How do Old Earth Literalist handle the Biblical Earth age?
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Here's one answer (emphasis added):
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Professor William Henry Green and theologian Benjamin B. Warfield noted gaps and omissions in the Genesis genealogies. This suggested the creation was conceivably older than the 6,000-year timeframe proposed by Ussher and Lightfoot. Today many Bible scholars believe the Genesis genealogies were written primarily to provide only highlights and not necessarily a complete record of every actual generation.
And here's another from Reasons to Believe that argues in essence that there is telescoping and theological (rather than strictly historical -- but that's not to say unhistorical) content therein.
This theological telling of history is akin to what we see in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus, for instance. See "The Adoption of Jesus" where the (conservative) author notes:
The generations are not counted in a precisely similar fashion — Jeconiah is counted twice. This is not inappropriate given that [the genealogy] is primarily a literary device intended to highlight the four markers [viz., Abraham, David, the exile, and Christ]. Moreover, Jeconiah rightly belongs in both groups: in the first group, he is in a line of kings; in the second group, having been deposed, he is merely counted as a man.
Upvote:0
Some say that, since the Bible says a thousand years is like a day to the Lord, that the 7 days of creation aren't literal (after all, we measure the day by the sun, which wasn't created until the fourth day).
Another theory is called the "gap" theory. Genesis 1:1 says that God made the heavens and the earth. The rest of the chapter could be a description of how He did it, or it could be something further done to the heavens and the earth that He had already made. This theory hinges on verse 2 in Genesis 1. Many translations say "And the earth was void and empty", or something like that. Other translations say "And the earth became waste and emptiness", or something similar. The idea is that God made all things perfect, He would never make something as "waste and emptiness", but at some point Satan rebelled against God and corrupted the earth. God then judged the earth, similar to Noah's time, with water. This sets the scene for Genesis 1:2 and onwards, where the earth is simply darkness and water, and God restores it to what it is today.
Both of these theories state that although mankind is ~6000 years old (which I've seen no solid evidence to prove otherwise), the earth itself is much older.
Upvote:3
My answer is simple: water into wine. What this miracle demonstrated was that God can create something that has, not only the appearance, but the very substance of being aged, even if it has only existed for a mere moment. Another example would be Adam, who, being formed from the dust of the ground, was formed as a mature human, not an infant.
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