Truth Unites - Response to Ken Ham (Part 2): Animal Death, Historicity, and Science

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

In this video Gavin Ortlund responds to Ken Ham's claim that the foundations of the gospel are at stake with a young-earth creationist reading of Genesis 1, following up on three common objections. See the original video here: https://youtu.be/FL9t3O-1E7w?si=RT9vw8fXgE6ZPMGL See Jack Collins' book on Genesis here: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Genesis-Well-Navigating-History/dp/0310598575/ See Matthew Levering's book on creation here: https://www.amazon.com/Engaging-Doctrine-Creation-Creatures-Creator/dp/0801030994

In a previous video, I argued against Ken Ham's approach to the doctrine of creation. He's a famous spokesperson for young earthen... I can't talk to... Oh, geez. In a previous video, I argued against Ken Ham's approach to the doctrine of creation. He's a famous spokesperson for Young Earth Creationism, which is the idea that the days of Genesis 1 are 24-hour periods of time, such that the universe is very young, maybe 6,000 to 10,000 years old, something like that.

And he sees this as different from an issue like baptism or spiritual gifts where Christians can legitimately disagree. He sees this as a litmus test for faithfulness to Scripture. He says, what is at stake is nothing less than the authority of Scripture, the foundations of the gospel? If the early chapters of Genesis are not true literal history, remember those words, then the rest of the Bible is undermined, including the teaching about salvation and morality. One of his reasons for this that we were going through is he thinks that there's nothing

in the Bible that would lead you to read the text any other way. He thinks the only reason people could be something else, a different view, is because of things outside the Bible putting pressure on you. So what I was trying to do in my last video is just work through how many examples there are. Pre-modern examples like St. Augustine, modern examples like B.B. Warfield, where it looks like you have godly Orthodox Christians who come to a different view on Genesis 1 and the early chapters of Genesis for reasons in the text. We talked about Augustine's reasons, for example, the light before luminaries issue,

discronology in Genesis 2, 4, and 5, God's rest on the Sabbath, and so forth. We'll get into those little more in this video. Now, some people, by the way, say, but Augustine wasn't an old earth creationist. That misses the point. I'm going to address that at the end of this video. The point is not whether he believed in an old earth or old universe,

but whether he interpreted the text in the way that Ham calls for, namely true literal history. Because I see so many misunderstandings of that, I am going to return to that at the end of this video. But first, let me just work through three objections or concerns that some people have. I take these seriously. I'm trying to be helpful to address the things that really honestly are on people's minds, as they're maybe really wrestling with this issue, as many of us have. And so I offer this video to try to speak to the most common things I hear in response to what I've argued in my last video to try to help people wrestle with this. Going a little more into scripture here in this video, the three most common objections I hear are these. Number one,

if you deny the historicity of Genesis, that imperils the historicity of the rest of the scripture, because Genesis 1 through 11 is the foundation. Number two, that is taking man's science over God's truth, and that is compromise. So, in other words, interpret Genesis such that it's open to an older universe, older world is taking man's science over God's truth. And, you know, so it's like, let God be true and every man a liar. Don't compromise. That's the second concern. And the third one is old earth creationism, evolutionary creationism, any view that has death before the fall makes God the author of evil. Because if you have animal death before the fall, then this makes God the author of evil. And the body,

Bible is very clear that death comes through sin. Okay? So I'm going to work through each of those and then I'll address the issue about Augustine that I just mentioned. And I'm happy to do other issues as well. I really care about these things. I've studied this a lot and I want to be helpful to people on this topic. So if there's other questions you have about creation, let me know. Let me do some book recommendations. This is the single most important question I get through emails. Can you recommend a resource or a book on this or that? So I always try to work these into my videos. Sometimes I get paid by a publisher to recommend a book, but I always choose the book myself if I'm going to do that. In this case, I'm not getting paid for these. I don't always

get paid for that, but sometimes I do. Just always want to be transparent about that. And by the way, so if you ask, I just have to say, I can't respond to all emails. People will often email me with a question. I feel so bad, but I just have to set some boundaries. If you're a patron of mine, I'll answer questions and address things. But for just random people emailing me, it's gotten to a point where I'm not able to do that. I'm truly sorry, but I'm just trying to set good boundaries over the long haul. But I do want to recommend some books, again, just trying to be helpful to people who want to go level deeper. Both of these are a little more academic, so be aware of that.

This is the best book that I like to recommend on how to read the early chapters of Genesis. it's by Jack Collins called Reading Genesis Well. He basically uses studies for modern linguistics and then insights from C.S. Lewis and then throw in a dash of common sense. And it's like to do biblical hermetics. Outstanding book. I also want to recommend in terms of just the doctrine of creation, so thinking less just biblically and more theologically.

This book by Matthew Levering called Engaging the Doctrine of Creation is so good. Levering is a prolific theologian and just a wonderful person as well. Both him and Jack have been real personal encouragements to me. And how do I describe Matthew Levering? I'll say, brilliant and balanced. Those are the two words I'll use, because his theological judgments are balanced. Okay? If you think of like, you know, when he's talking about like procreation and the ecological concerns

people have about whether the planet's getting overpopulated and stuff, he's balanced. If you think of like conservative versus progressive views, he's not just wildly out there in one side, but he's also very capable as a theologian. And that book just goes into so, I mean, it really is outstanding. It talks about the atonement, divine simplicity, all these other things in the doctrine of creation. All right, let's work through the three objections. I'll put a link to those books in the video description. Number one, if you deny the historicity of Genesis, that imperils the historicity of the rest of the Bible because Genesis 1 through 11 is the foundation. recall Ken Han's language of true literal history. In other words, the concern here is like of a slippery slope. We're opening up Pandora's box, you know, that kind of thing.

Now, I'll just be really short and to the point, because I've learned in YouTube videos sometimes just clarity and simplicity and focus can be helpful. Don't just drone on and on. Okay, here's the short answer. We are not denying the historicity of Genesis 1 or of Genesis 1 through 11 by exhibiting exhibiting openness to interpreting the days as something other than 24-hour periods of time. It's historical. It happened. What we're talking about is not whether it's historical, but whether it is literal. And even that word literal, I'm going to just use that word,

but I'm aware that that word actually comes with all of its own baggage, because some people would define the word literal to mean that that word has a range of meanings as well. Sometimes we use the word literalistic. Okay. But just for the sake of this video, I'm not going to, I'm trying not to get too nuanced here. So just to make the basic point, there's a difference between a text narrating history. That's one thing. And the second thing is how it narrates history, what literary genre is in view. And the Bible does use diverse literary genres to convey historical events. There's many examples of this. Several years ago, I preached through the night visions of Zechariah 1 through I love that portion of scripture. It's fascinating. It's about history. It's not literalistic.

Habakkuk 3 tells the story of God's deeds in Israel's history, like the Exodus, but it's not literalistic. The book of Psalms describes many historical events in language that is not literalistic. Deborah 5. Deborah and Barack's song in Judges 5. Excuse me, I said that wrong. By the way, I'm probably going to misspeak at some point here. I'll ask for grace if I misspeak. Sometimes when I'm watching my own videos, I'll see I said something wrong. I preached already this morning, got a busy week, recording this on a Sunday afternoon, and my brain is a little jumbled, so thanks for patience.

Deborah and Barak's song in Judges Five. It's about history, but it's very different than how Judges Four recounts that history. Obviously, a huge example would be apocalyptic literature, Daniel, Revelation, portions of Ezekiel, and so forth. our Lord's words in the Olivet discourse, Mark 13, Luke 21, Matthew 24. All of those passages are concerned with history, but they're not literalistic, okay? So I'm trying to just make that conceptual distinction between history and something being conveyed in a literary genre that you interpret in a literalistic manner.

Now, someone's going to say, well, yeah, those passages, obviously revelation is different than Genesis. Okay? Okay. Okay, that's fair, but let's slow down and just think about Genesis. There are reasons to be careful in interpreting this literature. We've already seen some of the particular details in the text that interpreted pre-modern readers, like Athanasius, Augustine, Didamis, etc. To start even further back with the most basic point that's noticed by virtually every commentator,

there are differences of language and style between Genesis 1 and the rest of Genesis, or more strictly between Genesis 1-1 to 2-3, because starting at 2-4, you have a to toulodot, which is a structural marker. And more on that, another time, basically that's the unit of text we're talking about here. There are pretty immediately evident differences of style and language between 1-1-2-3 and the rest. there are also then significant differences in style and language between Genesis 1 through 11, which is about primeval history and Genesis 12 through 50, which really slows down as you get to Abraham. Both sections of the book are historical, but there are differences in how they relate history.

To make a generalization, you can say the literary style of Genesis 1 through 11 is more elevated, pictorial, stylized, compressed, and symbolical. than that of Genesis 12 to 50. And those differences, those kinds of differences are even more obvious between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, 4 and following. J. I. Packer, who is a staunch defender of biblical inerrancy, describes it like this. He speaks of the ordinary narrative prose mode of Genesis 12 through 50,

and he distinguishes that from what he calls the poetic prose mode of narration in Genesis 1 through 11, with its pictorial, imaginative, quasi-laturgical phraseology, its paucity of mere information, and its drumbeat formulae. Now, is J.I. Packard denying the historicity of Genesis 1 through 11? Absolutely not. He rejects the labels legend, saga, epic, myth, or tale to describe Genesis 1 through 11. He says, these are space-time history, although told in Moses's chosen incantatory. poetic way. Now, those are kind of hermeneutical judgments. He's describing the kind of literature we're dealing with. If he's wrong, he's not wrong because he's denying that Genesis 1 through 11 is history,

but rather he would be wrong for making a bad interpretation of the literature. The more you stare at it, the more you look at Genesis 1 through 11 and Genesis 1, even more than that, the more you start to see, okay, maybe it isn't so obvious exactly how to read this. Let me just mention a few features in the text that generate some questions. I've already mentioned several of these with Augustine, the light before luminaries. Okay, sometime do an experiment, take out a sheet of paper, read through Genesis 1 and just try to draw it. Day 1, okay, draw day 1. Day 2, okay, draw day 2. Try to picture it. The more you start to think about it, the more you realize there are at least questions that arise that are kind of awkward. Not impossible, but awkward. So the light before luminaries is, where's the

light coming from on days one through three? And then you're asking, does God turn this light off at night? Because we still have 24-hour days here, but why are they 24 hours at this point yet? And does the light contain the nutrients that cause plants to grow through photosynthesis on day three? Does God supernaturally suspend gravitational forces in a universe without stars and then suddenly switch those forces on in day four? Do you have the Earth just standing there suspended without orbit and then it's sort of catapulted into orbit when the sun is created? Those are legitimate questions. I am not trying to make fun of that. Totally.

I mean, you know, I'm not trying to say you can't believe that. I'm not trying to poke fun at that. I'm sincerely not. I'm just trying to say, trying to picture it, it's not crazy to wonder. kind of like, well, wait a second, this seems a little odd in terms of the sequencing here. Secondly, you have what Meredith Klein argued for in his classic 1958 article, which every interpreter has to wrestle with this chronology like this, when no bush of the field was yet in the land,

and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground. Okay, now there's ways around that. But it at least might make you ask the question of, wait a second, So was it all the plants? Or is this a new kind of plant? Again, I'm not trying to close this down or poke fun. I'm just trying to say, here's some of the things that generate some questions

and make it not crazy to wonder about this. By the way, the Hebrew word Yom is used here in Genesis 2 verse 4, where it says, in the day that the Lord made the heavens and the earth. So you've got the word day used in a non-24-hour sense here. True, without a number, but still. Thirdly, you have to try to envision predatory fish and birds created on day five, when supposedly everything is still a herbivore, suddenly growing carnivorous teeth and meat digesting internal organs, at least some of them would do this, on day six after the fall.

So there's the fall of man. Adam and Eve fall in the Middle East, and I affirm a historical fall, by the way, and a historical Adam and Eve, just in case anyone's wondering about that. I'll do another video on that and another video on the flood of Noah sometime. And then suddenly it causes this massive reverberation all throughout the animal kingdom, where a number of animals become carnivores. Okay, look, I'm not making fun of that. Maybe it happened that way, but it's at least understandable. When the text doesn't really say any of that, while you might wonder about that.

Fourthly, David Snoke makes this good observation that on a literalistic reading, day six is a pretty busy day for Adam. Quote, if day six was a single 24-hour day, then on that one day, Adam had to be created, name all the animals, feel lonely, fall asleep, have Eve created, wake up and find her, marry her, and receive God's commission in Genesis 1, 28 to 30.

Again, I truly am not trying to make fun of it. I'm just trying to say, like, you know, the more you stare at it, the more you look at it, let me say something. This is not on my script. I really believe that Genesis 1 is like this, where it's the kind of thing, you might look at it at first glance and say, oh, that's obvious how to read that. But then it's like other things where the longer you stare at, that the more you realize, this is very intricate.

Okay? And I am concerned that some people assume what a literal reading is, is basically just how it strikes me on first glance, or when I first think about it. Of course, not everyone does that, but sometimes I see people just thinking, it's so obvious how to read this text, and they've never read other ancient Near East cosmologies.

They haven't really delved into some of the intricacies and challenges that are here. Nothing I've said thus far closes down a young Earth, I'm trying to show things that generate why someone from the text might wonder about this. So the point that I'm making is very modest thus far. If you disagree with an Old Earth Creationist reading, don't say you're denying that the text is historical. Rather say, no, you're misinterpreting this literary genre.

This is where the conversation gets stuck and it elevates unnecessarily, very often. To create sympathy, imagine you're talking to a friend, and you're explaining that in Daniel, Daniel 8, the stars falling, is symbolical, and it's a reference, it's a way that the scripture talks about the persecution of God's people. And someone says, hold, slow down. If you deny the historicity of Daniel 8, then you're endangering the historicity of the Gospels. Now, the response is, Daniel is a different kind of literary genre than the Gospels. The Gospels are widely considered to be in the genre of ancient biography. You can't.

can see Richard Burrage's book on that. So you're not denying historicity, you're just denying literalism in Daniel 8. You could be interpreting Daniel 8 wrong, but you're not denying that it's historical. You really believe in history Christians were persecuted, and that's what's being referenced, okay? Or suppose you're preaching through the book of Philippians, and you point out that Philippians 210 is not literal, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth doesn't mean we have a three-tiered cosmology in which the earth is flat and stationary, heaven is up there, and hell, the underworld is below us. And someone comes up to you after the sermon and says, no, no, no, no, Philippians 210 is historical. Don't deny its historicity. You'd say,

well, I'm not denying that. I'm just trying to interpret phenomenological language, which is the language of appearance. So I'm not trying to say Philippians 210 or Daniel 8 are the exact same as Genesis 1. just trying to make sympathy for this conceptual distinction between literalism and historicity. All right, I'm hitting this on the head pretty hard, sorry, but I just find it is needed. I'm really burdened about this. People do this all the time. So here's the simple fact. The Bible is not always literalistic and how it relates history.

In fact, even the historical books of the Bible do it a little differently. The book of Exodus is a little different from the book of Esther, and the book of Esther is a little different from the book of Luke. They're all true, they're all historical, but the manner in which they relate history is a little different, and they're certainly different from many modern models of historiography. One basic example, in scriptural history books, there's a little more comfort with discronology, which means putting things out of order. So you can just see this in the Gospels. Matthew and Luke, place the temptations of Christ in different order. Even John Calvin acknowledged. The evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates. That's not error.

It's just a matter of literary genre. Not all historical reporting has to be as exact as you might want it to be. Now, here's the thing I want to say is that if we have a problem with this and if we don't think that the Bible should communicate in non-literal ways, then that's our problem. actually the best way to honor the scripture and submit to the scripture as the truth of God is to submit to its way of communicating. That means we have to say, hey, look, the book of Daniels is in the Bible. The book of Psalms is in the Bible. The book of Zechariah is in the Bible.

God chose to communicate to us that way. And if we overemphasize literalistic interpretation, that actually can be a way of making it about us. We're kind of transporting the Bible into our way of interpreting rather than submitting to how it was. to communicate to us. And I'm just very concerned about that. So again, if you think this, a reading of Genesis 1 that is open to older timeframes is wrong, it's not because it's ah historical or denying the historicity of the text. Okay, whew, the next two points are more interesting. I hope I haven't lost you yet. At least I find them a little more interesting. Here's the next objection. This is taking man's science over God's truth. Now, I think

this objection is valid in principle, but I think we need to exhibit greater humility in how we interpret the scripture, in how we interpret science, and then in how we interpret their relationship to one another. The reason is, while scripture is infallible, our interpretations of scripture can be wrong. In fact, that happens a lot. Furthermore, it's kind of lazy to just dismiss all science. Nobody can really do that. There is such a thing as common grace. We do benefit every day from science, and we need to work hard at distinguishing valid scientific claims from invalid scientific claims. And there are times where science does correct an interpretation of Scripture, not because Scripture is wrong, but because we interpret Scripture wrong. And that happens.

And the most poignant example, I think, is the Church's widespread condemnation of Nicholas Copernicus in the 16th century. Because this episode is often overplayed, some people go in the other direction and completely downplay it. But it did happen, and it is something that is instructive for us. Now, because Copernicus's controversial status among Roman Catholic authorities is usually focused upon, I don't want to pick on another tradition, and I'm always eager to build bridges when I can, since I criticize non-protestant traditions a lot in my other videos. So here let me pick on Protestants who resisted Copernicus. Luther reportedly, that we don't know if this was an actual quote, but he reportedly called Copernicus a fool who's basically inventing something new in order to be clever.

And he opposed that on the basis of the book of Joshua. Melanchthon continued Lutheran opposition to heliocentrism, that is, the discovery that the sun is in the center of our solar system and the earth rotates around it, which Copernicus discovered. Over the course of Melanchthon's career, he continued that opposition to heliocentrism. In the reform tradition, I won't even tell you what John Calvin had to say about Copernicus and his followers. It's pretty bad. But I'll say, because it's less flamboyant, that a century later, John Owen, perhaps one of the greatest of the Puritan theologians, referred with criticism to the late hypothesis, fixing the sun as in the center of the world, as built on fallible phenomena and advanced by many arbitrary presumptions against the evident

testimonies of Scripture. Now, this is what I'm trying to say to us. We need humility. John Owen's word evident, he says heliocentrism is evidently against the Bible. We can sometimes think the Bible is so evident. It's just obvious. Look, it's right there in the text, and we need to be humble enough to admit. Sometimes we get it wrong in how we read the scripture. Today, the church's opposition to Copernicus can seem outrageous to us, but in their context, it made a lot of sense, and they had the exact same appeal. Don't take man's science over God's word. Now, and they had verses, like Psalm 931, 9610, 105, First Chronicles 1630, and others that at least can, or the book of Joshua, of course, the sun standing still, they all appeal to that one. But the point is, you can

find verses that at least seem at a superficial reading to say the earth is stationary, the earth shall not be moved. Now, let me be clear, I am not saying that heliocentrism contradicted scripture. Far from it, in my work on this, I've talked about those passages. I don't think there's a contradiction. What I'm saying is this is an example where genuine scientific discovery did correct a mistaken interpretation of scripture. And that's something we need to be open to. Today, this don't let God's truth be trampled upon by man's science, ethos, and way of thinking is used by those who argue for geocentrism or flat earthism. Now, I am not trying to be insulting by saying, if you're a young earth creationist, you're

the same as a flat earther. I don't think that. I'm not trying to say they're equivalent. I am trying to say the same basic appeal can be made for both, right? God's word over man's science. And we need more humility about this. We need to be more careful. Here's what Augustine said about the importance of humility before Scripture.

He said, let us never throw ourselves head over heels in the headstrong assertion of our private interpretation of a biblical passage, lest we find ourselves championing what is not the cause of the divine scriptures but our own in such a way that we want it to be that of the scriptures. You see, sometimes thumping your fist on your Bible and saying the Bible says can be an expression of pride if it's about you and what you want the Bible to say, but you're actually not even open to the fact that you might be misreading it. That's where we need to read scripture with wisdom, with humility, with attention to the

tradition, and so forth. Similarly, in the context of his discussion of creation, Augustine appeals to humility before what we would call science. In my book on this topic, I have a whole chapter. on Augustine's humility and his call for humility on this topic. I'll just give you perhaps the most poignant quote. He says there is knowledge to be had after all about the earth, about the sky, about the other elements of this world,

about the movements and revolutions, or even the magnitude and distances of the constellations, about the predictable eclipses of moon and sun, about the cycles of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, stones, fruits, and everything else of this kind. So he's talking about science. Okay, we talk about geology, other scientific enterprises. And he says, it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments or experiments.

Now, it is quite disgraceful and disastrous. I remember translating through this passage and things. Those are mild translations. He uses some strong words there. Something to be on one's guard against at all costs that they should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say. on these topics and talking such nonsense that they can scarcely contain their laughter. Why is that such a problem? Because what is so vexing is not that misguided people should be laughed at, as that

our authors, that's the scriptural authors, should be assumed by outsiders to have held such views, and to the great detriment of those about whose salvation we are so concerned should be written off and consigned to the waste paper basket of so many ignoramuses. That's a funny translation from the translator Edmund Hill there, but again, it's very strong language in the original Latin. The point is just to try, I'm not trying to shut anything down here. I'm trying to bring this concern into greater visibility. That we need to be careful. We don't discredit the gospel by over-speaking.

Am I saying that we should uncritically accept all scientific claims? No. There are some claims made in the name of science that Christians should reject. What I'm saying is we need humility to figure out which ones. and I see too many times Christians adopt a wholesale suspicion towards science. Historically, Christians have spoken of two books, general revelation and special revelation, the book of nature and the book of scripture. These two are ultimately in harmony with one another, but sometimes it's hard to tell how.

I'll put up this passage from the Belgian Confession. This idea of general revelation is very biblical. Romans 120, for example. Another great passage is in Psalm 19 where it talks about how day to day pours forth speech. Every day God is speaking through creation. Insofar as scientific claims reflect accurate interpretation of the book of general revelation, we should seek to harmonize them with the book of special revelation, with humility and carefulness and hard work and common sense and so forth. And in general, this will be the more controversial part of the video that I hope people will have lasted too a little bit, because I want to talk about the strength of the evidence for an older

universe. It's very strong. There's an abundance of evidence in creation for an older world. And my encouragement is for young earth creationists. This is not directed toward well-studied young earth creationists. There, we just have disagreements. But what I find is a lot of people haven't really gotten into the specifics. And they're assuming that, and they're maybe not aware of how powerful the evidence is. So here's a metaphor. Suppose you chop down a tree and you see 30 tree rings.

The natural conclusion would be the tree seems to be 30 years old. Okay. That kind of reasoning is what we face when we look everywhere in nature. We see starlight, coral growth, ice layering, river, erosion as with the Grand Canyon, for example, permafrost formation, layers of craters on the moons of Jupiter and other moons in our solar system and planets, stalactites forming in caves, those are the icicle-shaped deposits dripping down, layers of cooled molten lava, petrified wood, crystal formation, the fossil order, layers of sedimentation beneath the Earth's surface in the ocean,

fossil layers in the bottom of the ocean. Basically, everywhere we look, it's like looking at those 30 tree rings in the tree. Everywhere we look, it gives testimony to a longer history. Now, so, for example, just to explain one of these, layered craters on the moons of Jupiter. I'll never forget studying this one. I'll put up a picture of Callisto,

the second largest moon of Jupiter after Ganymede, almost the size of Mercury, larger than our moon. it's the most heavily cratered object in our solar system. You can see a lot of the craters, hopefully in one of the pictures I show you. I don't know what pictures I'm going to choose yet. If you see the bright dots, that's not craters. But basically, craters are circular depressions, resulting from asteroids and other objects smashing into its surface.

There are so many craters on Callisto that scientists have named the biggest 142 of them. The largest one is 130 miles wide in diameter. Its name is Heimdahl, which I didn't know until about 20 minutes ago right before I started. I was just curious. You never know what you're going to learn in a Truth Unites video, right? Okay. Lots of information there. Here's the point.

There's way too many impact craters to have happened in a 6 to 10,000-year lifetime. It's been hit by millions of objects over the years. there's so many craters on Callisto that you can't possibly make a new crater without wiping out an old one. Okay, that's what we mean by layers of craters. So the question that comes up is, if the world was created, say, 8,000 years ago, why would God go to such lengths to create all those impact creators? You see, people will often make this appeal, and it's a fair one in principle, that, well, God could have created the universe with the appearance of age,

just like Adam would have had a 21-year-old body or something like this. But the problem is the abundance and mutual convergence of all this data makes it arbitrary to imagine God putting all this false information of fictitious history everywhere we look. Why would General Revelation be so deceptive? Why would he put all those impact craters on Callisto and everywhere else? Why would he give us a false history of annual temperature in ice core samples that we drill into, or a false history of so many plankton fossils on the floor of the ocean.

It's one thing to create Adam with a 21-year-old body. It's another thing to fill his mind with 21 years of false memories. If you want to posit fictitious history, you need a compelling reason to do that. Another example would be starlight. So the light we see, if you just go out on any old night and look up, you see stars. The very light you're seeing has been traveling to us for extremely. long periods of time. In some cases, you're looking at light that has been traveling to get here for millions of years. Some cases, tens of millions. Some cases, hundreds of millions. Some cases, if you

have a powerful enough telescope, billions of years. The most distant star ever seen is called Arundel. It's 50 times the mass of our sun, millions of times brighter, but you see. You still can't see it without a telescope. It's 12.9 billion light years away. That's how long the light took to get here. Now, I'm speaking in terms of just general, conventional science. I understand that young earth creationists have various different interpretations of starlight. And there's different ones on the table. Last time I spoke about this, I mentioned starlight being created en route to us and people got mad because they said, oh, that's the worst one. Why are you? I'm not trying to make fun of the view or make it sound dumb. You can believe that, uh,

There's lots of different options if you believe the universe was created recently. You can say God created it en route. You can say starlight could have been time, could have happened differently, the speed of light. But what I would just encourage people to think about is what this would involve, because it seems pretty elaborate and conspiratorial. Here's how Robert Newman puts it. When we look at our sun, we see what was happening on the sun, movement, rotation rate, sunspots, flares, et cetera, as it was about eight minutes ago when the light we see left the sun.

When we look at the next nearest star, we see what was happening about four years ago when the light we see left that star. When we look at a star 8,000 light years away, we see what it was doing 8,000 years ago. But when we look at a star, say, 12,000 light years away, we do not see what it was doing 12,000 years ago because by this argument, the star didn't exist. Instead, we see what it would have been doing if it had existed, but it didn't, fictitious history. not just appearance of age, but a full, complex history of events that never happened. And not just for a few isolated objects, but for the vast majority of stars and star clusters, and for all the galaxies and galaxy clusters in the universe. Then he says this conclusion that I agree with,

in harmonizing the revelation God has provided us in His Word, the Bible, and in his world, the universe, it seems to me that it is much preferable to spend our efforts on models that do not require us to believe God has given us fictitious history. Now, if you disagree with this, my appeal would be we need to work hard to explain all the varied data that does seem to indicate an older universe, because we want to be careful not to contribute to the scenario envisioned by Augustine, where we discredit our witness on the foundational matters of the faith, like repentance and the resurrection of Jesus and the coming judgment and the basics. We don't want to discredit our witness on those things because we've overreached over here on this

more peripheral matter of the age of the universe. Okay, third topic, third objection. This is making God the author of evil. Doesn't the Bible teach that death came through the fall, through sin? and to be sure I'll put up two passages, Romans 512, 1 Corinthians 1521, that do talk about death coming through sin. But I think that Paul's concern in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 1521 is specifically with human death, not with all death. Because throughout these passages you have this Adam Christ typology. And the word all seems to be talking about all human beings over whom Adam and Christ are both federal. heads. I'll put up the passages again. And this time you can note what I underlined where basically it says in Romans 512, to all men. And in 1st Corinthians 1522, it's talking about resurrection for all.

So if you believe in animal death in 1st Corinthians 15 being referenced, then by consistency, you should also posit animal resurrection here. I think it's just better to see that Paul is not trying to give us that. That's not his scope of concern. That's not. the horizon of his teaching in these passages. Now, let's say you disagree. You say, no, it's not just human death, it's other kinds of death as well. Okay, then you have an obligation to tell us what kind of death is in view, because this gets very complicated, and as soon as you get into this, you realize it's very hard to find a non-arbitrary cutoff point. Because, you know, typically at the street level, people will say, well, plants can die, but animals can't. But as soon as you start to

probe this, you realize, well, that's not accurate because we've got other life other than plants and animals like fungi or protists. And second of all, many young earth creationists will admit that, well, at least some animals can die before the fall, especially in the invertebrate animal realm, like insects, worms, leeches, spiders, sometimes jellyfish, crabs, mollusks, etc. Now, what people will usually say is that's not really death. Because it's not, you have to be really alive in the biblical sense of the word in order to die. So then they'll try to say, no, it is still. But then the, so then the question just becomes, okay, well, what is really alive?

And what's the cutoff point there? And that still is this challenge of arbitrariness. And it's very reasonable for Younger Earth Creationists to concede that, like, mosquito death is not evil, okay? Mosquitoes being alive might be evil, in my opinion. you know, it's hard, it's not very intuitive to say if an ant dies is this evil, okay, so then you say, okay, well, what is really alive in the biblical sense of the word, right? The better distinction is not plant versus animal. It's basically all lower forms of organic life, bacteria, plants, invertebrate animals, for the most part, versus death among vertebrate animals. That's usually where

it starts to funnel, though there's different views on this. On the Answers in Genesis website, there's an article that says, basically it's not clear whether insects are fully alive in the biblical meaning of that term. And it appeals to Leviticus 1711, which talks about how the life is in the blood. So basically it's saying invertebrate animals aren't really alive because they don't have blood. So now you have this question. Well, there's two problems I have with this. Number one is the Bible doesn't use the word death like that. There's references to trees dying, for example, in the Bible, like Job 14.

one example, but also this still feels arbitrary. Why is shrimp death evil, but jellyfish death not? How do you know? How do you know to cut it off there? You see? What I'm trying to show is the complexity of the words life and death, so that no one interprets Romans 512 and 1st Corinthians 151 is just all death. We all have to define that word. It's certainly not talking about all biological cessation. The question is what is death? And I think it can get kind of lazy when people just say, well, it's all death, and they don't enter into this, try to figure out what's the cutoff point there? I will share my own testimony on this of trying to figure this tough issue out that it is

an emotional issue. I've struggled with this a ton. The greatest struggle that I have had to work through in terms of objections to the Christian faith has to do with animal suffering before the fall. And you know my thoughts on that if you've watched my video on the Angelic Fall. But what I would simply say for our purposes in this video is to encourage people to see the complexity of this and to be more careful about making this charge that God is the author of evil. We've already seen the position of so many early Christians in the early church like Augustine,

Ambrose, Basel, Thomas Aquinas, and others who rebuke that sentiment and say, animal death is not bad. And it's possible that our intuitions about this are shaped differently living in the modern West. The Bible does seem to celebrate carnivores. Psalm 104-21 talks about how the lions get their food from God. Now you could say, okay, well, that's just talking about how the world is now, but the Psalm seems to be celebrating God's creation. And it continues in verse 24, Oh, Lord, how manifold are your works?

By the way, it's just mentioned numerous carnivores. In wisdom, have you made them all? The earth is full of your creatures. Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both great and small, or small and great. there go the ships and Leviathan which you form to play in it. These all look to you to give them their food in due season.

When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are filled with good things. It looks to me like the biblical portrait is that God created all these creatures and feeds them all, and that's a good thing. That's not to say there's nothing broken about nature, but the mere fact of carnivores, I think we need to be careful. At the very least, be careful with the charge of calling God the author of evil. the early church fathers do seem to rebuke that mentality. I think we need to be careful with that.

All right. Final issue. What about Augustine? Some people say, you can't endorse Augustine as an old earth proponent because he believed in a young universe. Now I have three points of pushback, and I need to say this because several people said this, but I think it's based upon a misunderstanding. I'm not invoking Augustine against a young earth per se, but against the specific view being put forward by Ken Ham as a requirement, namely true literal history, namely 24-hour days. That is the view on the table being insisted upon, and in his own day, Augustine would have had no reason to know how old the earth is exactly any more than he would have had reason to know about Einsteinian physics or something like that. We don't blame people in the ancient

world for not knowing of these more modern discoveries. The relevant point at hand is he didn't read the text in a literalistic way where it's a blow-by-blow, a countessing. of how it actually happened. That's the main point. Secondly, I do want to point out, and this is, honestly, I've not seen others say this, but in my own book on this, I read through this passage very carefully, and I think people miss this. Augustine actually doesn't stipulate precisely how old the world is. People get this wrong a lot. There is a passage in the city of God, actually more than one, I think, where Augustine talks about 6,000 years since the creation of man, but he's not talking about the creation of the world. He's talking about the creation of humanity. And when people

point this out, sometimes I've seen young earth creationists respond by saying, oh, but the creation of Adam was a part of that instantaneous creation. Not so. Augustine thinks humanity was created after the instantaneous creation, and just a few pages later, he expressly says, I own that I do not know what ages past before the human race was created. So we don't know Augustine's position on the exact age of the earth, though certainly he had no reason to think it was really, really old. So that's fine. The third problem is, given what Augustine does say, I have no doubt that he would have no trouble with an older universe if he was aware of evidence for that. For example, in the very context of his assertion that humanity is recent, the whole burden of his argument is basically

turning upon this principle that our intuitions about the timing of creation are not reliable. I'll put up this passage. I won't read through all of this, but the basic point to say here is, for Augustine, the difference between eternity and time is far more important than any two relative time lengths. Okay? The sheer passage of time prior to humanity is not the most important point. The most important point for Augustine is the philosophical conundrum involved with time itself. and, you know, I go into that more in my book. I'm not going to go on. This has been a longer video. But the most important point is simply this. Augustine and Augustine influenced the entire medieval West, not universally, but significantly. He didn't read the Genesis 1 as what Ken Ham calls true literal history. He thought it was basically a framework for describing God's work of creation. All right, to conclude, while we continue to debate this topic, my appeal.

in conclusion are, we should recognize it's not a matter of one side affirming history and the other denying it, of one side caving in to man's science while the other upholding God's word, or of one side making God the author of evil while the other upholds God's goodness. This is an in-house debate among Christians who can and do equally affirm the historicity of Genesis, the complete truthfulness of Scripture, and the goodness of God our Creator. whew, I made the end. Sometimes that's the end of a long video. My back hurts from sitting up so straight.

All right. With that said, I don't have anything in the queue and the topic of creation beyond two other topics. Adam and Eve, an evolution, and then the flood of Noah. And if you think these videos have been tough, those ones will be controversial, but I've already resolved before the Lord. I'm just going to do, I'm just going to basically be completely honest

in my convictions as I've wrestled through these topics in a spirit of kind of, you know, sometimes you have the thought, what if, you know, what I say is going to just cause, like, my channel to just blow up or something like that. You know what? I'm okay with that. I never, because the alternative would be to be yoked to not be true to your own conscience, right? So, even if you disagree with me on this, my commitment to you is I will always do what I believe is right and true. So even if we disagree, you know, at least you know that's where I'm coming from. At least if I go down, I'm going down with sincerity, because this is what I really believe. I really don't

think the world is six or eight or ten thousand years old. I really don't. But I believe God's the creator. And I'm happy to affirm that his creation is miraculous and wonderful and so forth. So anyway, those two videos, I guess my point in saying that was if there's another topic in creation that you'd like me to address, you think would be worthwhile, put it in the comments and I'll try to read through the comments as I have time and see how I might be of service. Thanks for watching, everybody. Let me know what you think in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel, like the video, all those things if you're willing to support in that way. Take care.