The current debate on the age of the earth has its origins in the mid-1800s. The prophetess in the newly formed Seventh Day Adventist Church (SDA) Ellen G. White experienced trances she claimed were visions from God. One “vision” was of creation week where God “revealed” to her the seven days of Genesis 1 were in fact literal!? Her motivation for the claim was obvious− to obligate Christians to the 7th day Sabbath – the signature distinctive of the denomination.
Before White’s claim, Christian geologists speculated that Noah’s flood might have skewed the geological evidence with false appearances of deep age in the strata. White picked up on that speculation and insisted God told her it was so. After exhaustive attempts to verify their hypothesis with actual work in the field and at numerous sites, those Christian geologists were deeply disappointed to discover their speculations were wrong. They saw the strata showed extreme age consistently throughout the world.
George McCready Price, another SDA and amateur geologists in the 1920s, was devoted to E.G. White and her claims. He established the current Young Earth Reform Movement rhetoric that mutated into first day Christians in the 1960s with an engineer named Henry Morris who concluded “If the earth is old, God is lying to us.” Like many fundamentalists, Morris believed God wrote Genesis 1 as a literal description of his work at the beginning of time. Literalists read Genesis superficially not knowing or rejecting the Ancient Near Eastern context discussed at length in the book The Six-Day War in Creationism.
Understanding history often requires peering into the cluster of roots beneath any movement or idea, much like understanding a tree entails a glance below the soil.
“The Six-Day War in Creationism” by Gene Nouhan outlines the historical roots of the Young Earth Reform Movement’s mission to reform all of Christianity and the culture with six literal days and a 6000-year-old universe. They believe the age of the earth is foundational to Christianity. In the Answers in Genesis website Ken Ham says: “We need a new reformation honoring the authority of God’s Word starting with Genesis 1.” By biblical authority he means literalizing Genesis. That assertion is based on their “Young Earth Science”, not the Bible. A young earth is not God’s Word, and neither is an old earth. That is nothing but denominationalism and trying to fit science into the Bible when there was no science.
Note articles on the Answers in Genesis website like “Igniting a New Reformation”, Reforming the Church, One Pastor at a Time”, Reformation, Resistance and Renaissance”.
In this reform movement a young earth is the foundation of Christianity and has become the Young Earth Reform Gospel complete with Missionary Trips preaching the Gospel of a young earth (See the Blog, “The Christian Mission Vs. The Young Earth Reform Movement”).
The Six-Day War in Creationism, provides insights to navigate the historical journey of Young Earth Creationism, illuminating how it matured from modest beginnings to a prominent position in fundamentalist Christianity.
Young Earth Creationism’s story did not begin in a cultural void; it was birthed from a context punctuated by rapid scientific advances and vigorous debates on the nature of Earth’s geological history. The overarching narrative in YEC hinges on a literal interpretation of the creation in Genesis and banking on Noah’s flood disrupting the geological strata to such an extent as to give the illusion of deep age.
So Young Earth evangelists insist that God created the Earth and all life within six literal 24-hour days and views Earth’s age as ranging between 6,000 to 10,000 years. But acknowledging that Noah’s flood skewed the geological record is an admission that the geological record shows deep age! This artsy interpretation arose in stark contrast to the deep time scales suggested by geological, astronomical, and DNA data, which harmoniously present Earth’s origins 4.5 billion years ago.
Historically, the seeds of what would become the modern YE Reform Movement are traced to the early musings and “prophetic” trances from Ellen G. White and the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church. It is obvious that some reformists in this movement intend to impose religious conviction of 7th day Sabbath keeping onto emerging geological evidence.
As geological science progressed, it became increasingly clear that the Earth told a tale of a vastly ancient past, a narrative etched into every stratum of rock and fossil record. Early YEC proponents who ventured into the natural world to seek confirmation for their young Earth hypothesis were met not with affirmation but with a consistent and irrefutable antiquity.
These early Christian geologists fervently believed that the traces of a young Earth would reveal themselves scientifically, thus proving their theological assumptions. Despite exhaustive efforts, they faced a disheartening realization; the Earth’s strata unveiled not a young creation but one of profound age contrary to their hopes.
By the nineteenth century, the idea of flood geology was abandoned not by atheists but Christian geologists, before Darwin, such as the Reverend William Buckland and James Hutton who like many others believed God created the world with “active principles” that developed naturally. The idea that all geological strata were produced by a single flood was rejected by 1837 by Reverend Buckland who wrote: “Some have attempted to ascribe the formation of all the stratified rocks to the effects of the Mosaic Deluge; an opinion which is irreconcilable with the enormous thickness and almost infinite subdivisions of these strata”.
Yet, within any movement, adaptability is key to survival, and YEC proved to be resilient. It began to mutate, integrating varied strategies to accommodate the advancing waves of scientific understanding. In this state of flux, the YE Reform Movement embraced a scientific facade, with supporters orchestrating their own research and interpretations, constructing an alternative scientific framework to support their theological convictions, not as recognized science but for naked apologetics.
The movement’s adaptation stirred a reformation among a fringe on how scientific inquiry was engaged—a cosmology underpinned by belief and zeal that has led to persecution of Christian scholars that disagree in an attempt intimidate and cancel them from the fray. One of those scholars, the late Norman Geisler, also one of the framers of the influential Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (a highly conservative group of Evangelical scholars who omitted YEC for being irrelevant to biblical inerrancy) expressed concern when he wrote, “One is surprised at the zeal by which some Young Earthers are making their position a virtual test for evangelical orthodoxy.”[i]
The YEC narrative fused unyielding adherence to a superficial reading of scripture, rejecting biblical scholarship even though they are totally dependent on that scholarship for their Bibles being translate into their language. Supporters saw the literal six-day creation as a cornerstone, a foundation upon which to rebuild a new understanding of Christian doctrine, sublimating the life, death, resurrection of Jesus as the historical heartbeat for theological interpretation and evangelistic devotion.
Final Words
As the narrative of the Young Earth Reform Movement continues to unfold, its persistent re-examination of conviction and evidence underscore the movement’s historical journey, as presented by Gene Nouhan in “The Six-Day War In Creationism.”
[i] Norman Geisler. “A Response to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis,” by Norman Geisler, online.