Do You Want To Know How Old The Earth Is?

A presentation by John Lennox at Rice University.

Do you want to know how old the Earth is?

It’s quite a bit older than me.

So let’s have a look at this because it bothers many people, and I want to say, unnecessarily so.

I gave a speech at my old school two weeks ago, and my old school was founded by an archbishop and a mathematician.

The archbishop’s name was Usher, and he calculated the age of the earth. He wrote a famous letter to the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, and he said [with Lennox’s poetic license], “Dear Sir, I have worked out that Adam was born at 9:00 a.m., on the 5th of October 4004 BC. I am sorry that I cannot give any more precise information than that.” And this has gone down in history as Archbishop Usher’s young Earth chronology.

I was standing beside his successor, who is the chairman of the governors of my school, and I turned to him and said, “Sir, Usher was a historian and so are you.” Now Usher is interesting because many people laugh at his calculation; what they don’t know is that both Newton and Kepler made an almost similar calculation at that time. We never hear of that. I said to the Archbishop, “Your Grace, I suspect you probably reckon the Earth and the universe are by seven orders of magnitude older than that. But, whatever the answer to the question is, we must not forget that he got one thing absolutely right and that is there was a creation.”

Now the most important thing about this is not when it happened, not even how it happened, but that it happened. And you know, it took centuries before people came to comprehend this.

I was at Cambridge in the ‘60s, not 1860s, the 1960s, when the first evidence, really strong evidence from the microwave background came in, that the universe was a finite age.

Do you know, and many people today don’t know, that the scientific establishment resisted that concept fiercely? The chief editor of Nature, the world’s most famous scientific magazine at the time, a man called Maddox, said, “We shouldn’t go down this line, that there was a creation at a finite time in the past. It gives too much leverage to people that believe in the Bible.” One of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century was resisted because it paralleled what Scripture said.

In the 21st century, I was at a prestigious gathering of physicists and philosophers. I was the ‘token Christian’, and I was asked to say something about this. I got up and said something about creation.  I was heckled by a leading scientist who stopped me dead. He said, “Professor Lennox, stop! You are joking. I hope you’re joking if you suggest the Bible has anything to say to us in the 21st century.”

Wow!

I said I wasn’t joking. In fact, I said, “It’s interesting, of course, that the Bible isn’t a textbook of science. I don’t teach algebra from Leviticus, and I never will. But, it does talk in certain places about exactly the same physical universe that scientists study.”

“In the beginning, God created the very heavens and earth that you study. Not only that but it’s also got the idea, which is very new in terms of science, that creation is finite backwards in time. A huge amount of mathematical work has been done in this regard, and it is compelling.”

“Now,” I said, “I’m going to make a suggestion. If you scientists had not been so wedded to Aristotle, and his eternal universe, you might just have looked more carefully to see if there was evidence of a finite age of the universe long before you did.”

And, of course, that was a pretty devastating thing to say, but it’s hugely important. It’s the fact of creation that it is finite in time backwards.

Does the Bible say anything about that? No, of course not, but you can interpret the Bible as saying something about it.

So, I want to say something about this. That question would not have been asked if we had had this evening lecture 500 years ago. Not once, let alone three times. But I will tell you what question would have been asked three times: somebody would have stood up and said, “Dr. Lennox, Dr. Tour, what are we to make about this crazy chap in Italy, claiming that the earth moves? When the Bible says it doesn’t. “The earth is fixed on pillars”, says the Psalms, “so that it should not be moved.” And this crazy chap is saying it does move. Help us to really get a grip of the fact that the earth doesn’t move.”

Just by a show of hands, how many of you, this audience, believe the earth doesn’t move against the background of the fixed stars?

Goodness, I thought I was in a place with some people who believe the Bible!

Now this is very interesting, you see. You do believe that the earth moves and yet the Bible says it doesn’t. How did this happen?

It happened because Galileo was the first ‘moving earther’, and everybody else was a ‘fixed to earther’ – the philosophers, the Aristotelians, plus the Catholic Church. Then there were one or two more ‘moving earthers’, as they began to be convinced, and now the whole lot of you are ‘moving earthers’.

But you haven’t necessarily given up your conviction that the Bible is true. Why?

We can see that when the Bible speaks about the earth being fixed, it’s not talking about being geometrically or spatially fixed; it’s talking about something much deeper. And that is stability. The Bible refers to this; the harvester depends on fixed things.

The stability of the earth in its orbit, for example, depends on gas giants, the inverse square law of gravity, and everything else; and we’re happy with that. But for centuries it was difficult.

Now come with me if you can. It seems to me a very similar thing is happening with your question. You can believe if you want, that the Bible says the earth doesn’t move, you can believe it. But you don’t have to.

Now I want to argue, briefly, that you can believe that the earth is young, and the universe is young, but you don’t have to because the Bible doesn’t claim it.

Now let me try and establish that briefly.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and then you have a sequence of days. Remember that? Six days. The seventh day is the day of rest.

Now here’s the interesting thing, in the Hebrew language, the first statement, “In the beginning”, or “the heavens and the earth” and “the earth was this and that”, is made in one Hebrew past tense. Then the tense changes to another past tense for the description of the days; you can establish that.

I asked, to be fair, the professor of Hebrew at Oxford and the Professor at Cambridge, and they agreed, amazingly. This is what it says, but what does that mean?

Well, Professor Jack Collins, who was a scientist and is now the chief translator for the English Standard Version of the Bible, which you may be aware of, says, I quote, “It means that the first statement occurs at an indefinite period before the second.”

What does the Bible say about the age of the universe and the earth? Absolutely nothing. So why fight about it, folks?

I meet people, not so many in the UK and Europe, but I do meet people who’ve been put off the gospel because they say there is a flat-out contradiction, but there isn’t in what the Bible says. There is only a contradiction between it and the dating given by cosmology these days, on the basis of certain interpretations of the Bible.

Now, I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. I don’t believe that every interpretation of it is, and we have to separate between those two things. So, linguistically, it seems very clear that we cannot be dogmatic here.

Now there’s a lot more to be said, but people say look, the word [Hebrew word] ‘ha yom’[1] means a day at 24-hour day and that’s the finish of it.

You see, what I’ve just told you is quite subtle because it means that no matter what you think the days are, the universe isn’t young because its creation occurred an indefinite period before the days. So, the interpretation of days is not affected by the question of its age.

Now let’s come to the days. I’m amazed, frankly, that people don’t read this text. What’s the first mention of day in Genesis 1? “And God called the light day and the darkness he called night.” How long was that day? It certainly was not 24 hours. How many hours is it at the equator? Twelve. [The earth did not yet exist] So, where does this insistence come from that every time the Bible uses the word day, it’s 24 hours when the very first one isn’t?

Now let’s look at the second one, “And there was evening and morning, the first day.” That is usually taken to be, although there is some controversy about it, as the Hebrew way of saying, a normal 24-hour day. That’s the second meaning of ‘day’.

Now we come to the third meeting of ‘day’, “And God rested on the seventh day.” Have you noticed there’s no formula, “And there was evening and morning a seventh day.”? Why is that? Right from the early centuries of Christianity, and Jewish interpreters also, understood that to mean, that God is still resting from creating. When did God start creating again? He never did, so that Shabbat Day, the seventh day, is still going on! That’s a pretty long day, isn’t it? And it’s in the text.

So that’s three meanings for the word day.

Now we come to the fourth one. There are only one hundred words in this text. Chapter 2, verse four of Genesis says, “When God created the heavens and the earth…”, that’s what the English translation says. The Hebrew doesn’t. It says, “In the day God created.” What day was that? Tuesday or Thursday? No. You know as well as I do, you’ve heard people say, as they often say today, “Back in the day”. You know that expression? What day was that? Sunday or Wednesday? No. If I say to you, “In my younger days at Cambridge, you had to be back in your college at 10:00 at night.”, you would never say “What day was that?”, because my ‘younger days’ are an indefinite period of time in the past.

So, there are four meanings. For the same word in a text of 100 words. What does that tell me? “Be very careful.” But you need to be even more careful, because if you read most English translations, they say “the first day”, “the second day”. That’s not what the Hebrew text says. Hebrew has a definite article, “ha”.  “Ha yom”, the day, is not used for the first five.

Isn’t that interesting? The translators I’ve spoken to, professors of Hebrew, never noticed it. The definite article is only used on days six and seven, the 6th day, the 7th day. They’re special. the 6th day God created human beings in His image. On the 7^th He rested. But actually, what it says is:

day one, (or, a first day)

day two, (or, a second day)

day three, (or, a third day)

day four, (or, a fourth day)

day five,  (or, a fifth day)

the sixth day,

the seventh day.

Now if you just had the text (as listed), what would you deduce logically? Well, you could say those are the six days of an ‘Earth week’. Are they? Necessarily? But suppose they were days of the sort that are of evenings and mornings, Day one, God created something, day two, God created something more. When is day two? How long after day one? The text doesn’t say. It’s a ‘creation day’. Day three?

So, you see the text itself, once you begin to think about it, opens up all kinds of possibilities. So I wouldn’t be too dogmatic about it. The thing to emphasize, though, is what these days are telling you, and it’s vitally important!

“And God said…” is repeated all the time.

This is a word-based universe that is the exact opposite of a random, unguided, evolutionary process, and it’s hugely important because this is the information age. Genesis, and John’s Gospel which packs it together in the brilliant statement, “In the beginning was the Word.”

The word is primary. The material universe is derivative.

“In the beginning was the Word.” That is, the Word already was. The Word, God, is eternal.

Now unfortunately the translators have not been strict enough. “All things were made by Him.” That is true, but it is not what it says. “All things came to be through Him.” It’s an existence statement. So, you’ve got the word which is primary and the material universe which is derivative. The basic naturalism, that we were being asked about earlier, is the exact opposite. The material universe is primary. Naturalists say that life, mind, and the idea of God, are derivative. There is no real God – the exact opposite.

And what is so important is this, that this information age we’ve come to know has come to the point where, in science, people recognize that information is, ‘a quantity irreducible to physics and chemistry’. And that’s hugely important. The Bible had seen that centuries ago. That’s one of the evidences to me, that although Scripture says very little about how God did it, it does enough to say it fits with everything we understand.

[1] The Hebrew word יום (yom, Strong’s #3117) means a “day,” but not specifically a twenty-four hour period, but instead more generically like in “a day that something occurs.” An example would be “a day of the month” (Genesis 8:4), “in that day Yahweh made a covenant” (Genesis 15:18) and “until the day” (Genesis 19:37). This word can also refer to the light part of the day in contrast to night (see Genesis 1:5 and Exodus 13:21), but the related word יומם (yomam, Strong’s #3119) specifically means “daytime” as in Job 5:14. This word can be used for a time, age or season, but that is only when this word is in the plural form, which is ימים (yamim), and should simply be translated as “days” and not time, age or season, as this can lead to incorrect interpretations of the text. The word היום (hayom) is the word יום (yom) with the prefix ה (ha) added and it literally means “the day,” but we would translate it as “today.”