YOUNG-EARTH CREATIONISM OVERVIEW

1. "Yôm can indeed mean long age or unspecified time, but it is argued that only in special cases with a preposition is this possible. However, in the specific context of Genesis 1, the days are numbered and have "evening and morning", so YECs claim that they can mean only 24 hour days," (2).

2. "YECs also claim that their view is the only one that makes sense of the Sabbath command in Exodus 20:8–11 (one of the passages containing the Ten Commandments), because the Sabbath cycle was set up in terms of 24-hour days," (2).

3. "YECs believe that it is possible that Adam's naming of the animals could have fit into a 24-hour day if Adam named "genera" of animals and spent hours of his first day doing nothing but naming them. For example: Scripture explicitly states that Adam named all the ‘livestock’ (Heb. behemah), the ‘birds of the air’ (Heb. op hassamayim) and all the ‘beasts of the field’ (Heb. chayyah hassadeh). There is no indication that Adam named the fish in the sea, or any other marine organisms, nor any of the insects, beetles or arachnids.[3] Also, the “kinds” may be broader than the modern term "species".[4] So: Assuming Adam had to name 2,500 proto-species (genera), and he named a single proto-species every five seconds, it would have taken him approximately three hours and forty-five minutes to complete the task if we include a five-minute break every hour, [5]" (2). This regards the seventh day when God rested. While DACs assert that too many events took place on this day for it be a mere 24 hours, YECs present this claim.

4. "Most Young Earth creationists believe that God is resting from his creative works, but that the seventh day ended even without the closing phrase," (2). Some DACs say that because the seventh day does not end with a closing phrase (and there was evening, and there was morning) like the first six days do, we are still living in the seventh day as God rests from his creative works. This would disprove the YECs' claim because the seventh day would not be 24 hours. However, YECs believe that the seventh day has ended even though there was no closing phrase in Genesis. Yet since the Bible is very formulaic in that it is consistent with the way it presents material, DACs confirm that the seventh would have to have the closing phrase to be considered a day, otherwise the Bible would not follow it's clearly established format of specificity throughout.

5. "Young Earth Creationists also argue that their position is the only way to explain the Fallen state of the world (the existence of death and suffering), which they believe originated purely from the fall of man. [7] They argue that long-age views entail death before man’s sin. They also argue that physical death must be included in this, since God cursed mankind with returning to the dust (Gen. 3:19). And Saint Paul contrasted the death of Adam with the resurrection of the dead of the Last Adam, Jesus, which DACs agree was physical, so by analogy, Adam's death must have been as well. (2). This explains that each must have been 24 hours, otherwise animals would have been dying for millions of years before the Fall (the presupposed initiation of death).

6. "Although many YECs don't adhere to the position that God is deceptive in His revelation, some espouse the position of "appearance of age" or Omphalos hypothesis, in which God creates the Universe/Earth to simply look old without being old. Biblical refutations of this position are seen by opponents of "appearance of age" (both old and young) in passages such as Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19:1-4. These passages are said to demonstrate that God has revealed truth in His creation," (2). This statement conveys that though geology and history are said to make the Earth look billions of years old, God simply intended for it to look "old" for reasons unspecified by the YECs.

DAY-AGE CREATIONISM OVERVIEW

1. "The term "day" in Genesis is used before the sun and the moon were created or appeared (Gen. 1:5, 14-15.) 2; consequently, "day" does not refer to an Earthly day, because such a day does not yet exist," (2). This point therefore asserts that the meaning of "day" strongly suggests and "age," because the absence of a sun and a moon would demonstrate the impossibility of a regular 24 hour day.

2. "Genesis 2:4 uses the word "yôm" to refer to the entire creation account, which is obviously not 24 hours long in total. Therefore, the word "yôm" in Genesis 1 could also have a more abstract meaning." "Other examples of "yôm" as a long period include: Genesis 2:4, Genesis 30:14, Joshua 24:7, Proverbs 25:13, Isaiah 4:2, Zechariah 14:8 and references to "the day of the Lord,"(2).

3. "The abstract use of "day" as an indefinite period of time is found in other mythological and religious writings of the Middle East to denote the passage of cosmic benchmarks in addition to referring to earthly time marked by the sun or the moon,"(2).

4. "DACs also claim that the number of events that take place within “day” six are far too great to fit within a space of 24 hours. God makes livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals. Then He creates Adam, places him in a garden to “work it and take care of it”, and tells him not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God apparently walks with him, and brings him animals for companions (as it is not good for Man to be alone (he is presumably bored)). Adam then names all the animals and then grows bored with them. God then decides to create Eve, puts Adam into a deep sleep, removes a part of his side and forms Eve. Adam then meets Eve. At this point, many DACs claim that Adam’s response at his first sight of Eve in Genesis 2:23 'ha pa'am' is properly translated: "At long last this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (ha pa'am is merely pa‘am with the definite article added, so the ‘p’ is doubled). All of these events took place in the sixth “day” and DACs believe that the events seem quite crammed and don’t make sense from a Young-Earth perspective," (2). These points demonstrate the DACs proof for days that are ages, for why would Adam say, the DACs claim, "At long last this is bone of my bones..." if the day was merely 24 hours. Could it be possible that Adam is simply impatient and exaggerating?

5. "Some Day-Age creationists note that all of the “days” end with the phrase “and the evening and the morning” except for the seventh day. They conclude that this indicates that the seventh day may not have ended and that we are still in God’s Sabbath rest from creation activities. It is often believed that this is indicated in passages such as Hebrews 4 and Psalm 95," (2).

6. "There are other passages (such as Daniel 8:14, 26) that use "evening and morning" and yet apply to long periods of time. In the cited case, "yôm" is referring to a prophecy to take place at an indefinite time in the future," (2).

YEC STANCE

On day seven, the Fall of man occurs with Adam and Eve which brings a physical death into the world for all life created. If each day was an age, many animals would have been dying for millions of years, as DACs and evolutionists claim, before death entered the world on day seven. Therefore, each day must be translated as a 24 hour day, otherwise a contradiction in the Bible would materialize: death before the entrance of death into the world. Along with this evidence, there is physical proof that suggests the Earth is as young as 6,000 years old, which supports the 24 hour time period of each Genesis day.

The Claim's Conditions:

1. Animals must have lived without death before the Fall.
2. All animal, Adam and Eve were herbivores prior to the Fall so that animals were not being killed and eaten.
3. Animals began to die only after the Fall.
4. A physical death was the consequence for all living things, not just humans, after the Fall.
5. The Earth must be approximately 6,000 years old.


Evidence for Conditions:

1. 1 Corinthians 15:26 says that "The last enemy that will be abolished is death." And since Genesis says, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good," (Genesis 1:31), God's creation would not be "very good" if the animals he created were subject to death. This demonstrates that animals were not dying before the Fall of man.

2. "Then God said, 'I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground - everything that has the breath of life in it - I give every green plant for food,' " (Genesis 1:29-30). There is no meat involved in the diet of man and animal. Therefore, no animals are killed for meat. This adds to the evidence that animals were not dying before the Fall.

3. Since no animals are killed and God's creation is "very good," there was no death before the Fall. Therefore, the Fall resulted in the death of all living creatures, not just humans.

4. "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be alive," (I Corinthians 15:20). Death must have entered through Adam. This means that animals could not have been exposed to death prior to the Fall, showing that each day would have to be 24 hours to prevent the death that would occur within long ages of time.

5. "The wages [penalty] of sin is death," (Romans 6:23). Adam and Eve's sin was what brought forth death to animals.

6. "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned," (Romans 5:12). This demonstrates that physical death was, in fact, the result of sin which shows that there could not have been death before the Fall that caused it.

7. "According to astronomical observations, galaxies like our own experience about one supernova (a violently-exploding star) every 25 years. The gas and dust remnants from such explosions (like the Crab Nebula) expand outward rapidly and should remain visible for over a million years. Yet the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants. That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years worth of supernovas.3," (4).

8. "Every year, rivers [8]and other sources [9] dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year.[9,10] As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today’s input and output rates.[10] This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, three billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations that are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years.[10] Calculations [11] for many other seawater elements give much younger ages for the ocean," (4).

9. "With their short 5,700-year half-life, no carbon 14 atoms should exist in any carbon older than 250,000 years. Yet it has proven impossible to find any natural source of carbon below Pleistocene (Ice Age) strata that does not contain significant amounts of carbon 14, even though such strata are supposed to be millions or billions of years old. Conventional carbon 14 laboratories have been aware of this anomaly since the early 1980s, have striven to eliminate it, and are unable to account for it. Lately the world’s best such laboratory which has learned during two decades of low-C14 measurements how not to contaminate specimens externally, under contract to creationists, confirmed such observations for coal samples and even for a dozen diamonds, which cannot be contaminated in situ with recent carbon.[27] These constitute very strong evidence that the earth is only thousands, not billions, of years old," (4).

10. "The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.[1 ] Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this “the winding-up dilemma,” which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same “winding-up” dilemma also applies to other galaxies. For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the puzzle has been a complex theory called “density waves.”1 The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the “Whirlpool” galaxy, M51.2," (4).


Claim's Conclusion:

Because there cannot be death before the Fall, the creation must be interpreted as six 24 hour days, otherwise death is present before it enters the world due to sin. Following this, the physical evidence in our universe demonstrates that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, as opposed to 4.5 billion years old.

DAC STANCE

The way in which Genesis is written demonstrates there was biological death of animals before the Fall. Therefore, the consequence of the Fall was a spiritual death (Hell) that would be only upon humans without God's salvation as well as a biological death for all humans. Animals had no part in the punishment that Adam and Eve suffered for their sin. With the above being true, each day must be interpreted in Genesis as an age as the Earth is seen to be much older than 6,000 years.

The Claim's Conditions:

1. Animals must have been subject to death before the Fall.
2. The consequence of sin was humankind's biological and spiritual death.
3. The correct interpretation of "day" is "age."
4. The Earth is older than 6,000 years old, more likely 4.5 billion years old as modern science proposes.


Evidence for Conditions:

1. Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind"; and it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:24-25). The word for beast (chayah in Hebrew) translates as "carnivore" and is also used in the Bible to mean carnivore in later sections (Ezekiel 5:17, Ezekiel 14:15, Ezekiel 14:21, Hosea 2:12, Leviticus 11:27, Genesis 37:20). This shows that there were meat-eating animals before the Fall of man, meaning there was animal death.

2. When God gives Adam the assignment of naming all of the animals, Adam picks several peculiar names that strongly suggest some animals were carnivores: "Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him," (Genesis 2:19-20). "For example, the Hebrew name for lion is derived from the Hebrew root that means "in the sense of violence." Was Adam referring to the violence with which the lion ate its vegetables? It doesn't seem likely! In addition, Adam named some of the predatory birds using a Hebrew word with the meaning "bird of prey." Were these birds preying on fruits and nuts? In naming the eagle, Adam used the Hebrew word whose root means "to lacerate." Was the eagle ripping up plants with its talons? Likewise, the Hebrew root for the word "owl" means to "do violence to" or "treat violently," (5). These comments show there was death in nature before the Fall.

3. God warns Adam of death: "Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die," (Genesis 2:15-17). How would Adam understand the concept of death without having seen it? He must have seen the death of animals beforehand. God could supernaturally inform Adam of the concept of death but there is no basis for this in Scripture. This points out that death was a natural part of God's first creation and that man was the exception to the fact, the one made in God's image that would transcend a biological death.

4. God did not judge the innocent animals for the sin of humans by sentencing them to death. "The reality is that God judged only those who committed sin. The serpent (Satan) would crawl on his belly and be bruised on the head by the seed of the woman.[19] Eve was judged by having more pain in childbirth. [20] Adam was judged by having to work harder for his food. [21] There were no other judgments made [on animals] by God, since all the guilty parties were punished. God does not pass judgment upon the innocent. [22] The young earth idea that God would punish the innocent along with the guilty actually denigrates the character of God," (5).

5. If animals were not subject to death in the beginning of their creation, they would eventually overpopulate the Earth without the natural balance of death. Humans, on the other hand, would have potentially lived forever if they had not sinned (for a general discussion on the topic, click here).

6. "Yes it is true that God will do away with animal death in the millennial kingdom. [30] However, none of these verses indicate that this is the way it was in Eden. The connection to this idea comes through a common young earth doctrine that claims that God will restore paradise back to the way it was in Eden. There is no biblical support for restoration theology. In fact, the Bible says that God will completely burn up the earth and its elements [31] and create an entirely new heavens and earth. [32] The new heavens and earth will be vastly different from Eden. For example, Eden was not without pain [33] and temptation to sin.[34] Although the original creation was very good, [35] it was not perfect, with even part of it being described as "not good." [36] The Bible indicates that we will be delivered from paradise into a kingdom that is eternal and perfect," (5). This demonstrates that while God's first creation was very good, it could not have been perfect being that Satan was obviously present, even in Eden. And though animal death will be done away with, it doesn't mean that it was originally caused by man, but possibly Satan or by God for various reasons, some of which are explained above.

7. On day seven, Adam was told to name all of the animals as is cited above in Genesis 2:19-20. Could he have done this in a 24 hour period? Look in Genesis and see how many more events took place on the seventh day. Again, could it all haven taken place within a 24 hour period where Adam must not have rested?

8. "The wages of sin is death," (Romans 6:23). This most obviously refers to the biological and spiritual death of all humans. Because of sin, even humans die (like animals), and if they do not have salvation, they will be eternally separated from God.

9. "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned," (Romans 5:12). This clearly shows that "all men" suffer death because of Adam and Eve. Notice that it doesn't say that death spread to all life. This passage does not contribute to the YEC belief that all death originated with Adam because it only addresses the death of men.

10. Due to many events that have taken place on Earth, from the lives of all the species to the immensely slow movements of the continents in regard to plate tectonics, to the appearance of agriculture as early as 10,000 years ago, and to the reliability of dating techniques that show the universe to be consistently 14 billion years old and the Earth to be 4.5 billion years old, it is clear that the word "day" in Genesis refers most likely to "age," which it translates to in Hebrew. (More evidence for an old Earth).


Claim's Conclusion:

Because of the evidence that has accumulated, the Bible most likely suggests that animals were subject to death before the Fall. Therefore, it is not a contradiction to interpret each day as an age, as that seems to be the case in many findings. As for the age of the Earth, the YECs only present bits and pieces of evidence for a young Earth that are often poorly constructed and organized are merely parts of science that are still being investigated. The overwhelming evidence states that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe is 14 billion years old (More debate).