By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
The most difficult part of the creation worldview for outsiders to accept is the length of the Creation Week days.
The Bible in the book of Genesis teaches that the creation of the heavens, Earth, and all life, took six 24-hour days. Science says the universe is 13.8 billion years old, the Solar System is 4.6 billion years old, and the Earth is 4.5+ billion years old. Which is right?
First, let us examine the creation of the first humans as related to Genesis. The creation of Adam in the Garden of Eden could not have involved large amounts of time.
The reason is, to be alive Adam must have been created as a fully functioning human with blood activity traversing in his circulatory system.
After only three minutes lack of blood flow to the brain causes global cerebral ischemia that becomes progressively worse after each second. To separately create a lung, heart, and the other 100 organs required for life is not a viable option.
Without the protection of the body, and the sustenance provided by nutrient and oxygen circulation, these organs would rapidly deteriorate.
Consequently, Adam would have had to be created ex nihilo with a fully functioning body and oxygenated blood traversing throughout his entire body.
Furthermore, Adam and Eve arrived in this world with adult minds pre-wired with human thought processes, language, and a knowledge of the Creator.
If a medical doctor examined Adam to determine how old his body appeared, the doctor would do some medical tests. Using cognitive tests to determine his mental age, the doctor estimated he was in his early 20’s.
One of the best tests of an individual’s approximate age is bone evaluations. Individuals still growing have growth plates in their bones.
By about age 20, the bones have stopped growing and the growth plates cease. This measurement produced an age of 22 years old. Adams hair length also would have evidence of previous growth.
Obviously, although only a few hours old, medical measurements concluded he is in his early 20’s. This is called the “appearance of history.” Producing edible fruit likewise requires from 10 to 15 years.
Therefore, trees in the garden which produce fruit would have appeared to be a decade old, even though they were created only shortly before Adam.
For the tree to exist, the soil must contain worms and decayed plants to make it fertile, which also requires the appearance of age.
The Solar System and the Appearance of Age
The most widely accepted model of planetary formation is the Nebular Hypothesis proposed by Pierre de Laplace in 1796. This theory postulates that the Solar System originated from vast clouds of gas and dust within interstellar space.
The material that created the Solar System and Earth, the theory claims, was once a slowly rotating cloud, or nebula, of extremely hot gas. The gas cooled and the nebula began to shrink.
As the nebula became smaller, it rotated more rapidly, supposedly evolving into an enormously wide, flattened disk.
Although now over 300 years old, the Nebular Hypothesis is still the most widely accepted explanation of our solar system for one reason: no better naturalistic theory has been proposed. Nonetheless, the Nebular Hypothesis suffers from many serious problems.
One is that it assumes the original spinning cloud somehow existed, ignoring the problem of where it came from, and how and why its rotation began.
Calculated on the basis of the known orbital momentum of the planets, the Nebular Hypothesis predicts that the Sun must rotate about 50 times more rapidly than it does, making one rotation every few hours.
In fact, it spins only once approximately every 25 Earth days. The many other problems with the theory have forced scientists to propose other theories to explain the origin of the Solar System, but none has proven superior to the Nebular Hypothesis.
The Moon’s critical role is required both for Earth’s stability and for life to exist on Earth’s surface. The Sun must exist to provide light for plant growth.
Therefore, the Sun and Solar System must be working and functional. For these reasons, the entire Solar System must have been created as a functional working system. A few proto planets circulating around the Sun as evolution proposes would be chaos.
Our solar system’s planets are all held in a smooth-running, orbital system due to the Sun’s gravity. To produce the required stable solar system that supports life, God would have created a set of planets with momentum that produced stability.
In short, secular science would conclude Adam was age 30, the Solar System is 4.6 billion years old, and the Earth 4.5+ billion years old because it looks that old even though it is not.
When a scientist estimates the Earth is 4.5+ billion years old, he is assumed to be correct because, from the evidence, it appears to be 4.5 billion years old, just as, from the evidence, Adam appears to be 30 years old even though, when created, he was only a few seconds old.
Given the scientific evidence, the appearance of history is the most logical explanation of the reality we see around us.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning teacher and author. He has taught in the science and psychology area for over 40 years at the University of Toledo Medical College, Bowling Green State University, and other colleges. His 9 degrees include a Doctorate from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He has over 1,800 publications in both scholarly and popular science journals that have been translated into 13 languages. His publications are in over 2,400 college libraries in 65 countries. Bergman has spoken over 2,000 times at colleges and churches in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa.