Two Christian Views of Geological Time: Old-Earth Creation and Young-Earth Creation


6:14 PM Sunday.

Now that I have made separate spaces and project lines under my Music of the Spheres area of responsibility for Big History, Christian Astronomy, and Abrahamic Astrology, I can begin to better untangle what I mean by Christian Geology and Christian Biology here in my course on Christian Earth Science. Eventually, I may need to treat Christian Geology and Christian Biology as separate courses, and even add a third, which would be Christian Climatology. I guess I might as well get the ball rolling now and label this entry under Christian Geology.

All I really want to accomplish on this project thread this evening is to stake out two Christian views of geological time: Old-Earth Creationism and Young-Earth Creationism. 

(Ancestor Simulation is currently a techno-niche hypothesis that I find very intriguing but probably won't address in this study - even if I think it is at least as plausible as YEC). 

Old-Earth Creationism agrees with both the Standard Cosmological Model and the scientific consensus regarding the geological record. The major division within Old-Earth Creationism in our current decade is between the evolutionary creationism of BioLogos and the progressive creationism of Hugh Ross at Reasons to Believe. It makes sense to tackle this divergence under Christian Biology, where I guess the starting point should probably be the tricky problem of abiogenesis.

Young-Earth Creationism and Old-Earth Creationism seem to have had something of a falling out, as represented by the breakdown in civil dialogue between Ken Ham at Answers in Genesis and Hugh Ross with Reasons to Believe. This is unfortunate, because 40% of US adults are YECs, 33% are OEC/Theistic Evolutionists, and 22% are naturalistic evolutionists:


Young people are leaving YEC. As they do so, some are becoming naturalistic evolutionists and others are becoming OEC/Theistic Evolutionists:


YEC was the dominant view for most of Christian history. I think it must be very difficult to teach Christian geology without teaching YEC as the foundation, and then OEC as the paradigm shift. At the same time, it's clear that OEC was already well established - at least in the UK and among US elites - when YEC in its modern form staged something of an American comeback with publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961:


Given the prevalence of belief in YEC in America, is it more helpful to teach the history of geology to faithful Christians in a way that validates the Christian role in scientific reasoning or that dismisses the YEC perspective as wrong, antiquated and uncultured? I like Gemini's answer:


Let me leave it here this evening.

End 11:01 PM.

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