Origins: What's the Biblical Age of the Earth?

how old is the earth according to the Bible our guest today says there are multiple gray areas that affect the date calculation including what he calls date slippage in Genesis genealogists if you consider all irrelevant passages the answer is surprising to most people coming up on today's edition of origins the biblical age of the earth with dr. Rob Carter hello my friends and welcome to origins my name is dawn Chapman it's my privilege to be your host during this program we showcase interesting guests who present evidence from science along with other important facts validating the truth of creation and the accuracy of the Bible today's guest dr. Robert Carter did his undergraduate work at Georgia Tech and he earned a PhD in marine biology at the University of Miami currently he's a popular much in demand speaker for creation Ministries International out of their US office here in Atlanta Georgia his research centers on the field of human genetics human history and other issues related to biblical creation Rob it's so good to have you with us thanks now we're gonna talk today about the biblical age of the earth how is that different than the real age of the earth no this should be the same thing they should be the same because the Bible is true we have a lot of questions about how old the earth is we didn't go through a lot of those questions try to answer them I think that's tremendous and we'll appreciate your insight on that so why don't you just go up to the board and share your thoughts with us I think it's gonna be invaluable okay first we have to acknowledge that the book of Genesis claims to be the history book of the universe Wow that opening chapter specifically in Genesis gives us a time frame of God creating everything and it says very clearly that he created the entire universe in six days there's no doubt in your mind that that's what Genesis 1 means that's what it says whether it's true or not is something as we as Christians have to figure out right but that's absolutely what it says and what the words mean God creates light and from this big ball of water he separates it into the waters above and to the waters below creating the heavens and the oceans and then he creates landfills what plants and they creates a Sun Moon and stars then he creates all the flying critters and all the swimming critters then he creates all the land animals and then finally he creates man now the whole purpose of creation is to bring about a bride for Christ Wow we are actually the most important thing in creation according to the Bible that's amazing to think about we have to understand that there are multiple references to the creation account in the New Testament in fact there are over 100 references to Genesis and about 60 references to the first 11 chapters of Genesis which is the creation Noah's Flood and a Tower of Babel and here we have mark quoting Jesus Jesus says but from the beginning of creation God made them male and female therefore man shall leave his father and mother hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh wait a minute did Jesus really believe that Adam existed at the beginning of creation I don't know you ought to tell me well he's saying that that is quoted like he sees those calves II aughts hear he's not saying well you know the Bible says he's created the beginning but really evolution is true nothing like that at all but if Adam existed at the beginning then there's no evolution no because the evolutionary beginning is a Big Bang Adam couldn't exist back then no no so this is we have really have to treat this carefully in fact our options here are this actually is what really happened and Jesus is quoting it right or mark misquoted Jesus which means the Bible is not the Word of God or Mark lied about what Jesus said or Jesus didn't know what he was talking about yeah you know I think it's so important because it's not just that it's a New Testament but this is God become a man this is eternal God saying from the beginning of creation God made man and if the testimony of Jesus isn't true I can't put my faith in him for anything else that's right so that's why these are critical issues absolutely so now the question is how old is the earth of evolution isn't true according to the Bible what do we do well a lot of people have tried to calculate the age of the earth and I'm not trying to contradict any of them the most famous person ever was James Ussher he's archbishop of armagh and Ireland he lived in 15 and 1600s and his famous date which lot of liberal scholars and a lot of secular you know and taking antagonists against Christianity have mocked this date but he said 4004 BC now the purpose of what we're going to discuss we're not gonna try to get exactly that number what we're gonna try to do is is build the worst-case scenario okay what is the absolute oldest the Bible could be and what's the absolutely youngest the Bible can be according to what we're given in the in scriptures that's an interesting question a really interesting question now to do that we'll have to turn to Scripture there are genealogies in the Bible lots of lots of them these are the two from of the New Testament from Matthew and Luke right one of them starts at Adam and goes all the way to Christ Christ and and then the other one starts at David yeah and goes a different line all the way to Christ so we've got genealogies but there's no dates on these genealogies are they're missing generations are there are these accurate those are questions as scholars and Christians struggle with no I don't think there are missing generations at least and in in the Luke line boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom okay but how do we put a number on the age of creation if this is all we have well if this was all we had we couldn't do it happily there's more a lot more in the Bible so in order to get at this we need several things one we need some historical pegs we need to be able to take a biblical event and put a date BC in history and one of the classic things to use is the Babylonian captivity when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem 586 BC that is a classic thing it's very well documented in the Bible and it's documented in secular archaeology let's just take that we could use the date of Jesus's birth or even his crucifixion those things are known and if you if you start with the Book of Daniel you can actually figure out when Christ is born from the book of daniel that's really cool so we can span that but that's really not something a lot of people debate it's the things before 586 of people debate yeah so let's start with this as an anchor point planter flag there okay and then look at everything was back from there work backwards and see how far we go all right something else we can use something I call date locks ban a lot of times in the Bible it gives a range from to events and what if you if you take this event in this event and now you know the range between those events then you can know you can fit these pieces of the puzzle together okay for example in judges chapter 11 there's actually late in the period of judges this judge named Jeptha and the king of the ammonites has started a war with the Israelites and he's claiming that everything in all the Israelite territory on the far side of the Jordan River is actually ammonite territory and Jeptha says while Israel lived in heshbon and his villages an error and it's villages and in all the cities that are on the banks of the Arnon it's just Transjordan this is the stuff on the other side of the Jordan okay 300 years that's a long time why did you not deliver them within that time he's saying we have been here for 300 years well 300 years from what 300 years from the end of Exodus when Joshua invaded Canaan land right that's when this clock starts now 300 years later these people were there the whole time well that range right there it's a nice range that means the time of the judges can't be less than that question is is it exactly 300 years right could it be 301 y'all round off exactly we all round off so we have to take the numbers were given in the Bible in their proper context nothing here saying it's exactly 300 years but it's not gonna be 400 not to be 200 it's not a thousand it's not a thousand so we have to take biblical numbers in context for what they're worth but that still helps now there are sections in in Genesis they're called Crono genealogies now we don't know what genealogy is raised just a list of names right but a crow no genealogy also includes time statements there's one in Genesis 5 and there's another in Genesis 11 give me a quick example of that okay quick example the Bible says that Adam is 130 years old when Seth is okay and it says that Seth is 105 years old when Enoch was born so it gives you both a number and a genealogy yes okay and if you add up these two numbers you can tell what year of the earth Enoch was born in okay well then you realize that these genealogies can be brought all the way up to Joseph Wow 22 generations later that's that spans thousands of years of human history well Joseph he can be he's a historical individual who lived in Egypt before the time of the Exodus so we can link up all these things into a very nice chronology but looking at all these numbers they're awesome there's a couple other things that these generous these genealogies don't give us in Genesis five we also have the father's age when he died that's important in Genesis 11 it also gives us a sum this Plus this equals that and that's really important because later on when we talk about some of the other types of manuscripts some of the manuscripts adjust this number and this number to keep the sum the same looking at all these numbers add them up we can conclude that Shem Noah's son was born in 1558 now am most people know what ad and BC mean a.m. is I know Mundi year of the world Oh so starting from 0 creation Shem would have been born 15:58 after the career after creation Wow only sorta you see that's a scientific term well yes it very psyched to have these numbers if you add them up you'll get what I call the nominal date it's just a number but there's gray in this number that lot of people don't realize watch this okay similar table but this is my family my great-great-grandfather was 29 years old when my great-grandfather was born he was 25 when my grandfather was born he was 23 when my father as he was 31 when I was born and my son was born when I was 36 that's five generations that's 144 years so this is a sea animal Carter this would be my son would be born 144 years after my great great grandfather was born in Ireland all right okay if I told you that my son was born in 2005 could we figure out when my great-great grandfather was born sure you could yeah you just take two thousand five - hundred forty-four years and you'd say he was born in 1861 you'd be wrong you'd be wrong absolutely wrong okay he was born in 1859 where do we get the where do we lose in two years yeah we didn't have any errors we lost two years because my birthday's in November my son was born in March when you're taking ages like this and adding him up and going to calendar years well if my son was born after my birthday I would have been 37 but he's born before my birthday I was only 36 we get this issued I call it date slippage if you're trying to convert just numbers of Ages like this into calendar years you have a every about every other generation you lose a year but it could never be off more than one was a year absolutely right absolutely okay so but that first table I just showed you yes that was ten generations okay so you could be off ten years five years about yeah um when we get to Abraham has 20 generations that's about 10 years about all right but it's random its statistics right it could be zero it could be 20 years but on average you'd expect it to be about 10 years off well that's interesting another question we have what calendar system that ancient people use imagine Adam and Eve right there in the Garden of Eden God didn't give them a calendar no pile doesn't say that I hope not so they wake up in the morning they go to sleep they wake up in the morning to go to sleep what's the first thing they realize a day makest our counting days what's the next thing you're gonna see that changes on them the moon right the moon's gonna change Hey look at that the moon goes through cycles oh hey we'll call that a move we call that a month right okay what's the next thing they're gonna realize Oh every once in a while the stars get back to the same position in the heaven we'll call that a year but it might have taken them many years to figure that out especially most people consider they think of the Garden of Eden as a tropical paradise that means not much seasons right so why would they count years they probably would counted months now we don't know we have no idea but it is true that 12 lunar months are 11 days short of a solar year well we know that since the Exodus the Hebrews have been using what we call a lunar solar they counted months and every once in a while I'll have to add an extra month to keep the the lunar months with the witnesses matched up with the seasons but we think it's funny because we don't we have leap year we have one day every four years they had an extra month after a couple of years we don't know what was used before the exodus but this affects the date of creation by up to 90 years and then we have a question about the numbers themselves if you look at the last number for how old the father is when the child was born and how old the father is when he dies there are a lot of zeros in those numbers more more zeros than you'd expect at random in fact that random you'd expect about this many of each one of the numbers but none of them end in a 1 and none of them end in a 6 in fact after the 0 there's a whole lot of fives now I'm not gonna claim that they were rounding their numbers off but it looks like they may have you know what does that mean that affects the data creation because if you're rounding things off well that means is more great there's more wiggle room in the date calculation but how about this what if they were ratcheting their numbers in other words if I'm gonna live to a very old age right I after I hit 400 years old do I really care if I'm 401 I'm still 400 I'm 400 I'm 400 ok now in 405 now 405 I'm 405 on 405 405 okay now in 410 they made have ratcheted the numbers especially in the air see the early ones these are the early numbers these are middle numbers and these are the later numbers or maybe they were converting from a lunar calendar to a solar calendar because that means every five years every 60 lunar month you get five calendar years maybe the reason those zeros and fives are there is because they converted from one calendar system to another I don't know well we've got to take a break this is fascinating it's changing it but it's not changing a lot and we want to talk about that but don't you go away we'll be right back hello my friends and welcome back to orgies we're here with dr. Robert Carter and we're talking about the biblical age of the earth and you were giving us all the factors that could give us some gray area some some area of uncertainty when you put all those things you talked about together how much time are we talking about when we add up all of those areas of uncertainty we're talking about about 308 years of uncertainty only you know in history of the world that's not very much not much at all no like when I started to study a good friend of mine and I we were to paper for a journal of creation and when we started as we didn't know how much uncertainty there would be and we put all these factors in we only got that like okay I'm totally happy with that yeah that's a footnote but there's something really important about this okay uncertainty is not the same thing as error absolutely when we look at the Bible you know the the the authors of Genesis weren't intending to give us a minute-by-minute chronology of Earth history it's their family records from those family records happens that we can build a pretty good case of the age of the earth but it doesn't mean that the Bible is full of errors if we can only get to plus or minus three hundred eight years you have to look at the intent of what they're telling you and not just at the number yes okay now after that there are some additional textual concerns that we have to look at one we can link the coronal genealogies of Genesis five and eleven and we can extend the Genesis 11 coronal genealogy past Abraham up until the time of Joseph but each one of those steps you have to do some complex mathematics for example the Bible says that Tara is seventy years or more when his sons are born his three sons named two Tara Abraham being one of them right it bible also says that Tara is 205 when he dies and it says that Abraham is 75 when he leaves her ran go to the promised land well most people would take 205 and subtract 75 and say that terror was 130 when Abraham was born make sense but the Bible doesn't say that all we know is Abraham 75 when he leaves her ran and his after Tara dies so he goes stayed more time for south of a worst-case scenario we know that Sarah is 10 years younger than Abraham let's say that she was 15 when they got married worst case okay and they got married and uh they went to her Anne and Terah died well Abraham could have waited 50 years before he left at 75 years old okay no I don't know if that's true or not but what that does is that that again you're given the worst case worst case that that actually affects the age of the earth by up to 50 years that's really interesting there's another debate amongst scholars about how long the the Hebrews were in Egypt most people say they were in Egypt for 430 years now Genesis 15 and Exodus 4 is where we get these numbers from you know in Genesis 15 God promises Abraham that that his descendants are going to be afflicted for 400 years and in Exodus for the time the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years at the end of 430 years on that very day all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt well some people want to say the 430 clock starts with Abraham most people say it starts 215 years later with Jacob when Jacob goes to to Egypt that's what I always thought me too but you know to allow for this other possibility that affects the age of the earth by 215 years okay so we have the long versus short sojourn debate there's more debates about the the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah and if you look at different scholars and how they how they work it out I've pulled numbers and it looks like about 54 years is about the range of the scholarship plus or minus 54 years and then we have the Masoretic versus a Septuagint and that's that's a big deal you're gonna have to explain that to our folks those are words most of our viewers probably don't know the Masoretic text of the Hebrew is what is in our English Bibles okay so if we went from Hebrew Masoretic translated into English a couple of hundred years BC some Hebrew scholars in Egypt translated the Bible into Greek and that's the Greek Bible that the Apostles used look at this chart here these are the nominal dates in white this is the Masoretic ages of the patriarchs okay in black if you just add it up these numbers from the Septuagint you get this line the situation is significantly longer timeframe than the Masoretic they're their Bible is their age of the creation is older but there's another Bible it's a Samaritan Bible the Samaritan Pentateuch no Samaritans they lived in northern Israel they changed their Bible so that like the temple would be on Mount Gerizim not on the Temple Mount no they they modified a but they still have the genealogy local records in Genesis in their Bible and when we add those up we get this line now all that said okay we can come to the final slide if you just at face-value add up all the numbers the earth was created about four thousand two hundred twenty BC according to the Bible the worst-case scenario using the Masoretic using all the maximum possible numbers about 43:39 bc the worst case on the other side for the Masoretic using a short sojourn and the lunar calendar up into the time of the exodus we've got 38 22 bc that's not a big difference four hundred years most we can come up with yeah but notice we can't get to ten thousand no we can't certainly can't get to millions or billion or billions the worst case for the Septuagint using the maximum things 5665 bc if that was true I'd be happy with it but I'm gonna go with that date as my my basic date for creation so dr. Rob Carter you put us in a position if we're going to be biblical Christians we're gonna believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God we have to be young earthers I believe so that's why I became a so-called young earther yeah because the Bible is screaming that all these things are historical records right and I've treated like historical records and if they're really history I didn't believe evolution anyway so that helped right but really I came into the so-called young earth camp I studying the scriptures and realizing what they're actually saying yeah I appreciate that and I I'm putting you on the spot because I think our people need to think through this look so and they need to see that if we're gonna say the Bible's true this is what it means and then we can talk about the science verify that and so forth but if we just give this up we've given up the Word of God yes and God smarter than we are yes and Jesus chimed in on this as you quoted him and and he knows more than we'll ever know yes and so I appreciate your willingness to say okay there's wiggle room but the wiggle room is 300 years not billions versus thousands and it and your you've got a pretty specific date or if it's very narrow range if you're gonna remain biblical and folks I just want to say this to you as we close you know it's God's view that he created you I think he created a young world but I want you to know that God being the one who made you made you makes you accountable to him and that should be your world you too I hope that we shook you up and made you think and I hope you'll join us again soon here on origins we'll do it again until then god bless you my friend thank you for watching this edition of origins for a DVD of this series you can order online or send a twelve dollar donation to cover shipping and handling and right to you origins program number 1614 cornerstone Network wall Pennsylvania one five one four eight if you like a copy of the PowerPoint information presented today you can download an episode guide at origins TV org origins is made possible by the faithful prayers and financial support of you our cornerstone family you

Channel: Cornerstone Television Network

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Rating: 4.5897732 out of 5

Keywords: Biblical Age of the Earth, earth age, Genesis, genealogy, how old is the earth, Dr. Robert Carter, Donn Chapman, creation, how, old, is, the, earth, God

Id: zgR0ukEEZqA

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2016