In this episode, I take on one of the most heated debates inside the church — young earth creationism versus old earth creationism — and try to do something that does not happen nearly enough: lay out both positions fairly. I walk through what each view actually claims, survey where the major Christian denominations land, and then answer the question that really matters. Does what you believe about the age of the earth affect your salvation? Drawing from 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, Romans 10:9, and Ephesians 2:8–9, the answer is clear. And it might just change how you hold this conversation the next time it comes up.

Interesting Links:

• Urban, T. (2015, December). The tail end. Wait But Why.
• Morris, H. M. (1976). The genesis record: A scientific and devotional commentary on the book of beginnings. Baker Books.
• Carson, D. A. (1996). The gagging of God: Christianity confronts pluralism. Zondervan.
• Keller, T. (2012). Center church: Doing balanced, gospel-centered ministry in your city. Dutton.
• Whitcomb, J. C., & Morris, H. M. (1961). The genesis flood: The biblical record and its scientific implications. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing.
• Walton, J. H. (2009). The lost world of Genesis one: Ancient cosmology and the origins debate. IVP Academic.
• Naturalis Historia. (2024, December 26). Creation together: Building bridges across the origins divide.
• The Gospel Coalition. (n.d.). Why Christians should not divide over the age of the earth.
• Communion Church. (2025, June 4). Young earth creationism.
• BioLogos. (n.d.). The Bible, rocks, and time: Christians and an old earth.
• Institute for Creation Research. (n.d.). Is belief in the young earth necessary to be a Christian?
• National Center for Science Education. (n.d.). Just how many young-earth creationists are there in the U.S.?
• Pew Research Center. (2019). The evolution of Pew Research Center's survey questions about the origins and development of life on earth.
• OldEarth.org. (n.d.). Church denominations, creation science.
• Gallup. (2024). Majority still credits God for humankind, but not creationism.

References to Bible Verses:

Genesis 1:31; Romans 5:12; Psalm 90:4; 1 Corinthians 15:3–4; Romans 10:9; Ephesians 2:8–9; Romans 14:1, 19; Ephesians 4:3

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Thank you for listening and welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Jason McConnell. Picture this, two Christians standing in a church foyer after Sunday service. Both of them love Jesus. Both of them read the same Bible. Both of them pray, serve, give, and share the gospel. The only difference is that one of them believes God created the universe in six literal 24-hour days, roughly 6,000 years ago, and the other believes the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.

And here is the question: Are those two people going to spend eternity in different places because of it? That's what today's episode is about. We are gonna lay out both positions, Young Earth Creationism and Old Earth Creationism, fairly and honestly. We are gonna look at where the major Christian traditions and denominations actually land on this, and then we are gonna answer the central question head-on.

Does what you believe about the age of the Earth have any bearing on your salvation? And I think you're gonna find the answer both clarifying and freeing. And if you have ever been in a room where there is this debate and it's turned ugly or felt like you had to pick a theological team on something the gospel never actually asked you to settle, I hope this episode gives you some breathing room.

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Now, before I jump into today's topic, I wanna share something personal. Now, my daughter's turning 16 in a couple of months, and lately I've found myself just amazed at how fast time has gone. And I came across an article recently that quoted an author and blogger, Tim Urban, who said something that kinda stopped me in my tracks.

He wrote that once you move out of your parents' house, you have already spent about 90% of the total time you will ever spend with them in your lifetime. And I had to sit with that for a minute. I went looking for more data because that felt a little too sharp to be true, uh, but it checked out. By age 12, roughly 75% of your lifetime shared with your parents is already behind you.

And after about age 18, you will spend somewhere between 5 and 10% of the rest of your life in the same room as the people who raised you Now, as a parent, that kind of broke my heart a little bit. But I sat with it a little bit longer, and I came to something I guess you could call peace about it.

Because the goal of parenting is not to be needed forever. If you do your job well, your children will grow into people who can stand on their own. The painful outcome of good parenting is that one day your kid does not need you the way they once did, and that's actually a good thing, even when it's hard to feel.

So if you're a mom or dad listening to this podcast, please treasure those years. That 90% goes faster than anyone warns you about.

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And here's why I'm bringing this up right before a debate about the age of the Earth. Time is limited. Attention is limited, and the older I get, the more I find myself asking, "Where am I spending that time?"

And there are things in the Christian life that are absolutely worth every ounce of conviction and energy you have, and there are things worth a healthy conversation over coffee that should never be worth a broken friendship or a fractured church. And today, I think we're gonna try to figure out which category the creation debate actually belongs in.

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So that said, let me set the stage for where this debate actually comes from. The question of how to read Genesis one is nothing new. It has been in the church for a very long time. Augustine of Hippo, one of the more important theologians in Christian history, wrote in the early four hundreds that Christians should be careful about making dogmatic claims about the physical world based on Genesis.

His concern was rather practical. When believers insist on a reading the text cannot bear, and the science or reason disagrees with that claim, the unbeliever does not just reject the scientific point, they reject the faith behind it. And that's a warning that's fifteen centuries old, and it kinda feels like we're still learning it.

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Now, the modern young earth creationist movement, as most of us know it today, is actually a relatively recent development. Before the nineteen sixties, most evangelical pastors and seminary professors, including those inside of the Southern Baptist Convention, held to old Earth positions. The common assumption that young Earth creationism is simply what faithful Christians have always believed is not really supported by the historical records.

The modern movement was largely shaped by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, who published a landmark book that called-- that was called The Genesis Flood in, in nineteen sixty-one. That book became kind of the founding document of modern young Earth creationism, and it shifted evangelical opinion dramatically over the following decades.

Now, that's history that's kind of important because it tells us a developing conversation is happening, not a closed one. And here's why that matters today in a, in very practical terms. So check it out.

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A Gallup survey conducted in May of twenty twenty-four found that thirty-seven percent of Americans believed or believe that God created humans in their present form within the last ten thousand years.

That's the lowest number Gallup has recorded in four decades of tracking this question. It's actually down from forty-seven percent just twelve years earlier in twenty twelve. So then the needle is moving, and it's moving inside the church, not just outside the church. Now, what's more concerning is a pattern the organization BioLogos has documented over many years of working with Christians at the intersection of faith and science.

Young people who are raised in homes where young earth creationism is presented as the only faithful option and who later encounter strong scientific evidence for an old earth, they sometimes walk away from the faith entirely. Not because old earth beliefs contradict the gospel, but because they were taught the two were inseparable.

They faced a false choice the gospel never actually gave them, and they chose the direction that felt more honest. And that is a pastoral crisis that's worth taking seriously, and it begins with our category error about what the Christian faith actually requires.

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So let us look at what is actually on the table here, starting with both positions Young Earth creationism, um, some call it YEC for short, holds that Genesis one and two are historical narrative describing six literal twenty-four-hour days of creation.

Now, based on biblical genealogies and the internal timeline of scripture, young earth creationists place the age of the Earth somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand years old. Now, young Earth creationists also hold that the global flood described in Genesis six through nine is the primary explanation for most of the geological features we observe in the world today.

The, the fossil records, rock s- uh, rock strata, strata, uh, canyon formations, all of that stuff. Where mainstream science attributes those features to billions of years of gradual pro- procession, now YEC contributes them to the catastrophic force of the worldwide flood instead of that gradual procession.

Now, one of the more serious the- theological arguments YEC makes has to do with death. Now, Genesis one verse thirty-one says, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day." Okay, and then Romans five twelve tells us, "Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin."

Now, YEC asks a pointed question: If the Earth is billions of years old and animals were dying for millions of years before Adam and Eve ever sinned, what does that do to the biblical framework connecting death to the Fall? And it's really-- it's not a frivolous question. It's a real theological concern, and it, it deserves some real theological answers.

I'm not gonna go that deep today, but it is worth a theological conversation about that. Now, the modern YEC movement is largely an American evangelical phenomenon. Answers in Genesis fou- uh, founded by Ken Ham, is probably one of the most prominent institutional voices today operating the creationa, uh, Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in Kentucky.

Now, Ken Ham has built an entire ministry around a similar argument. Now, their position is internally coherent. They read the Bible a certain way, they follow that reading to its conclusion, and they hold it with conviction. Now, I want you to notice this, though. You do not have to agree with Y- Young Earth to understand why sincere, scripture-loving Christians hold onto it.

Dismissing these beliefs as anti-intellectual or scientifically ignorant kinda misses the point. They are applying a specific way of reading scripture to the biblical text. Now, the disagreement at its core is more about hermeneutics first and science second.

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I mean, that's Young Earth in a nutshell, but let's talk about Old Earth creationism, or OEC, as some call it.

I- it's not really one single position. It's kind of an umbrella covering of several distinct views, all of which share the conviction that the universe is billions of years old, and the, that Genesis does not require otherwise. Now, day age creationism holds that days of Genesis represent long epochs rather than 24-hour periods, a- and the Hebrew word translated as day in Genesis I is yom.

And it's worth knowing that yom in the Old Testament can literally mean 24-hour day, a general period of time, or a long historical era, depending on the context. Psalms 90:4 says, "A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by or like a watch in the night." So the Hebrew language itself leaves room for interpretation here.

The framework hypothesis takes a different approach. It argues that Genesis I is structured as a literary framework designed to convey theological truth about God as a creator, not to provide a sequential scientific chronology. Scholars like Meredith Kline and Henry, uh, Blocher developed this new... th- have developed this view extensively.

It does not make Genesis less true. It argues that Genesis is trying to accomplish Something different. It's, it's communicating who God is and what creation is for, not providing a geological timeline. Now, progressive creationism, associated with astronomer and apologist Hugh Ross and his organization Reasons to Believe, holds that God intervened at specific points in natural history to create new life forms.

So the universe is old, the process took an enormous amount of time, but God was actively involved at key moments. And this is distinct from atheistic evolution in that it does not trace human life to evolutionary descent from earlier primates. So Old Testament scholar John Walton in The Lost World of Genesis, um, One, published by IVP Academ-Academic, it, it makes one of the most compelling cases for a non-literal reading of Genesis 1, in my opinion.

Now, OEC, old Earth creationists, in its various forms is not a fringe position held by Christians who do not take scripture seriously. It is actually the majority position across global Christianity. And on the death before the fall objection, the OEC response is that Romans 5:12 is talking about death spreading to all people because of sin.

It is making a theological claim about humanity's broken relationship with God, not a scientific claim about the first organisms that ever died. The passage's context is about human spiritual death and its remedy in Christ, not about animal mortality before the fall. So both sides have thought this through, and, and that's kind of the point here.

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So if you were hoping for a clean denominational consensus on this question, it doesn't exist, and it never has. A review of 50 major Christian denominations found that only two are formally hostile towards old Earth believers, certain independent fundamentalist Baptist bodies and the Assemblies of God.

44 of the 50 have no official position on OEC. That, to me, was a surprising number, and it tells you something important. Most of the global church has never required young Earth belief as a condition of fellowship. Now, the Southern Baptist Convention has no binding position on creation timelines. Now, individual churches and seminaries vary widely.

The church's posture is that scripture is true in all matter relating to human salvation, but it is not a science textbook and should not be read as one Reformed and Presbyterian traditions contain both young and old Earth voices. Westminster Seminary faculty have held OEC positions. Other Reformed bodies, particularly in the Dutch Reformed and confessional Presbyterian world, tend to emphasize young Earth readings.

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has made young Earth creationism a matter of doctrinal emphasis. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America takes a much more open posture. Uh, Anglican and Episcopal traditions are broadly OEC, with theistic evolution widely accepted among their clergy and theologians.

It is a statement about what the gospel is. Evan Albert Mohler, the conservative president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and young Earth advocate, has developed a framework he calls theological triage, and the idea is that Christian beliefs exist at a different level of importance relative to the gospel.

He places the age of the Earth as a secondary issue, important, worth having a conviction about, but not salivic. He personally prefers young Earth beliefs, but he draws that line himself, and that line is doing a lot of work. But we need to, we need to look at it directly.

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So the real question here is, does the age of the Earth affect your salvation?

And here is the answer based on my research. No, it does not. And I wanna give you that answer from scripture, not just from my personal opinion. Paul defines the gospel with some precision in First Corinthians fifteen, verses three and four. "For what I receive, I pass on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the scripture, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures."

I mean, that's the gospel. That's it. Creation timeline not included. How about Romans ten, verse nine? It states the terms of salvation, "If you declare with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." And again, the age of the Earth is not mentioned here.

Ephesians two, verses eight and nine says, "For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourself, it is a gift from God, not by works, so that no one can boast." Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ. That's what scripture requires. That's pretty much the full list.

What makes this particularly important is that even the most prominent young Earth creationist advocates acknowledge this. Dr. Todd Wood, a leading young Earth creationist research, has publicly stated that young Earth creationism stands distinct from the essential gospel message. The Institute for Creative Creation Research has made the same acknowledgment.

They believe young Earth is the correct reading of scripture. They do not believe it is salvation requirement. The people most committed to this position are drawing that line themselves.

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Now, the actual young Earth creationist argument is more careful than you need to believe in a young Earth to be saved.

The argument is actually that old Earth creationism undermines the consistency of biblical authority and opens the door to theological compromise down the road. And that's a real argument, and it's worth engaging seriously. But it is a different argument than salvation. Conflating those two is where the damage gets done Timothy Keller argued in Center Church that Christian beliefs can be sorted into three tiers.

Tier one, things essential to salvation, death, burial, resurrection of Christ, his lordship, justification by faith alone, and so on. Tier two, these are important denominational distinctives, things churches organize around, but that they do not break fellowship with all of Christianity. Tier three is a matter of personal conviction, things Christians hold with varying degrees of confidence, but that do not determine salvation or fellowship.

Now, the age of the Earth, in my opinion, belongs in tier three or at most tier two on a careful reading. When it gets treated as tier one, something goes wrong, and the BioLogos pattern is the most visible sign of what goes wrong. A young person is taught that young Earth belief is the only faithful Christian option.

They study geology, astronomy, or biology, and the evidence for old Earth accumulates. They were told old Earth belief means that you have compromised the Bible. So they face a choice between what they were taught is faithful Christianity and what the data right in front of them is saying is true. Some of them walk away from faith because of this, and this is not a failure of science.

Understand that. This is a failure of theological categories, and the church is the one that's paying the price for this.

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Now let me be clear about one thing before we finish up this episode. Having a conviction on this question is not the problem. The problem is treating a secondary conviction as if it were a primary one.

You should think through what you believe about creation and why. Read the text carefully. Study scholars on both sides. Come to a view yourself. Hold it with appropriate confidence. A- And that healthy... That's healthy Christian thinking. What is not healthy is deciding that Christians who land differently are compromised or weak in their belief or not really Christians at all.

Paul's words in Roman 14 were written about dietary laws and Sabbath observances, secondary issues of his day that were causing genuine division between Jewish and Gentile Christians, and his counsel was straightforward: "Accept the one whose faith is weak without quarreling over disputed matters." Then in verse 19 he adds, "Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification."

Ephesians 4 verse 3 pointed, "Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace." The Gospel Coalition, one of the most influential conservative evangelical networks in the world, has recommended a book called Controversy of the Ages as essential reading for pastors, parents, and professors.

Both sides articulated their positions clearly, disagreed substantively, and walked away with fellowship intact, and that's what this conversation looks like when it is, when it is handled rightly. D.A. Carson observed in The Gagging of God that one of the most serious threats to Christian witness is internal fragmentation over issues that outside observers correctly identify as secondary.

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When the church is loudest about the things scripture is quietest about, it loses the credibility to speak about the scripture, what scripture is clearest about So there's three things I wanna leave you with on this. First, know what you believe and why, but also know what category it belongs in. Second, extend to others the grace you would want to be extended to you on a question where you might be wrong or have a different opinion.

And third, reserve your sharpest, most uncompromising convictions for the person and work of Jesus Christ. That is where Scripture is most important, and that is where your conviction should be focused. And here's a final question worth sitting with. If you met a Christian who loved Jesus, shared the gospel, served their community, read the Bible faithfully, and prayed every single day, but believed the earth was four and a half billion years old, would you call them a brother or sister in Christ?

And I think the most honest Christians would say yes without much hesitation. That answer already contains the theological principle this whole episode is built on.

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Okay, so today we walk through two serious Scripture-rooted positions on the age of the earth. Young Earth Creationism reads Genesis 1 as literal historical six-day account and places the age of the earth at roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years old.

Old Earth Creationism, in its various forms, reads Genesis as a theological literature set with an ancient Near East context and holds the universe to be billions of years old. Both of these positions are held by faithful Christians who take the Bible seriously. Both have theologians, scholars, and major denominations in their court.

And both sides, to their credit, have acknowledged that this is not a salvation issue. The gospel has a definition, and Paul gave it to us plainly. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day. Salvation comes through faith in the gospel, not through holding the correct position on the age of the earth.

What saves you is not your view on geology. It is your Savior. So this week, I want to encourage you to do one thing. If you have been in a conversation about this topic that got a little sharp, or any topic that's secondary, where fellowship might have been damaged or someone's made to feel like less of a Christian for what they landed on, consider reaching back out to that person.

Not to relitigate the debate, but to make sure the relationship is intact. Because a relationship is something the gospel actually does require. Ephesians 4 verse 3 said it plainly, Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Until next time, keep loving your neighbors, dive into God's Word daily, and may the Lord bless you and keep you and fill you with His peace.

Take care, God bless, and I'll see you in the next episode.