Whoops, I Accidentally Outgrew Young Earth Creationism

An unrelated deep dive took me down a months’ long deep dive into changing my mind completely on young earth creationism. Come join me down the rabbit hole of the ages.

Well, it’s been a minute and a half hasn’t it? Lots of life happening this year. Maybe I’ll write more about why it took til September to finally write a post this year another time.

A bit about myself to start for context – I was born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s and early 2000s. It was a time where if you were a person of faith, you were a follower of young earth creationism. There were limited paths of belief you were expected or pressured to follow. The earth was created in 4004BC because Old Mate in the Ussher Chronology added up all the ages in Genesis and took some liberties on things, married some things up to real world events, and Bob’s your uncle.

My days (or decades) as a fleixble-ish Young Earth Creationist

When I was in university, I took to researching this more seriously. Creation science did and does have some defensible positions regarding the earth being young, or at least the events of the Bible being real. Names like Answers In Genesis, the Institute of Creation Science and Ken Ham come to mind. At the same time, I kept meeting other Christians from different denominational or academic backgrounds who kept putting forward the idea that the Bible doesn’t actually discount the possibility of a billions of years old Earth, or the main held theory of macro-evolution explaining all origins of life.

I came to the conclusion that it seems like you can still be a Christian and believe in a young earth, and you can also be a Christian and believe in alternate readings of the text. Those were the two main positions I thought were predominate as I kept experiencing people in both camps, and I had mine. I had catastrophic plate tectonics and questionable carbon readings and weird patterns in geology and the problem of death before the fall of man, and they had a more widely accepted consensus view where the days of creation were millions and billions of years instead of literal days.

The third view would usually result in a lot of people I know in the faith who weren’t able to reconcile either possibility against what school and university and scientific findings kept telling them, and it became the source or a large contributor for why they left their faith completely.

Well, that was about 20 years ago, and I remained in the camp of “I think young earth creationism is probably right, and alternate views are still okay” for quite a long time. I knew about other theories but not in great detail and I wasn’t super interested in doing a deep dive into any of them.

What changed

Then last year and again this year I went on a random deep dive into scholarly thinking around the book of 1 Enoch, being a book that is quoted and referenced in Jude, and has a decent amount of synergy alongside the early chapters of the Moses-written Genesis. I love to learn about all sorts of topics and daily put my YouTube Premium subscription to use, having on in the background or as a main focus a set of videos about all sorts of different things. I’d recommend Religion For Breakfast as a good and insightful channel on all sorts of different religious studies. I’d read it lots of times before alongside the works of the Jewish historian Josephus as some commentary on surrounding events in the Biblical text, but I was going into more and more studies around it just as I suppose a matter of interest in “Christian mythology” – that is, about angels and demons and where our belief systems about all of these come from.

The book suggests the notion, as Genesis and many other books throughout history have also done, of interaction between angelic or demonic beings and humans. For instance, 1 Enoch suggests the demon (not the X-Man you nerd) Azazel was responsible for teaching humans about weaponry. These sort of suggestions then get into the topics of history and obviously about validity.

And so I splintered off into the path of what actually happened in greater detail in those “early” human years before some more of the more established, apologetically reinforced stories of Scripture take place. I love the work of Nils Glenn and BLK SHP on YouTube synthesising a lot of great scientific and academic literature, I utilized the current excellent versions of AI to synthesise and discover further scientific studies to read for myself, and even was willing to put my tinfoil hat on and consider all opinions on the topic including ancient Sumerian or Akkadian religion, or the Ancient Apocalypse series on Netflix and other sources featuring the world of Graham Hancock and Randal Carlson who insisted the world had been destroyed before.

And I think I’ve finally reached the point of ditching young earth creationism. Not that I ended up holding on to it too tightly as I got older, but in my study and exploration, I’ve been able to find some explanations that seem to sit well across all research and faith work in this space and have something I think is a very happy replacement in that spot.

Now if you’re an agnostic or skeptic who’s instantly putting your defences up at this point, or probably more likely a Christian who’s freaking out that the Sunday School imagery we have might be able to be challenged by some random Lego Hair man on the Internet, please stay with me as I reason with you what I’ve found.

There’s been a lot that had changed since my last major deep dive into the historical or scientific basis of the origins of man ~20 years ago.

The first being that carbon dating being questionable has become an almost impossible position to keep maintaining and seems kind of silly at this point. The main reason here is that as the skeptical 90s and 2000s positions were more tenable, there’s just been too many more discoveries and other dating methods discovered and used that reinforce things too much. In fact you can take carbon dating out of the conversation completely and you’re still left with the geological record, dendrochronology (trees), potassium-uranium dating, paleomagnetism… a lot. When a lot of these all say the same thing over and over, you’re looking a bit silly maintaining that position against things forever. In fact, and spoilers for later, carbon dating actually reinforces certain Bible events in great strength.

The second that was more and more sites older than 4000BC kept being found. The Tepe sites in Turkey for instance, or sites in Syria like Tell Qaramel or Iran or even the age of the Biblical city of Jericho. Maybe one or two, but there’s just too much to ignore.

Another thing that changed, which was the biggest surprise of all, and actually in the opposite direction of my previously defensive position – intelligent design was no longer being disputed.

The current mainstream thought isn’t actually dismissive of The Rare Earth equation or The Drake Equation that you’d use to use to try to convince someone that there must be a higher power – it’s actually somewhat acknowledged after all our continued discoveries that an intelligent agent has been at work.

A surprisingly huge amount of people believe in the Simulation Hypothesis including very rich and successful people like Elon Musk, or the Multiverse theorom believed by Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking that explains the perfection of our existence through a machine that infinitely generates universes of all possibilities with ours being the only one that ever lined up perfectly.

You might hold one of these positions yourself, or know lots of other people who do (I sure do know a lot of people who very seriously believe in these).

What didn’t change

And I want to say that some things didn’t change:

• I kept believing in God
• I kept seeing indisputable evidence all across my life of an intelligent and intentional hand at work
• I kept believing the Bible is a dependable and powerful book
• I kept seeing as did everyone else all these artifacts being discovered that keep reinforcing the reliability of the Bible’s reporting beyond reasonable doubt – the Sennacherib Prism is a favourite of mine as I’ve always loved the story of Hezekiah
• I actually still believe in six days of creation (uh oh), but their surrounding events are what I have had change

Okay here we go…

So what do I actually think? Here’s where I’ve landed, which is subject to change as I keep reading and learning, but maybe these views might help free up your inability to explain or reason certain findings or systems and help you open up a bit to wider possibilities that can still lead you to finding answers and rest.

Warning: this is the nerdiest part. Strap in.

One that got me down this path originally was a suggested video I saw from The Gospel Truth about an older theory from the 1800s called The Ruin and Restoration Theory. Whilst it was dismissed by many at the time including by a lot of Christians even over the last few decades, our current understanding of science seems to lend heavy credence to the possibility that this state of Earth was not the one that was originally made.

The theory originally put forward in modern times by theologian GH Pember goes that instead of God creating the universe from scratch in six days, it was a recreation of the Earth, forming out of the existing chaos and flooded description we have in Genesis 1:1. A reading of let there be light could instead be, “turn the lights back on”, with land and water and new species and humanity and all the things described coming around for a recreation.

Who was here before? The species our fossil record already knows about, and/or the angelic or demonic beings that the Bible acknowledges have been around for just as long as the universe itself potentially. I think I recall even a mainstream preacher like John Bevere talking at length about how he believed in demonic cities even without too much of a scientific deepdive on the topic back in the day. Not that the cosmos and gravity and the laws of physics and life on earth had never existed, but that new life in the image of God was being created out of the ruins of what was here before – a literal forming out of a chaotic, watery, flooded state.

The original channel that got me interested in this direction highlighted that in 2 Peter 3, Peter seems to describe a flooding of the Earth and a recreation of mankind that doesn’t seem to align with the account of Noah’s flood, mainly because we don’t see language of God creating the earth after Noah’s flood. Others like John Lennox who also consulted Hebrew professors at Oxford and Cambridge would point to the fact Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 use a different grammatical structure for the amount of time they’re talking about, with Genesis 1:1 speaking in far older terms than Genesis 1:2. Isaiah 14 also describes the fall of Satan from Heaven and says that he fell to Earth, meaning Earth would have had to have been here at some point in time immemorial as the Serpent seems to have already been present when Adam is around.

Ancient Hebrew is also somewhat loose in its use of the word we translate “begat” or describing someone as “the son of”. For instance, Jesus being described as the son of David is the same language – he’s a descendent, someone in the line of, who may or may not necessarily be the direct descendent. In the Gospel of Matthew, the author is quite liberal in skipping over certain kings to prove the lineage of the Messiah rather than it being directly a year for year retelling of when people were alive, and no one seems to be too upset about that.

Now here’s the thing you need to know to set your understanding free – history, geology, even the feared carbon dating, and all else we know from anthropology and other disciplines actually fully support this reading in union with the Bible. We don’t live in a world that believes there was never a global flood or catastrophe any more, or some of these other events in Genesis that people have always struggled to put together a global flood at 2300BC or a world that is somehow younger than 4004BC or the age of the Tower of Babel or the records of these other civilisations. You could even say if you broaden your reading the Biblical account almost becomes indisputable and you can even seen where other cultures and belief systems have tried to explain similar events.

This has led me to two theories about how the timeline could have gone. The first was that the flood in 2 Peter that destroyed the old world and turned into the void and formless one in Genesis 1:1 was the Younger Dryas cataclysm or another form for the end of the Ice Age, a multi-disciplinary confirmed all across the world event, where the Ice Age suddenly (within 10 years) or a bit more gradually (1000 years) resulted in major weather events and huge changes to sea levels worldwide. This was either triggered by a solar flare, a massive comet collision, or was just gradual but still chaotic – between the years 11800 and 10750BC. Depending on which belief you have although ultimately both led to catastrophic melting of ice sheets and raising water levels, you could certainly see how a deity might use this to wipe or thoroughly cull a previous existence away.

Following this cataclysm, God recreates the earth and a distinct species of humanity. Gobekli Tepe in Turkey could then have been built around 9550BC as well as the other ancient cities with no conflict. Humanity grows and is influenced negatively as described in Genesis 6, Josephus and 1 Enoch by or producing the nephilim or other forces, prompting the desire for the flood of Noah. There are a few candidates here for Noah’s flood, being the 8.4ka Black Sea incursion, the 5.8ka mid-Holocene climate transition, or the 5.2ka Piora Oscillation – 5450BC, or 3850BC, or 3250BC respectively.

In 2900BC, the oldest confirmed living tree is born – the Methuselah Pine. And in 4.2ka, around 2250BC, a massive climate cataclysm befalls the region of Mesopotamia, prompted well documented mass migration and scattering of humanity. If you’re a Bible reader, this corresponds in timeframe and description identically to the events of the Tower of Babel from the Masoretic text. From here on, we have the more well known years of the events of the Bible as in line with many other archaeological discoveries.

My alternate theory is largely similar, with the world restarted at the Meltwater Pulse 1A flood event and the Late Glacial Population Turnover. This one is quite amazing in that a major sudden shift in humanoid DNA occurs, with the existing hunter-gatherer DNA markup shifting to a group entirely distinct. In turn, the Younger Dryas cataclysm of 10850BC becomes Noah’s flood instead. I’m still trying to work out which one of these sits more accurately and am continuing my research along these lines currently, but isn’t it amazing that we do have multiple events that sit entirely in line with what the events of Genesis suggest.

While we do have ages and years for Adam to Noah, which may correspond to a numbering system that eerily mirrors the Sumerian Kings document and their base-60 numbering system, and from Noah to Abraham, this reading really does allow us to open up to a very convincing and very humbling alignment between that book in your pocket and all the studies you keep reading about.

I have been blown away and thoroughly fascinated by these possibilities where you don’t have to throw away your geology textbook and still hold on to your faith. And hasn’t the inability to reconcile modern scientific discovery with limited interpretations of the Genesis narrative absolutely ruined people’s ability to believe in something beyond themselves? What a burden people have been under when conflict doesn’t necessarily exist.

Now there are way more theories out there than this. There are still many Christians who believe that the six days were more than six days. There are many who would still defend young earth creationism utilizing new findings as their evidence. There are those who believe that Adam and Eve were a chosen group from an existing humanity set apart for the purpose of a covenant leading to the Messiah, also attempting to explain the land of Nod being a real, populated, preexisting place rather than just a state of exile for Cain.

A pretty good alternative I’ve heard is that no one believes that Adam and Eve were created as babies. Whenever anyone thinks of the Garden of Eden, they think of two 30+ year olds. If people could believe they were born already aged, the argument is that you could also believe the world was created aged. This one is probably my fallback if I were to abandon my current understanding.

The age old old age question & bringing it home

So how old do I believe the Earth is? Or the universe? Could it be 4.54 billion years? But the universe keeps expanding and we don’t fully know it’s size yet. It could be much older. Maybe it is younger. But I can see a really strong case for humanity (or modern humanity) starting at either around 12550BC or 10750-9550BC, with these other key and well researched events forming the other anchor events in the Genesis timeline. Could this change? Probably. But I wanted to share this as something I’ve really being enjoying studying and piecing together. Does it matter for the underlying most important thing in the faith? No. I think you can be a person of faith and believe vastly different things about the origins of creation, the end times, the physical vs spiritual side of the Eucharist, and so many other topics. Keep the main thing the main thing, but at least this may help you move beyond a place where many people get stuck.

And in truth, this goes way beyond what you believe or don’t believe about Genesis. As people we regularly get stuck in the “what” because we can’t fully reconcile with the “how”. The what is, no matter what scientific discoveries or otherwise come up, it’s clear to me that God created the earth. But where we have the potential to get stuck is in the “how”.

The “what” may be that you’re believing in a promise you’ve been given. But you’re stuck in the “how”. The what of believing you’d have a thriving career, but the how of the failed interviews is depressing you. The what of believing you’d have a restored marriage or relationship, but the how of people leaving you. The what of finding peace and wholeness in your life, but the how of how many trials you’re having to walk through until you are able to find peace that goes beyond your circumstances.

If you’re a believer in the God of the Bible, we should always read and live like this – what over how. What over how. Again, and again – what over how.

You’re loved. How? Still working that out. Can’t see it right now in how I’m looking at my life and the world, but maybe my how is wrong.

You have a great calling on your life. How? Through opposition and trial and discovery in your heart of what that means every day.

You are going to see the fulfilment of the promises that have been made to you. How? Not sure, but I do know in my own life I’ve always been amazed when I eventually do discover the how, after so many times being disappointed or stuck in what I thought how was supposed to look like.

Keep your mind engaged. Keep learning. Keep searching. The one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness will be filled.

And if I’ve tweaked your curiosity for further reading, I’ve tried to reference or put a form of reference to everything I’ve mentioned throughout – go check out the additional resources and come to your own conclusions. Fortunately we live in a time where you can get your AI tool of choice to read through this and help you find or ratify sources or events for yourself.

And if you’ve found the freedom in reading this to move beyond your young earth creationism into some other very legitimate readings of the text, I’m glad. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a few more 3 hour lectures to watch about all the other major worldwide events in the Holocene epoch.