The Biblical Case
Genesis 1 clearly describes 6 consecutive days of creation delineated with the “evening and morning” phrase for each one.
Genesis 2 starts with declaring that the creation of the heavens and earth was complete and then God rested the 7th day.
The rest of Genesis 2 is about the account of the creation of humans specifically and combined with a little translation ambiguity it sometimes gets declared as a contradiction with Genesis 1 in the order in which things happened. Here is an article giving a full explanation.
The next significant point in the Bible that helps us examine the validity of the creation account is in the 10 Commandments. Exodus 20:11. This is the words of God himself telling us specifically that the heavens and earth were created in 6 days and to remember the Sabbath day as it is a remembrance of the creation and of our creator. What is especially critical to understand here is that the Sabbath set forth here is every week as we know it. The Jews(and some other groups) still hold to the Sabbath day in the manner it is presented in the Bible. So it is very clear that God is specifically saying that His creation was just that one week.
I will skip ahead to the words of Jesus now. Matthew 5:17-19. Jesus states that not one bit of the law will change or be done away with till heaven and earth pass away and all is accomplished. Well, if that is the case then the 10 Commandments were totally validated by Jesus himself and, again, Exodus 20:11 is part of the 10 Commandments and clearly states creation took 6 days as we know them as he reminds the Israelites of the Sabbath.
Jesus again says something in Matthew 19:4,8 that is relevant to the conversation. He states that humans were created at the beginning. As Genesis states, humans were created on the 6th day of the creation week and that would certainly qualify as “the beginning.” What wouldn’t qualify, certainly, is the evolutionary path where humans come along very late in the creation sequence.
Jesus states something else that continues to affirm the biblical creation account. In John 5:46-47 Jesus questions how one could believe in Him if not Moses. “Moses” being the first 5 books of the Bible attributed to being authored by Moses. This, of course, includes Genesis and Exodus.
So if you are a Christian and believe in Jesus as God who came to earth as a sacrifice for our sins and to establish the church here on earth and show us the way to Him and salvation, well, he himself says this part of the Bible is true.
Further, Jesus makes other statements about his validity. Matthew 7:24-26 Jesus states that following his words is wise and ignoring them is foolish. Also these: John 3:16, John 6:68-69, John 8:12, John 8:31, John 10:27, John 15:5-6, John 15:14.
2 Peter 3:8 is sometimes mentioned as a statement that the days mentioned in Genesis don’t actually mean 24 hour days as we know them. Couple problems with this idea. First is the context of 2 Peter 3:8. 2 Peter 3:3-7 is pretty strong language in support of the YEC viewpoint. Going so far as to mention uniformitarianism and calling out those who push it as “scoffers.” So Peter makes this strong statement in support of the biblical viewpoint then immediately turns around and says something that doesn’t fit? No, what he is really saying is that we must be patient and that just because its been a while since creation, and from our perspective now since Jesus was here on earth, that we shouldn’t lose hope in 2nd coming. He isn’t stating a conversion ratio of days to years or whatever. Another problem is that even if this statement is intended as a conversion ratio, the amount of time this is surmising is still dramatically short of the supposed ages by the mainstream viewpoint. 6 thousand years is nowhere near the millions of years the mainstream view pushes.
Let’s not delve into the evolution debate, in fact let’s pretend for a moment that the world was actually created by a supreme being.
That said nothing in your arguments has anything to do with the age of the earth. Nothing says those six days of creation happened 6000 or so years ago, so I’m a bit at a loss.
Could those six days of creation not have happened hundreds of millions of years ago? Could those six literal days of creation not have happened millions of years apart?
How do you square science’s dating of the earth with a 6000 year timeline? Has carbon changed its rate of decay over those six millennia?
I actually didn’t get into it yet in this post, it’s not complete, but I wanted to go ahead and publish what I had put together. There are genealogies in the Bible that pin the timeframe at roughly 6000 years ago. It’s not some sort of wild guess. Multiple points in the Bible put the creation as consecutive days in one week. The original account, the 10 commandments.
Also, if we think humans have only existed for a few hundred thousand years, as I did already state in the sticky post, Jesus made the statement humans were created “at the beginning.” How do you get millions/billions of years of stuff going on before “the beginning?”
As for the scientific data that claims things are vastly older, and this is something that will come in much more detail in another sticky post about the science side of things, the main scientific argument comes from radiometric dating which is entirely based on assumptions about the starting conditions and the rates of decay being constant, there’s not good data about those pieces of information. The decay rates are measured today based on assumed starting conditions and the rate of decay we measure now and those measured numbers are extrapolated out to the dates we see purported. Frankly, let’s be honest, that’s not the scientific method, it’s not good science. But since it backs the position everyone wants to believe everyone just ignores those problems and claims it’s correct anyway. There is relatively new published research showing variable decay rates based on temperature. The creation position definitely involves dramatic warming involved with the flood event.
Several other significant pieces of evidence.
Earth’s magnetic field is falling at a rate that matches the young earth timeframe. Not only that, a creationist scientist predicted the magnetic field situation on other planets in the solar system before they were measured. He nailed it because he was working under the premise of the young creation timeline. Mainstream science has no good, functional explanation for the falling magnetic field. The best idea is Dynamo Theory. The problem with Dynamo Theory is that there’s no actual evidence it happens and various issues with it being a reality and if it did happen then the magnetic fields of other planets in the solar system wouldn’t have been able to be predicted because we’d have no way to no where those planets were in their cycle. And, it just so happens we are right now on earth at the point in the dynamo cycle where it matches what we’d expect if a young earth is true? Bit of a coincidence…
Another big issue is why there isn’t more erosion between layers throughout the geologic column. There is a striking lack of erosion in comparison to the erosion we see on the surface of earth today and the mainstream view is that the surface of the earth today is young compared to some of the timeframes between layers in the past. Yet there’s nowhere near the erosion seen in those layers. There’s a pretty simple explanation for less erosion between the layers, they got deposited rapidly, hours, days, weeks in between. Not millennia or millions of years.
The rate of erosion from the continents and the salinity of the oceans is another issue. By mainstream views, the continents should all be eroded in just around 14 million years from now. Supposedly, the continents have existed for around 1 billion years. There’s only roughly 2.5x the mass of the continents existing as ocean floor sediment. How do you only have 2.5x the mass of the continents currently existing as sediment on the ocean floor if the continents have existed for 1 billion years and it would only take 14 million years to entirely erode away all the continents from now? That math doesn’t work, at all, unless you introduce creation ideas about the length of time that has gone by and events that have happened. Salt has a similar story, there should be more salt in the seas. A lot more.
Soft tissues in dinosaur fossils are another thing that just shouldn’t exist if mainstream timeframes are true. There have been attempts to explain them but those attempts fall flat to actual reality. There are a lot of soft tissues being found in dinosaur fossils.
There’s more. Like I said, I’ll be creating a sticky discussing some of the primary points in detail at some point.