In the confessions series I am going to go through all of the core reasons I am a YEC (Young Earth Creationist), but before I get into part 2 I want to explain the term “Young Earth Creationist.” Specifically, I want to address the fact that I actually reject the word “young” as being factual.
The Earth is NOT Young. It’s REALLY old.
It’s important to understand that “young” and “old” are words which are relative to their context. When I pick up my daughter from preschool, I am VERY old, but when I go visit my grandmother, I am quite young. It depends on the context, much like short or tall, big or little, fast or slow. So when we call the earth “Young” what are we saying?
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Very simply we are referring to our rejection of deep time/evolutionary timescales. That word is only a response to the popular dogma of Billions of years- but when you actually look at the history of the universe as we propose it (according to the Bible, Historians and science), it is FAR from “young” as we would ever experience or think of Youngness. Take a look at the following timelines: This is the past 300 years or so. That big arrow is pointing to the 1776 declaration of Independence. Since then, 45 men have served as president of the United States. Where were you born on this timeline? If you’re under a century old, you were born AFTER the third blue line. If you are still in school, you were probably born after the big white line on the far right side (just before the little white line which indicates 2017AD). Included here is every computer ever made, every iPhone, every web site, every movie, radio, TV, tank, plane, car, and train. Almost everything we take for granted, from YouTube to the electric light is found on this timeline, along with the ENTIRE history of the United States as a nation. The last century has seen FIVE generations of my family be born. As of this writing, my grandmother has seen her son’s, son’s, son’s daughter be born. Think about how many generations lived across the centuries before in this timeline.
And that is only 300 years.
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This is the past thousand years. That arrow is still showing you the birth of America, but now we can see the invention of eye glasses, the microscope, the telescope, and the compass. We see the birth of the Protestant Church just after the midway point, which means every church other than Catholic and Greek Orthodox fit on the back half of this timeline. We see the lives of Shakespeare, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, and all of those guys the Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles are named after. Had america been founded at the start of the millennium, we could easily have already had more then 200 presidents. Where is the entire span of YOUR life on this timeline? How far back can you trace your family? I can trace mine to the first settlers here on the Mayflower, and that doesn’t even go back to the halfway mark at 1500 AD.
And this is only a thousand years.
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Here is the entire timeline of world history/Biblical history. 6,000 years and change. The dark arrow on the far right is still pointing to the birth of America, but now we see how much has happened before this nation was born. On this timeline is every empire, dynasty, city, government, and major work of architecture ever created.
Let me make the point: Even according to secular dating methods– methods which assume at the start that the human race as we know it has existed for 100,000 years– ALL of the known nations, governments, cities, empires, and dynasties exist on this timeline AFTER the first dark arrow on the left *.
This is a HUGE amount of history, with more events, people, generations, inventions, constructions, cities, songs and stories than we can possibly imagine. Look at how LITTLE of this timeline America takes up and then try to imagine how little of this timeline YOUR life takes up. Then remember the last time you complained about waiting in line at the DMV. The time it takes to get through the DMV would BARELY show up on this scale.
What I want you to see here are two things.
- The Biblical model is called “Young” earth creation, but it still involves a HUGE amount of time- time enough to account for everything we see on earth, under the earth, or above it.
- The only evidence of human civilization that exists shows up AFTER the flood, which is what that arrow on the right is pointing to**. On the evolutionary time frame, this means the human race did none of those things for 95% of its history, and then within 1-2% of our time on earth we founded civilizations, governments, dynasties, nations and cities all over the world- a fact which is easily explained by the Genesis accounts of the flood and the tower of Babel incident.
So when I use the phrase “Young” Earth Creation, just know that I am merely using this name to distinguish my position from the popular billions of years, but the history I am proposing really is very deep and wide.
Below is the full six thousand years in more detail. Check it out and think about it, won’t you? And remember, #JesusLovesYou
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* Egypt has different proposed dates for its founding, the oldest of which falls before the flood by around 500 years, but the earliest dynasties have left no direct evidence, and thus dating them is based on the fragments of evidence left by much later dynasties recalling their own historical past and the assumptions of historians working five thousand years later.
**except for a small handful of instances of speculative dating with no direct evidence or historical links to KNOWN history.
