What's wrong with Young-Earth Creationism?

This started out as a response to an anonymous comment, asking the question of the title.

My problems with Young-Earth Creationism (YEC) are six-fold.

1) The Bible tells us, in Psalm 19:1-4, and Romans 1:20, that God has revealed Himself to us through nature. (That's not the only way!) To ignore that evidence, or distort it, is a serious mistake, just as it would be an even more serious mistake to ignore God's revelation in Jesus Christ. I'm not sure that we understand any of God's types of revelation fully and correctly, but we shouldn't ignore them, and should seek compatibility between them.

The post to which the comment was made illustrates this problem with YEC. Kurt Wise is one of the most prominent Young-Earth Creationists, a paleontologist with impeccable academic credentials, and he cannot find good scientific evidence for the young-earth position in the fossil record. There is abundant evidence that the earth is older than a few thousand years in that record. How does Wise get around this? He says, honestly, that he has a prior commitment to believing in YEC. In other words, he discards evidence that argues against that position.

A similar situation exists with a YEC study of radioactive dating, called the RATE project. A group of YEC scientists concluded that the evidence from radioactive dating seems to indicate that the earth is a lot older than a few thousand years old. But then they went further. They proposed that it really isn't so old, because there have been periods when the radioactive decay rate was a great deal faster than it seems to be now. In other words, they rejected the evidence they discovered. (See here for one of my posts on this subject, which gives documentation.) There have been several criticisms of the RATE project's proposal that the rate of decay changed greatly, such as in the latest issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (which is not yet available on the Internet). The critic in that article, J. Brian Pitts, cites arguments** that way too much heat would have been produced by so much radioactivity, and that a mechanism proposed by the scientists who worked on the RATE project would not have worked. ("Nonexistence of Humphreys' 'Volume Cooling' for Terrestrial Heat Disposal by Cosmic Expansion," PSCF 61:23-28, March, 2009.)

Unfortunately, unlike Wise or the RATE project scientists, many YEC advocates just dismiss all evidence that there is good scientific evidence for an old earth.

2) The Bible does not necessarily teach Young-Earth Creationism. For example, Genesis 2:5 poses what I believe to be serious problems for the Young-Earth interpretation of scripture. (See this post, or my posts on David Snoke's excellent book, A Biblical Case for an Old Earth, for more criticisms of the YEC interpretation. In particular, here and here are posts pointing out problems with the belief that the days of Genesis 1 were literal 24-hour days. And the YEC view is an interpretation.) Many God-fearing, Bible-believing scholars are not convinced that the Bible definitely teaches that the earth is only a few thousand years old, that the days of Genesis 1 were literal, or that the flood of Genesis was world-wide. The Young-Earth view, in its present form, is comparatively recent, becoming prominent only in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, although many Christian scholars, well before that time, did believe that the earth was not very old. See the history section of the Wikipedia article on Young Earth Creationism.***

3) The days of Genesis 1 were not necessarily 24-hour days. Two of the major arguments from YECers, that they were such, are criticized effectively in a post from He Lives. The first such argument is that "anytime the word yôm is used with an ordinal number, it always refers to a twenty-four hour day." But David Heddle, the author of He Lives, points out that that is not always true. Hosea 6 is at least one exception:
1 “Come! Let’s return to Yahweh;
for he has torn us to pieces,
and he will heal us;
he has injured us,
and he will bind up our wounds.
2 After two days he will revive us.
On the third day he will raise us up,
and we will live before him.

The second argument for 24-hour days in Genesis is from the Ten Commandments: Exodus 20:8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 You shall labor six days, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. You shall not do any work in it, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your livestock, nor your stranger who is within your gates; 11 for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy.

But Heddle points out that Leviticus speaks of the Sabbath as a year, not a day:
25:1 Yahweh said to Moses in Mount Sinai, 2 “Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them, ‘When you come into the land which I give you, then the land shall keep a Sabbath to Yahweh. 3 You shall sow your field six years, and you shall prune your vineyard six years, and gather in its fruits; 4 but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to Yahweh. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. 5 What grows of itself in your harvest you shall not reap, and you shall not gather the grapes of your undressed vine. It shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. 6 The Sabbath of the land shall be for food for you; for yourself, for your servant, for your maid, for your hired servant, and for your stranger, who lives as a foreigner with you.  

Many Bible scholars believe that God's rest, described in the Exodus passage quoted above, is continuing into the present, therefore was hardly 24 hours in extent.

Heddle has more to say, and I invite you to read his blog post. 

This 3rd point was added on August 22, 2017.

4) There are well-informed YEC scientists, like Wise, or the people who worked on the RATE project, who are scientifically qualified, fair and reasonably objective in their discussion of the evidence for and against Young-Earth Creationism. But they are few and far between. There are charlatans, tax dodgers (see here), and demagogues out there, many with little or no scientific training, with web sites, radio programs, books to sell, and seminars to present in churches. It is much easier to get a following, including financial support, if you scream that anyone who doesn't believe in YEC is anti-God, and that there is abundant scientific evidence that YEC is true, than if you are fair and reasonably objective. Christians who don't agree with the screamers are seldom heard in the non-scientific media, or in conservative churches. As a result, conservative Christians, as individuals, in congregations, and in Christian schools, including home schools, colleges, and others, are being cut off from fair and honest examination of alternative Christian views of origins. They are providing ammunition for atheists who are anti-God. Further, they are cutting themselves, and their children, off from being able to reach well-educated sinners in need of a savior.

There may be a few people who have been won to Christ by a presentation of YEC. There are likely more than a few who have been driven away from Christ by such a presentation -- "If the Bible is so wrong about geology*, how can it be right about what it says about sin and redemption?" Glenn Morton, who had a career as a geologist with YEC training, describes how he "was almost through with Christianity," after he found that the Young-Earth geology he had been taught did not work, and discovered that other professional geologists with YEC training had found the same thing -- YEC geology doesn't describe the way things really are.

It is also true that there are screamers on the other side, people who say that Christian belief is incompatible with science, or that all Christians are willingly ignorant. That's just as bad, but this post is about what's wrong with YEC, not what's wrong with Richard Dawkins.

5) YEC advocates usually portray themselves as defending the Bible. That isn't really true. What they are doing is defending their interpretation of the Bible.

6) YEC and Intelligent Design (ID) are often presented as if they were one and the same. They are not. See here for documentation.

There are many Bible-believing, God-fearing, soul-winning, heaven-bound people who believe that Young Earth Creationism is the only option for Christians. I love them, and appreciate their sincerity and zeal. But most of them have been cut off from evidence, both scientific and Biblical, that argues against their position. There is such evidence, and it is part of God's revelation to us. YEC may or may not be right, but there are other views held by Bible-believing, God-fearing, soul-winning, heaven-bound Christians. Christians who haven't much background in origins, or science, should be told that such views other than YEC exist among believers. (There are problems with all of these views. In this post, I explain why I have problems with Intelligent Design. I'm not alone.)

7) (This point added on August 20, 2012) The genre of Genesis 1 is peculiar, and probably was meant to be largely symbolic. See here for some of the evidence for why I say that. This point is closely related to the second one, but since I'm adding it so long after the original post, I'm entering it as a new item.

What do I personally believe about origins? See here.

Thanks for reading!

*The Bible says little about geology, and I believe that what it says is correct. YEC advocates claim that the Bible says that the earth was covered by a world-wide flood, which is responsible for most of the earth's rock layers, and that this flood took place a few thousand years ago. That's one interpretation of what the Bible tells us. It's not the only one, and it is inconsistent with the evidence from geology. Some YEC advocates also claim that the Bible teaches that dinosaurs co-existed with humans, and other such nonsense. Here is some additional material about geology and YEC.

**This sentence was clarified on June 6, 2009. The article by Pitts is in this issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.

***This sentence was added, and the previous sentence corrected, on June 6, 2009. I thank Brian Pitts for a communication which led to these changes.