The Age of the Earth
Finally, we should be
remiss if we did not mention the most fantastic element of the entire primaeval
history—namely, the ostensible claim that the entire world was less than two
thousand years old at the time of Abraham’s birth. Only 1,656 years elapsed
from the time of Ada’s creation until the flood, and another 292 years separate
the flood from Abraham’s birth. The genealogy of Shem in Gen 11:10-26 is so
tightly constructed by means of the ages at which fathers bore sons that
generational gaps are difficult to interpolate. Noah would thus have been a
contemporary of Abraham, and Shem would have even outlived Abraham by
thirty-five years, an embarrassment that the Samarian Pentateuch and the
Septuagint both try to avoid by revising the patriarchs’ ages. Even if we allow
for gaps in the genealogies of Gen 1-11, at most a few thousand years can be
reasonably interpolated. As creation scientists themselves recognize, this puts
a literal interpretation of Gen 1-11 into massive conflict with modern science,
history, and linguistics. In order to explain how we can even see the stars,
some of which are billions of light-years away, creation scientists have been
led to radically reinterpret modern cosmology. Since Noah was contemporaneous with
the age of the dinosaurs, he is said to have taken dinosaurs aboard the ark,
two of every one of the five hundred genera. Upon disembarking, he released
these dinosaurs into the world, where they spread throughout the earth and
evolved into all the known species of dinosaur. Since Noah disembarked only 292
years prior to the birth of Abraham, the entire history of dinosaur evolution and
extinction must be compressed into the space of less than three hundred years (unless,
that is, dinosaurs were still about the time of Abraham). In order to explain
how most all the marsupials, like koala bears and platypuses, crawled all the
way from modern-day Turkey to Australia, plate tectonics is held to have not
yet separated the primordial supercontinent into the world’s contingents; this
tectonics activity is said to have also taken place within about three hundred
years following the end of the flood, while at the same time mountain-building
crustal movements were forming the Himalayas and Mount Everest, with remains of
the marine life of the flood on its heights. On and on the revisionism must go.
Truly, young earth creationists are living in a different universe than the rest
of us.
I want to say once
more that none of the above has anything to do with a naturalistic bias or a
prejudice against miracles. Biblical literalists are far too facile in
dismissing such observations as based on anti-supernaturalism. I trust that it
is clear that this allegation is false. The fantastic elements in the
narratives that we have identified have nothing to do with miracles, which we
accept. Rather, they concern nonmiraculous features of the story that, if taken
literally, are palpably false. (William Lane Craig, In Quest of the
Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration [Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 2021], 130-31)
