Good evening! I am very excited to be participating in this debate tonight. I want to say firstly thank you to Jeff and Gary for their willingness to do this debate, and all of the people that have come to see this topic debated. You see, the question of the age of the earth or what the best interpretation of Genesis 1 is is of interest not only to geologists and theologians but also to church members and Christians in general. I'm going to approach tonight's question biblically and from the standpoint of reason and argument. I'm convinced that there are better arguments for an old earth and a day-age interpretation than for a young earth and 24 hour interpretation. So in tonight's debate I'm going to defend two basic contentions: jellohead comments/First, that there is no good argument that Jeff's position is true, and secondly, that there are good arguments that my old earth day-age position is true. Consider then my first contention, that there's no good argument that a literal 24 hour and young earth view is true. I have seen countless reasons for this position, but no one's ever been able to come up with a successful argument. So rather than attack straw men at this point even though I know there are some things he is sure to object to, I'll just wait to hear Jeff present his arguments, and then I will respond to them in my next speech. In the meantime, let's turn to my second main contention that there are good arguments for an old earth day-age interpretation to be true.

Many people with whom I have discussed faith issues with were convinced that becoming a Christian would require them to reject all knowledge except that found in the Bible. Few had been presented with these three core ideas:

- God is the initiator of both the biblical revelation and the created revelation (the natural world)
- God renders both the words of the Bible and the facts of the nature true and consistent
- God's character and attributes are expressed specifically in the Bible (propositionally) and generally (intelligibly) in nature, neither negates or contradicts the other.

These viewpoints represent obvious but rarely articulated options. All too often, people are left with the hard choice between believing what they think are the words of the Bible and rejecting the truths of nature or believing the truths of nature and rejecting the Bible. Tragically, this false dilemma hinders serious consideration of crucial spiritual issues, and creates a cultural milieu where the Gospel cannot be seen as an intellectual option.


First to set the stage for my arguments, I will briefly show that a non-literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is not one of compromise, so that we don't have any assumptions going into my arguments such as " Marek's interpretation is a retreat in the face of modern science " or " All theologians before Darwin believed in Jeff's position ". With rising hostilities on both sides of the creation-evolution controversy (which, by the way is a false dichotomy), many churches and Bible colleges now include a belief in a young earth in their statement of faith. In some cases, applications who disagree are denied admission. In 1992 the Institute for Creation Research published an article in its Back to Genesis magazine about the important of a belief in a young earth for determining a person's role in the church and in ministry. The article's author, John Morris, concludes,
" I am still uncertain about young-earth creationism being a requirement for church membership; perhaps it would be proper to give new members time to grow and mature under good teaching. But I do know one thing: Young earth creationism should be made a requirement for Christian leadership! No church should sanction a pastor, Sunday school teacher, deacon, elder, or Bible-study leader who knowledgably and purposefully errs on this crucial doctrine. Where a written doctrine or not, young-earth creationism as a tenet for Christian acceptance inflicts damage. Is it any wonder that individuals trained in the sciences, especially those with little or no Christian background, seem hesitant to make their way into churches? How painful to be a disciple of Christ or a sincere seeker and yet be turned away as an enemy of the faith. How difficult, too, for the devout fundamentalist, trained as he or she is to stand firm against compromise and worldly thinking, to embrace as brothers or sisters who believe in a billions-year-old earth. According to what the fundamentalist has been taught, such people must deny Scripture's authority. They must be deceived or of the devil. With these dynamics at work, open, friendly dialogue has become virtually impossible. Instead, heated debates, confrontations, public attacks, and watchdog committies keep the storm front in place. Let's acknowledge emotional attachment to our views and, with a sense of humility, plunge ahead with our reconsiderations, trusting God's Spirit to guide us.

Let's start by going back to the beginning to look at how the church fathers view the length of creation days. Some young-earth creationist leaders have attempted to use this technique to settle the creation-day controversy. They claim that before the advent of modern geology and Darwinism, early church scholars consistently taught a 24-hour creation day interpretation of the Bible. In the Protestant tradition, the opinions of the past church scholars are never accorded the same weight or priority as the special revelation of the Bible or the general revelation of nature. Nevertheless, the historical position of the church carries significant authority where we find clear agreement in such matters such as the deity of Jesus Christ as the means of redemption from our sin. The portion of Genesis 1 that describes the six creation days receives more commentary from early church scholars than does any other text in the Bible. However, of the approximately 2,000 pages they wrote (a commentary called Hexameron) (Hex Em Err On), only about two pages address the duration of the creation days. Clearly, the church fathers did not consider the length of these days as a major doctrinal point. Evidence points to a diversity of opinions within both Jewish and Christian traditions, though the range of perspectives may be somewhat limited because many early writings failed to survive. The earliest scholars to record their thoughts about the six days of creation were Jewish Philo between 45 and 50 AD and Josephus. Philo expressed the notion that God created everything instantaneously and that the six days are figurative, a metaphor for order and completeness. He writes " It is quote foolish to think that the world was created in six days or in a space time at all. Why? because every period of time is a series of days and nights, and these can only be made such by the movement of the sun as it goes over and under the earth; but the sun is a part of heaven, so that time is confessedly more recent than the world. It would therefore be correct to say that the world was not made in time. (By the way, we know this not to be true, but we must cut this guy some slack as he didn't have the scientific knowledge that we have today) but that it was formed by means of the world, for it was heaven's movement that was the index of the nature of time. When, then, Moses says " He finished His work on the sixth day," we must understand him to be adducing not a quantity of days, but a perfect number, namely six.". What I am trying to do by showing these view points is not appeal to authority, heck, I might not even agree with a lot of these quotes, but the reason is simply to show that a non-literal 24-hour interpretation is not one of compromise. The earliest known Christian writings on the meaning of the creation days date back to the second century. Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus (Ear Ann Eye Uss), drew support from Psalm 90:6 and 2 Peter 3:8 to suggest that the "days" could be epochs, perhaps thousand-year-long creation periods. Third century Christian scholar Hippolytus (Hip All It Us) apparently wrote more extensively than others on the Genesis creation days, but most of his writings have been lost. What scholars have recovered gives no indication of what he believed about the duration of the creation days or about the dates for creation. Clement of Alexandria echoed Philo's (Fi Low) belief that the Genesis creation days were not 24-hour days. He claimed that the creation days communicated the order and priority of created things but not time. Origen (Orr Ige Inn) taught that in approaching certain difficulties in Scripture we should seek a spiritual meaning, not always a concrete one. In the six creation days in Genesis he saw just such a difficulty. He claimed that the time as we mark it did not exist until the fourth day. Neither could the 7th day be a 24 hour period be of 24 hours, according to Origen. He saw that the six creation days as representing the time that people work on earth, while the seventh day represents the time between the creation of the world and its extinction at the ascension of all the righteous. But finally, among early church leaders, no one penned a more extensive analysis of the creation days' duration than Augustine. In The City of God this esteemed scholar wrote " As for the days, it is difficult perhaps impossible to think, let alone explain in words, what they mean. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis he added "But at least we know that it [The Genesis creation day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar." In the same book, he added " Seven days by our reckoning after the model of the days of creation, make up a week. By the passage of such weeks time rolls on, and in these weeks one day is constituted by the course of the sun from its rising to its setting; but we must bear in mind that these days indeed recall the days of creation, but without in any way being really similar to them. Augustine understood the evenings and mornings of the Genesis creation account in a figurative sense. He concluded that the evening of each creation day referred to the occasion when the angels gazed down upon the created things after they contemplated the Creator, and that they morning referred to the occasion when they rose up from their knowledge of the created things to praise the Creator. In Confessions, Augustine noted that for the seventh day Genesis makes no mention of an evening and morning. He deduced from this omission that God sanctified the seventh day, making it an age extending onward into eternity. Eusebius a bishop of Casearea devoted six pages in " Preparation for the Gospel " for explaining the Genesis creation account. However, nowhere did he address the universe's or earth's creation dates. He was aware that the Hebrew word for day, yom, can and does refer to a timescale longer than 24 hours in dozens of places in the OT. He quoted from Genesis 2:4 as follows: This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day (yom) that the Lord God made earth and heaven. I've got here a list of a couple more church fathers who held a non-literal interpretation, but it appears I've already gone over my time limit for this part of my opening speech. So in conclusion, and listen very carefully:


Evidence that the church fathers did not agree in their interpreation of the Genesis creation days as a six-24 days meets with harsh reaction from many young-earth creationist leaders. They either accuse the scholar of compromise with Greek philosophy or dismiss their entire body of work because of "error" in some point of their doctrine.

Having devoted their lives to refuting false teachers within the church and to challenging secular society's morals, practices, and teachings, they hardly deserve to be labelled compromisers. Some like Justin, Irenaeus (Ear Ann Eye Uss), and Origen were tortured or martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ. They were also free of scientific bias. It cannot be argued that these scholars were free of today's modern ideas such as Darwinism. The dismissal of an early scholar's work based on a point of doctrine seems unwarranted. There is no indication that they sharply debated the issue or took a dogmatic stance. Instead, they charitably tolerated a diversity of views. Missing are the emotional insults tossed at those who disagreed with their views. I'd love to spend more time on this topic, and I will add this: For those young-earth creationists who center their case for a young earth on a historical examination of the church father's interpretations or church creeds, Kenneth Samples, professor of theology and philosophy, noted that Christianity's greatest thinkers allowed for a diversity of views on the nature and duration of the creation days. Writing: "From the time of the church fathers, through the Reformation, and up to the present, various views have prevailed, some more broadly represented than others, but none was ever considered the definitive, or the only, orthodox biblical position. But I will now get into my main arguments for a day-age interpretation.