The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 126 - Why I'm Not A Young Earth Creationist

00:00:00.000 So I thought we'd talk about something a little bit different today. I've been talking a lot

00:00:03.660 about politics, and I hate politics because I find politics extremely boring, and I'll bore

00:00:08.540 myself to death if I continue with it for too long. So a little bit of a different discussion.

00:00:14.800 I was having this debate on Twitter over the past day and a half, a debate about the issue of

00:00:20.980 young earth creationism. And of course, Twitter is the perfect forum for theological and scientific

00:00:27.800 debate. Actually, it's a terrible forum for that sort of discussion or any kind of discussion. So

00:00:32.400 I thought maybe we'd move the discussion into a slightly more fruitful venue. Although I have

00:00:38.260 been told that I'm alienating and may in fact lose half my audience with my opinion on this topic.

00:00:46.280 So maybe I should just drop it. That's what I've been told. But I'm not very good at dropping things,

00:00:51.180 number one. And I like to try to hold people and myself to a higher standard than that. We should

00:00:57.180 be able to discuss an important and interesting issue without getting angry, without getting

00:01:01.680 offended or losing respect for each other and all this kind of thing. And I know that I need to work

00:01:07.040 on that first and foremost, because in our debates on Twitter about this, I know that I got a bit

00:01:13.380 heated and angry at points. And I regret that. I regret it because it detracts from the topic,

00:01:19.920 which is an interesting and important one. But sometimes I let my passion run away with me,

00:01:25.300 as I'm sure you've noticed, something I need to work on. So let me say at the outset that good

00:01:32.120 and faithful Christians reside on either end of this debate. There's no reason for it to be a source

00:01:37.660 of division within Christians, within the church, within Christianity. But there is reason for it to 0.97

00:01:45.160 be a source of discussion. And though I don't question the sincerity or the faithfulness of

00:01:52.100 six-day creationist folks, I do think that their view, when it is preached and argued for,

00:02:00.720 can inadvertently do some harm. Not inadvertently. It's not like they're trying to hurt anybody,

00:02:07.100 of course. But I do think it can put obstacles in the way, especially for non-believers. And I'll get 0.99

00:02:14.900 to that. I'll explain why. But first, I want to explain why I'm not a six-day creationist. And

00:02:20.420 then I'll talk about why the six-day creationist view is, in my opinion, counterproductive. So

00:02:28.920 there's a lot to get to. We'll proceed. All right. First of all, just setting the stage here.

00:02:38.340 When somebody asks me, and I get this question kind of frequently, someone says,

00:02:41.760 do you take the whole Bible literally? Right? I always find that to be a confusing question.

00:02:48.820 Do you take the Bible literally? It's a very confusing question. I think that the literal

00:02:53.820 versus non-literal debate is a false dichotomy. It's kind of a miscommunication, really,

00:02:59.940 between the two sides. Much like, I would say, the faith versus works debate isn't really a debate.

00:03:08.040 It's a false dichotomy. It's a miscommunication that's been going on for 500 years. Because

00:03:14.080 nobody thinks that you can earn your way to heaven just by doing certain things and faith

00:03:19.920 doesn't matter at all. Nobody thinks that. No church that I'm aware of teaches that. I don't

00:03:25.500 think that's really a belief that almost anyone holds. Everyone knows that you have to have faith.

00:03:31.720 The question is not whether you must have faith. Everyone agrees, yes. All Christians agree,

00:03:36.160 yes, anyway. But the question is, what is faith? And how is it expressed? Is faith just a feeling?

00:03:44.760 An intellectual assent? Is that all faith is? Or is it something that you feel, think, do,

00:03:51.260 and live? You know, that's really the fundamental question there. And as for literalism,

00:03:56.500 nobody takes the whole Bible literally, okay? Nobody does. We all agree that there are parts

00:04:06.200 of the Bible that cannot be taken literally. We all agree, for example, that the parables,

00:04:11.720 that Jesus' parables are parables. They're stories. Jesus did not mean for us to assume

00:04:15.920 that the prodigal son is a real historical person. So that is non-literal, obviously.

00:04:20.260 He was telling a story to illustrate a point. Jesus speaks non-literally quite a lot. For example,

00:04:27.580 he calls himself the door, but we know he's not a literal door, right? He's speaking in a spiritual

00:04:33.640 sense. He is the door to eternal life. That's a metaphor. And I tell you, you are Peter. On this

00:04:41.700 rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Is Peter an actual rock?

00:04:47.040 No, he's not. Is Jesus literally building a physical church with bricks and wood and things? No. As far

00:04:54.380 as we know, he never built a church. Is there a literal gate leading into hell? Probably not. It's

00:05:01.560 a non-physical place, so I don't know what a physical barrier, what good a physical barrier would do

00:05:05.800 in a non-physical place. So this is non-literal language. You get the idea. I think, by the way,

00:05:12.340 it is kind of instructive and interesting that God in the New Testament uses non-literal language

00:05:19.580 so often. You know, he uses stories to make his point, and he uses metaphors so often in the New

00:05:25.960 Testament. So we have to ask ourselves, did he just start doing that in the New Testament?

00:05:30.880 Or is it possible that he did it in the Old Testament too? Well, even in the Old Testament,

00:05:39.620 there's agreement that some of it is non-literal. Even the so-called biblical literalists would agree

00:05:47.060 that the Psalms, for instance, are not literal. Yes, the Psalms literally exist, but they're poetry,

00:05:55.800 they're hymns. It makes no sense to say that you take poetry and hymns literally. You may as well

00:06:02.600 say that you take, you may as well ask me, well, do you take Beethoven's Fifth Symphony literally?

00:06:08.200 Well, what does that mean? I take Beethoven literally. I think he literally existed,

00:06:12.120 but a symphony is not a thing to be taken literally. It is outside of the literal, non-literal

00:06:17.020 debate. The Song of Solomon, set me as a seal on your arm, for stern as death is love. Again,

00:06:23.960 not literal. We're not talking about self-mutilation here, carving someone's name into your arm. That's

00:06:29.040 not what we're talking about. Back to the New Testament, revelation. I don't think very many

00:06:32.680 people believe that revelation gives us an exact literal account of what will transpire at the end

00:06:39.380 of the world. There probably aren't going to be actual horses and lampstands coming out of the sky

00:06:45.340 and so forth. This language is heavily metaphorical. I think we all basically agree with that. The point

00:06:49.720 is that when you're reading the Bible, which is comprised of dozens of books written by dozens

00:06:54.140 of different authors over hundreds of years, what you have to do is you have to first determine

00:06:59.620 what genre each of the books belong to, because they don't all belong in the same genre.

00:07:06.780 There are many different genres in the Bible. It's not one genre. The Psalms are not the same

00:07:11.920 genre as the Gospels. The Gospels, what's the genre of Gospels? Well, that's easy enough.

00:07:16.040 Biography, right? Paul's letters are in the epistle genre, which again is a genre that doesn't really

00:07:23.540 belong in the literal versus non-literal discussion. St. Paul says many things literally, of course,

00:07:28.220 but he also uses metaphor, simile, analogy, and so on. So then we get to Genesis. Now again,

00:07:34.520 we've already established that the Bible contains what we might call non-literal genres. Everyone agrees

00:07:40.880 on that. And it also contains literal genres, such as the Gospels, for instance. So now we ask,

00:07:52.440 what genre is Genesis? Is it meant to be read? Is it a science textbook? Is it meant to be read as a

00:08:05.460 precise scientific account of the origins of the universe? Is that why Genesis is there? Is that

00:08:10.700 what God wants us to take from it? Does he want us to study it like we study a science book?

00:08:19.460 Of course, he wants us to study it, but is it to be studied as a science textbook?

00:08:24.800 If you were to isolate Genesis and put it in a section of the bookstore by itself,

00:08:29.120 would it be in the science section? Do you think that Genesis should or can be used as a reference

00:08:36.180 for serious geological and cosmological study? Could a theoretical physicist kind of check his work

00:08:42.900 by consulting the Bible? A historian who wants to know about Jesus will certainly consult the Gospels.

00:08:51.440 The Gospels and the Epistles are essentially the only first-hand accounts that he can consult.

00:09:01.580 So the Gospels are historical documents. But a cosmologist who's trying to figure out what's

00:09:07.620 going on with the universe will probably not look at the creation story in Genesis because Genesis is not

00:09:13.780 a cosmological resource. It is a theological resource. It's not going to be in the science section. It belongs

00:09:23.080 in the theology section. It is a theological work, not a scientific one, which isn't to say that it's false.

00:09:30.600 It is still 100% true. It is still the Word of God, but the truth that it contains is a transcendent,

00:09:36.580 timeless truth. So it's true, but you have to know how to read it. Okay. Now, there are many Christians 1.00

00:09:46.380 who insist that Genesis describes a literal six-day creation, okay? And literal six-day creation as in

00:10:00.280 a literal 24-hour day, you know, six days in a week. And they cite as their proof the fact that it says

00:10:10.420 day. That's pretty much it. That's the entire, that's all the evidence, is the word day. And the

00:10:18.420 word day is in there. The word day does exist. And the word day is true. No one is saying, or at least

00:10:24.580 I'm not saying, that the word day is a falsehood or that it's a lie. It's not. But are we talking

00:10:30.940 about a 24-hour earth day or some sort of other kind of day? Now, I think the latter. I don't take

00:10:39.180 it as a 24-hour day. And so I'm agreeing with many of the great doctors and fathers of the church,

00:10:44.920 Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, many of the great current apologists and theologians,

00:10:50.540 like, you know, William Lane Craig and John Lennox, Bishop Barron, along with, by the way, my favorite

00:10:55.540 19th and 20th century apologists like C.S. Lewis and John Henry Newman, none of them were or are avowed

00:11:05.180 six-day creationists. And a great many of the great teachers and thinkers of Christianity have from

00:11:12.160 the beginning held that Genesis is not entirely literal, which is really, I think, interesting that

00:11:20.220 you had so many Christians who came to this conclusion before there was modern science to,

00:11:29.120 in my view, basically prove that it was not a 24-hour, six 24-hour periods. So I agree with all

00:11:37.400 of them, and I feel very safe in their company, and I'll explain why. First, let's look at what

00:11:46.560 happens on day four. Let's start with day four. Let me jump ahead for a minute, and we'll circle

00:11:50.580 back, but day four. Then, and God said, let lights appear in the sky to separate day from night and

00:11:57.780 to show the time when days, years, and religious festivals begin. They will shine in the sky to

00:12:03.000 give light to the earth, and it was done. So God made the two larger lights, the sun to rule over the

00:12:08.200 day and the moon to rule over the night. He also made the stars. He placed the lights in the sky to

00:12:13.160 shine on the earth, to rule over the day and night, and to separate light from darkness. And God was

00:12:17.880 pleased with what he saw. Evening passed and morning came. That was the fourth day. So the sun just came

00:12:25.400 on to the scene. The sun was just created on day four. All of the stars, trillions and trillions of

00:12:30.700 stars, all made on day four. Yet God said, let there be light on day one. He said, let there be light

00:12:40.080 before there was any source of physical light. So the light of day one is not a physical light. It

00:12:46.340 is not a light in the way that we think of it. There is no sun. There are no stars. There is no

00:12:51.660 moon. There isn't a formed earth yet. The earth is formless on day one. It is formless and void,

00:12:59.620 we're told, on day one. Does it make sense to assume that we're talking about a 24-hour earth day when

00:13:05.800 the earth is a formless void and there is no sun? Why should we think that? What's the reason?

00:13:14.080 Imagine yourself standing or floating, I guess, in the midst of a shapeless, formless mass with no sun

00:13:20.300 or moon or stars in the sky. What is a day in that context? I mean, it could be a 24-hour period,

00:13:27.240 I guess, but there's no reason at all to assume that. Let's think about this. Let's define our terms.

00:13:35.800 What is a day in our current context? What does day mean if we're talking about a so-called literal

00:13:43.260 day? If we're referring to the calendar when we say day, well, what we mean is a day is when the

00:13:51.960 earth, as it orbits the sun, makes one full rotation on its axis, thus causing the sun to,

00:13:59.180 from our perspective, rise and set. But the Bible talks about days before there is a rotating earth,

00:14:06.880 before there really is an earth at all, at least an earth of any discernible shape,

00:14:13.220 and before there's a sun for the earth to rotate around. Thus, we can already say rather definitively,

00:14:19.320 I think, that we're not talking about an earth day. We're not talking about a 24-hour day

00:14:25.400 because such a thing does not yet exist. Now, I don't even think, we don't even need to get into

00:14:35.020 the translation discussion. If you look at the word, the Hebrew word for day, does it have to mean 24

00:14:43.420 hours or could it be referring to a broader kind of passage of time? In English, the word day means

00:14:50.600 either a 24-hour period corresponding with the rotation of the earth, that's one definition, or a day means

00:14:59.320 an age, a period of time. Can day be understood in Hebrew in the same sort of way? And the answer is

00:15:08.020 yes, it can be. The word day in Hebrew can mean several different things. There are those who say that

00:15:15.240 the Hebrew word for day, as it's used in Genesis, cannot ever mean anything but a 24-hour day.

00:15:23.300 That is simply false. That is not true. And this is one of my problems, you know, with some of the

00:15:28.540 young earth creationists, is that they look at this text that people have been studying for thousands

00:15:32.800 of years, and it's very dense and, in fact, very complex. And they say, no, I know exactly what it

00:15:39.020 means. I know exactly what it means. There's zero chance that I'm wrong. And they'll say, nope, day

00:15:44.500 can't mean anything but that. And it's just not true. What they're saying is simply untrue. It can mean

00:15:51.880 many different things. In English, you know, if I say back in my day or in the days of old,

00:16:01.740 I don't mean a 24-hour period. I mean a chunk of time. In fact, in Genesis itself, day is used in

00:16:09.380 at least three different ways in Genesis. He named the light day and the darkness night. Okay, that's

00:16:15.640 one meaning of day. First day, second day. That's another meaning of day. And then it says, you are

00:16:21.860 free to eat from the tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and

00:16:25.480 evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. Well, Adam lived, we're told, for 900

00:16:31.380 years. He didn't die on the day that he ate it. Yes, he died spiritually, but physical death also

00:16:38.660 came from the fall. So it would seem that die in that verse has two meanings, which would mean that

00:16:45.740 day probably has multiple meanings as well. So you've got day used in multiple different ways

00:16:51.940 within Genesis. All you have to do is read Genesis to see that. So we already know that you cannot

00:17:00.280 approach Genesis with only one definition of day in mind. The text does not support it, won't allow

00:17:06.960 for it. Most crucially, though, we know from the text itself that a day cannot mean the earth

00:17:17.360 spinning on its axis as it orbits the sun, because the word day is being used here completely apart

00:17:25.400 from the sun and the earth and rotations and everything that physically defines a day.

00:17:31.840 The light on the first day is obviously something transcendent. It is not a light from a physical

00:17:38.360 source. It is something timeless, not physical. There is not yet any source, any physical source of light.

00:17:47.680 So if the light is different and transcendent, that means the evening and morning it refers to must be

00:17:54.760 different and transcendent as well, which means the word day must be as well. We're dealing with a

00:18:00.280 different sort of light, a different sort of morning, therefore, and a different sort of day,

00:18:09.220 therefore. The thing that makes physical earth days, 24-hour days, that thing has not yet been formed.

00:18:19.420 Augustine thought that the light and darkness on the first day describes the angels and demons as the

00:18:23.560 light is separated from the dark, just as the rebellious angels are separated from the loyal

00:18:27.480 ones. That's how he interpreted that. I'm not sure if that's true, but the point is that many great

00:18:33.160 minds in the church, from the beginning, have recognized that we're dealing with something

00:18:37.520 bigger, deeper, vaster than literal days and nights. You know, young earth creationists like to say that

00:18:44.660 or think that theirs is the traditional view and the most orthodox view, but it's not necessarily.

00:18:51.960 It is a traditional view, but it is not the traditional view. The early church fathers and

00:18:57.100 doctors of the church had diverse views on this topic, and I'm okay with diverse views. I think

00:19:02.560 that's great. It seems to be the six-day creationist who insists that there can be no diversity at all,

00:19:09.580 and he is absolutely right and everyone else is wrong. That seems to be, you know, the way that the

00:19:16.500 young earth creationist approaches it. There's also a bit of a reductionist thing going on here,

00:19:22.260 because I've heard it said many times, well, Genesis is clear. The text says what it says.

00:19:29.900 How could you be confused? It's very straightforward. That's what I've been told. Really? Genesis is clear?

00:19:38.300 It's straightforward? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and

00:19:44.120 empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

00:19:48.700 That's totally clear to you? You have no confusion about that at all? Well, then you are, I mean,

00:19:55.460 you're way smarter than me, and I think you're smarter than almost every human who has ever existed on

00:19:59.000 the planet, because people have been debating and talking and analyzing just those lines alone

00:20:05.180 for millennia, because it's very hard to understand what even that means, and we're not even past the

00:20:12.160 first two sentences yet. I mean, if you understand, well, explain to me what a formless earth looks like

00:20:20.580 and how it has water on it and what it means for the Spirit of God to hover over it. If you say that

00:20:26.860 it's totally clear-cut, plain as day, nothing metaphorical happening here at all, well, then draw me a

00:20:33.680 picture of what a waterlogged, formless mass of earth suspended in a starless, sunless, moonless void

00:20:39.600 looks like. Can you draw me that picture? I mean, I don't think you can, because we're dealing with

00:20:45.320 something that is actually not simple at all. You could spend your whole life studying just the first

00:20:51.820 two sentences. Also, by the way, God rested. What does that mean? Do you know what that means? I don't

00:20:59.360 really know what that means. Do you know what it means for an eternal, changeless, spaceless, timeless

00:21:04.560 God to rest? I don't dispute the truth of the passage, but I'm saying that I don't really know

00:21:11.680 what it means. I can't wrap my puny mind around it. I don't think you can either. We're dealing here

00:21:16.860 with things that are beyond us, which is yet another reason not to insist upon particular time

00:21:23.160 measurements. And it's another reason not to be so afraid of the idea that there may be some metaphor

00:21:29.260 here. Because when God is trying to communicate something to us that is beyond our grasp, he has

00:21:36.280 to use metaphor. Because it's the only thing we can understand. And so when it comes to Genesis,

00:21:42.700 there are clearly things happening here that are beyond our grasp. Also, keep something else in mind,

00:21:51.780 just to reiterate, a day does not mean 24 hours. That is not the definition of a day. So when someone

00:22:02.820 says, oh, I'm a literalist, I take it literally, well, that's not the literal definition. If you're

00:22:09.020 insisting that that day must mean 24 hours, you are not a literalist. You are actually putting a non-literal

00:22:16.520 definition into the text. A day is not 24 hours necessarily. That is not the definition of day.

00:22:27.080 A day on Earth right now is 24 hours because that's how long it takes now for the Earth to rotate on its

00:22:34.240 axis. A day on Pluto is like 130 hours. On some planets in the solar system, a day is thousands of

00:22:40.640 hours long. The word day depends very much on what space rock you happen to be standing on and when you

00:22:48.640 happen to be standing on it. So let me ask you, was the formless Earth suspended in a void without a sun

00:22:58.300 spinning on an axis? Did it have an axis? And if it was spinning, how fast was it spinning?

00:23:06.640 The answer, of course, is you have no idea, not the faintest clue, which means you have not the

00:23:14.440 faintest clue how long a day was in that context. If you're saying it must have been a day as we think

00:23:21.700 of it, then what you're saying, the definition of day is rotating on an axis, which means that you are

00:23:28.920 saying that you know 100% that a formless, shapeless Earth suspended in a void with a transcendent

00:23:36.400 non-physical, spiritual light shining upon it must have absolutely been spinning and taken 24 hours

00:23:43.860 to complete its rotation. I just don't know how anyone could ever say that. And to me, it's such

00:23:49.300 an odd thing to insist upon, absolutely. So we have no reason at all to assume that it was 24 hours,

00:24:02.300 but we do have very many good reasons, I think, to assume that it wasn't. And we'll get to those in

00:24:06.380 a minute. Remember, Scripture says that a day for man is like a thousand years for God. So really,

00:24:20.260 if you're a true literalist, it would seem to me that you would have to say that the Earth was made

00:24:24.800 in 6,000 years, not six days. If you're taking it literally, if you're taking the whole book

00:24:31.680 literally, which no one does, as I said, but if you are, if you claim to be, then you would have to

00:24:36.860 take that verse into account. But of course, like a thousand years is not an exact math equation. It is

00:24:42.700 not a rate of exchange. It's metaphorical language meant to convey the point that when God says he did

00:24:50.440 something in a day, it doesn't mean a day the way we think of it. A day for him is not a day for us.

00:25:01.040 By the way, Isaiah 40, 22, he sits enthroned above the circle of the earth and its people are like

00:25:07.240 grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

00:25:13.260 Here we are told that the Earth is a circle. Circles are flat. We're told that God is above it,

00:25:19.600 enthroned. So again, must we take this as literal? Must we believe that NASA is lying to us and that

00:25:27.100 actually God is up literally in the sky hanging out next to the satellites? Must we believe that

00:25:32.740 the Earth is flat like people used to believe? The Bible also speaks frequently of the ends of the

00:25:41.540 earth. That's one of the reasons the people that used to believe in the flat earth, they would point

00:25:45.200 to those verses and they would say ends of the earth. Apparently the earth has an end, but a sphere

00:25:50.380 has no end. So we don't take it literally. Psalm 104, he set the earth on its foundation. It can never

00:25:59.420 be moved. Must we take this literally and believe that the earth does not move? Science tells us that

00:26:05.300 the earth is hurtling through space at incomprehensible speeds. It's constantly moving, rotating, spinning,

00:26:09.900 orbiting, orbiting. Even the ground itself, the plates are moving. Everything is moving. Everything on

00:26:16.300 Earth is constantly in motion. Must we deny all of that science for the sake of taking it literally?

00:26:24.680 By the way, early Christians and Jews did take this literally. That's part of the reason why Copernicus

00:26:32.840 and Galileo got themselves into trouble because the Bible says, absolutely, that the earth doesn't move.

00:26:38.340 And so when people, when upstart astronomers started coming along and saying the earth is moving,

00:26:44.580 they said, that can't be. The Bible says it doesn't. Plain as day, it says it does not move.

00:26:50.440 And that's why many Christians at the time rejected and denounced in the harshest terms any suggestion

00:26:57.380 that the earth moves. They did so on the basis of their interpretation of scripture, which they

00:27:03.340 insisted should not change one bit to accommodate scientific fact. John Calvin and Martin Luther

00:27:11.900 were two of the most vocal critics of the idea of a spinning, of a moving earth. John Calvin

00:27:21.580 called it deranged and monstrous. He said it was a deranged, monstrous lie. Well, eventually, 0.81

00:27:28.980 Christians realized that their interpretation of these verses had to be wrong because the scientific

00:27:35.180 facts are indisputable. The earth is moving. It cannot be disputed. So we must take those verses

00:27:43.940 metaphorically. If we can take those metaphorically, why can't we take day metaphorically?

00:27:51.360 One other point here. In the story of creation, every day begins with, and God said. God speaks

00:28:04.280 at the beginning of the day, and that's how we mark each day. But read the opening of Genesis again.

00:28:11.200 The opening is, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless

00:28:15.580 and empty. Darkness over the surface of the water. And God said, let there be light.

00:28:24.500 Many theologians have looked at this over the years, and they've pointed out that the first two

00:28:32.020 lines don't take place on the first day. The first day begins with, and God said. So what we're being

00:28:39.840 told here, according to this interpretation, which I think is a good one, is that God created the heavens

00:28:44.440 and the earth at some point in the beginning, whenever that was. And we aren't told when,

00:28:48.900 because it doesn't matter at all, really. At least it has no bearing on the point the Bible is trying

00:28:54.280 to make. And so it was made at some point in the beginning, and then sometime later, maybe billions

00:29:00.600 of years, the first day began. And there was light, etc. It doesn't say, on the first day, God created

00:29:09.620 the heavens and the earth. It says, in the beginning. And then there's a first day. So, with all these

00:29:18.020 points in mind, you hopefully see why I think the Bible does not require us to believe in a young earth

00:29:25.560 creationism. You can believe it. You can draw that conclusion theologically, but you don't have to.

00:29:34.520 It's not required. There's a reason why faithful Christians for 2,000 years have arrived at different 1.00

00:29:40.200 conclusions on Genesis. It's not a simple text. It is not easy to understand. It's quite dense,

00:29:46.320 quite mysterious, and theologically, you can justify multiple interpretations. But if we're interested in

00:29:52.640 getting some idea as to how these things physically happened and when, if that's what we're trying to

00:30:02.580 figure out, then I think we look at the science. And then, when we look at the science, certain

00:30:10.300 interpretations of Genesis become significantly less tenable. The real point of the Bible is about, the

00:30:18.040 Bible is all about why. Why we're here. We're here to love and serve God. Science has nothing to say about

00:30:24.060 that one way or another. We can't cross-reference that with science. But when it comes to our

00:30:29.440 interpretations of the how and the winds, well, then things like archaeology, cosmology, physics,

00:30:38.980 all of that becomes useful. Science tells us that the earth is around 4 billion years old.

00:30:49.080 Or, I'm sorry, the, yeah, the earth is 4 billion around 4 billion, and the universe is around 14 billion

00:30:53.660 years old. In order to defend the six-day creationist view, we must essentially reject

00:30:59.460 the fields of modern astronomy, cosmology, geology, and biology. We must declare that all but a very

00:31:06.360 tiny fraction of experts in those fields are deluded fools. We must basically wage an all-out war on 0.98

00:31:14.640 modern science because it stands so explicitly and starkly against young earth creationism.

00:31:20.640 I'll say this. You will be very hard-pressed to find a legitimate geologist or cosmologist or

00:31:28.340 physicist or astronomer who believes, based on his studies, that the earth and the universe are 10,000

00:31:35.420 years old. Maybe you'll find a few who believe, who hold that belief in spite of their studies. Maybe

00:31:42.420 you'll, maybe you'll, you know, um, um, maybe you'll find a few here and there who, who will say

00:31:51.160 something like, uh, yeah, I mean, you could interpret the science in a way that kind of comports with

00:31:57.620 young earth creationism. Uh, I mean, you're gonna be very hard-pressed, hard-pressed to find any

00:32:04.260 scientist who will even say that much. But there are a few, I mean, young earth creationists, they'll,

00:32:08.660 they have a few scientific names, they'll trot out and they'll say, well, this person, that person,

00:32:12.480 that, you know, it's a few. Um, but even those people, if you listen to what they're saying,

00:32:17.360 they're not claiming that they can prove this just by looking at the, the physical scientific

00:32:24.240 evidence, what they're, they're starting with Genesis and their interpretation of it,

00:32:29.000 and then trying to make the science fit. Um, and that's, that's just, that's not how you do science.

00:32:36.160 That's not real science. Now, I fully admit that I'm neither a cosmologist or a geologist,

00:32:43.560 so I must decide whether I will believe the near unanimous consensus in those fields, or if I will 0.98

00:32:50.120 come to the conclusion that they're all a bunch of godless liars and lunatics because certain 0.94

00:32:54.180 Christians insist that the word day in Genesis can only mean 24 hours and nothing else. I must ask 1.00

00:32:59.760 myself, what's more likely that the entire fields of cosmology, astronomy, and geology are wrong,

00:33:06.420 illegitimate, and falsified, or that young earth creationists are simply misinterpreting the text?

00:33:15.060 What's the more plausible explanation that modern science is completely wrong,

00:33:20.820 or that young earth creationists are misinterpreting it?

00:33:24.260 Um, and it isn't just those scientific fields that young earthers need to disqualify. There are many

00:33:31.900 others that we basically are disqualifying. Paleontology. Most every paleontologist in the

00:33:38.120 world will tell you that dinosaurs existed and they died off 60 million years ago.

00:33:41.840 But young earthers, based on one word in the Bible that they have interpreted in one particular way,

00:33:48.020 will say to paleontologists, nope, you're all wrong, all of your work is wrong,

00:33:51.920 your life's work is wrong, everything you think is wrong, it's everything you've studied,

00:33:55.880 it's all wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, because I believe that the word day in Genesis can only

00:34:00.760 mean 24 hours. Um, I just, you know, it doesn't make any sense. Uh, so you, we, we have to discard,

00:34:14.060 and, and then, and then, you know, young earthers must, must also say that, well,

00:34:18.160 either they say dinosaurs never existed and it's all a big sham,

00:34:21.920 I've heard, I've had some young earthers tell me that, um, God put dinosaur bones in the earth to,

00:34:27.800 to test our faith. It's all a prank that he's playing on us. Or that, um, that there were

00:34:33.280 Tyrannosaurus Rexes and Brontosaurus and Triceratops and Stegosaurus on Noah's Ark. Uh, somehow they all

00:34:40.020 fit on there and didn't, and they also didn't eat, uh, everybody. Um, and then once they got off the Ark,

00:34:46.620 they all died in some mass extinction event that only affected the dinosaurs and then all of their

00:34:52.040 bones somehow sifted and, and, and, and sunk lower in the ground than any other bones and they

00:34:58.500 fossilized so as to take on the appearance of age. I mean, it's just, you, you've got to run through

00:35:03.440 all of these massive loops and you've got to do these twirls and handstands and everything to make

00:35:09.940 this work when you don't need to. Um, archaeology is another field of study that young earthers would

00:35:21.100 have to basically, uh, uh, disqualify. Archaeologists have dug up many ancient artifacts,

00:35:31.760 sculptures and so forth that are clearly made by humans and are clearly older than 10,000 years,

00:35:37.760 significantly older, like 30, 40, 50,000 years. There are, for example, many of what are called

00:35:44.300 Venus sculptures, sculptures of large women with exaggerated features that seem to indicate some 0.85

00:35:49.120 kind of fertility worship by ancient people. Um, some of these Venus sculptures are significantly

00:35:55.360 older than 10,000 years. You will not find a legitimate archaeologist who will look at every

00:36:02.000 prehistoric artifact and declare based on his study of those artifacts that none of them were made before

00:36:09.100 10,000 years. You will not find one who can say that. Uh, so archaeology has to be bunk as well

00:36:17.400 on the young earth view. Physics, Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant minds ever to exist on earth,

00:36:24.320 believed that the universe was billions of years old. But young earthers, I mean, they basically tell us

00:36:29.800 that we have to treat Ken Ham as a greater authority on the subject than Einstein. And I just can't do

00:36:35.520 that. Mathematics must also be discarded on the young earth view because it is through mathematical

00:36:41.180 equations that we measure cosmic distance and age. And so young earthers are saying that even mathematics

00:36:47.480 we can't trust. Nothing can be trusted. Um, in fact, we know that if you're looking at a star

00:36:54.400 and the star is however many light years away, you're looking that many years into the past

00:37:01.040 because it took that many years for the light to reach here. And this is a huge problem for young

00:37:07.340 earthers. It may, it may actually be the biggest problem of all. I think it's the thing above everything

00:37:12.200 else that settles the question. And it's an insurmountable problem, I think, for young earthers.

00:37:18.720 Any stars that we have located, which are over 10,000 light years from us would seem to prove

00:37:28.020 beyond a shadow of a doubt that the universe is older than 10,000 years. Otherwise we wouldn't be

00:37:35.120 able to see them because the light wouldn't have gotten to us yet. You see the Hubble space telescope

00:37:42.320 recently located a star 9 billion light years away, which is to say that it looked 9 billion years into

00:37:50.800 the past, which is incredible. You know, they say we can't look into the past. We don't have a time

00:37:55.640 machine. We do. And go outside at night and look up in the sky. You're in a time machine. You're looking

00:38:01.520 at the past. Um, all of those stars, you're looking at what the stars looked like thousands or millions

00:38:09.620 of years ago. Uh, so I think that's a rather insurmountable problem.

00:38:21.580 Here's the thing to prove young earth creationism, you need to do a whole lot more than just quibble

00:38:27.520 with the methodology of some of these disciplines. You need to do more than say, well, maybe carbon

00:38:32.940 dating isn't accurate. You certainly need to do more than show me a couple of vague, ambiguous

00:38:37.520 stains on a cave wall somewhere that you say must be paintings of dinosaurs and therefore must on

00:38:42.760 their own upend the entire fossil record. No, that's not nearly enough. It's not even close.

00:38:48.160 You need to provide evidence that these fields of study are fundamentally wrong about everything

00:38:55.420 because that's what you claim. But before you set out to prove that, which I don't think you can,

00:39:03.000 uh, I would ask you to think, to, to think twice

00:39:08.920 because there are two difficulties that I think should give us pause before we go around preaching

00:39:17.760 the young earth view. Um, difficulties, you know, uh, theological difficulties, I guess you would say.

00:39:26.200 First of all, the argument as I've heard it, or one of the most prominent arguments or explanations for

00:39:32.820 young earth is that God made the earth and the universe to look old. And he made, I suppose,

00:39:40.200 uh, you know, and he put, he put fossils in the ground that look old and he arranged all the

00:39:45.040 mathematical equations and physics and everything that they would give us false information about the

00:39:49.500 world. And he created light beams that were already in motion on the way to us. Um, so as to give the

00:39:57.560 impression that the stars are much older than they really are. God by this view is deceiving us.

00:40:04.280 You're saying that God is playing games. He's tricking us rather than science being a method by which

00:40:10.720 God reveals more about his own creation. Science becomes a method by which God confounds and confuses

00:40:17.220 and obscures. So apart from how this view degrades science, the bigger issue is how it degrades

00:40:23.780 God, because it gives us a God who deceives and who doesn't want us to know things and who tricks us.

00:40:33.600 It gives us this kind of petty pagan God, uh, not the true God, not the God of truth, not the God of 0.99

00:40:42.640 light, not the God who reveals more and more of himself and this world to us as we search and

00:40:49.660 explore. You know, this gives us a God who wants us to be in the dark and demands that we never look

00:40:55.660 outside the pages of the Bible to learn anything. I think that God is much bigger than bigger than

00:41:02.400 that and much more honest. Second point, according to this view, modern science isn't just wrong. It is

00:41:13.840 useless. Geologists can't tell us anything about the earth. Cosmologists can't tell us anything about

00:41:20.780 the universe. Archaeologists can't tell us anything about the past. And if that's the case, then you have

00:41:26.080 set up science and faith as two competing things. You have taken an adversarial approach to science.

00:41:34.020 And this is a huge stumbling block for people, a serious stumbling block, because when you make

00:41:39.620 someone choose between science or an ancient religious text, when you tell them that only one

00:41:46.340 or the other can be true, many will choose the other. If you say to be a Christian, you must reject 0.92

00:41:53.960 all of modern science. And if your listener believes you, he is likely to respond, well, then I can't be

00:42:03.420 a Christian, because Christianity must just be another primitive, anti-science, anti-knowledge, 1.00

00:42:10.880 ignorant superstition like all the rest. But Christianity is not an ignorant superstition, 1.00

00:42:18.040 and you don't need to choose between the two. And you don't need to disbelieve your own eyes in order

00:42:25.420 to believe the Bible. You don't need to do that. There is no reason to set up this competition

00:42:35.720 between science and the Bible. They can all work together. And much of the time, they're doing

00:42:45.220 different things. And they're doing things that are not in competition. The Bible is telling us why.

00:42:54.180 That is the fundamental message of the Bible. And science is telling us how and when, and to some

00:43:03.980 extent, what. This can all work together. So that a person can read the Bible and be spiritually nourished

00:43:13.420 and learn quite a bit. And then they can go into science and they can learn even more about this

00:43:20.080 wonderful creation that God has given us. And even more than that, God reveals himself.

00:43:29.500 You know, rather than treating science like it's some sort of, like it's some sort of, you know, black

00:43:34.600 magic, magic. Really, we should see that science is a form of revelation. It's God revealing things to

00:43:42.600 us. It's what it means to reveal, right? You know, things are being revealed to us through science about

00:43:49.820 the nature of the earth and how God goes about creating things.

00:43:57.040 And that's a wonderful thing.

00:44:03.520 So, this is a long one. That's why I'm not a young earth creationist.

00:44:11.800 And it's why I think this view can have the effect of discrediting Christianity and creating

00:44:21.520 very unnecessary stumbling blocks. So, I hope that you'll take that into consideration.

00:44:27.880 Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Godspeed.

The Matt Walsh Show - October 18, 2018

Ep. 126 - Why I'm Not A Young Earth Creationist

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript