Some thoughts on the Age of Earth controversy || Get to know these all before you jump to debate!

 

 

"Either science is wrong and deceptive or the Bible has been misunderstood!"

 

This topic is one of the most dividing topic in Christian circle. Once you take a step inside this ring, you become Iron man and your friend becomes Captain America. As in Batman vs Superman, you may prepare well to defeat your enemy at any cost. Most Christians debate intensely on nature of days. But this topic is much more deeper to ponder than that! Why I’m saying this? Because I know its depth...

Here are some considerations:-

• Christians try to reconcile this subject a lot using many possible assumptions: Some take side of scientific arguments while others take side of pure Biblical cases of what it is written and the chaotic results are creepy theories like Day-Age, Punctuated Day-Age, Mature Earth, Soft-Gap theory, Analogical days and so on.
• Usually Christians (most even if not all!) have been holding that the world of Genesis 1-2 was very perfect until corrupted in 3rd chapter.
• Now that infers there was no existence of carnivorous animals which includes literally every violent creatures. 
• Hence, all ecological systems came only after the Fall. Why? Ever heard of Food Chain?
• Even if Adam and Eve spent some undefined period of time with God (perhaps?), that cannot be argued for lengthy period of time to fit in modern science into the Genesis!
• Next, if Adam literally named all animals then we no longer use those names today because check in Hebrew what the names of carnivore animals hold. If so, whatever we call animals today, these names were developed very later!
• No Christians can argue for a mature time creation as its not just about timeline but also about the events. Why need billion years timeline if there were no deaths of creatures before the fall ever happened? 
• Physics of nature was then not same before the fall. It means General revelation also got affected and maybe that's why people failed to reach God and rather misused nature to make their own gods. That's what Romans 1 says!
• If carnivores became as they are today as a result of fall, their morphology must have been different before the fall! Hence, some sort of evolution did happen after the fall!
• Christians who think animals became such violent only after the fall, should not argue for possibility of an old earth theory or they should hold to classical Gap theory of Satan's fall. But the text seems to suggest the nature got cursed and spoiled after Man's Fall and not Satan's or, was it only the case with world outside the garden? Many speculations!
• The starting key phase for this topic is to be certain whether Genesis 1-2 was God's intended perfect world or it was not. Otherwise, another area is how we should translate Genesis 1:1 or was it an account of functional or a material creation. These are prime issues before we argue on Age of the Earth topic.