Quote:
Originally Posted by DieselAddict
Doesn't the Bible say the Earth is only a few thousand years old and man was created shortly after Earth's creation? Then how do you explain dinosaur fossils which date back about 70 million years or Earth's actual age which is over 4 billion years the fact that modern humans didn't evolve until about 20,000 years ago? This is all well documented by carbon dating.
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I have answered this several times, but for the benefit of maybe some new members, here goes...
NOWHERE does the Bible give an age of the earth, or a date of creation. The infamopus 4004 BC date is the result of some rather poor scholarship, and assumptions. Bishop Usher came up with those dates by adding the age of the various patriarchs to arrive at the time of creation. This is based on a faulty understanding of the Jewish mind, and use of genealogies. The Jewsih culture is essentially an eastern one, as opposed to a European culture which came from Greece. The Greek mind thinks about adding up dates; the Jewish mind would never consider doing such a thing.
The genealogies are listed to give the family background, and often only the highlights are listed. It would be like an American being told, " You are descended from George Washington. The Jews listed the important people in the line; not necessarily every person. One simply example is the one given of Jesus as son of David, son of Abraham. Obviously there are more than 2 generations between Jesus and Abraham, but the point for the author was that Jesus is a son of these two greats in Jewish history.
The point is that it would never have been the authors' intention to list every progenitor in the line. Therefore to simply add up their ages is to get a wrong answer.
There is a another, more subtle hint in the creation account that the earth is old, and that we are living in what is the second creation here on earth. If you look at the beginning of Genesis, you will read, " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was ( became) formless, and void ( wasteland)." ( The words in parentheses() are alternate translations that fit better than the usual ones.)
Compare the idea of a wasteland with what we read every time God creates in the rest of the account. We read " And it was GOOD". over and over again. So when God creates, the result is "good". How to reconcile this with the earlier verse that says , " became a wasteland".
There are some Christians who see this, and other passages as pointing to an earlier creation, judgement, and destruction of earth. This would put the time of the original creation well back into the dark past.
So, no, the Bible does not require a young earth.