...and does it matter? Part 2 of 3.

Editorial introduction: Following his opening article last week on scientific evidence for a Creator, Paul Garner looks at three more theological problems presented by an ‘old Earth’ model of history.

4. Thorns and Thistles Before Sin

An ‘old Earth’ model forces us to accept that ‘thorns and thistles’ have been around for hundreds of millions of years, long before humans appeared or sin entered the world.

The biblical term ‘thorns and thistles’, used in Genesis 3:18, seems to be a ‘catch-all’ that embraces all plants with thorns, spines and prickles.¹ Botanically speaking, these terms have different meanings. Thorns are derived from shoots and spines from leaves or some part of a leaf. Both contain plant vascular tissue. Prickles are derived from the outer epidermis of the plant and do not contain vascular tissue. Plants with these features are known in the fossil record at least as far back as the Lower Devonian Period, conventionally 419-393 million years ago.

Lower Devonian examples include the spiny species Psilophyton princeps,² Drepanophycus spinaeformis³ and Sawdonia ornata⁴. Spiny cacti⁵ and prickly roses^6,7 date back to the Eocene Epoch, conventionally 56-34 million years ago. But the existence of these plants long before there were humans runs counter to the biblical claim that thorns and thistles were brought forth only as a result of human sin.

Genesis 3:17-18 tells us that the ground was cursed because of Adam’s sin, and that his life subsequently became one of sweat, sorrow, hardship and toil. From that time, thorns and thistles have been a constant reminder of the curse that God pronounced.

Thorns before sin...or as a result of sin?The connection between thorns and thistles and human sin is illustrated most graphically in the crown of thorns that adorned Christ at his crucifixion, as he bore the curse in our place (Matt 27:29; Mark 15:17; John 19:2, 5). But how can thorns and thistles symbolise the effects of the curse if they were around for hundreds of millions of years before Adam sinned, and were a normal part of the world that God described as “very good” (Gen 1:31)?

5. No Adam and Eve Ancestral to All Humans

Fifth, we would have to accept that there was no first human couple, and that humans were not all descended from Adam and Eve.

Modern humans have a fossil record that can be traced back a very long way - according to conventional dating methods. The first modern humans are thought to have appeared in Africa around 300,000-200,000 years ago.^8,9 Some of their descendants are thought to have migrated out of Africa as early as 177,000 years ago,¹⁰ followed by a more lasting dispersal event beginning about 74,000 years ago.¹¹ Modern humans then spread along the southern coastline of Asia, reaching Australia by about 65,000 years ago,¹² Europe by about 45,000-40,000 years ago^13,14 and the Americas by about 24,000 years ago.¹⁵

So even if we consider only members of our own species (Homo sapiens), there is no way that all humans alive today could be descended from one man unless Adam lived at least 300,000-200,000 years ago.¹⁶ This is problematic, given that a straightforward reading of the biblical genealogies (e.g. Gen 5:1-32, 11:10-32) indicates that Adam lived about 6,000 years ago.¹⁷

How can thorns and thistles symbolise the effects of the curse if they were around for hundreds of millions of years before Adam sinned, as a normal part of God’s ‘very good’ world?

Even if the genealogies are incomplete, as some argue, the amount of time that can be inserted into them is extremely limited. Since the fathers listed in Genesis 11 had their sons at age 35 or less, about 300 missing generations would be needed to add even 10,000 years to the chronology.

To extend the date of Adam’s creation back to 200,000 years we would have to insert 6,000 missing generations – clearly an absurdity in genealogies that together contain only 20 generations! And the problem gets worse if we consider earlier members of our genus to be descendants of Adam too. Homo ergaster and Homo erectus have a fossil record going back almost two million years!¹⁸

An alternative is to locate Adam much more recently in history, say less than 20,000 years ago. This is more in line with the biblical genealogies, but it would mean that Adam could not be the ancestor of most people living today, for the simple reason that humanity was already widely dispersed across the globe by that time. This runs counter to the biblical claim that Adam was the first man (1 Cor 15:47), Eve the mother of all living (Gen 3:20) and that all humans that have ever lived arose from this one, primordial couple (e.g. Acts 17:26).

It also raises disturbing questions about the spiritual status of the Homo sapiens that lived before Adam. Did they bear the image of God, or were they animals? And what about the people alive today that are descended from those other Homo sapiens, and not from Adam? If Adam was not the first man, but only one among many, the implications are startling and far-reaching.¹⁹

6. No Worldwide Flood

Sixth, we would have to accept that there was no worldwide flood within human history.

Lifesize ark built to Noah's specifications (Kentucky, USA).

Assuming the standard geological time-scale, most of the sedimentary rocks, with their enclosed fossils, were deposited in the hundreds of millions of years before humans made their first appearance. It logically follows from this premise that these sediments could not be the product of a global flood within human history.

Furthermore, the sediments that were formed since the first appearance of humans in the fossil record show no signs of having been deposited in a global flood. They mostly represent the deposits of ‘normal’ environments such as lakes, rivers and shallow oceans.²⁰ Thus, there is no place in the standard chronology for a global flood. In fact, even a geographically local but anthropologically universal flood cannot be accommodated unless the Flood was a very long time ago, since we have already noted how widely distributed humans have been for many tens of thousands of years according to conventional dating.

The biblical genealogies do not allow us to place Noah so far back in history, and in any case the idea of a local flood runs counter to the many lines of biblical evidence that point to a global flood.²¹ Others have suggested that the Flood may indeed have been global, but that it left no trace in the geological record. But a geologically ‘tranquil’ global flood is a contradiction in terms, and there is no evidence in the fossil record that human populations were ever wiped out by such an event.

The biblical claim is that Adam was the first man (1 Cor 15:47), Eve the mother of all living (Gen 3:20) and that all humans that have ever lived arose from this one, primordial couple.

Was the Original Creation “Very Good”?

Big questions confront us as we consider the logical consequences of embracing the old-Earth chronology. Perhaps the biggest is whether a world replete with death, agony, sickness and disease for hundreds of millions of years is compatible with the biblical description of a world that was “very good” in the beginning. If physical death was not the consequence of human sin but a normal part of the world from the outset, then what are the implications for our theology of Christ’s atonement and bodily resurrection?

Some may be tempted to say that the ‘death’ attributed in the Bible to Adam’s sin refers only to ‘spiritual’ death. But if that were the case, why was it necessary for Christ to suffer and die physically in order to save us?^22,23 Others will perhaps say that the death and suffering of animals for millions of years before the first appearance of humans is of no theological consequence because the death brought by Adam’s sin applied only to humans. But this is to downplay what the Bible says about animal suffering and death, which is connected to human sin in many passages.²⁴ And problems remain even if we consider only human death and suffering.

Consider Neanderthals, for instance. Neanderthals, whose fossil remains are conventionally dated to 250,000-40,000 years ago, are known to have suffered from bone fractures,²⁵ arthritis,²⁶ dental abscesses,²⁷ infectious diseases²⁸ and abnormalities arising from malnutrition.^29,30 One Neanderthal individual appears to have sustained crush injuries and head trauma, perhaps from a rock fall; he was probably also blinded in his left eye.³¹ Another shows evidence of widespread degenerative joint disease, as well as a rib fracture and loss of teeth.³²

Stringer and Gamble write that “evidence of injury or disease in some form or another is found in almost all reasonably complete adult Neanderthals.”³³ Are these Neanderthals descendants of Adam, suffering the effects of the Fall? If so, Adam must have lived a very long time ago - much further back than even the most generous interpretation of the biblical genealogies would allow. But if these Neanderthals lived before Adam, what are we to make of their cultural continuity with modern humans? Neanderthals are known to have manufactured stone tools and bone implements,³⁴ worn jewellery^35,36,37 and buried their dead.³⁸ In fact, genome sequencing has revealed that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred with one another.³⁹ Most modern Europeans and Asians have some Neanderthal genes – are Europeans and Asians the offspring of bestiality?

It is also important to note that all these problems apply as much to the old-Earth creationist model as to the theistic evolution model (both defined last week). If we accept the standard geological time-scale, we must abandon much well-established biblical theology.

Conclusion: Only the Young-Earth Model Explains the Data

It seems to me that we can only make sense of both the biblical and the scientific data if we are ready to question the standard time-scale and embrace the shorter chronology proposed by the young-Earth model. According to young-Earth creationism, the world was created in six days about 6,000 years ago.

From this perspective, the fossil record is a witness to the thousands of years of biblical history, not to the hundreds of millions of years of the old-Earth model. In fact, in the young-Earth model much of the fossil record is considered to have formed during the worldwide Flood in the days of Noah.⁴⁰

Is a world replete with death, agony, sickness and disease for hundreds of millions of years compatible with the biblical description of a world that was “very good” in the beginning?

The death, agony, sickness and disease evidenced in the fossil record is thus a snapshot of what the world was like at the time of that global judgment, not what it was like at the time of Creation. And the fossil record of humans is telling us a story not about human origins but rather about the patterns of human migration and dispersal after the Flood.⁴¹ In other words, in young-Earth creationism it is not our theology of the goodness of Creation or the atonement that we must re-think, but our scientific interpretations - specifically our understanding of the geological record and its millions-of-years time-scale.

Undoubtedly this is a radical proposal, one that requires many aspects of Earth history to be carefully re-considered. In fact, it is so radical it raises an obvious and pressing question: is such a wholesale re-envisioning of Earth history scientifically viable? Is it really credible to contemplate an Earth history spanning only thousands, rather than millions of years? What about the ‘mountains of evidence’ said to favour an old Earth? These are very good questions and I shall seek to address them in my next article.

References

1 Catchpoole, D, 2012. A thorny issue. Creation, 34(3):52-55.

2 Lang, WH, 1931. On the spines, sporangia, and spores of Psilophyton princeps, Dawson, shown in specimens from Gaspé. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 219:421-442.

3 Rayner, RJ, 1984. New finds of Drepanophycus spinaeformis Göppert from the Lower Devonian of Scotland. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Earth Sciences, 75:353-363.

4 Rayner, RJ, 1983. New observations on Sawdonia ornata from Scotland. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Earth Sciences, 74:79-93.

5 Chaney, RW, 1944. A fossil cactus from the Eocene of Utah. American Journal of Botany, 31:507-528.

6 Becker, HF, 1963. The fossil record of the genus Rosa. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 90:99-110.

7 DeVore, ML and KB Pigg, 2007. A brief review of the fossil history of the family Rosaceae with a focus on the Eocene Okanogan Highlands of eastern Washington State, USA, and British Columbia, Canada. Plant Systematics and Evolution, 266:45-57.

8 Hublin, JJ, Ben-Ncer, A, Bailey, SE, et al, 2017. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature, 546:289-292.

9 Richter, D, Grün, R, Joannes-Boyau, R, et al, 2017. The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age. Nature, 546:293-296.

10 Hershkovitz, I, Weber, GW, Quam, R, et al, 2018. The earliest modern humans outside Africa. Science, 359:456-459.

11 Appenzeller, T, 2012. Eastern odyssey. Nature, 482:24-26.

12 Clarkson, C, Jacobs, Z, Marwick, B, et al, 2017. Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. Nature, 547:306-310.

13 Higham, T, Compton, T, Stringer, C, et al, 2011. The earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans in northwestern Europe. Nature, 479:521-524.

14 Benazzi, S, Douka, K, Fornai, C, et al, 2011. Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behavior. Nature, 479:525-528.

15 Bourgeon, L, Burke, A and Higham, T, 2017. Earliest human presence in North America dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: new radiocarbon dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada. PLoS ONE, 12(1):e0169486.

16 And even then, it is claimed based on studies of modern genetic diversity that the ancestral population size of Homo sapiens cannot have been lower than about 10,000 individuals. See Venema, D, 2010. Genesis and the genome: genomics evidence for human-ape common ancestry and ancestral hominid population sizes. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 62:166-178.

17 Garner, P, 2009. The New Creationism: Building Scientific Theories on a Biblical Foundation. Evangelical Press, Darlington, pp66-70.

18 Wood, B, 2005. Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp84-93.

19 Lloyd, S, 2017. Chronological creationism. Foundations, 72:76-99.

20 For example, in England and Wales, deposits assigned to the Pleistocene (conventionally dated from 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) include scattered outcrops of glacial and interglacial sediments and cave deposits. See Boulton, GS, 1992. Quaternary, pp413-444 in Duff, PMD and Smith, AJ (eds), Geology of England and Wales. The Geological Society, London.

21 Lloyd SJ, 2014. Flood theology: why does Noah's flood matter? Origins, 59: 4-8.

22 Lloyd, S, 2009. Christian theology and Neo-Darwinism are incompatible: an argument from the resurrection, pp1-29 in Finlay, G, Lloyd, S, Pattemore, S and Swift, D, Debating Darwin. Two Debates: Is Darwinism True & Does it Matter? Paternoster, Milton Keynes.

23 Lloyd, see ref. 19, pp86-89.

24 As we have already noted, this connection is evident in the Flood account but is seen also in the Passover narrative (Ex 12:12, 29) and in the fate of the animals in Nineveh (Jon 3:7-8, 4:11), as well as many other passages. It also provides the basis for the Old Testament sacrificial system.

25 Berger, TD and Trinkaus, E, 1995. Patterns of trauma among Neandertals. Journal of Archaeological Science, 22:841-852.

26 Dawson, JE and Trinkaus, E, 1997. Vertebral osteoarthritis of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1 Neanderthal. Journal of Archaeological Science, 24:1015-1021.

27 Brothwell, DR, 1959. Teeth in earlier human populations. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 18:59-65.

28 Fennell, KJ and Trinkaus, E, 1997. Bilateral femoral and tibial periostitis in the La Ferrassie 1 Neanderthal. Journal of Archaeological Science, 24:985-995.

29 Guatelli-Steinberg, D, Larsen, CS and Hutchinson, DL, 2004. Prevalence and the duration of linear enamel hypoplasia: a comparative study of Neandertals and Inuit foragers. Journal of Human Evolution, 47:65-84.

30 Barrett, CK, Guatelli-Steinberg, D and Sciulli, PW, 2012. Revisiting dental fluctuating asymmetry in Neandertals and modern humans. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 149:193-204.

31 Trinkaus. E, 1983. The Shanidar Neandertals. Academic Press, New York.

32 Stringer, C and Gamble, C, 1994. In Search of the Neanderthals. Thames and Hudson, p95.

33 Stringer and Gamble, see ref. 32, p94.

34 Hayden, B, 1993. The cultural capacities of Neandertals: a review and re-evaluation. Journal of Human Evolution, 24:113-146.

35 Radovčić, D, Sršen, AO, Radovčić, J and Frayer, DW, 2015. Evidence for Neandertal jewelry: modified white-tailed eagle claws at Krapina. PLoS ONE, 10(3):e0119802.

36 Finlayson, C, Brown, K, Blasco, R, et al, 2012. Birds of a feather: Neanderthal exploitation of raptors and corvids. PLoS ONE, 7(9):e45927.

37 Welker, F, Hajdinjak, M, Talamo, S, et al, 2016. Palaeoproteomic evidence identifies archaic hominins associated with the Châtelperronian at the Grotte du Renne. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 113:11162-11167.

38 Hayden, see ref. 34.

39 Pääbo, S, 2014. Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. Basic Books, New York, pp185-195.

40 Garner, see ref. 17, pp194-208.

41 Garner, see ref. 17, pp226-238.

...and does it matter? Part 1 of a new mini-series on Creationism.

Editorial introduction: We are delighted to publish the first in a three-part series on scientific evidence for a Creator, written by researcher, author and lecturer Paul Garner. The relationship between science and faith is an important spiritual battle-ground in the modern world, so it behoves us all to know what we believe about Genesis.

Whether you subscribe to a ‘young Earth’ or an ‘old Earth’, a seven-day Creation or a ‘millions of years’ evolutionary model, we hope that Paul’s in-depth research and writing will provoke you to think seriously about what you believe and why – for the sake of the Gospel.

In this first part of the series, Paul lays out different possible theories about the origins of human life and asks what kind of theology each requires.

 **********

The debate about origins – the origin of the universe, of life and of human beings – rages as fiercely today as it did at the time of Charles Darwin. A central question in the debate concerns common ancestry. Are all organisms related by descent from a single, common ancestor (as evolutionary theory proposes) or were many kinds separately created in the beginning (as creation theory proposes)?

Another question concerns the age of the Earth. Is the Earth 4.6 billion years old (as conventional science suggests) or is it about 6,000 years old (as a straightforward reading of the Bible suggests)? Although these two questions are rather different, they are connected. For example, if it could be shown that the world was young, common descent would in effect be disproved.

Christians today tend to fall into one of three ‘camps’. Theistic evolutionists (sometimes referred to as ‘evolutionary creationists’) embrace common descent and an old Earth. Young-Earth creationists reject common descent and an old Earth. Many Christians seek a middle way between these positions by rejecting common descent but embracing an old Earth.

It is often difficult for ordinary Christians to navigate their way through this maze of different opinions. The issues, both theological and scientific, can seem formidably complex and many believers feel ill-equipped to evaluate them.

The debate about the origin of the universe, of life and of human beings rages as fiercely today as it did at the time of Charles Darwin.

But I think there is a way to assess these ideas that most Christians can grasp, and that is to compare the relative sequence of events given in Genesis with the relative sequence of events according to the old-Earth, evolutionary model of origins. For contrary to common opinion, it is actually the age question that has the greater theological implications (rather than the ancestry question), and that is why I am making it the focus of this short series.

In this article, I begin with an overview of Earth’s history according to an ‘old Earth’ model, and then present three ways in which this conflicts with the sequence of events described in Genesis, with more to come next week.

History According to the Old-Earth Model

The conventional scientific view is that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old and that its geological development has been immensely long and gradual. The multi-million-year dates assigned to Earth history come from the application of radiometric dating, a set of methods that uses the decay of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes as a kind of ‘clock’ to date the rocks and minerals of the Earth’s crust. The rock layers, with their enclosed fossils, are thus said to document the history of life over long eras of time.

Figure 1: The standard geological column representing the history of life on Earth according to the old-Earth model. Fossil organisms typical of each geological era are shown (‘my’ stands for ‘millions of years ago’). After Garner, P, 2009. The New Creationism: Building Scientific Theories on a Biblical Foundation. Evangelical Press, Darlington, p195.

This understanding of Earth history can be summarised as follows (Figure 1).

• Precambrian rocks are considered to be the oldest rocks on Earth, deposited between 4,000 million and 541 million years ago. Most Precambrian fossils are micro-organisms resembling today’s bacteria and blue-green algae. Dome-shaped structures called stromatolites, thought to have formed when sediment became trapped by sticky algal mats, are abundant in Precambrian sediments. Towards the end of the Precambrian Eon, the first multi-celled organisms are thought to have appeared – represented by some strange segmented and frond-like creatures first discovered in the Ediacara Hills of South Australia.
  
• Palaeozoic (‘early life’) rocks follow the Precambrian and are said to have been deposited between 541 and 252 million years ago. The beginning of the Palaeozoic Era was marked by the sudden appearance of many hard-bodied animals including sponges, brachiopods (‘lamp shells’) and trilobites. By the middle of the Palaeozoic Era, fish had become numerous in the oceans, and plants and animals had begun to populate the land. By the end of the era, the first large reptiles and modern plants (conifers) had appeared.

Something we can all do is compare the relative sequence of events given in Genesis with the relative sequence of events according to the old-Earth, evolutionary model.

• Mesozoic (‘middle life’) rocks are thought to have been deposited between 252 and 66 million years ago. This was the ‘age of the reptiles’. Life on the land was dominated by the dinosaurs, in the skies by flying reptiles called pterosaurs, and in the oceans by aquatic reptiles such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. Ammonites (squid-like creatures in coiled shells) were also common in the warm, shallow seas. The mammals, birds and flowering plants (angiosperms) also made their first appearance during this time.
  
• Cenozoic (‘recent life’) rocks are said to have been deposited between 66 million years ago and the present day. During the Cenozoic, the flowering plants are represented by a great array of trees, shrubs and vines. This was also the era in which most of the modern groups of birds and mammals appeared, as well as the first humans.

Many Christians suppose that there are few, if any, theological consequences of embracing this standard account of Earth history, with its time-scale of hundreds of millions of years.

But in fact there are massive theological difficulties, some of which I am going to highlight in what follows. I will do this by asking the question: what theology would we have to accept as true if we did embrace the old-Earth time-scale?

1. Agony, Death and Bloodshed Before Sin

First, we would have to accept that physical agony, death and bloodshed have been around for hundreds of millions of years, long before humans appeared or sin entered the world.

It hardly needs saying that fossils are the remains of dead things and therefore provide prima facie evidence of physical death. Conventional dating places the first appearance of animals in the fossil record at least as far back as 541 million years ago, probably earlier.¹ But even if we restrict our considerations to sentient beings capable of experiencing pain, evidence of agony and death goes back a long way.

Consider mosasaurs, a group of large marine reptiles, now extinct, preserved in the Upper Cretaceous deposits of North America and Europe. Conventionally, these fossils are 92-66 million years old and long pre-date the first appearance of modern humans (Homo sapiens) around 300,000-200,000 years ago. Many mosasaur skeletons show evidence of physical trauma, including bite wounds² and bone fractures.^3,4 These injuries would have been extremely painful when they were inflicted.

What theology would we have to accept as true if we did embrace the old-Earth time-scale?

Another dramatic example is the mass-death assemblage of horses, camels and rhinos at Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska, USA, conventionally dated to about 12 million years ago. Bone lesions in these animals show that they died slow and agonizing deaths by asphyxiation as the result of inhaling volcanic dust in the aftermath of an eruption.⁵

Ashfall Fossil Beds: a Teleoceras female and her calf.But such evidence of agony and death long before there were humans runs counter to the biblical claim that death and bloodshed came into the world as a consequence of Adam’s sin (Gen 3:19; Rom 5:12; 1 Cor 15:21-22). When Adam fell, God told him he would return to the dust from which he had been taken (Gen 3:19), the ground was cursed (Gen 3:17) and Creation itself was subjected to corruption (Rom 8:20-22). And it is this causal connection between sin and physical death that explains why it was necessary for Christ to suffer and die physically to pay sin’s penalty (Matt 16:21; Mark 8:31; Luke 24:46).

As for the animals, they were caught up in the Fall because they were part of Adam’s dominion (Gen 1:28). When he fell, he dragged the rest of Creation down with him. The original diet of both humans and animals was vegetarian (Gen 1:29-30; cf. Isa 11:6-8, 65:25), and carnivory (meat-eating) is explicitly mentioned only after the Flood (Gen 9:3).

Indeed, the account of the Flood highlights the unnaturalness of animal violence, for we are told that the destruction of “all flesh” included the animals as well as the humans (Gen 7:15-16, 21), because both were corrupt and violent (Gen 6:11-13).

2. Disease and Sickness Before Sin

Second, we would have to accept that disease and sickness have been around for hundreds of millions of years, long before humans appeared or sin entered the world.

Clear evidence of pathology can be seen in the fossil record of many organisms, as we have already seen in the case of the animals that died of lung damage in Nebraska. In fact, the study of ancient disease is a discipline in its own right, known as palaeopathology.

Consider mosasaurs again. Many fossil specimens have pathological features of the skeleton, such as fused vertebrae,⁶ and some of these animals even show evidence of decompression sickness associated with diving.^7,8

An old-Earth model requires us to accept that pain, death, bloodshed and disease were around long before humans appeared or sin entered the world.

Bone abnormalities are common in certain types of dinosaurs, with one specimen displaying no fewer than eight maladies of its forelimb, including a permanently deformed third finger.⁹ Painful conditions such as malignant tumours, ripped tendons, broken teeth and arthritis are also known to have afflicted dinosaurs.^10,11,12 But such evidence of sickness and disease long before there were humans runs counter to the biblical claim that in the beginning God made a “very good” world that was later spoilt by Adam’s sin.

During Creation Week, God expressed his satisfaction with the things he had made by stating six times that they were “good” (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Upon completing his work, he crowned it all with a seventh, even stronger declaration – that the finished creation was “very good” (Gen 1:31). Sorrow, suffering and death were not part of this “very good” world but came about as a consequence of Adam’s sin.

It was Christ, the last Adam (1 Cor 15:45), who came to undo what Adam did. Christ’s healing ministry (Matt 8:16-17; cf. Isa 53:5, Ps 103:2-3), culminating in his atoning death on the Cross, points forward to the day when God will wipe away every tear, and sorrow, pain and death will be no more (Rev 21:4, 22:2).

3. Natural Disasters Before Sin

Third, we would have to accept that natural disasters, such as famines, floods, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, have been around for hundreds of millions of years, long before humans appeared or sin entered the world.

Indeed, the fossil record is largely the product of such natural disasters, more being accomplished geologically during short-lived catastrophic events than in many years of quiescence.¹³ Some of these ancient natural disasters are known to have dwarfed any experienced in the present day.

The Chile earthquake of 1960 was the most powerful ever recorded on a seismograph.¹⁴ But much larger earthquakes would have accompanied the formation of large asteroid impact craters, such as the ones at Popigai in Siberia (conventionally formed 35 million years ago) or Sudbury in Ontario (conventionally formed 1.8 billion years ago).¹⁵

The most violent volcanic eruption in recent human history took place at Taupo, New Zealand, in about AD 186, and it left behind a pumice layer up to 1.8m thick with a volume of about 24 cubic kilometres.¹⁶ But much larger volcanic eruptions are known from the geological record, evidenced by deposits tens to hundreds of metres thick and with volumes exceeding 1,000 cubic kilometres.¹⁷

During Creation Week, God stated six times that what he had made was “good” and crowned it all with a seventh, even stronger declaration – that the finished creation was “very good”.

A popular Christian apologetic is to say that natural disasters such as these are a consequence of the Fall of man, and that they were not part of the world that God originally created. For example, here is what Tim Keller says in his book, The Reason for God:

Human beings are so integral to the fabric of things that when human beings turned from God the entire warp and woof of the world unravelled. Disease, genetic disorders, famine, natural disasters, ageing and death itself are as much the result of sin as are oppression, war, crime and violence.¹⁸ (my emphasis)

But this apologetic is baseless if such natural disasters were occurring long before the origin of humans or of human sin. In such a scenario, we could not say that natural disasters are consequences of living in a fallen world.¹⁹ Instead, we would have to acknowledge them as a normal part of how the world functions and that it had been this way from the beginning. This also seems to run counter to the biblical claim that the world as originally created was “very good” (Gen 1:31).

Next week: Three more theological problems presented by an ‘old-Earth’ model.

Author bio: Paul Garner is a full-time researcher and lecturer for the Biblical Creation Trust (www.biblicalcreationtrust.org). He has an MSc in Geoscience from University College London, where he specialised in palaeobiology, and is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London. He has taken part in research funded by the Institute for Creation Research and has written numerous papers, popular articles and a book.

References

1 dos Reis, M, Thawornwattana, Y, Angelis, K, Telford, MJ, Donoghue, PCJ and Yang, Z, 2015. Uncertainty in the timing of origin of animals and the limits of precision in molecular timescales. Current Biology, 25:2939-2950.

2 Everhart, MJ, 2008. A bitten skull of Tylosaurus kansasensis (Squamata: Mosasauridae) and a review of mosasaur-on-mosasaur pathology in the fossil record. Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, 111:251-262.

3 Schulp, AS, Walenkamp, GHIM, Hofman, PAM, Rothschild, BM and JWM Jagt, 2004. Rib fracture in Prognathodon saturator (Mosasauridae, Late Cretaceous). Netherlands Journal of Geosciences / Geologie en Mijnbouw, 83:251-254.

4 Lingham-Soliar, T, 2004. Palaeopathology and injury in extinct mosasaurs (Lepidosauromorpha, Squamata) and implications for modern reptiles. Lethaia, 37:255-262.

5 Tucker, ST, Otto, RE, Joeckel, RM and Voorhies, MR, 2014. The geology and paleontology of Ashfall Fossil Beds, a late Miocene (Clarendonian) mass-death assemblage, Antelope County and adjacent Knox County, Nebraska, USA, pp1-22 in Korus, JT (ed), Geologic Field Trips along the Boundary between the Central Lowlands and Great Plains: 2014 Meeting of the GSA North-Central Section. Geological Society of America Field Guide 36.

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18 Keller, T, 2008. The Reason for God. Hodder and Stoughton, London, p170.

19 One author, understanding the force of this objection to the old-Earth chronology, has sought to explain the hundreds of millions of years of death, suffering and other ‘natural evils’ before there were humans as the effects of the curse applied retroactively! See Dembski, WA, 2009. The End of Christianity. Broadman and Holman, Nashville, Tennessee.