A Conversation on the Age of the Earth: Theology in Action

Levi: thank you welcome to this week's theology in action we're back again with Dr Tony Caffey how are you doing this week 

Dr. Tony Caffey: hey Levi glad to be with you yeah yeah

Levi: so are you ready to dive in this week I think so what do we got on the docket today so this week we're going to talk about young Earth versus old Earth and the big the big point there is is the earth a few thousand years old is it a couple million years old is it somewhere in between I guess the first question would be what is your stance on that controversial topic huh here we go yeah

Dr. Tony Caffey: I am a young Earth creationist so uh I went to The Moody Bible Institute and I paid good money for that position so that that's my view uh and that's what I grew up with now there there are different views and even and Evangelical Christianity broadly there's those who hold to an old Earth view there's those who ascribe to what's called The Gap theory that there are gaps between day one day two day three my conviction comes from textual arguments and and this might surprise you it doesn't really come from Genesis 1. it comes from Exodus 20 because as God is delivering you know the Ten Commandments and and um telling Moses to honor the Sabbath day there's that statement in Exodus 20 about God creating the universe in six days and then resting yeah and that derived from that is this principle for the Israelites and you might even say for us generally to to rest on the literal seventh day and so um I hermeneutically there's a principle of of trying to understand it in the minds of the original audience and so as Israelites are gathered in the wilderness hearing this for the first time as Moses comes from Mount Sinai none of them would have conceived of well you know this could have been a gap Theory idea or this could have been you know thousands of years they're going to be taking that as you know God created the world in six 24-hour periods and I think the onus is on those who would say no it's not that or it can be broader than that or it doesn't necessarily have to be that and if you derive from that this kind of General principle where no it's not really six 24-hour days then you know how does that relate to the Sabbath understanding if if an Israelite came back to the Lord and and said well I'm going to rest once a month because you know we don't it's not really a 24-hour day where we understand this more symbolically is you know a time period I don't think that would have would fly with the Lord and so I think Exodus 20 is more definitive in terms of uh what's going on Genesis 1 I'm sure as you read and research this there's some some issues there with regard to when the sun was created and how 24 hours could have been conceived without kind of the apparatus of the the Sun and the Moon and all of that um so I get that and I understand even the Gap Theory and and recognizing that this word de Yom in Hebrew isn't always a reference to 24-Hour periods totally get that and so the workarounds in Genesis 1 as people have constructed them okay that might fly but then what do you do with Exodus 20 and so that's for that reason and others I'm a young Earth creationist

Levi: I agree completely I I think I land on that as well and for a long time A friend of mine and we're recently talking about this topic as we were kind of thinking through this uh he and I both used to have The Stance of this is one of those areas where it doesn't matter where really ultimately that's just one of those Christian topics that we're debating and arguing about and it's causing contention so if it's causing contention let's leave it off the table uh there were some good points made that no this is actually a stance that is very important and there you you kind of you you can't just not take a side would you would you agree with that it is important and even those who would disagree with me say it's it's important um so I would differentiate between you know a I think we've walked through this before the three different tiers of uh doctrinal uh distinctives this is derived from an article that Albert Mohler wrote on uh theological triage she called it and uh on level one the first tier there's you know those things which make you a Christian or make you not a Christian so you put the deity of Christ in tier one and you would you know the trinitarian theology which the the necessity of Christ for our salvation and Christ 

Dr. Tony Caffey: Alone being the way in which we are um saved so those are like you can't not believe in those things and still be a Christian

Levi: I I saw a a term or a quote I don't remember who said it was reading today on ultimately we should always come back to in this debate that it's about the Rock of Ages not the age of rocks I thought that was kind of a catchy of the way to say it yeah

Dr. Tony Caffey: it's and that's probably leading to the second tier which uh I'll mention which you know there there are issues that we can disagree on for sure um and even from church to church so I passed your church you're in my church first by verse fellowship and there's certain uh doctrinal commitments that we need to have to be a part of this church so if so we're Credo Baptist yeah right um so if somebody comes to our church and says Pastor Tony I want you to baptize our baby it's time I'm you know that's that's probably not the church for you there's Presbyterian churches in town there's there's reformed churches that would do that that's not what we do we we're Credo Baptists and so in so I mentioned tier one so tier two would be what are those issues that we can be Brothers and Sisters in Christ and still disagree on in tier three we reach a place where we can actually have disagreements within the body of Christ so you know we're we're going to agree on baptism we're all going to be Credo Baptists we're all going to be Pato Baptist we're going to agree on you know the way in which um uh the the communion elements are taken and the significance behind that uh but but there's going to be disagreements as well we can still gather we can still be a part of the body of Christ now the tricky part is where do we put where do we put this young Earth creationism thing do we put it in tier one or do we put it in tier three is it something that we can kind of you know uh agree to disagree on but we can't go to the same church yet or does it need to be a tier three thing I would say that you are welcome to come to verse by verse Fellowship you're welcome to disagree on my young Earth view that we hold to but uh but you need to at least abide by that as being the the method of our teaching from children's ministry to as I'm teaching Genesis 1 from the pulpit or other elders and as long as you can agree on that then uh it's okay for us to be in Fellowship

together and to to serve in the local church so so that would be the tier three distinction between tier two yeah I do want to say this and I think this will be helpful maybe for those who disagree about this uh there's a helpful debate where Al Mohler and Brian Chapel argue through this matter um at the Gospel Coalition website and so Brian Chapel would be more the older creationist Al Mohler would be the young Earth creationists and there's definitely some disagreement there on on how that fleshes out um but here's what they do agree on they agree that Adam was created uh uniquely as a human being and there wasn't an evolutionary process that led up to Adam and the reason that's important is because and they walk through this you do have this Romans 5 statement about the new atom so if if Adam as a person is just kind of generically being describing or that creation of Adam and Eve it's just it's just generically describing Humanity at large and God instead of just putting one man and one woman on earth he created lots of people and just put them on earth like he did the birds well then how do you reconcile that to this new atom typology in the New Testament so you know you have to have the one atom with the fall and then that's passing Down original sin to get corrected by the the true and better Adam Jesus in the New Testament so that was helpful because you had these two men who disagree on the nature of creationism but they agree on that as being foundational to our Christian faith and so I've been on Elder boards with people who have disagreed with me on this issue and we were able to serve alongside of each other but but we had to agree on that as something that was foundational to our faith I do want to say this too just a clarifying point about the young Earth view so there are some data points that have led people to about a 6 000 year time range and uh people have worked through the math you know going to the genealogies so as I say young Earth creationism I want to give a little bit of uh latitude on that so I'm going to say between six and ten thousand or six and twelve thousand years is what I believe and the main reason for that is because the way in which genealogies actually work in the Old Testament so uh if you look at the genealogies of the Old Testament and then link that up with Matthew chapter one there are gaps so and as an Old Testament person would write about the father of so and so or so and so begot another person that can and sometimes and sometimes indicate a grandfather to a grandson versus just father to son relationships there's some debate about this but that's my view is that there could be condensed genealogies in the Old Testament where just like in Matthew chapter one we're not listing every single person in the the genealogical link but could be skipping a generation so that's why I have that kind of six to ten thousand range to account for maybe a little bit of latitude there but definitely not in my opinion you know millions and millions of years or billions and billions of years I do believe that the Lord created our our Earth and our world with the appearance of age

Levi: yeah one of the more recent uh points I heard on that that really stood out that is at this point I haven't really been able to refute it in my mind and play Devil's Advocate but with it much and you started I think kind of started talking about it and touching on it was the fact that the introduction of the fall and the curse and with the curse brought death and if if there's evolution millions of years something would have died in that process and in that point if something died in that point then it takes away from that point of death being introduced because of a curse of the fall and that to me really stood out of okay that that's absolutely that signifies young Earth to me um so can I comment on that yes absolutely so I I have a problem just generally speaking as well with kind of buying into an evolutionary framework in general because it's bigger than just kind of science it it bleeds into philosophy it bleeds into theology so if you you know Darwinism as a philosophy more than just a science because it really does have a full philosophical framework if you buy into that you do have this Paradigm where the the strong eat the weak and where um the the mentality is that the those who are weaker those who are lesser developed those who are uh and lack the strength to continue should be weeded out that min

Dr. Tony Caffey: dset really gave birth to the Eugenics movement in this country and in other countries and and that uh starts to violate what we talked about last time in terms of the image of God so now instead of all uh of God's uh human creatures being created equal and having equal dignity now you say well the ones who are stronger or greater survival of the fittest they're the ones that should have the greater value they're the ones that should be given privilege they're the ones that should be kind of advocated for and it's really hard as an evolutionist a pure evolutionist or a pure darwinian evolutionist to clarify that term to to get to a place of Ethics yeah like General ethics like why do we value those who are poor or why do we value those who are um you know mentally handicapped you can't get there

Levi: yeah they contradict it's it's too contradictory and and so they have to kind of and this is where a lot of evolutionary uh thinkers frame it they're like well we have evolved to a place where now we are moral beings and we we do have this ethical framework because we're more highly developed than our forebearers uh that just doesn't work for me there is yeah and uh and and also if you're really evolving why wouldn't you evolve to a place where ethics isn't always great for the advancement of your civilization so yeah you know if you want to be purely focused pragmatically on the develop of developing your civilization why not weed out the weak why not weed out those who are less strong uh why not go for eugenic yeah and my Christian framework says no you can't do that because we are created in the image of God all of us and we're created at part of that is that we do have this value for our fellow human beings as those who are image bearers absolutely so we're getting into little theology a little bit a little bit of philosophy there but these issues are bound up together I agree completely a lot of uh it seems that most conversations I end up with with people in other uh spectrum of this talk evolution of its science versus the Bible and I've never really seen it that way I've seen it as there's a certain level of understanding where once you get it with if if you're in a shallower depth you've just dove into the Bible per se into some scientific understanding of something you might be in this hazy place where it seems like it contradicts the Bible but then as you start taking more information comes out and I'm personally never seen a lot of contradiction to the Bible or anything it might ultimately I'm getting a little bit of my own soapbox here ultimately God isn't Bound by science he created it if he made things Supernatural he spoke them into being scientifically we can't prove that in my understanding of any of that so I don't necessarily see it as a contradictory thing I know they use science to base it off of but I don't see that as a good stance yeah

Dr. Tony Caffey: well the Origin of Species isn't purely science there's philosophy wrapped up in that way and uh you just you have to make certain jumps yeah philosophically from what can be verifiable with science and there is there is science and love science actually some of the greatest scientists in the history of the world have been Christians just just look it up um but there's also in a modern day world which you might call scientism the idea that science is the end-all be-all and we can kind of make these philosophical jumps to to create a modern world view and even a religious system and that's that's dangerous people who have gravitated towards that have uh really built a religion unto itself that goes well beyond the way in which science and the initial propositions involving science and the um you know the how you build a hypothesis and the science scientific method they go well beyond that kind of framework so um so I don't think Christians have to feel like they're being anti-science or they have to you know broad brush science as a as a um as a discipline which it really is it's a discipline but then again there's there are religious systems that in our religious system coming from the Bible gives us information what I would call Revelation from the Lord that is not verifiable in a scientific sense if it is that the best science would suggest I think what we would call intelligent design that there is built into Humanity into organic matter into our humanness an intentionality and it's funny as you look at that the intelligent design which does have a scientific framework there are many within the scientific community that would want to basically cancel that or blackball that why you know it's because that as it infringes upon their philosophical underpinnings it it's perceived as a threat yep

Levi: so and Christians have been guilty of that in the past where they've seen kind of science gravitate away from maybe the way they thought the science the science should confirm certain things you know this Earth is the center of the universe so to speak um as uh or the what is it heliocentrism the sun is the center of the the Universe um that the Christians have been guilty at times of kind of suppressing scientific knowledge because of their faulty view of the way in which the Bible spoke of things so we need to admit that in terms of our our Christian Heritage but I don't see that in the modern day world I see it actually the other direction where now Christian views or a Christian worldview or even Christian thinkers who are in the realm of science are being suppressed and they're they're data and their researches is being blackballed so somewhat on topic but even just I think about even as a Christian studying the Bible and how it applies it it's the same concept with with that is you can't read it and discredit what you read because you don't like it and just toss it out you have to allow it to challenge your thought process and ultimately work within you and change you if if that's what it's God's using it to do uh obviously not everyone's going to want to do that and threaten if it's threatening their thought process we as you said we see often that people just want to toss it to the side and not think about it or talk about it but that's that's not I just don't think that's a healthy place to be hopefully they can grow out of that uh so another point that a lot of people bring up is uh we obviously we know the Bible it has many different uses of languages you've got um metaphors similes poetry things like that they bring up the point that really it seems like genesis is written like poetry so how can we take it as truth how would you defend that what would you what's your thought process there yes

Dr. Tony Caffey: that's a common objection and let me start by saying this poetry has a spectrum there are uh even in English we would have you know history telling that's more poetic or more Artful uh than not but that's different from what we would call the genre of poetry so in English as we're reciting poetry we would have rhyme and meter and those kinds of things and you know okay that's poetry uh the Hebrews had that too and the switch would be from a narrative form of relaying information to their poetic genre which we see in the Psalms which we see parallelism is kind of the characteristic form of Hebrew poetry so instead of rhyme you would have you know a parallel line matching you know line for line um and then there's in in the kind of verbal usage there some variation on on the conjugation of verbs you would also have some something that's called terseness where you would use an economy of words to shrink the statements that are made so that's quite characteristic in the Psalms that's not Genesis yeah just for the record and Genesis uses I'm gonna get really technical here so um in Hebrew it's called vietol and it's this verb form that's used to convey history so when you look at Genesis the same vital form of conjugation and storytelling narrative is used there that's used later in Genesis as Moses is talking about Abraham that's used later in first Samuel as as the author's talking about David this is how the Israelites conveyed history with bayettol is how they told stories This Is How They did narrative and so Genesis 1 is is poetic it's Artful but to say that it's not history telling is not true the Moses was trying to convey the history of the world and the history of his people to his listeners to those people that he let out of the Wilderness and so the the grammar of Hebrew actually argues the other direction that this is not the poetic genre this is the the storytelling narrative history hit the technical term is historiography this is historiography Moses is trying to tell his people how the world came into being so uh poetic sure yeah Artful absolutely poetry but not history no that's not true

Levi: another point I think I would I would kind of make and you can add to or push against this feel free to is uh you brought up Psalms Psalms are a great example poetry but that doesn't mean they're not truth there's psalms about God's love about multiple Psalm 22 you've referenced tonight uh love Psalm 22 in the reference and the title like the truth is still there just because it's in poetry form does not mean it's not truth yeah

Dr. Tony Caffey: that's and that's a little bit technical because there are uh poems um I think Psalm 105 Psalm 106 that are historicals okay now you have uh blending of genres where you have a poetic genre that's used to convey some aspect of of History um yeah that's true I I think probably uh the distinction systematic theologians would make is that poetry is less didactic than um you know a narrative or in the New Testament world the epistolary sections of scripture so there are times when David as part of his uh poetic impulse exaggerates or hyperbolizes okay or uh uses um you know there in the New Testament world you have Jesus who tells Parables and that's a genre unto itself as well the parable is an actual non-historical means of Storytelling so you know the rich man uh um trying to think of a good Parable you know like the Good Samaritan did that actually happen well I mean that's irrelevant that's not why Jesus told that story he's telling us a story in that way to convey meaning that's apart from history yeah that's not what Moses is doing right and uh the pentateuch that's not what he's doing in Genesis 1. he's he's teaching it's didactic but it's also history the conveying of to the Israelites and for us too human history at the very beginning

Levi: yeah great point I hadn't really thought about uh that aspect of Genesis being a little bit of a different style of poetry before so I actually want to go dig into that a little myself and see what I can learn about that style I didn't didn't know that uh so digging into the the application process because I know you love that and I actually as I Was preparing for this I was thinking like what is the application in this and I feel free to add I on or whatever but my my initial thought is this may not be something that there's specific application with how we perceive the Earth but I think the we touched on a step back is how we communicate with our fellow brother in Christ or anyone about these subjects and can we agree or disagree in Grace

and move forward

Dr. Tony Caffey: yes we can so there's you know laws of polemics for us as Christians where we can respect as someone who's made in God's image somebody who says something that we strongly disagree with so I'll I'll relate it to parents so my son's 15. so we've been working with him for 15 years on how to take in information from the world and discern you know truth from science from kind of the the philosophical framework that goes behind that sometimes so just as an example I listened to a Christian speaker the other day a Catholic who just kind of he had a lot of good things to say quoted some portions of the New Testament Jesus speaking that was very edifying love your enemies but then he just kind of um not even aware of what he was doing he said you know our brains have evolved over millions of years to develop this kind of ethos what you know so just being able to pick out from that like okay there's good that this person is conveying but there's in in his case an evil evolutionary framework that I don't agree with and actually if I buy into that evolutionary framework I'm not going to end up where he's at in terms of you know love your enemies because that shows us that we have a highly developed brain that can can do it whereas our forebearers couldn't I just can't get into that and there's some really popular speakers in our day I could name some names who who use that framework and try to squeeze it into the Christian worldview and I just resist that and when Aleister was a kid my son we would watch sometimes you know nature videos which I love you know National Geographics and and videos and and it's it's just inevitably part of that genre where it's like yeah hundreds of billions of years ago this happened and and so we would typically as parents like pause it and say son just so you know this is what we believe and this is the framework that's built into that and so take this with a grain of salt and then hit play and then there's great truth even as you watch National Geographic specials there's great truth to be extracted from that uh but it's you know what's the old adage eat the fish and spit out the bones right you got to teach your kids to do that

Levi: yeah and it's a challenge it's it's a how do you know what's boned and whatnot and I think the foundation and framework of pausing and having those conversations with family or whoever maybe is absolutely how that process is gone about there have been times I will say this where it's been more bone than fish you know I was just like this is not even worth it

Dr. Tony Caffey: yeah

Levi: well I think that is all the time we have for this week if you guys were interested in this topic and would like to check out any other topic we have feel free to check out our playlist here uh if you would like to see some other content we have we have our website bbvf.org you can check out our Facebook page we do live streaming on Sundays and Wednesdays

Levi: Tony thank you for your time

Dr. Tony Caffey: thanks Levi until next time guys