I hold the young-earth reading of Genesis. Which is exactly why the arguments that do not work have to go — and why the people who built that case said so first.
A man came up to me after a study once and told me, with real enthusiasm, that NASA’s computers had found a missing day in history that lined up with Joshua stopping the sun. He had heard it from a pulpit. He was delighted by it. He had told his coworkers.
It is not true. There is no such computation, there never was, and the story predates NASA by half a century. And the problem is not that he was mistaken about an astronomical trivia item. The problem is that he had spent that story at work, among men who can look things up, and when they did, the thing they concluded was not he got one wrong. It was that is what these people are like.
Let me say plainly where I stand before I start pulling things down. I read Genesis 1–11 as history. I believe God created in six ordinary days, that Adam was a real man, that the Fall was a real event, and that the flood was a real global judgment. I am not writing as a critic of that position. I am writing because it deserves better defenders than it sometimes gets.
The Verse Nobody Applies to Apologetics
Job’s friends spent thirty chapters defending God with bad material. Job finally turns on them with a question that ought to be printed on the inside cover of every apologetics book.
Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him? Will ye accept his person? will ye plead for God? (Job 13:7–8, KJV)
Talk deceitfully for him. Job’s charge is not that they were on the wrong team. They were on God’s team, loudly, and they were saying things about Him that were not so. And the book ends with God rebuking them, not Job (Job 42:7).
Paul faces the same temptation head-on and refuses it with contempt: And not rather, as we be slanderously reported… Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just (Romans 3:8). You do not get to run a false argument because the conclusion is true. The ninth commandment has no apologetics exemption.
And here is the thing worth knowing, especially if you have only ever heard this subject shouted about: the major young-earth organizations said all of this first, in public, about their own material. Answers in Genesis maintains a standing published list of arguments it asks creationists to stop using. The Institute for Creation Research withdrew one of its own films over a claim that did not hold. That is not weakness. That is what intellectual seriousness looks like, and most people arguing about this on the internet do not know it happened.
Six That Should Be Off the Table
Not an exhaustive list. These are the six I still hear most often from sincere men.
1. Moon dust proves the moon is young. The argument ran that meteoritic dust accumulating on the lunar surface should have been many feet deep after billions of years, and the Apollo landers found only a thin layer. It rested on a 1960 dust-influx estimate that direct measurement later showed to be far too high. The thin layer is what current influx rates predict. The argument died in the 1970s and is still in circulation.
2. NASA found Joshua’s missing day. An urban legend with a nineteenth-century ancestry, retold with computers added. Joshua 10 does not need corroboration from a computation that was never performed.
3. Darwin recanted on his deathbed. He did not. The story traces to a woman who claimed to have visited him; his own family denied the account. Even if it were true it would prove nothing — a theory is not refuted by its author’s last words. We would laugh at the reverse argument if it were used on us.
4. Human and dinosaur footprints together at Paluxy. The Glen Rose tracks in Texas were presented for years as men walking alongside dinosaurs. Closer work showed the shapes are better explained as elongated dinosaur tracks and erosional features. Creationist organizations themselves retracted it. If you are still showing that photograph, you are showing something your own side withdrew.
5. The second law of thermodynamics makes evolution impossible. As popularly stated, this argument proves far too much. If increasing disorder forbade biological organization, an acorn could not become an oak and an embryo could not become a child — both run uphill locally, powered by energy from outside. There is a serious conversation to be had about where functional organization comes from. Entropy, waved at a whole field, is not it.
6. There are no beneficial mutations. There are some, and they are documented. The real question is a narrower and much harder one: whether mutation and selection can generate genuinely new functional information rather than degrade, duplicate, or reshuffle what is already there. Make the narrow argument. The sweeping one hands the other side an easy win in one sentence.
I would add a seventh item that is not false but is often mishandled. Young-earth “clocks” — magnetic field decay, helium retention in zircons, carbon-14 in samples thought to be ancient, soft tissue in dinosaur fossils — are live research questions with real published work behind them and real published pushback. Present them as what they are: anomalies and models under dispute. Present a disputed model as a settled proof and you have not strengthened your case, you have post-dated a check.
What Is Actually Load-Bearing
Clear away the rubble and notice what has not moved. My confidence in a recent creation never rested on lunar dust. It rests on the text, and the text has arguments of its own.
The days are described like days. Each one in Genesis 1 is bounded by evening and morning and carries a number. That is how Hebrew narrative marks ordinary days, and it is a strange way to write if the author meant eras.
The fourth commandment hangs on it. God grounds the Sabbath in the pattern of the creation week itself:
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)
Six of something, then one of something, and Israel is told to copy the proportions weekly.
Jesus places man at the beginning, not the end. But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female (Mark 10:6). On a deep-time reading, humanity arrives at the last sliver of the story. Christ’s phrasing puts the pair at the start of it.
Death is an intruder. This one carries the most theological weight. God pronounced the finished creation very good (Genesis 1:31), and Paul traces death to a man, not to a mechanism: by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin (Romans 5:12). The parallel with Christ depends on it — for since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:21). Death is not a tool God used for millions of years and then called very good. It is the thing He came to destroy.
Where I Owe My Brothers Honesty
The same discipline I am asking for cuts toward me, so let me say three things out loud.
First, the believing old-earth position is not unbelief with better manners. Men who read the days as long ages, or as a framework, or who hold creation by fiat over a longer span, routinely affirm the things that actually matter: God created from nothing, Adam was a real man, the Fall was a real event, and Christ is the second Adam who undoes it. That is a brother. Our disagreement is in the house, over the reading of a passage, and I will argue it hard and still take communion with him.
Second, our side has real difficulties and we should say so. Distant starlight is a genuine problem, not a solved one; the proposed models are models. Some of the geology is hard. Saying we are working on that costs you nothing and buys you the right to be believed on everything else.
Third — and this is the one that stings — the age of the earth is not the gospel. A man is not saved by a timeline. I have watched Christians treat Genesis chronology as the test of fellowship, and that is a weight the doctrine was never built to carry.
Buy the Truth, and Sell It Not
Here is what the bad arguments actually cost, and it is not an argument. It is a person.
A nineteen-year-old sits in a dorm room having been handed moon dust and a deathbed recantation and a photograph that was withdrawn. He discovers, in an afternoon, that all three are no good. And he does not conclude that his youth pastor was out of date. He concludes that the whole structure was a bluff, and he stops trusting the book underneath it. I have met that young man more than once. Nobody lied to him on purpose. He was simply handed something nobody had checked.
Scripture does not allow us to be careless with that.
Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding. (Proverbs 23:23, KJV)
Truth costs something to acquire. You buy it — with study, with the discomfort of checking a story you love, with the humility of dropping a line that always got a reaction. And then you do not sell it for the cheap applause of a room that already agrees with you.
So go through your own material. Pull the three claims you have never verified. Learn the two you can actually defend. The God who spoke the universe into existence has never once needed a false witness, and the fastest way to make Genesis look fragile is to defend it with something that breaks the first time a skeptic looks it up.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist