The Age of the Earth

One of the main concerns against Christianity that I hear from skeptics and atheists is the notion that the Bible teaches an Earth that is only ~10,000 years old. Given the abundant scientific evidence to the contrary, how can anyone believe what that book has to say? they ask. I believe this is an honest concern, one that I myself struggled with for many years. But, is this actually true? does the Bible proclaim a young Earth?

Interestingly enough, there is more than meets the eye, well in this particular case, more than meets the text. It turns out that, unlike English, the vocabulary size in ancient Hebrew (the language in which the first part of the Bible, the Old Testament, was written) is tiny. Roughly speaking, it contains only about three thousand words. Therefore, most nouns in biblical Hebrew possess multiple “literal definitions” or common usages. The Hebrew noun, yôm, translated “day” in Genesis 1 is no exception.

The word yôm possesses four distinct literal definitions: a portion of the daylight hours, all of the daylight hours, a 24-hour period, or a long but finite time period. In biblical Hebrew, as opposed to modern Hebrew, no other word besides yôm carries the meaning of a long but finite time period. Therefore, if the author of Genesis wanted to communicate a creation story consisting of six eons, he would have no other option but to use the word yôm to describe those eras. 

I like to think about these eras as school years. The entirety of astrophysics education, for example, is primarily made up of four periods: elementary school, high school, graduate school, and post-graduate school (master's, PhD). None of these necessarily have to share the same length, but they must follow a chronological order (one after the other). Likewise, these “days” in the creation account can also describe long, but finite, time periods. Therefore, the Bible does not strictly teach that the Earth is ~10,000 years old. That is just one of the multiple interpretations of the Genesis account that results from assuming a day as a 24-hour period. In this sense, the Bible allows for an interpretation of the creation story beyond the popular teaching that the days of Genesis represent six consecutive 24-hour periods.

Even more so, the first verse of the Bible: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth" (Genesis 1:1) reinforces the claim of an old view interpretation of the creation account, since in biblical Hebrew there was no single word for the concept of a universe. So the expression the heavens and the Earth, acting as a compound word made from the union of the words “heavens” and “earth”, does precisely that, it refers uniquely to the totality of the physical universe, all its matter, energy, space, and time. The rest of Genesis 1 then describes how the Earth became habitable for human beings.

This understanding of the word “day” yields a creation account that is completely consistent with modern science, where both the universe and Earth are as old as astronomers and physicists have measured them.

Therefore, people should think twice before dismissing the Bible from page one.

Post based on Hugh Ross's A Matter of Days book, see resources

Image credit: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/