Why Is the Age of the Earth an Important Issue? Part 2

To continue last week's post with answer from The New Answers Book 1 from Answers in Genesis...

6.  Jesus was a young earth creationist.  Jesus consistently treated the miracle accounts of the Old Testament as straightforward, truthful, historical accounts (e.g. creation of Adam, Noah and the Flood, Lot and his wife in Sodom, Moses and the manna, and Jonah in the fish).  He continually affirmed the authority of Scripture over men's ideas and traditions (Matthew 15:1-9).  In Mark 10:6 we have the clearest (but not the only) statement showing that Jesus was a young-earth creationist.  He teaches that Adam and Eve were made at the "beginning of creation," not billions of years after the beginning, as would be the case if the universe were really billions of years old.  So, if Jesus was a young-earth creationist, then how can His faithful followers have any other view?

7.  Belief in millions of years undermines the Bible's teaching on death and on the character of God.  Genesis 1 says six times that God called the creation "good," and when He finished creation on Day 6, He called everything "very good."  Man and animals and birds were originally vegetarian (Gen. 1:29-30, plants are not "living creatures," as people and animals are, according to Scripture). But Adam and Eve sinned, resulting in the judgment of God on the whole creation.  Instantly Adam and Eve died spiritually, and after God's curse they began to die physically.  The serpent and Eve were changed physically and the ground itself was cursed (Genesis 3:14-19).  The whole creation now groans in bondage to corruption, waiting for the final redemption of Christians (Romans 8:19-25) when we will see the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21; Colossians 1:20) to a state similar to the pre-Fall world, when there will be no more carnivorous behavior (Isaiah 11:6-9) and no disease, suffering, or death (Revelation 21:3-5) because there will be no more Curse (Revelation 22:3).  To accept millions of years of animal death before the creation and Fall of man contradicts and destroys the Bible's teaching on death and the full redemptive work of Christ.  It also makes God into a bumbling, cruel creator who uses (or can't prevent) disease, natural disasters, and extinctions to mar His creative work, without any moral cause, but still calls it all "very good."

8. The idea of millions of years did not come from the scientific facts.  This idea of long ages was developed by deistic and atheistic geologists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  These men used anti-biblical philosophical and religious assumptions to interpret the geological observations in a way that plainly contradicted the biblical account of creation, the Flood, and the age of the earth.  Most church leaders and scholars quickly compromised using the gap theory, day-age view, local flood view, etc. to try to fit "deep time" into the Bible.  But they did not understand the geological arguments and they did not defend their views by careful Bible study.  The "deep time" idea flows out of naturalistic assumptions, not scientific observations.


9.  Radiometric dating methods do not prove millions of years.  Radiometric dating was not developed until the early twentieth century, by which time virtually the whole world had already accepted the millions of years (idea).  For many years creation scientists have cited numerous examples in the published scientific literature of these dating methods clearly giving erroneous dates (e.g., a date of millions of years for lava flows that occurred in the past few hundred years or even decades).  In recent years creationists in the RATE project have done experimental, theoretical, and field research to uncover more such evidence (e.g., diamonds and coal, which the evolutionists say are millions of years old, were dated by carbon-14 to be only thousands of years old) and to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years to thousands of years, confirming the Bible.


Conclusion
     These are just some of the reasons why we believe that the Bible is giving us the true history of the world.  God's Word must be the final authority on all matters about which it speaks--not just the moral and spiritual matters, but also its teachings that bear on history, archaeology, and science.
     What is at stake here is the authority of Scripture, the character of God, the doctrine of death, and the very foundation of the gospel.  If the early chapters of Genesis are not true literal history, then faith in the rest of the Bible is undermined, including its teaching about salvation and morality. 


I think that pretty much lays out exactly why the first chapters in the Bible (and our belief in them) are significant.  What I don't understand is why people who call themselves believers put more faith in scientists than in God's Word.