I know what some of you must be wondering: “Even if you take the Creation WEEK as literal, what makes you think it was only 6,000 years ago?” A perfectly valid question. Of course, we should look to the Bible for our answer. What does the Genesis account say?

Well, in Genesis 1: 7, right after the description of the Creation Week, it says,

“And it was thus that The Lord created the Heavens and the Earth, approximately 6,000 years ago.”

I mean, it’s right there in black and white people. 6,000 years ago. That’s where we get the date for creation as happening 6,000 years ago. Case closed.

Ha ha! I’m kidding of course. But this is the level of silly I feel people have sunk to when they think they have popped my Young earth balloon* by telling me there is no Bible verse which says how long ago God created everything. If a verse like this DID exist, it would have been wrong the very next year, and increasingly wrong every year after. We don’t determine the age of the earth by reading A VERSE, but by reading lots of them.

Specifically we read those dull, sleep inducing genealogies in Genesis 5: “³ When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth...⁶ When Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father^[b] of Enosh...⁹ When Enosh had lived 90 years, he became the father of Kenan...” And on and on it goes, telling us the ages of everyone from Adam to Noah, and then in Genesis 11 to Abraham, and on and on it goes until we have all sorts of other historical markers to line things up with. In short, if you can balance a check book, you have the math skills to figure out how long ago creation happened.** It puts Creation week at about 6,000 years ago. Answers in Genesis does all of the math for you, and explains it in detail HERE. You really ought to send them a thank you note for all the work they’ve done for you.

One of the reasons for my confidence in this method is the pitiful, weak sauce arguments against it.

I heard a podcast not long ago where two gentlemen attempted to determine if we could calculate the age of the earth from these genealogies as YEC claim. Naturally, they started their discussion with a close look at the genealogies given… in Matthew?
Of course that offered no help as Matthew’s Genealogies are not a complete list nor do they give any ages at all, so of course they turned back to the Old Testament and took a look at… CHRONICLES?

Are these guys KIDDING ME? How in the world are you supposed to figure out whether or not you can calculate the age of the earth from the genealogies given in Genesis when you KEEP LOOKING NOT IN GENESIS?!?!

I could not believe these cretins. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that they SOMEHOW failed to come to the creation date of about 6,000 years ago. People do this kind of thing all of the time, and it makes me wonder how they sleep at night.

Do they do this with other literary questions? I expected their next podcast to sound like this: “Some people have claimed that the characters of Bob Cratchit and Pip are both Charles Dickens’ depiction of his own father as told to him by his aunt Shelly Doubouis. They site her memoirs as giving anecdotes that both relate to the development of those two characters. To see if this claim has any validity, we will be looking at Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, and then, the second book in the Twilight Series.”

To see their weak position systematically dismantled, read this.

People will often claim that there are gaps in these lists of names, but all you have to do is read it for yourself. “Dude was this old, and had a son. That son was THIS old and he had a son. That son was THIS old…” over and over. If you can fit a dozen more generations between a dude and his own son, then let me know how it’s done. Whatever you come up with, I suspect it will not paint his wife in a very flattering light. But again, I digress.

In summation, the Bible and math are both good tools for discovering why people like me believe in the Young Earth Creation model. In future installments of this series, I shall be adding science to the mix and showing how it too supports the Biblical account. In the mean time, I’m going to read Green Eggs and Ham to see if I can’t determine whether the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation was exacerbated by the cost of the war, or if Lincoln thought of himself as being from Mars. After all, if I have learned anything from the methods people use to criticize the Young Earth Creation model… well, it isn’t much.

#JesusLovesYou

*Young Earth Balloon would be an excellent name for a band.

**If you can’t balance a check book, you may have a career in politics [rim-shot]