An old earth

Speaking of which, how many millions of years old do you say the Earth is? And I'd love to see that Scriptural confirmation you said you had.

Cory,
This is going to be a bit long because I want to preface what I say with a few things. First of all, the intelligence that is used to share some of these things makes others feel inferior. Please do not feel this way. The intelligence of man is nothing in comparison to knowing God and being set free from sin. I would have never even investigated any of this had God not asked me to in order to witness to people such as you see on this board.

I am on another message board for street preachers and they allow this same type of thing where these folks can write in and say what they wish. What Mr. Comfort is doing here is the best! Don't worry about making mistakes because you will learn what is truth through it. We need to have answers for these people.

When I saw how strongly their heels were dug in, it made me think that they had some element of truth that we as Christians did not and I was curious what that was. See, I already knew God is real because I know Him. I have some science in my background so I have a baseline to understanding some of these things, which helped me tremendously. I was an NICU nurse for many years. Talk about seeing mutations. One of the most difficult illnesses to regulate is a heart that is abnormal, which shunts blood away from the heart and lungs.

I have home educated my children for 16 years. That also added more knowledge into my data base.

Now the Christian community was highly promoting a literal 6 days of creation. I think I told you about the stars and their light moving at a predictable speed and how if the earth is young, the light from the stars would have to be here miraculously. Now, that might be true and God has perpetrated this scenario to fool us and to believe in faith in something that clearly tests out differently. But that was Hugh Ross's biggest point for me. I already knew God and it has never been in His character to deceive and He loves for us to prove Him and see if these things be so. He wants us to investigate. So to investigate something and find it to be false according to our understanding was a mystery to me.

There are two debates on the market from the new earth and old earth. Both were so educational for me. One was with K. Hovind and the other with Ken Ham. The reason I like the one with Ken Ham is because Hugh Ross brings a Hebrew scholar that is a Christian that shares about that 4th day of creation and pinpoints this word "yom" which was translated day.

The new earth creationists had no solid proof just that they held in faith that the Bible is true. Well we all that love God believe that. So does Hugh Ross. We all want to know the truth. So that argument was irrelevant.

The carbon dating has been shown at times to give false readings. To be honest, that was a big issue with me. But the problem is that I don't know how to interpret the data. For example, the NEC said that Mt. St. Helen dated old. Well that is because argon gas is naturally occurring in volcanic gases. I didn't know that. I wouldn't know an argon atom if it was staring me in the face. I was kind of angry at that news to be honest with you because that was one of the biggest arguments against carbon dating. The other thing is that there are about 5 other methods of dating. I didn't know that either. And lastly the vapor canopy theory is apparently impossible because of gravity and the NEC agreed! I couldn't believe it. I learned so much from these debates. They were excellent.

The word yom is used sometimes to indicate a single 24 hour day and other times as a time period. For example, Genesis 2:4 says "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens," This day represents the whole of the creation process and we know that wasn't one single day. There are other examples of this. You can do your own word study at Blue Letter Bible.

The 4th day of creation actually accounts for the first 24 hour day. According to Dr. Ross the word made in that text should actually be translated "had been made."

In his article entitled Does Old-Earth Creationism Contradict Genesis 1? he writes,

"Verse 16 tells us God made the Sun, Moon and stars on the fourth "day." Most young-earth creationists focus on the English translation and interpret this verse to mean God created the Sun and Moon that instant. The Hebrew does not support that interpretation. The Hebrew word for "made" (asah) refers to an action completed in the past. Thus, the verse is correctly rendered "God had made" rather than "God made." This indicates God "had made" the Sun, Moon and stars earlier than the fourth "day."

This view of the fourth "day" has broad support. For example, Gleason Archer, one of the foremost evangelical Hebrew scholars, states: "[Verse 16] should not be understood as indicating the creation of the heavenly bodies for the first time on the fourth creative day … Likewise, Protestant theologian Wayne Grudem states: "[Verse 16] Can be taken as perfects indicating what God had done before … This view would imply that God had made the sun, moon, and stars earlier …"

So, when were the Sun, Moon and stars created? Genesis 1:1 tells us, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The Hebrew phrase "the heavens and the earth" (hashamayim we ha' erets) refers to the entire universe, entire creation and everything that can be seen or has physical existence. This indicates the heavenly bodies -- the Earth, Sun, Moon, stars and other planets -- were created "in the beginning" prior to the six creation "days."

and

On the fourth "day," God caused the Sun, Moon and stars to become visible from the surface of the Earth (1:19-20), having made them earlier (1:16) as part of His creative activity prior to the six creation "days."

The other biggest point Dr. Ross made was that there was never an evening and morning on the 7th day. We are still in His day of rest which causes Hebrews to come to life.

We know that the 7th day is at least 6000 years so that these yoms had to be at least that long. Now I do disagree with him on man. I think the evidence we see is as a result of the time these people lived prior to the fall. This is my own personal theory and I have no proof and our little friends can say so. This is pure conjecture. I was taught that on the 7th day, it had barely hit sunrise before Eve was off with the snake eating fruit. But see, the more I think about that, the more that doesn't sound plausible. That would have been quite a huge failure for God and I don't think God is that dumb. I think that things had gotten pretty relaxed. I think Eve had enough experience with God to convince her that He wasn't going to follow through on this threat. From what I know about God, it seems more in character for this to have gone on successfully for a long time. How long? I don't know. I just don't think it was right off the bat. That is at least one possible explanation for man being here for so long. When Adam sinned, sin entered the world and death by sin because all have sinned. I think man is completely different than the animals is hundreds of ways. The animals died, which was for man's benefit to see death. But he lived. However, I think the animals lived very long lives which is why the dinosaurs were so huge. I think the NEC are correct in that dinosaurs were living when man was here. They have proof of these in artifacts.

I am not sure about all of Dr. Ross's other teachings and theories. I am only singling out the age of the earth. His forte is astrophysics and he is a brainiac where that is concerned. The chart I sent was part of a study he did knowing the parameters necessary to support life.

I love the man's testimony of coming to Jesus.

This is where these anti-God evolutionists have decided well if they are wrong about the age of the earth, then they're wrong about the rest. In their minds, the two are connected. It is so easy for them to tear down the NEC arguments, which is leading hundreds of thousands of young people into flagrant se*ual sin. But they aren't. Evolution has no solid proof. All the "proof" they have has to include intelligence. Be very careful when they talk about manipulating DNA because there is always someone behind the experiment. They do not find this in nature unless it is something like a virus but a virus does more than just complicate the DNA, it turns it into an unhealthy debilitating problem. IOW, it doesn't create something good. Cancer turns cells into nonfunctioning cells. They also point out microorganisms that adapt with a DNA change. However, it is still a microorganism. It doesn't mutate into even a two celled organism and there is intelligence behind what just happened.

It is ok to say I was wrong about something. I had to too and not only on this but on many other things that I thought I knew. We need to always be willing to switch gears if God says to but never to sin. The truth is that like I said, in the day to day scheme of things, this stuff was irrelevant. It is only in an effort to save some of these folks from hell's fire that I have taken on the challenge of turning some of them back to God. Romans 1 tells us that creation and their conscience are absolulte proof that God is real, exists and is offended by sin.

Vera