Featured Old or Young Earth?

I very seriously doubt that A & E were in the garden very long, less than, oh, one month max. Or maybe just a few days?????
Why??
Glad you asked. Assuming normal passions of a loving human COUPLE (a him & a her:thumbs, how long do you think it would have taken Eve to get pregnant?:laugh:
But their first born (as far as we know) had the sin nature enough that he was a murderer, so he had to be concieved AFTER the fall; IMHO!
No proof of any of this, but it seems logical, sans any direct intervention by God to delay pregnancy, which is entirely possible.

 

YEC.

However I would entertain time compression and/or decompression along with "markers" (my terminology).

It is very difficult to think "out of the box" when it comes to Modern Physics (which I have taken) concerning the rate of time passage as all we know is our little time slice here on earth.

Think of a video taken to watch an individual as he/she works an eight hour day.

Then run the video at high speed so that it only runs for an hour.

It took an hour to view the complete day of work although it took eight hours for the individual you have watched to complete it.

For a crude definition of a "marker" - Think of a 20$ gold piece. It was worth 20 dollars in the early 1900's but about 1600 dollars today - it all depends on the "marker" you choose. In 1908 - value - 20 US dollars, In 2015 - 1600 US dollars.

What then is the chosen "marker" for the time passage in Genesis 1? During Moses days?

Its difficult to put these double components of time together (Plus throw entropy into the menu as one brother has mention) and then unravel that time in today's value.

It is a given that you must choose to believe that C is not a constant which (if you believe it) will you have stamped with the same stigmata as even mentioning "intelligent design" in our antichrist schools of higher learning (although a few years ago Scientific American ran an article C Is Not a Constant).

This is why I have no problem at all with anyone's explanation (even creative evolutionists) concerning creation as long as they attribute the Intelligent Designer (The Triune God) with the work of His fingers).

Psalm 8
3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

Besides - God is eternal, therefore eternity /2.5 billion years or eternity/6000 years are both zero.


HankD

 

Interesting observation! You might find the information presented by Robert L. Whitelaw in the book Why Not Creation?, Walter E. Lammerts, editor. I doubt the book is still in print but it should be in a college library or a good local library!

 

oops should have said eternity, not zero in my former post.

HankD

 

Outstanding post, great explanations, Hank.

 

How do we make "an evening and a morning" longer than a 24 hour day?


God bless.

 

lol...poor thing.

If?


Genesis 3:16

King James Version (KJV)

16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.



Now, this reasoning might make you sigh, lol, but consider that if Cain and Abel were born before the fall then we have men who were not subject to the curse.

Men are born separated from God after Adam:


Romans 5:12

King James Version (KJV)

12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:



Cain and Abel would have been innocent of Adam's disobedience, and the deception of Eve if they were already living.

That is rather easy to explain: because he lived in the Garden and had access to the tree of life.

That is what is speculative: we do not know that Adam's lifespan starts at creation or at the time of the Fall.


Genesis 5

King James Version (KJV)

3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth:



Nothing in this gives us a relation to the Fall.

Seth was born after Abel's death.

And there is no reference we can dogmatically claim to show the age of his siblings.

Simply not reasonable. Adam could have been in the Garden for a thousand years, then, his lifespan beginning at the time of the Fall.

It is good speculation, I'll grant you that, and admit it is a possible scenario, but, there is nothing you have given which makes it a certainty that Adam was created, then lived 109 years before Seth was born.

There is nothing that makes it possible to place Cain and Abel as being twenty when Seth was born (particularly when one of them had been murdered).

That remains a variable which could be considered by old earth proponents and not something either side could be dogmatic about.

I'm not going to speculate about how much time there was in the Garden before the Fall, and don't see that it really plays a critical role in the Age of the Earth. We have the set point of Creation followed by genealogies by which we can approximate how old the earth is.

As a YECer, I take that route. If someone wants to embrace an old earth, the only interest I have is how they reconcile that to Scripture.

And as I said, your view of 25,000 years would really make you more of a YECer than an old earther.

Still curious as to how you could consider the genealogies to be off, by true YEC standard, roughly 19,000 years.


God bless.

 

I'm a YEC and I see it as falling into a YEC standard, as opposed to the duration ascribed by Evolutionists and even Theistic Evolutionists, who place it in at least the millions.


God bless.

 

You have kind of destroyed your reasoning, lol.

I agree, Cain and Abel would have been born after the Fall, which while we see an exception to chronological order in regards to the Fall (which is an important exception since the Bible has as a primary focus the Fall), the birth of children appears to be listed as after the Fall.

Moral of the story? Glad you asked: don't have kids, they're nothing but trouble.

Just kidding.

Besides, many married couples put off having kids.


God bless.

 

Don't forget that Adam and Eve were not exactly like us in our thinking. There is a distinction pre-Fall and post.


God bless.

 

While it is true that time is irrelevant to God in the eternal perspective, it is not true that it is irrelevant to man and the Record of Scripture. Scripture gives us these genealogies for a reason, which may not be to track time, but, we see that time plays a distinct role in Prophecy.

And specific timespans can be seen, such as the time the Hebrew People would be in Egypt, for example. Another would be the duration of the Tribulation, which is founded in the duration of the Seventy Weeks.

So we can't deny the role that specific periods have in Scripture. And when it comes to the genealogies, we are, I believe, given an accurate portrayal which allows us to gauge the time the earth has been here. And it just seems that it is a little speculative to add to that time significantly.

But, it is an interesting discussion, and always glad to see the thoughts of others on this. I have already learned something, which is the relation of Seth's death to that of Abraham. That is a good one, lol.


God bless.

 

I do not know. How do you make an evening and a morning before the earth was formed on day three, and the Sun's light governing day and night on day four?

We do not know unless we do not know that we do not know.

 

I knew evolutionists had vivid/creative imaginations but did not realize that anything such as a "creative evolutionist" existed!

 

I disagree. You do not plan to redeem something unless you intend to sell it to start with, 1 Peter 1:18-20, I believe Adam was created, a living soul, flesh and blood, carnal sold under sin.

It was God who created. It was God who planted a garden. It was God who put the man in the garden. It was God who took the woman from the man. God knew who lurked, in the garden. That would make a great title for a song.

1 John 3:8 Why was the Son of God manifested?

Adam and Eve were the means through which God would send his Son, to destroy the devil and his works, the primary work being the death, of which Adam's would be redeemed from and adopted as sons of God, incorruptible for eternity.

I believe old earth because I believe God from Genesis 1:3-31 began his plan relative to the devil and his works, that proceeded verse 3.

 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Darrell C View Post
How do we make "an evening and a morning" longer than a 24 hour day?

God bless.


I see the evening and morning of day one, two and three, before the sun began to set, time on day four, just as the day of 24 hours that Jesus spoke of in John 11:9 and 10.

There it is obvious to me that walking in the twelve hour day is walking with God and tp walk in the night, is walking with the devil. The night also being twelve hours. The same light and darkness of John 1 and of Acts 26:18

 

You have got to be kidding. The duration of a 24 hour "day" is based on the time it takes for the earth to rotate 360 degrees. Therefore, before day 4 and the light governing the day and night, we had evenings and mornings based on something else. So the argument that evenings and mornings requires 24 hour days does not make sense.

It is clear to me we do not know, God was right when He said so in Job 38.

 

And that the point, assumption has to be made because there are points we don't know.

Yet you are in the habit of making dogmatic conclusions:

Are you a Hebrew Scholar?

Why would Adam not have an appearance of age?

Everyone has an appearance of age. It is you who are denying an appearance of age and wrongly implying a parallel to procreation. We are not told God created a fetus or a baby...but a man.

As a man he would have had an appearance of age.

The dogmatic statement here is that "Scripture does not give any indication of the age of the earth," and I beg to differ...but it does. And gave my reasoning.

Because you find Usher's calculations wrong...you know this?

Please explain how you work in that extra 19,000 years.

Simply a weak argument built on speculation on your part.

There is nothing unusual in the concept of them being contemporaries.

Assumption? Or dogmatic?

But why would this be reason to add 19,000 years to the times we are given?

Seems pretty dogmatic to me. While I do think Adam's lifespan is that which is given and that starts at his creation, I am not going to be dogmatic about that.

Here is an assumption to think about: Chapter Two does not have to be held as occurring in one day. Meaning, we don't expect that Adam named all of the animals in one day, though it is possible, since likely animals would have been condensed in one area at creation (another assumption).

Now here is the point: we also assume Adam named the animals prior to the fall (with the exception of the platypus, which would have occurred after the mutative process began after the flood which likely had astrological events such as that seen in the evidence of the Chicxulub crater (hey assumption is fun!)).

Let's go back to that if:

Does this line up with the dogmatic views presented above?

Not always...

Do we really need to assume their children came after the Fall?

So is it not a reasonable assumption that there was a period after Creation and before the Fall...that lies unaccounted for?

Can we say dogmatically that Adam's lifespan does not begin after the Fall?

I think it unlikely, but will not be dogmatic about it.

Continued...