The Real Issue When Discussing the Age of the Earth

I’d like to offer a little bit of perspective on the issue of the age of the earth for my fellow Christians who hold to the Bible’s inerrancy. The age of the earth is an important theological issue, but it isn’t THE issue.

This is in the context of returning over the weekend from the Cross-Examined Instructor Academy (offers training in how to deliver apologetic presentations; I highly recommend it!) held once a year in Charlotte, NC on Southern Evangelical Seminary’s campus.

We heard from one of the leaders of the intelligent design movement, Dr. William Dembski. For those who don’t know, intelligent design calls into question the naturalism embedded in how the biological sciences are studied and asks instead if the biological structures have originated from intelligent design. Intelligent design deliberately leaves the theological questions (who’s the designer) to others to answer. Dr. Dembski gave a pretty sobering assessment of the current state of the intelligent design movement (one may say somewhat depressing). He lamented how intelligent design scientists get attacked from multiple sides.

On one side, Darwinists attack them for even calling into question neo-Darwinism (denying them jobs in the university and preventing their research to make it into mainstream science journals). He mentioned several science papers that were submitted by proponents of intelligent design that were rejected simply because of who wrote it and not based upon any scientific flaws in the research. The denial of jobs also occurs in Christian universities where theistic evolution is the norm in the biological sciences. There tends to be a very unfriendly atmosphere from the biology departments to intelligent design on Christian universities.  Exhibit A:  Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University.

On the other side, well-meaning but misguided Christians attack design theorists for not being “Biblical” enough. Dr. Dembski (teaches at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) talked about how just about every month, his seminary president has to defend him against Christians who call for his ouster because he doesn’t believe in a young earth. This despite him agreeing with the Baptist Faith and Message (a doctrinal statement for Southern Baptists) as well as holding to biblical inerrancy, the traditional theory of Moses authoring the Pentateuch, salvation by grace, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, etc. Why is there this tendency for some Christians to try to out-conservative each other such that they want to fire people who don’t exactly line up with their little list of non-essentials like the age of the earth?

The clincher of his talk in my mind was this: Christians are willing to raise close to $30 million to set up a Creation Museum in Kentucky but they are unwilling to support the scientific research activities of intelligent design labs like the Biologic Institute or the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. There is real scientific research going on from these labs, but unlike a fancy Creation Museum, scientific research is painstakingly slow. Are they willing to donate $30 million here? But after 15 years in the intelligent design movement, there is still no intelligent design lab attached to even a major Christian university like Baylor. He ended with this observation: If we are going to do battle in the arena of ideas, shouldn’t we concentrate our intellectual forces on a common opponent and not on each other?

And that, to me, is the real issue.