Hi Lysa
The timeline of the bible is accurate and correct I believe.
You have to remember when it comes to Eygptian timeline you are talking about something that is not a precise science.
I take the bible timeline as having authority and the secular timeline as being incorrect.
After all the same people who date the Egyptian timeline are the ones who date the earth to be millons of years old and who work from that premise.You cant get away from it to come to a conclusion that Genesis is not literal and accurate the christian has to believe in non christian secular atheists for the most part.
The question is a where you start with the bible being authoritve or mans wisdom as being authoritive.
Like in all other issues when you take the bible as authoritive you will get the correct answer,
Yours Staff

HiTMK
Appologies i did not see that post.
I disagree with your qoute below.
Mainstream scientists(what a scientist anyway)would not change at all their attitude because their attitude has nothing to do with facts.They are non christian atheists and this belief is a doctrine from the devil.You dont deal with the spiritual at all in your discussion.You dont take into account that all religion is a work of Satan.You threat these scientists as if they were neutral,non effected when it comes to influence from Satan because of their intellect.Except in Christ nobody is immune from the work of Satan.Just because scientists dont believe in Satan doesnt mean hes not there.
What is Mainstream?only the blind leading the blind.
Mainstream is man's opinion of himself,his own puffed up CV.
When no evidence exists man says "I AM AN EXPERT" listen to me.
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Most of the best arguments against the creationist viewpoint currently being made by mainstream scientists disappear when we give up our insistence upon a 6,000 or so year old earth
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When the Holy Spirit goes to all the trouble of recording individual names ages births and deaths we know they are exactly what he says.If the bible is not an historic document accurate then it is not worth the paper it is written on
Yours Staff
The question is are "Mainstream Experts" your starting point or is the word of God the starting point?Who do you trust?

Staff,

I love bouncing these ideas around, too. Testing our knowledge. Pushing our assumptions where they bear pushing.

Without commenting on the specifics of any age of any feature of Earth, the Bible has no timeline against which to measure the ages of any feature of Earth.

Before you point to generations from Adam and their respective biblical ages, I would submit to you that the Bible itself does not offer those for the purpose of measuring time. I do not consider any scientific (so called) method that does attempt to measure the ages of things as reliable, so it is not a question of man's wisdom. Man is a presumptuous fool on his best day.

I start with Scripture. Day one and two of creation, for example, taking merely the Scripture and yielding to its authority, demonstrate periods of activity that are not possibly consistent with one day. "Yom" cannot be a 24 hour day because there was no sun on Yom 1 for the Earth to orbit or to rotate in relation to it. If you can locate the Sun on day 1, please show it with the certainty that you assert the Bible offers. In fact, I would submit that you will not even arguably find a single star until creation day 4. The Sun is a simple star. Until day 4, there is no true "day".

So, if Scripture clearly uses words and phrases that, although we typically understand them to take on our presently understood meaning, do not offer themselves as meaning what we think or how we apply those words regarding time, we cannot overdraw conclusions from them and remain faithful to sola scriptura.

I take Genesis literally. Because I do, I cannot follow you to your conclusions about time insofar as you rely on the bible for them.

It is dangerous to say the Bible is worthless if inaccurate when the basis of that accuracy is not the reliability of God but is the insistence that it speaks to something that, manifestly, it does not. It is more than He asks to attribute to God the Holy Spirit a motive for His revelation of himself (i.e., your argument that He went to great lengths to record ages, etc.) that He does not claim for Himself.

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Tim

While I would not at all venture into the idea of theistic evolution or a really old age for the earth, even when one studies the Bible in a very literal fashion, as I believe we should, one must take the text at face value and admit our perfectly polished doctrines don't always flesh out when we look at all the data.

We already know that Genesis isn't trying to tell us the full story from the get go, as it doesn't explain things such as what was happening outside the garden of Eden, or where Cain fled to after murdering Able, and the cities he went to, and why it was he was afraid of others avenging his brothers death, who did he marry, etc. It shouldn't surprise us if there are gaps in the genealogy laid out in Genesis, as we see such a phenomenon in other places in the Bible.

To bury ones head in the sand about such a thing is to prefer one's doctrine to all of the data found in the Bible. We can still hold to our doctrines, but simply admit there are things we don't have a full explanation for. Also, when taking the Bible literally, such involves understanding it in its historical, grammatical, and literary context. While we need to take secular history with a grain of salt, we also must be careful to make sure we don't impose things on the Scripture that they could never mean in that same historical context. Otherwise we are guilty of inventing fictions, and claiming something God's word never claims. The Book of Mormon does that. Let's not stoop to such a level.

God's word doesn't demand a 2400 bc flood, so we should not be trying to force such a story into the history of mankind, especially when there is ample historical record available to us at that time period to suggest there was no global flood that history gives testimony to as having happened at that time. The world seemed to exist just fine in 2400 BC. An olde date should be preferred. I like to place it a few thousand years before.

Of course, historians could be very wrong about a lot of things. But I don't see this interpretation of things that somehow contradicts or undermines the things we actually see in Scripture, not does it change or threaten what I believe about a very literal interpretation of Genesis. If anything, it enhances it, and foes not take away.

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Jimmy H

And if you are interested in it, check out this link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramids

This wiki article documents the history of the Egyptian pyramids being built between 2600 and 600 BC. Do you really believe the Bible teaches that Noah's flood really happened in 2400 BC? In all due respect, the Egyptians would beg to differ.

Before you answer, keep in mind these are the same Egyptians the Jews were freed from under Pharaoh in 1400 BC, a mere 1000 years later. Do you really believe all of Egyptian civilization formed so quickly and so powerfully after the flood, and got to monument building practically over night?

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Jimmy H

As The angelic host was being made.... and since God can see the future, he saw that Lucifer and some of the angels would rebel. That's what necessitated the creation of earth. God was going to need a prison. The Book of Psalms has a lot of references to the word prison, how God sees his prisoners. Earth has an electric fence around it too called the Van Allen radiation belt. I believe it's Isaiah that mentions that Lucifer was once in the garden of Eden, but that was long ago. That period of the earth was finally flooded with water as you read in Gen 1;2. It became void. God cleared it up as time passed and replenished the earth.

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James R Barnes

my thinking around the age of the earth is this that it was formed 6 thousand years ago but the earth was created in a mature sense rather then a young sense beacuse it needed to be ready for the occupation of Gods creations.
"which came first the chicken or the egg" the chicken has to be mature enough to produce eggs. what would have to be the age of the earth to be mature enough to maintain life. it is evolutionary thinking that all things have to start from a young perspective because it doesnt make sense otherwise in their theory. We have a God that is not bound by these laws and does what he thinks fit at the time.

At the end of the day it will always lead back to faith because science can only qualify what it can observe anything other then that is theory and theories come from a belief point. there is individual supporting evidence which can sway these theories for us personally and for me this was experiencing Jesus christ in my life and doing what he said he would do in his bible. the bible for me has the only explaination of why we are the way we are, the spirit realm, sickness and death. why we fight and love.

just my view :)

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karl rashleigh

On KingJimmy's post - this reminds me of something I once read:

"The 6000-year thesis is nowhere stated in the Bible, and apart from rather tenuous speculation it's difficult to find anything in the Bible from which to make a doctrine out of it. The 6000-year thesis has been stubbornly clung to by Creationists, but I believe this to be unnecessary as it is extraneous to the revelation of God. I personally have no opinion on the thesis, as the Bible says nothing about it and as the debate is fairly polarised.

It is also worth noting, although this may seem a triviality given the previous paragraph, the 6000 year thesis is based on the premise that the geneologies in the Bible are complete, ie Adam was the father of Seth, Seth was the father of Enoch etc. While it is clear from the accounts that Adam was the biological father of Seth, there have been conjectures that the words translated as 'the father of' may also be understood as meaning 'the ancestor of'. An example would be in the geneology of Jesus in Matthew, where Matthew credits Jehoram as being the father of Uzziah, when in fact Jehoram's son was Ahaziah, an ancestor by several generations of Uzziah.

What does this all mean? Possibly that the 6000-year thesis (a figure arrived at by adding up the lifespans of those in the geneologies) may be flawed. But all the same, that doesn't really matter as there is little doctrinal basis in Scripture for the proposition."

"So, as the Bible is silent, so am I."


Separately, he also wrote:

"The whole reason why the scientific creationism movement got off the ground is that people believed that they had to prove Creation scientifically true in order for God to exist. It is because understanding has such a high premium placed on it by our society."

Hi Yuehan,
Firstly Creationists who believe in a young earth are not clinging to anything or are being stubborn as if they know they are wrong but wont admit it.
In regards to Seth all the main bibles translate "father" rather than "anscestor" a big jump that non young earth believers may also be said to "cling" too.
Even if we took the view than their are flaws the flaws would not add up to a hill of beans.
The "Doctrine" of an old Earth ie 20'000 yrs would not be even discussed except that evolutionists preach about billions of years and in an attempt to look "reasonable" to the world's view we try to Marry up the two.
The bible clearly says that from the Start Satan has been making up "doctrines" and Paul calls them "doctrines of demons".
The Doctrine of Millons and Billions is one of these Doctrines and although christians might not believe in million/billions the doctrine influences them to believe an older age of 10's of thousands.So the doctrine stems not from reasonable scientific people insulated from Satan but from the evolutionary fathers,
yours staff

Quote: "It is because understanding has such a high premium placed on it by our society."

This is true-- I would probably be a lot better off if I didn't try to understand everything!

This issue regarding the age of the earth is more of an interesting thing to me than something I lose sleep over. I really don't believe it is terribly doctrinally significant and I certainly do not believe that the authority of scripture stands or falls on this issue.

That is what worries me about the Ken Hams-- they are so very invested in this that I am concerned what they will do as science advances and we can someday know how to date things with certainty. I have little doubt that day will one day come (if the earth lasts that long). of course, he might be proven right!

Someone earlier mentioned how the current dating methods (radioisotopes etc) and unreliable. I agree to a point. But when all of them point to a very old earth it is somewhat difficult to say they are all plain wrong.

When it comes to the flood, don't forget about the Epic of Gilgamesh which very closely parallels the biblical account, yet pre-dates the birth of Moses by several hundred years- to perhaps 2100 BC. Ussher thought Moses was born around 1450 BC. The point is that this would seem to necessitate pushing the probable date for the flood back from 2400 BC

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Todd