“Debate over the age of the universe and earth and the duration of the Genesis creation days have . . . deeply divided” the Christian community. So says Hugh Ross, astronomer, pastor, and author of the book, A Matter of Days: Resolving a Creation Controversy. In his book (which was loaned to me by my son) Dr. Ross says that it is his hope that his work will “bring reconciliation” to this controversy.
Ross’s book states that the scientific community almost uniformly agrees that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. This conclusion is based on analysis of radioactive uranium decay, astronomical data, etc. But many Bible readers say the earth is only about 6000 years old. That conclusion was reached, in the 17th century, by John Lightfoot and James Ussher. Ussher went so far as to say that creation occurred “the week of October 18-24, 4004 B.C. [and] the creation of Adam [occurred] on October 23 at 9 a.m. 45th meridian time.” Their conclusions were made by studying Old Testament records of Hebrew genealogy.
Ross’s book says that fossils were discovered in the early 1800s – and needed to be explained. Dinosaurs and other once-living species needed to be explained. To compound the “age of the earth problem” there was the publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. While Darwin himself said that life has “been originally breathed by the Creator,” it has been widely assumed that his theory of Evolution stands in opposition to the Garden of Eden creation story.
Dr. Ross says that early church scholars (Augustine and others) politely discussed the implications of the Genesis timeline. They realized that belief in the age of creation “has little bearing on the essential teachings about God’s redemptive provision for repentant human beings.” It has only been in the last few hundred years, however, that “young earth” and “old earth” proponents have lined up against each other. They vehemently argue their viewpoints . . . arguments which have driven many potential Christians from church altogether. A word-for-word interpretation of the Bible has been made a prerequisite for church membership. Soul-searching Christians were told that they needed to ignore the scientific evidence (on the age of the earth) and accept as doctrine the “six 24-hour day” story of creation.
There is, according to Dr. Ross, a solution to this dilemma. He says that the controversy all hinges on one little word – the interpretation of the Hebrew word for day, which is yom. The actual word can be “used to indicate any of four time periods: (a) some portion of daylight hours, (b) sunrise to sunset, (c) sunset to sunrise, or (d) a segment of time without any reference to solar days (from weeks to a year to several years to an age or epoch).” To put it another way, Dr. Ross says that God’s “six days” of creation could certainly have occurred over “six epochs” of human time.
Some people say the “seventh day” of creation is still upon us. Dinosaurs and other species have certainly gone extinct; and new species (by cross-breeding, DNA mutation, and natural selection) have occasionally developed. But the rate at which these changes occur is exceedingly slow. Even if you accept as fact that the universe is extremely old (as astrophysicists believe) this is still “not ample time for a naturalist account of life” to explain where we are at today. As Dr. Ross puts it, “a 14-billion year old universe is vastly too young for any conceivable natural-process scenario to yield, on its own, even the simplest living organism.” And so Dr. Ross (along with his God-believing colleagues) believe that there must be “an ‘interventionist’ (that is, miraculous) aspect to life’s origin and development.”
Dr. Ross’s book is certainly thought-provoking. He wrote it with the intention of resolving a controversy. Pat Robertson, moderator of The 700 Club, has said that Ross’s book was “masterfully” written. Robertson agreed that “it is entirely plausible that a day on Earth might be one thing, a solar day another, and a day in the universe another entity altogether.” According to Dr. Ross, this viewpoint has the potential to bring to an end the animosity that has heretofore existed between the religious and the scientific communities.
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