0:00 Was the earth really created in just six days? We'll find out today on the Why Do Christians podcast. Hey, welcome to the show. My name's Mark Dickey. I host the afternoon show on the Bridge Radio Station. My co-host, Pastor Bert and Pastor Josh. How's it going, guys? 0:19 Great, 0:20 I concur. All right, so we're talking about the earth being created in six days. First of all, someone might say, but Pastor, I thought the world was created in seven days. 0:34 Yeah, yeah, but no. Genesis one says that He created the earth in six days, and on the seventh day He rested, so there was no creating happening on the seventh day. 0:42 That's right, yeah. So, even though it's six days, it was everything happened in six, but the seventh day, six, seven, 0:49 there he is. 0:50 Okay, anyway, so let's talk about it. I mean, we had to do that reference once, right? No, we might not have. We didn't. Sorry, keep going. All right, so six days, this is way contrary to what non-Christians would say, is how long the earth took to be created or to form, develop, develop, yeah, which would be billions and billions of years, 1:16 yeah, 1:17 and that, I mean, that really, as a Christian, who I kind of grew up believing, you know, just the, the literal creation of everything, big bang, and all of that, and so when I heard that Christians actually believed that it all happened in six days, I kind of thought they were crazy. 1:36 Yeah. Well, I think it doesn't help. Okay, so what this comes down to is a reading of one chapter of the Bible. The first chapter of the Bible, are we interpreting it right? I think what doesn't help is that sometimes it's characterized as either you're a Christian and believe in a literal six day creation or you're an unbeliever or something, and so, so what? What is put forward is the idea of it's sort of an all or nothing, that if you believe in the Bible, you will believe that this chapter is teaching a literal six day creation, versus you don't believe in the Bible at all, and this is popularized by various groups who may focus in on Genesis in ways that aren't always, I think, the most helpful, and so I think it's important to realize, like, wherever we land on this, that Christians have, since there have been Christians, disagreed about how to read Genesis 2:34 One. 2:34 Notable Christian thinkers throughout the ages, who we trust and like their stuff, have said, you know, guys, I think I think this is not meant to be read literally. A couple of them who spring to mind, C. S. Lewis, author of Constantinople, Mere Christianity, he believed that it was a teaching point, allegorical, St. Augustine, who's a notable Christian thinker, Augustine actually believe this is wild, so, and neither them was it. I mean, Lewis would say, yeah, let's, let's compare this with the science of our day. Augustine believed that it was a teaching point in Genesis one, to the point where he's like, I think God did it all in a moment. I don't think, I don't even think it was six days, 3:12 really. 3:13 Yeah, he's like, I think, I think God just did it, and then it's broken down into these six days to teach us stuff about creation. Um, so this is a thing where Christians have disagreed for a long time. It's not an issue of do people believe in the Bible or not. The issue is what's the right interpretation, and I think that's where we dialog, like, is it is it true to the text to believe that Genesis one is teaching that God made the earth in 624 hour periods. 3:40 Yeah, here's a question: Should I stop being friends with somebody over this debate? 3:45 Absolutely, 3:48 cool. 3:48 Yeah, no, not at all. Not at all. 3:52 Yeah, I don't know. There's, there's so many typical debates of the Christian faith where you, you feel like you lose friends if you have to pick a side, so you just agree not to talk about 4:02 it. Yeah, I would say the same thing. I don't think you need to stop being friends. I think what tends to happen is people evaluate the other person's faith based on how much they believe what they, what I believe, right, in terms of 4:16 interpretation. 4:17 Yeah, yeah, if you believe I believe, then you're really growing in your faith, but if you have a different view of something, then maybe your faith is not that great, my guy, maybe you're not that close to Jesus, and thank God that's not the way that He's kind of brought us in, and just like you said, Bert, there's so many great men who've great theologians who are on all different sides of the spectrum, and not one of us would say, at least not me, that I'm in any form or anywhere close to them, right, but they're they're all over the place. 4:47 Yeah, and to make it, you know, like maybe you're hearing this and you come from like a camp that's like, well, hold on, like we believe in the Bible, and so for you guys to even say that somebody could be a Christian and not believe in a little. Day before you tune out, by the way, I do believe in liberal six days, so don't, don't be like, oh my gosh, he's, yeah, right, okay, hopefully we'll get to at least for my own why that it is, but what can happen is, you look at this, you're like, well, like, no, they, if they don't read it this way, it means they don't believe in the Bible, to which people say, well, hold on, the Bible, remember, it's 66 books under one cover, right. The Bible is not one genre, there's all kinds of genres in the Bible. So, you have narrative, like reporting of history that's written out, but you also have poetry, you've got prophecy, you've got all kinds of stuff. The problem, why there's such disagreement around Genesis one is that it's not written like a typical narrative, right? So, if you're reading it through, right, God created the heavens in the other instance, you know, God said, 'Let there be light, there was light, and you know, then there's, you know, the animals, right, and every phrase begins with 'God said, and 'it was so, and ends with 'there was morning, 'there was evening, the blank day, and that phrase repeats throughout the whole thing. The problem with that section is it's not written like a narrative, but it's also not written definitively like a lot of Hebrew poetry that we see. It's its own kind of thing, and so there's disagreement around how to read it, and we have to have that space within biblical interpretation where we can say that, like, hold on, we need to figure out the best way to interpret this, because we could be reading it wrong, because ancient near eastern writers, like the author of Genesis, didn't write the way that 20-first century Westerners, like us, read things, and so we want to, as students of the Bible, understand that we want to approach the scriptures, let it speak for itself rather than us insert interpretation upon 6:47 it. Okay, and there's all kinds of theories and stuff of, oh, well, God didn't create the sun until 6:57 day four, I think. 6:58 Yeah, and so what we measure days by the sun and the rotation of the earth, so the first couple days could have actually been billions of years. What do you say to when people bring that argument up? 7:11 Yeah, like where they, where they get that idea from. So the word that we translate as day, there's a Hebrew word, yom, and it can be a literal 24 hour period, but it can also be epochs of time like expanses, and so that's where the difficulty comes from. And we want to be clear to that now. I think the reason that Josh and I both, because we both agree on the reading, there take a six day creation is not because it has to be like six days, like in terms of 24 hour period, but rather, at least, at least for me, I mean, I don't know if you disagree, for me it comes down to the way that other passages in scripture speak about the creation story, and the way that they treat it, that's where I tend to like hold on, there. There's something else, or there's something there, I think. I don't know. 8:05 Yeah, yeah, I would say the same thing. I mean, when we look at other passages in scripture, specifically when you get to like the law, where God says, like, six days will a man work, and on the seventh he'll rest. Like, the very idea of that comes from that it took him six days, and he rested in the seventh. 8:21 Yes, Exodus 2011 Yeah, worked on six days, and on the seventh he rested, 8:25 right. And so that it would, it would rip that idea if it was eons, like 8:29 so, which we're all mixing up timelines and stuff because of what different people believe, but Exodus. So the book after Genesis Genesis, so way back in time, I'm not using actual years, because time is debatable in the 16, yeah, so, but, but in that time period, a long time ago, they viewed it as six literal days, 9:00 right? 9:01 That's crazy. That's wild. I've never thought about that before. 9:05 Yeah, that's as well. That's actually that's what God appeals to in the Exodus. And this is something else, by the way. So we talked about this idea of, you know, I know a lot of Christians who are caught between a rock and a hard place, where they're like, well, hold on, I'm expected to believe in a liberal six days, but here's all this scientific evidence for the earth or the universe being much older than what the Bible accounts for, and I think there are a couple things. Number one, we want to hold this - we talked on the show before about this idea of open-handed and close-handed ideas, right? Or we say, like, you know, sort of majors and minors in theology. There are some things like our hand is closed, and we can't budge, because they define the faith, the divinity of Christ, His literal resurrection from the dead, the Trinity, those sorts of things. You can't budge on those and be a Christian. There are other things where we can disagree, maybe explore a little bit, maybe engage, and I think that the age of the earth is one of those things. Because number one, there's not a Bible verse that says the earth is x amount of years old, right? There are groups who will infer through interpretive work, oh, it's 7000 years or whatever, and we've also talked on the show before about this, like the difficulty with that is like when you've got people being ancestors of other people, the way they will translate as father can sometimes mean literal father. I can also mean ancestor of.. in fact, you can find that in the Gospel of Matthew, like he'll intentionally admit people because he's doing something numerically, so it's impossible to date the earth with, I think, what the Bible actually writes about. Okay, but for the person who's going, like, 'Well, you know what? Do I do with.. okay, you know, there's.. I don't know, carbon dating, or there's this issue, or that issue. So, how can the earth look this way if God made it in, you know, this finite amount of time? Like, shouldn't things be more spread out? And have you, have you heard that, that concern and question before? 10:54 Yeah, all the time. I know, for me, that was a question and concern too. It's like, well, I'm going to school. I'm hearing all of this science, so what do you, what do you do with it? And that is a question I think I still struggle with a little bit, because this big part of it, where it's like, sure, maybe there are in there somewhere millions of years, I wouldn't be able to tell you, and I think, and I think that's where we get where the scriptures don't say that information, right? They don't share that, and so there's no way I could say science is completely wrong, and there's, yeah, I don't think there's a way to go to.. 11:37 well, no, I hear you. I think this is where, for me, maybe my pastor hat will show, rather than Bible scholar or historian, where, like, some people in that field, they might just come at me with pitchforks right now, for what I'm about to say, is it just might be a little too simplistic. 11:54 Okay, 11:55 so an area how I find comfort in that with hold on, if it's described in this way, and yet we can see what we've got now, things are developed in much more of an expanded amount of time. I look within the text itself, and I see, particularly the creation of mankind. Right, so he makes the male and female in Genesis one, and you've got the more in-depth creation story in Genesis two, God fashioning Adam from the dust and stuff like that. What's interesting to me to note is that when He fashions Adam from the dust, He fashions him as a man, not a baby, not a child, a full grown man, meaning from nothing He creates something that is at its developmental height, and so, like, right there's no umbilical cord with Adam. There's no, like, mother, like, he just.. he is a now a living man. And so it's for me, it's not a stretch. And maybe I'm wrong here, maybe again, it's too simplistic. It's not wrong for me to go hold on. If that's how he does it in the creation story, why do I think it's got to be this domino effect of this, then this, then this, then this in a longer amount of time? Like, what is to stop the Supreme Creator of the universe feeling like here it is, and I recognize that in order for it to work in a way that is habitable and sustains life, it's got to have all this stuff that's developed in a certain way, and so I'm gonna just create it developed in that certain way, where for us within a framework of timelines and geology, for us we can only gage it by our experience, but we're dealing with an entity who's beyond all of our experience, and so it's not hard for me to just be like, yeah, I can see why it would look like that, and yet this story tells me that he's great at just creating stuff that I would call older that actually isn't older. Does that make sense? 13:44 Yeah, I think that that's really good, and I think that makes sense. I think of Jesus in John three, well, not John three, book of John, turning water into wine. 13:56 Yeah, 13:56 and you think it's aged wine, and it's good. Yeah, oh, it's a good point. Yeah, if you just make wine, it's not that good. And so, yeah, and that said, someone who would have tried to date that wine would have been like, oh man, this must have been prepared for for years. This would have been really good. Wow, yeah, right. 14:16 You just pull that out of nowhere, or have you done a sermon on that? Because that's awesome. 14:20 I own a unicorn that gives me special 14:27 undo the cloud that we're gaining here with somebody who's on the fence of the faith unicorns. He doesn't, that's not what he was saying. Okay, 14:35 that's phenomenal. It kind of kind of debunks what I wanted to bring up next was just how the verse actually words, it in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and so, Bert, you might know what the actual meaning of formless and empty actually is, but to me, I picture a rock. Rock that was there before God started another thing in verse two, or no, it's still verse, no, verse two, the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, spirit of God was hovering over the waters, and so there was water, there was, there was the earth, my faith doesn't hinge on this detail, but like, if we can prove that carbon dating is 100% accurate, it wouldn't break my faith. 15:32 Well, I mean, that, that's good. The word that we translate as formless or empty void is the Hebrew word Bahu, Bahu, right, and something to know with that narrative, there, like a big theme, man, this is so overarching biblical theology, a big theme is God creating order where there's chaos, right, like chaos, you know, and again, for us, you know, just an evidence for a creator. What's one of the biggest ones? Intelligent design, that there seems to be rules in how creation works, right? Okay. Well, Genesis begins with God putting order where there is chaos, so you've got the Spirit of God over the waters, right. And so we don't, a whole lot of time to go into this, but ancient generation thought a lot of times this had, like, the waters has to do with the place of evil, evil spirits, chaos, that that kind of thing. And so, in the narrative, what it's saying is that God is king over the creation, like he's the one who, that's why he, like, and he'll talk about this in Job, like, you know, I told the waters to go this far and no further, and with the land, so it's not so much. I think it'd be wrong to be like, you know, that the earth came well, that God is just like, so it says God created the heavens and the earth. So it's not this thing of like the earth was just existing, it's that He's in the way that He creates it, He's doing something intentional with it. Does that make sense? 16:57 That makes sense. 16:58 Okay. 16:58 Yeah, so not that we've been off topic, but to get back to the initial question of was the earth made, was did it all happen to God create it in six days. We've promised answers at the end of this, and what what can we give our listeners as we wrap up the topic, 17:20 like evidence for it. 17:21 Yeah. 17:22 Well, I mean, I think the one who can probably definitively settle this debate is Joshua. 17:26 Okay, I'll throw out why I think it's a literal six days. A couple of thoughts, and I think very, maybe you could jump in and share some. We'll see. Okay. Well, for one, I think Jesus talks about the beginning that way, when He says, you know, did you not read, like almost like clarifying, like did you guys misunderstand what was clearly written, that God made male and female? He's harking right back to Genesis, I think. I think also we have a tendency to be embarrassed by the scripture, you know, when God like clearly speaks, and it's so opposed to what the culture and the times say that we tend to shrink back and start to kind of try to make it work, but really the only thing that's outlast all of the culture and time has been the word of God. It has remained true to way, I mean, just through, just do everything. I think one of my biggest reasons for believing six day, besides all the verses we mentioned, everything is the end times. I notice when I read the end times, I don't have any problems with it, where God says He will roll back the heavens and the earth in one day, Christ will return, all things will change. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yep, that day, like 18:41 that 18:41 day, right, because it, it's not impacting how what I'm hearing from the culture, it's not, it's not impacting any of that, and so that future thing that's out there, right. Okay, but I see myself anyway. Long story short, if God can do it at the end like that with and He and He means it, in one day you will see then surely that in the beginning when He said in one day I did this, then yeah, He can, right? So I kind of pair the two together, that when He says what He's gonna do at the end, that He's not gonna take eons to do that, so there's there's a few more, but those are just a couple of the.. I mean, we could talk about Jesus multiplying bread and fish. I mean, he does this on the mountain, right? But then we're like on Genesis. I don't know, I don't know if he could multiply fish, and 19:39 if you scientifically showed how to multiply, he did it 5000 times. Well, 5000 people, men, 19:47 yeah, fed with bread 19:49 with bread. Could you all right? Let's just, all right, look, you got to look at me, okay? If this is a piece of bread, if it's this, Jesus did 5000 20:00 1000 20:00 reps, think of it like a gym workout, like that's that's gonna take some time, but he did it that afternoon, 20:07 yeah, yeah, yeah, be, I mean, you think about the power to heal, restoring dead bodies, I mean, this just the amount of power it would take from his word alone to do that in instantaneously, I mean, if he could cause, I think, some of the ideas. When you look at the Old Testament, you see Abraham, you see his wife, and from them come a nation. I would have never been, and so, but then, but then I struggle with Genesis, with Adam and Eve becoming a nation, and then filling the world, right? But sure, he, he does it again and again and again, and so it kind of makes me wonder, like, well, why, why am I struggling with Genesis one and two? There must be something there that makes me, and I think it is the clear and sheer power that got this place there, that that frightens me, that I don't have a category for that, that, that makes me go, he is great, and I need to bow quickly. All right, I mean, he's mighty, and it's such a display, because the universe is so massive, and I think that's what it says in Romans, Romans chapter one, right? That the universe displays his majesty, his glory, like his divinity, but yeah, it does. Sure, 21:22 yeah, 21:22 yeah. I think that frightens people. 21:24 I like that. Look, neither Josh nor I are apologists. What that means is, like, we are not people who specialize in making arguments for the faith. We're pastors. There are great arguments for believing in a younger earth, and particularly dismissing Darwinian evolution, when it comes to the idea of, like, let's be clear, evolution is not that life mutates, right? So, you know, think like Darwin's finches, where, hey, they're birds on different islands, and the Galapagos, and so, because they have different kinds of beaks, this shows evolution to be the case, that's that's micro evolution. I don't know any Christian has a problem with that. Macro evolution, and this is what the, the, the atheist or the naturalist would, would adhere to, rather than a belief in a creator, says that all life, all of life, plant, human, animal, all of it came from the same place. Simple single-cell organisms that began to live for reasons that are not entirely well, they're not provable at all. That's they've never been able to create that, but somehow you know this bacteria developed, and, and from that, over millions and millions of years, here we are. Right, there are great arguments against that, and if I could reference one, really easy reads a book by Lee Strobel called The Case for Creator. It's a great book, because he interviews different scholars and scientists. One guy stands out to be a guy named Michael Behe, Betty, I forget who say it's name, he talks about there are there certain things that are basically they're called, oh gosh, what's irreducibly complex, in other words, like they're things where if you change any part of it, it falls apart, so for instance, like if you have like a mousetrap, if you get rid of the spring, it's not a mouse trap, you know, if you get rid of the wood, it's not like if you remove any part of it, it doesn't exist anymore as it is, and he gives the example of like the eye, like an eye in any being that has sight. If you remove anything that makes the eye work as it currently is, there is no eye, there is no ability for sight. It's not simple, something as something just adding stuff later on as time goes on doesn't work like that. There are all kinds of arguments along these lines for us. That's not what makes or breaks it. A belief in Genesis one comes from not a need to date the earth, but from, and if I'm hearing you right, Josh, it comes from a conviction that the historical accounts of Christ are true, that like what the gospel narratives present about the life of Jesus of Nazareth is historically reliable, and I think just about everybody who studies that in debt, I mean, how many stories are there people where they decide I research the gospels, they look into it, and they end up converting just because of how reliable the gospel narratives are. Okay, we believe in this reading of Genesis because we believe that's what the readings of the life of Jesus Christ teach, and we believe they casted that life to be reliable, and so our faith doesn't rise and fall on how we read Genesis one, it rises and falls on who was and is Jesus Christ, and that's where we go. 24:49 Nice. Well, hopefully you got a nugget or 10 from this conversation about the earth being created in six literal days, if you have quite. Questions or ideas for future episodes, or if there's something that could be more clear, let us know in the comments, or email us podcast at We Are The bridge.org Thanks for watching. 25:09 Bye.