Answer for An Old
earth
Genesis 1:1-2 In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the
surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
In the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth. When was the
beginning for an eternal God? It must
have been Millions, billions, trillions of years ago for a God who has no
beginning and has no end his first recorded act in the Bible is that he
created the heavens and the earth, "in the beginning". That cannot be a problem for those who know
God. For the earth to have diamonds,
and, silver, oil, and everything God has provided for humankind, scientists tell
us these things can only be as a result of millions of years.
So that is the
answer. Millions, billions, trillion
years ago God created the planets, but at that point the earth was without "form and void," "formless and empty" - so for millions of years
the earth lay in this state but the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
God was present. There was no measured day or not - time had not been
introduced.
The space between verses 2 and 3 of Genesis is millions of
years. Then God began a world marked by time, days and nights. Genesis 3 – 5 ‘And
God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the
light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the
light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and
there was morning—the first day.'
The planets, stars,
galaxy, universes had all been dormant and their existence seemingly meaningless
until God starts it up with his command "let there be light"
In one day his work
jumpstarted everything. There should be no problem in believing that the subsequent
five days when all else was created as reported in Genesis 1, really did happen
exactly as stated. We have no reason to try and explain the claim that each day
was probably the same as thousands of years because the earth was already 1,000,000’s
of years old when God began the creation of the world as we see it.
Genesis 1: 9 – 10 ‘And
God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry
ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the
gathered waters he called “seas.”
When God created land
and sea we can understand that there was one land mass and one sea.
With the
International food of Noah's day it is very likely that the islands and
continents of today had their beginning. We can all see from the TV news how
floods can leave devastation and 1000's of tons of soil can be displaced in a
very short time. The whole earth was under the flood waters as a result of
God's judgement so you don't really need your imagination to see the affect this
had on the earth's layout.
Also during that very
same time when the surface of the earth was under water the movement of land
and sea resulted in the mass burial of all that remained outside of the ark. Things
were buried in an instant, and pressed down hard - what is the result of such
activity? Fossils
So how do you answer
the theory of fossils, bones etc. dated using carbon dating and claims that
they are millions of years? No problem.
The earth that
covered animals, men, and everything else that drowned or was killed during the
flood was already millions of years old and then it pressed down on things that
had died, which left an imprint as they disintegrated or were preserved by
their surroundings.
When scientists
perform carbon dating it is dependant on radioactivity. If something is
radioactive everyone knows that everything around will take on the same
radioactivity, the strongest radioactivity being more dominant.
When something has
been buried for a few thousand years by earth and rock that is millions and
billions of years old, of course it will all measure the same with Carbon
dating. People make the false assumption
that therefore as the earth around the fossil is millions of years old,
obviously the thing that died is the same age. This does not follow and when
thought about, is not logical either. I don't wish to cause embarrassment to
all the clever scientists who make their living by proving evolution true and
creation a fairy tale but the fact is when you know the one who created the
earth and everything in it, creation becomes logical and meaningful. If you
have to deny that a Creator created the earth and try to make evolution plausible you have denied the
existence of the Creator, the One true God, which is probably more important to you
than the reality or myth of evolution itself.
