Thursday 6 December 2007

Christianity Today: Young earth creationism makes life difficult for everyone!



Joel Kontinen

You can never know in advance what great “truths” you might learn by reading Christian webpages. Christianity Today’s blog claims that young earth creationists are a “movement that keeps raising its head to the chagrin of Christians and evolutionists alike”.[1]

The post is a comment on New York Times’ report on the First Conference on Creation Geology and it seems to support the NYT stand on the age of the earth.

Young earth creationism has certainly not made life difficult for me. I am in good company. Jesus (Mark 10:6) and Saint Paul (Romans 5:12-14) were also YECs and I suspect that they weren’t very miserable either.

There are perfectly valid scientific reasons for believing in a “young earth” [2], such as the discovery of soft tissue in a T-rex bone, the rapid formation of canyons, the discovery of carbon 14 in diamonds and the very existence of short-term comets.

But even more valid is the Bible’s own testimony. Advocates of a 4.6 billion year earth cannot consistently believe that death is a consequence of sin or that the flood of Noah’s day was global. In effect, we are thus faced with a choice: should we trust God’s opinion (as revealed in Scripture) or man’s fallible view?



Notes


[1] Moll, Rob. 2007. Young Earth Creationism Makes Life Difficult for Everyone. Christianity Today Liveblog (4 December). http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2007/12/young_earth_cre.html
[2] ”Young earth” is really a misnomer. Why should anyone regard a 6000-year old earth as young?