Apologetics · Creation — the assumption young-earth and old-earth believers share, and rarely examine
Two Christians sit down to argue about Genesis 1. One says the days are twenty-four hours and the earth is young. The other says the days are long ages and the earth is ancient. They go three rounds on radiometric dating, the speed of light, and the Hebrew word yom, and they leave frustrated with each other.
What neither of them noticed is that they agreed on something much bigger than what they fought about.
Both of them assumed that Genesis 1 is answering the question in what order, and over what span of time, did the physical processes run? Both of them treat the chapter as a timeline that either does or does not line up with the timeline produced by geology and astronomy. They disagree about which timeline wins. They do not disagree about what kind of document they are reading.
That shared assumption has a name — concordism — and it deserves a hearing before either side claims the trophy.
What Concordism Is
Concordism is the project of matching the text of Scripture, point for point, against the findings of natural science, so that the two “concord” — line up.
It comes in two directions, and both are practiced by sincere, Bible-believing people.
- Young-earth concordism holds the plain sequential reading of the six days and roughly six thousand years, and then works to show that the scientific data, correctly interpreted, fits it — flood geology, accelerated decay, created light in transit.
- Old-earth concordism holds the scientific chronology and then works to show that the text, correctly interpreted, fits it — the days as ages, or as a long creative epoch, with the Genesis order mapped onto the geological record.
Opposite conclusions. Identical method. Both sides have committed to the idea that Genesis 1 is, at bottom, a chronological and mechanical account that must be reconciled with a scientific one — and that whichever reconciliation works is the faithful reading.
Give Each Side Its Best Argument
Before anybody critiques anything, both positions deserve their strongest form, not a caricature.
The young-earth case at its best is a textual case, not a scientific one. Genesis 1 reads as sequential narrative. Each day is bounded by evening and morning. The numbered day plus evening and morning, everywhere else it occurs in the Hebrew Bible, means an ordinary day. And the Fourth Commandment does not merely illustrate from creation — it grounds a literal week in a literal week:
For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Exodus 20:11 (KJV)
That is a serious argument, and it is not answered by calling it unscientific. It is an argument about what the author wrote.
The old-earth case at its best is likewise not a surrender to the academy. It rests on the conviction that the created order is God’s own testimony and cannot finally contradict His word:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Psalm 19:1 (KJV)
If the rocks and the starlight are telling us something consistent and enormous, the old-earth believer argues, then the honest move is to ask whether we have been reading Genesis with more precision than Genesis claims for itself. The church has been here before. It once read “the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved” as fixed astronomy, and it was wrong — not about Scripture, but about what Scripture was asserting.
Both of those are arguments a believing man can make with a clear conscience. Neither is capitulation.
The Cost Nobody Prices In
Here is the problem with the shared method, and it cuts both ways equally.
Concordism makes the authority of Genesis 1 depend on the current state of a discipline that revises itself. If the text is only vindicated when it matches the consensus, then the text’s standing rises and falls with the consensus. Old-earth concordists who mapped the days onto the geological column in 1920 were mapping onto a column that has been substantially redrawn since. Young-earth concordists who staked the chapter on a particular flood-geology mechanism are staking Scripture’s credibility on a model, not on the Word.
Tie the Bible to this decade’s science and you have promised to untie it next decade.
And there is a quieter cost. When Genesis 1 becomes a data set to be defended, we stop reading it for what it is manifestly shouting. Look at its shape. Days one through three form the realms — light and dark, sea and sky, land. Days four through six fill them — luminaries, birds and fish, beasts and man. It is built. The chapter is a deliberate structure with a destination, and the destination is not a number of years. It is a throne and a Sabbath:
And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.
Genesis 2:2–3 (KJV)
Genesis 1 was written into a world drowning in creation myths where the sun was a god, the sea was a monster, and men were an afterthought made to feed the deities. Against all of it, Moses writes that the sun is a lamp God hung, the sea creatures are things God made, and man is the image-bearer God crowned. That is the polemic. That is the claim the chapter is pressing, and it is a far more radical claim than any date.
What Is Actually Non-Negotiable
None of this makes the age question unimportant, and none of it makes every reading acceptable. There is a floor, and it is not the calendar.
- God created out of nothing, by His word, freely. Not shaping pre-existing stuff, not emanating, not required.
- Christ is the agent and the sustainer of it. “For by him were all things created… and by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16–17, KJV).
- Adam was a real man, the head of a real race, not a symbol for early humanity.
- The Fall was a real event in history, and human death entered through it: “as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Romans 5:12, KJV).
- Man is the image of God, and that is a categorical difference, not a degree on a scale.
Surrender any of those and you have not adjusted your chronology — you have cut a load-bearing wall out of the gospel, because the second Adam only makes sense if there was a first one.
Where That Leaves You
If you are young-earth, hold it for textual reasons and hold it honestly — and stop treating brothers who read the days differently as though they have denied the faith. Many of them are contending for a real Adam and a real Fall as hard as you are.
If you are old-earth, be equally careful. The pressure on your position is not the dating; it is death. Work that question with a Bible open, not around it, and do not let “the science says” become a category that never has to answer to the text.
And if you are the skeptic reading over the shoulder of this argument, notice what you are watching. You are not watching people decide whether God is real. You are watching people who already know He is, working carefully on what His book is claiming. The first verse settled the question that actually matters, and it did not stop to date itself.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1 (KJV)
Everything else in the chapter is commentary on those first four words. Get those right and you can argue about the rest as family.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist