Psalm 119:151

You are near, O LORD, And all Your commandments are truth.
Psalm 119:151

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Six thousand years!?

With a simple look through the Bible, a person would easily be able to conclude that the Bible claims the the Earth, nay, all of creation is a mere six thousand years old.  How does a Christian try to make all of history fit into a time frame with numbers like that?  What about the cavemen?  What about all of the rock layers?  What about the fossil record and all of the Dinosaurs?

First, please keep in mind that it is a feeble attempt to try to explain how all of history fits into the Bible.  Why do I say that?  Because it is already clearly explained in the Bible!  One must only look at the evidence without an evolutionary paradigm.

Okay, lets start at the beginning of mankind, which was only five days after the beginning of time.  Where are cavemen in the Bible?  I would say of course.  What do you think of when you think of a cave man?  Fred Flintstone, wearing an animal skin tunic, and what does Genesis 3 say God made for Adam and Eve?  It states he made them an animal skin tunic, the first sacrifice was made of an animal by God to cover the sin of man.  You later read that the second sacrifice was made of the Son of God by God to wash away the sin of man.  But, I digress. The Merriam-Webster definition of a caveman is "a cave dweller especially of the Stone Age."  Well, there have been cave dwellers in very recent history, even today as seen in the pictures.  Even King David is recorded as having lived in a cave for a time.  Some of the patriarchs could very well have been "cavemen" since the Bible never really describes their abodes.  In the post-flood world, civilization has been destroyed, trees will take years to grow to usable size again, some people become nomadic.  Why would many of these people not choose to use caves as their home or temporary shelter on hunting expeditions or the such, and then create drawings of the very game they hunted?

Another topic I would like to view when investigating a timeline of history is population growth for humans.   Dr. Henry Morris asked in his book The Bible Has the Answer whether it was more reasonable to think that the present world population came from the few people on Noah's Ark 4300 years ago, or the first “dawn man” a million or more years ago:
The present rate of population increase in the world is more than two per cent per year, and the population is now over four billion. [This figure was correct when Dr. Morris wrote this. It is now estimated to be 7 billion as of October 31, 2011.] However, the average rate would only have to be one half of one per cent per year to produce the present world population in 4,300 years.
To put it another way, an average family size of only 2.5 children per family would suffice to develop the present population in just the length of time since Noah, even with an average life-span of only about 40 years per person. These figures are very reasonable, and in fact extremely conservative, showing that the Bible chronology is quite plausible in every way.
On the other hand, this same very conservative rate of population growth (only one fourth what it is at present), if continued for a million years, would have produced a present population infinitely greater than could be packed into every cubic foot of the entire universe! This fact alone argues that the supposed million-year history of man on the earth is completely absurd, whereas the Biblical chronology is perfectly reasonable …
Even if, by some miracle, the population growth rates were slowed down sufficiently to produce a population of only the present figure of three billion people after one million years of human life on earth, this would still mean that over 3,000 billion individual people had lived and died during that period of time. It is therefore strange that it is so difficult to find human fossils! It would seem rather that human remains ought to be extremely abundant everywhere. And this should be even more true of the pre-human ape-men that were supposedly evolving into men during 60 or 70 million years of pre-history.

I realize there are many other topics that would need to be discussed to thoroughly investigate the age of time, and could fill volumes of books, and there is no way I could possibly cover all of them here.  However, continue following this blog and I will touch on many other areas in the future.

2 comments:

  1. Very good, also one has to remember, when Jesus created wine at the wedding in Canaan, it was created with age already present as it was fermented. When Adam was created it he was created with age already present. I am skeptical of the dating methods we us as being accurate, but even if a rock dates to millions of years, that in itself does not rule out the 6 thousands years of creation to which you referred.

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  2. I am glad that you mentioned dating methods. While I agree you that God creates mature things, with apparent age present, I want to point-out that these dating methods have a built-in flaw. All of these test, rather the interpretation of these test assumes that conditions have always been as they are now. That is to say that atmospheric pressure, concentrations of elements in the atmosphere, rate of decay of elements, radiation received from the sun, life-spans, etc. have remained unchanged on earth throughout time. Now, even without a Biblical view, I think it would be difficult for one to say that conditions have never changed, while with a Biblical worldview it is very clear conditions drasticly changed after the orginal sin and again after and during the flood of Noah.

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