The reality is they’re generally all wrong.

You just have to be discerning as a Christian. This is the definition: when you encounter a news article covering a topic you’re a subject matter expert in and you notice a lot of errors or misunderstandings, but then read another article by the same publisher and just assume it’s accurate. This is from a very reputable source called Elastic Dog. But anyways, we live in a very strange world.

“We all have this bias to simply believe when somebody tells us something we don’t quite know about.”

Generally, the less you understand about science, the more you put your faith in it.

I’ve already talked about this stuff, so I’m not going to say it again. Basically, be able to distinguish what is science and what is dogma. And be careful who you trust.

Q2: How Do Old Earth Believers Reconcile Genesis?

Scientists are just people. If it’s not the scientific method, then you should understand that it’s dogma, right? Be as wary as serpents and as innocent as doves. That’s Matthew 10:16.

I beat that to death. Question two: How do people who believe in old earth reconcile themselves to the Genesis account?

I gave you many reasons to believe in six day creation, but how do other people believe and how do they reconcile that to their points? As I showed you this slide last time, there’s a non-exhaustive list of all the different competing theories of trying to reconcile the Bible with old earth and billions of years.

I’ll talk briefly about this, not too long. The gap theory is the first one you see there. This is also called ruin reconstruction. It’s a truly strange theory, but it was actually a widely accepted theory many years ago. I haven’t heard about it much recently.

Matthew 10:16: “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

The Gap Theory

But the idea here is that in the far distant past, God created a perfect heaven and earth. And then there’s a gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.

Between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, they put in billions of years. And they put in a whole lot of mythology in here.

“Between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, gap theorists insert billions of years and a whole lot of mythology.”

In this gap, Satan was the ruler of the earth and he had a whole people on the earth living that didn’t have any souls. Now that’s important because if they had souls then they could be redeemed by Adam. But Adam’s the first man. It didn’t come till later, right? So you have to have these people without souls.

Very strange.

Eventually Satan dwelled in the garden of Eden, rebelled, and then Satan fell. Sin entered the universe, brought on earth God’s judgment in the form of a flood. Now, this is not Noah’s flood. This is Satan’s flood. And then there was this global ice age.

Heat from the sun was removed and then was called Lucifer’s flood. And then plant, animals, and fossils on the earth today came from that era.

So everything, all of these fossils or whatever that you see is actually from Genesis between Genesis 1:2 and Genesis 1:1.

Problems with the Gap Theory

The first question you should ask is where is any of this in the Bible? They actually do have some Jesus references in there, but it’s just not in the Bible. It’s not supported by anything.

Exodus 20:11 comes to block this again, right? Exodus 20:11 is a very useful verse because it says in six days God made the heavens and the earth. If you put a bunch of billions of years in between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, that’s no longer true. You still have death and disease before the fall, and that’s still a problem.

Lucifer’s flood—this sort of mythological flood between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2—doesn’t actually solve anything because that’s also a catastrophic event. So remember, the uniformitarian agenda is like everything just kind of evolves over billions of years. Nothing really catastrophic happened except for maybe some meteors or something.

But Lucifer’s flood is another world-destroying event. And how can you believe anything, right? You can’t believe any of the dating stuff, and all of this stuff basically is a little bit questionable.

Exodus 20:11: “In six days God made the heavens and the earth—Exodus 20:11 blocks the gap theory.”

The Day-Age Theory

Okay. You also have to believe that Noah’s flood left no trace. If you think that everything happens at Lucifer’s flight, okay, you probably didn’t know any of this because I don’t think this is a very popular view today, but it was a popular view like 50 years ago, right?

The more popular view is day age. Day age is basically like every day in the Genesis account is maybe a few billion years or thousands of years. They hang this on verses like 2 Peter 3:8, which says a thousand years to the Lord is like a day.

But that verse is not talking about creation. It’s talking about the second coming of Christ, right? So it has nothing to do with creation. The way that the day age theory works is they accept the big bang as a model of the universe. They say that the record of nature that we see today is just as reliable as the Bible.

They have to believe in a local flood, otherwise it wipes out all of your evidence, right? They believe in death before the fall. They also believe in order to get away from the death problem, like we talked about before—when Adam comes, everything after him is redeemable, right? So if Adam doesn’t come until the end of creation, you have to have a race of people whose fossils are available before that.

So day age theory, at least many versions, have man-like creatures that existed before Adam and Eve that didn’t have souls. They would point to like the Neanderthals or all of the other hominids that they find and say that they’re different species.

So what are some of the big problems? As we said a little bit last time, the order of creation doesn’t make any sense, right? If you look at the day age and you say these are ages—even if you allow for some overlap—the earth is created on day one, but the sun doesn’t get created until day four. So how are you going to get around that, right? You can’t have the earth older than the sun in any of these cosmological evolution theories. And it’s just really weird to have hominids that are spiritless.

“You can’t have the earth older than the sun in any cosmological evolution theory.”

And then there’s another version of this that says maybe just the first three days are ages. Okay. So we’ll talk about that actually separately in a second.

All right. So the most common interpretation today is probably actually called progressive creation, which is I think somewhere down here, right? Progressive creation.

So this is a little bit weirder. Okay, sorry. I forgot to advance the slide. So this is like, where do you fit millions of years? There’s only really three options, right? Either before Genesis 1:1, between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, which is gap theory, or you spread it out. So day age is sort of spreading it out.

And this is the problem with all of them. For all of them, you have death before sin, right?

Progressive Creation and Framework Hypothesis

Okay. Do I have another slide on this? No, I guess not. All right. What did I want to say about progressive creation?

Progressive creation is a little bit weird. I thought I had a slide on it, but I don’t. It’s that God created in stages. He creates animals and then they die out, then he creates more animals and then they die out, then he creates more animals and they die out, right?

Eventually, he creates humans. What this allows you to do in some way is that you are able to reject biological evolution because you can say that God created these things in stages. So it’s still God creating, but you try to read in all of this astronomical and geological evolution.

Anyways, it’s the same problems as we had before. There’s still death before sin. Still, the order of creation doesn’t make any sense. And then some people call the framework hypothesis, which I had before. Some people just allegorize the whole thing.

It’s like all of this is a story and you have to kind of make some morals out of it and evaluate it like you would evaluate a myth. But they would say it’s not a myth, but it would be like one of these things where you have to read it like poetry and not really have to look at it as literal days.

Those are the different views, and I say I think none of them really hold up. All of them are kind of a little bit more ridiculous, in fact, than six-day creation.

“All of the old-earth theories are kind of more ridiculous in fact than six-day creation.”

Okay. Let’s try to move a little faster here. Question three.

Q3: Were the First Three Days Non-Solar Periods?

If the sun was only created on day four, then how can we be sure that the first three days were exactly 24 hours? Is it possible that you can interpret the first three days as non-solar periods and then maintain that days four through seven are ordinary 24-hour days?

First of all, you would ask, well, why would somebody want to do this? The reason somebody might want to do this is because you can then reject molecule-to-man evolution but you can keep your cosmological evolution. You can basically say the big bang and all the stuff is true—that’s in the first three days—and then all of the animal stuff, God created the way that we would read as 24-hour days.

So what are the problems with this? One problem is you don’t get this theory unless you’re really trying to do that. You have to have that motive.

Secondly, there’s no reason, as we said last time, to interpret the word “yam” (day) differently in days 1 through 3 and days 4 through 7. Both of them say “evening and morning” and “the next day,” right?

And we always go back to Genesis and to Exodus 20:11, which says in six days God created the heavens and the earth. That doesn’t make any sense at all if you believe that the first three days are somehow different, millions of years.

Exodus 20:11: “Exodus 20 says in six days God created the heavens and the earth—that doesn’t allow for millions of years in the first three days.”

Plants Before the Sun

But there’s other problems with this. One problem is: where are the plants? When are the plants created?

The plants are created on day three.

That’s before day four, right? So somehow you are having plants and trees and then there’s evening and morning.

So unless you want to completely spiritualize evening and morning, and then there’s the sun, you have maybe billions of years of plants living without the sun, which is extremely strange, right? You can’t really understand that. That doesn’t really fit with cosmological evolution.

Also, day one there’s a watery void and day four is the sun. So the earth again is created before the sun. That also doesn’t really fit with any sort of cosmological model. None of those things can be reconciled.

You really have to do a lot of violence to Genesis 1 if you want to read that in there.

“You have to do a lot of violence to Genesis 1 if you want to read long ages into it.”

Purpose of the Heavenly Bodies

All right. One other thing that was interesting here is marking the seasons. What is the purpose of the heavenly bodies? Did time exist, or did it make sense to talk about 24 hours before the sun existed?

The answer is in Genesis 1:14. God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of heavens to separate the day from the light and let them be for signs.” It doesn’t seem like they were necessary to create the concept of days. In fact, it seems like the concept of days already existed, and they’re just like the clock that you can use to measure the passing of time.

So you don’t need the sun to measure day and night. That’s why it says evening and morning. What you do need is an earth, right? And maybe a light source, and maybe you’re rotating the earth, but you don’t need the sun. The sun is really there just to mark the days.

“You don’t need the sun to have day and night. The sun is really there just to mark the days.”

The last question somebody might ask is why God did it this way. Why did God create the sun on day four instead of on day one? You can’t really answer that question with any sort of authority. But one speculation is maybe because God didn’t want to put that much importance on the sun.

If you think about what happens in Revelation, God is the light source, right? He is the light. And if you look throughout all of human history, you see that people worship the sun. In fact, there are Baal and all these other sun gods in Scripture. Here in the Genesis account, the sun is subservient.

It’s just a timepiece. There’s nothing special about it except it’s a clock. It’s like a watch, right?

But that’s speculation. Who knows the mind of God?

All right, let’s go a little faster.

Q4: What About Carbon Dating Methods?

Come on. Come on. Question four: What about carbon dating methods? Are they reliable and how do they fit with the young earth? And if we say they are not, are we being inconsistent when trusting them for biblical archaeology?

All right. I’ll answer the first question first. The answer is we probably are being consistent if we trust in them. We’d be inconsistent if we trust them for biblical archaeology in a very sort of trusting way, right?

Why do I say that? What is radiometric dating? Radiometric dating is a dating method developed in the 20th century, actually after everyone had already accepted millions of years. It’s not like people accepted millions of years because of radiometric dating. That was already the assumption, and then they developed this radiometric dating.

How does it work? There are different isotopes of atoms in the world, and carbon is one of them.

“Radiometric dating was developed after everyone had already accepted millions of years.”

Carbon usually is carbon 12, and then carbon 14 will generally decay into carbon 12. It decays with a very fixed half-life—it takes a very fixed amount of time for half of that carbon 14 to decay into carbon 12. If you know how much there is to begin with, then you have a way to calculate essentially how long that carbon has been there.

Let me repeat a point that I made before. If it’s not testable by the scientific method, then it’s not observational science.

If it’s not testable by the scientific method, then it’s not testable science. It’s not observational science. All facts are interpreted based on your assumptions.

No one can witness the age of the earth, right? Can you go back in time and look at when this carbon atom was created? You don’t know anything about that. You have to make assumptions about that.

We can measure these isotopes, but then we are guessing at the time based on our assumptions. But God was there, right? He actually has an eyewitness account. Would you trust the eyewitness account or a bunch of guesses?

What are the assumptions? There’s a funny video here. Is there a video in there that you can play? This will break things up a little bit. If not, I’ll just talk through it.

Yeah, just see if you can play it. It’s only like two minutes long. This video kind of tells you a little bit about the assumptions. I’ll talk about it later.

This is a very corny video.

Assumptions Behind Radiometric Dating

Any scientific method used to estimate the age of the earth requires making assumptions, and that includes radiometric dating. To illustrate the assumptions, let’s imagine something simpler. Suppose you walk into a room and see a flask with 300 milliliters of water in it sitting under a dripping tap. If the tap is dripping at 50 milliliters per hour, how long has the water been dripping into the flask? We don’t know without making assumptions.

It would be 6 hours, assuming the flask was empty when it was put under the tap, that the tap had been dripping at a constant rate the whole time, and that the flask had not been moved or tipped over. If we don’t know those things, we can’t be sure how long the water has been dripping into that flask.

It’s the same for radiometric dating. We have to assume we know the amount of each isotope present when the rock cooled, and we don’t. We have to assume that the decay rate has been constant. There are processes that can affect decay rates.

We also have to assume that nothing has been added or taken away from either isotope. The bottom line is dating methods don’t work because we can’t be sure if the calculated date is accurate.

“We have to assume we know the amount of each isotope present when the rock cooled—and we don’t.”

There’s a simple way to check if it works. Just test a rock of known age and see if the dating method gets the right age.

Now, this has been done many times. In 1992, samples of the lava dome that formed at Mount St. Helens in the early 1980s were tested by two reputable labs. Results came back at between 340,000 to 200.8 million years for rocks that were no more than 10 years old. That’s a fail.

So what did we say in the video? It said basically that there are assumptions, right? The amount of parent isotope that’s present at the start. Now, what do you have to know to assume that?

You have to assume naturalism. You have to assume that you knew exactly how much given naturalistic processes. But if God created everything in six days, you don’t know the conditions at creation.

You have to assume that the decay rate stays constant. That actually is demonstrably false. Even the person who developed carbon 14 was saying that it didn’t seem to him like the atmosphere had a constant amount of carbon 14. It seemed to change, and that disturbed him.

The other assumption is that besides the decay, there’s no other process that can add to it. That’s also uniformitarianism. Both of these things affirm uniformitarianism. But if you believe in six-day creation, all of these assumptions are wrong.

First of all, you have to assume that the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in the atmosphere is the same today as it was thousands of years ago. You have to assume that, but that’s demonstratively not true. Observational science has found many different things that validate, or rather violate, these assumptions.

For example, there’s another radiometric dating method that uses potassium and argon. You have to assume the amount of argon in the rocks at the beginning, and the assumption is that argon doesn’t get in the rocks except through that decay process. The problem is people have found rocks and literally watched them being formed with argon in it. So we know that’s not true.

The decay rate can be affected by many things. It’s been shown that magnetic fields on the earth can change the decay rates. Also, the varying amount of cosmic rays can change the decay rates. Whatever you believe about the flood, it completely changed the earth and perhaps how cosmic rays work.

There are at least three instances in the biblical account that would really bust the uniformitarian assumption. One is creation, another is the curse, and another is the flood. But you might say, okay, maybe we can at least test it with rocks of known age.

Testing Rocks of Known Age

And this is going back to the question about maybe archaeologically are we being inconsistent if we believe that?

We can see this table here. People have tested rocks of known ages, right? They know when the rock is formed because they know from what volcano it came from due to historically recorded volcanic eruptions. They test it with radiometric dating and they get times that are wildly off, right?

Potassium argon gives 170,000 years old for Mount Etna when the rock was known to be formed 122 years ago, and there’s a whole list of this, right?

So again, I just have to say that if it’s never been confirmed that this is unreliable, why are people depending on this so much? There is no study where the radiometric age of a rock agreed with the known age of the rock.

“There is no study where the radiometric age of a rock agreed with the known age of the rock.”

You can’t even test it, and they’ll say it’s because it’s not reliable for small amounts of time.

But if you can’t even test it for small amounts of time, why do you think you can test it for millions of years?

Do you feel lied to yet? Because you might start thinking that some of this is agenda driven. Okay. Question five.

Q5: Distant Starlight

Distant starlight. This is one of my favorite questions. From stars billions of light years away should have taken billions of years to reach Earth. The fact that we see them seems like evidence for an old universe. A few of you had this question, and it’s a good question.

The first way I want to answer this is to say whether or not science has a good answer to this question. Does science have a good answer to the distant starlight question?

Now you might say that of course science does because we have the Big Bang, right? That means everything started in one place. But it turns out that actually does not solve the question.

“Does science have a good answer to the distant starlight question? It turns out that the Big Bang does not solve it.”

The Horizon Problem in Big Bang Cosmology

And people noticed a long time ago when the big bang theory was first created or first envisioned that the problem is that there is something called the microwave background radiation. If you look at the microwave background radiation of the universe, if you just look at the night sky, you see that the temperature everywhere seems to be very uniform.

The fact is that you would not expect that given the big bang model because these places have been so far away that they can’t actually communicate. So there’s no way for them to come into thermal equilibrium.

It would take extreme fine-tuning to get every part of this universe, if you believe the big bang model, to come into thermal equilibrium with each other, right? Because they never basically never touched. So how did secular scientists solve this problem?

Well, it turns out this is called the horizon problem. It’s very well known. They solve this problem by something called inflation.

So inflation—you’ll hear about this—is this process where the universe became like this very small place that everything sort of came into equilibrium and then for like some fraction of a second or something it expands at the speed of much faster than the speed of light.

The problem is this is a completely not understood process. There’s no real theories on how it starts or how it ends. Nobody knows really anything about this process except that it seems to solve this problem, right? It was invented to solve this problem.

So the problem that I want to let you know is this: the problem of distant starlight is the same problem as secular scientists have. How do you get light to travel faster than it seems like time has allowed?

“The distant starlight problem is the same problem secular scientists have—how do you get light to travel faster than time seems to allow?”

Right? That is the problem, right?

Creationist Solutions to Distant Starlight

Like in our creation account, we see light from different stars and we’re like, “How did I get here?” It didn’t seem like in 6,000 years you have time for light to get here. But in Big Bang cosmology, you have the same problem. You just don’t hear about it because there’s a little thing called inflation they put in to sort of hide the problem. But nobody knows anything about it, right?

There’s a lot of other problems about the Big Bang that we can talk about some other time. But there are things that you would expect if the Big Bang was true, like the matter and antimatter ratio and things like this. But that’s really technical.

I think this is one of these things where the less about science, the more you put faith into it. But what about creationists? Do we have an answer to this problem? Well, I’ll give you two possible solutions. And again, I’ll just say that scripture doesn’t tell us, right?

A lot of this stuff is sort of like speculation. Some of it is okay to do that because we want to apply our logic to the scriptures. But maybe we’ll never know and we have to be kind of okay with that. This is sort of like one of these things we take by faith.

However, there are two interesting and intriguing solutions. One is something called dasha, which was developed by this guy named Faulkner in 2013. This is based on Genesis 1:1. The word dasha is Hebrew for sprout.

“Scripture doesn’t tell us the mechanism. Some of it we take by faith.”

If you look at the Genesis account here, it says God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed.”

Then it says later on that the earth brought forth vegetation. Faulkner, who developed this theory, noticed that these words seem to imply that there is some time involved in this. It wasn’t that the vegetation instantly appeared, but it seemed like they sprouted. It seemed like they grew maybe in an accelerated time scale, right?

Anisotropic Synchrony Convention

Maybe they grew extremely fast. Maybe somehow the mechanism of the process of this is impossible to determine, but it seems like maybe if you were there and you could see with your eyes, you would actually see it sprout from the ground faster than perhaps you would be used to today.

The idea now is you can apply that to light. And what this person said is, “As part of God’s formative work, light from astronomical bodies was miraculously made to shoot its way to Earth at an abnormally accelerated rate in order to fulfill their function of serving as signs, seasons, days, and years.”

That is one possible theory. It would be a miracle. It’s not based on scientific theories. And if you want to ask how it would happen, it would be like asking how Jesus raised himself from the dead, right? Like some miracles you just don’t have a scientific mechanism for.

Some people find this to be unsatisfactory for that reason. I don’t have such a big problem with it. But here’s a second possible solution, and this is from Jason Lyle. He calls it the anisotropic synchrony convention, which is actually really fascinating if you look at the physics. If you have any questions about this, you can ask Ian Pang over there. He’s a lot better at math than I am.

He basically says there is no problem. I’m going to try to explain this in like two seconds, right? Because I’m running out of time. But the idea is that Einstein came up with this.

Here’s how it is. We tend to think about time happening simultaneously because we live on this earth and we don’t live in astronomical time scales or astronomical length scales. But since we live closer together, we can basically synchronize our watches. I can come up to Mike and be like, “It is 9:49 right now. What do you have?” “9:49.” Okay, we can synchronize our watches.

But it turns out that the farther you get from each other, the more difficult that is to do, and it becomes impossible to do at long enough length scales. At long enough length scales, time behaves very unintuitively.

Einstein in his theory of general relativity really brought out a lot of the weird implications of this. One is that time passes differently depending on how fast you’re moving, right? So if you’re moving fast, time slows down. A lot of science fiction is based on this stuff, and in popular lingo it’s called time dilation.

One weird implication about this is that there is no actual universal now shared by anybody in the universe. You can’t actually objectively say this is now and like 20 million light years away that is also now, because the speed of light is really constant. It’s like if things don’t interact, if they don’t see each other, then they don’t interact, and the speed at which they see each other is governed by the speed of light. You can’t go faster than that. So it doesn’t actually make sense to say things are happening at the same time. It’s a weird concept.

So what do you do? Well, you can literally decide your reference frame. You can say, “Well, there’s no objective standard of what time it is at that star right now. And I can’t synchronize my watch to it because that’s impossible. But I can decide that it’s happening right now. What I see right now in the sky, that is happening right now.”

“Under the anisotropic synchrony convention, there is no distant starlight problem—we see the universe as it is now.”

The only reason we think there’s a problem is because we’re not used to this way that time actually works. So what is the implication of this?

The significance of the distant starlight issue is that it’s just as legitimate to say if you look at Alpha Centauri in the telescope, are we seeing it now or are we seeing it 4.3 years ago? Because that’s 4.3 light years away, right? So are we seeing it now or are we seeing it as 4.3 years ago? You can actually simply decide that you’re seeing it now.

The implication of that is that the speed of light you can just decide is not constant in both directions. The speed of light coming this way and the speed of light going that way we would think would be the same, like it’s the same both directions. But you can literally decide as a convention that the speed of light coming from the star here is instant and the speed of light going from here to the star is half the speed of light, half of C.

You can decide as a convention that that is happening right now. And because of relativity, because of all this math, you can never tell the difference. Those two conventions are going to be the same. It’s like an accounting trick, right? So there is basically no distant starlight problem in this model.

In order to really understand this, you have to really dive into all the math. But this is a pretty cool one.

In both of these solutions, I just want to say there is no deception because literally you’re seeing it as it happens.

Q6: Humans and Dinosaurs Together

Okay, let’s go through the next one. I know we have a few minutes. All right, humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Why aren’t there humans found with dinosaur bones? This is also a good question.

One thing I want to establish in one minute is that it does seem like there are dinosaurs in the Bible. In Job 40, it talks about a mysterious animal with strength in his loins, tall as a cedar, with a nose. He also has a tail. If you just look at this, the behemoth—there’s not really an earthly animal that corresponds to this.

The elephant doesn’t fit because it doesn’t have a tail. And this looks like a pretty good representation of what that verse is talking about. This is a brachiosaurus.

“It does seem like there are dinosaurs in the Bible—Job 40 describes the behemoth with a tail tall as a cedar.”

But there are also other places in Job that kind of do the same thing.

Another thing I want to show you is they actually have discovered soft tissue in T-Rexes. They found soft tissue in these fossils, and you begin to wonder that if it’s millions of years old, how could that still be around, right?

This is an intriguing story.

The Coelacanth: A Living Fossil

This is a living fossil.

Have you guys heard of this one? This is the coelacanth. So this is a coelacanth, and it’s a fossil that was found to be 360 million years old to 800 million years old. In fact, they thought it went extinct with the dinosaurs because you see the fossils in the same layers as the dinosaurs and all this stuff.

There was unanimous agreement about this until in 1938 they found it swimming around in the ocean. It hasn’t changed. It’s the same animal.

When you look at that animal and you look at what else is in the ocean, you see whales. Whales, according to evolutionary theory, evolved about 50 million years ago. So there’s about 50 million years where you might have seen some fossils of whales and coelacanths together.

But you don’t see them there. There are no fossils of whales and coelacanths together. So does that mean that whales and coelacanths don’t live at the same time?

“There are no fossils of whales and coelacanths together—yet they live at the same time today.”

No, they live at the same time today.

Why Missing Fossils Don’t Prove Anything

Okay. You can actually just go to the ocean and see them living at the same time. But there are no fossils where there were at the same time. So you start to wonder: why does the fact that dinosaurs and humans are not found at the same time prove that dinosaurs and humans did not live together? The answer is no.

It turns out that if you think about Noah’s flood and how we believe all the fossils were created right at the beginning of the flood time—maybe less than a year—that’s where everything died and everything was buried. You have to have that burial, by the way, to create the fossils. If you think that’s all happening in that short time period, what are the odds that you’ll see men and dinosaurs together? I mean, are you going to live next to a dinosaur if you’re a man?

Like, you’re probably going to keep your distance, right? But at that time, that gives you maybe six months to create fossils.

In the evolutionary model, you have 50 million years to create whales and pelicans at the same time, or really any sort of combination of fossils, right? Which we don’t see.

There are many different combinations of fossils that you would think you would see if they lived at the same time, but you don’t see them together. Okay. We’re not going to have time to look at this video, but we used to have a cool video on this. We’re already over time.

So what does that tell you? Two things. One is it does not prove anything that you don’t see humans and dinosaurs at the same time. Perhaps they just did not live together, and we only had six months to make that fossil anyway. However, there are a lot of other fossils you don’t find together.

So you ask the question: why is this talking point brought up so frequently? Why isn’t it brought up that two different trees that you would find at the same time don’t have fossils found together? That’s because it’s an agenda-driven question, right? It’s a question that’s specifically created. Even evolutionists know that this is not proof because they see many fossils that they don’t find at the same time.

“It’s an agenda-driven question—even evolutionists know that absence of fossils together is not proof.”

You wouldn’t necessarily expect that you would ever see that, but maybe we will and maybe we’ll find it.

But if they do find it, do you think they’ll change their mind? No. That’s not the point of that question, right?

This is basically what AI and social media say on this topic. I asked a bunch of AIs answering this question what they thought if you were a biblical creationist. Actually, all of the AIs are six-day creationists.

Interestingly enough, the only one that was a little bit hand-wavy on the issue was Claude Anthropic, which tried to say no, no, it could be both sides.

Resources and Closing

For more information, do I have my bag there? These are some of the books that I really appreciated when I was looking at these topics.

The best one I think, if you’re going to read a book, is the first one: Old Earth Creationism on Trial. It’s kind of short and it’s very informative. It kind of does this thing as like a jury type of trial, which is kind of interesting. Comic just the Genesis is if you’re very technical and you want a lot of theological lingo. There’s always the answer in Genesis stuff. Biblical Science Institute is from Jason Lyle. If you want a lot more astronomy stuff, that’s also a good resource.

As I promised, there’s a whole bunch of books here that are free for you guys. If you asked a question, you can just pick one up. But after you wait for a minute, you guys can all pick one up if you want.

“The best resource if you’re going to read one book is Old Earth Creationism on Trial.”

There’s ones on astronomy, one’s on Satan, one on Satan and the serpent, one on compromise. Best evidences, dinosaurs, young earth, did God create in six days? Should Christians believe in old Earth? There’s a whole bunch of these pocket guides that Dwayne got for basically a discount. But I want to give them out to you guys.

Take them. And maybe even if you’re going to read them, definitely take it. And if you want to give it out, that’s okay too. I’ll just leave them here.

You guys can look through them. Okay.

Sorry, I really did not leave enough question time, but we’ll have another Q&A at some point. If you guys really want to, you can ask me some hard questions. All right. Let me close in a word of prayer.

Father, thank you for the clarity of your word. Even though we struggle to really understand many of these things because they’re so wonderful, and who can understand your mind and why you do the way things you do. But we want to know, and all we can do is trust your word over that of fallible man. You are the one who can create the heavens and the earth in an instant if you choose. But you did that in six days as an example to us.

Lord, help us to understand these things and also to marvel at your creative work, to marvel at your power. And then to be able to go out and defend this doctrine to people who don’t believe, who don’t agree, because we do believe that it is a doctrine in which most of the other parts of scripture, including the redemption story, is built on. So we thank you Lord and pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.

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