Adam, Apologetics, and the Age of the Earth

What Is the Goal of Christian Apologetics with Respect to Origins?

It seems to me that the goal of many leading Christian apologists is simply to give solid reasons for believing in the existence of God. This implies that the only enemy to fight is atheism. But while atheism is certainly a serious foe of Christianity, that is not the only enemy from the perspective of biblical apologetics. The important apologetic text of 1 Peter 3:15 tells us that we each need to “honor Christ the Lord as holy” in our hearts and be ready always to give a defense (an apologetic) “for the hope that is in [us].”

That means that our apologetics must lead to Christ and must defend the truth of the Bible, which is the source of information about Christ, our Lord and Savior. And that means that we must defend biblical truth at whatever points its veracity and authority are being attacked.

Now Jesus taught that the whole of Scripture, beginning with Moses (i.e., Genesis), bears witness to him and his work of redemption (Luke 24:27, 44). The whole Bible is his Word. And Genesis provides us with the foundation of the gospel—it explains why Jesus had to become a man to be our redeemer. It reveals that an initially “very good” creation was ruined by God’s curse because of Adam’s sin, a curse that affected the whole creation (Genesis 3:14–19, 5:29; Romans 5:12, 8:18–25). We cannot reject the literal history of Genesis 1–11 without undermining the gospel. If those chapters are mythical or symbolic, then Jesus died for a mythological or symbolic problem and is offering sinners a mythological and symbolic hope.

We cannot reject the literal history of Genesis 1–11 without undermining the gospel.

Genesis 1–11 is undoubtedly the most attacked portion of the Bible over the last 200 years. And it has been under attack not only by Bible-hating skeptics but also by many well-intentioned, sincere, and godly Christian leaders and scholars who have mistakenly accepted evolution and/or millions of years as proven scientific fact. So Christian apologists must defend the literal historical truth of Genesis if they wish to be faithful to the biblical task of apologetics. It is not enough to defend the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, the reality of miracles in the Bible, or even the historicity of a literal Adam. We must defend all the truth of God’s Word.

Is the Earth Old Since Human and Dinosaur Fossils Aren’t Found Together?

A second question, which I often hear when I’m out lecturing in churches, is this: If Adam were really created on the sixth day of history only a few thousand years ago, as Genesis clearly teaches and as Jesus and the apostles clearly believed,1 how do we explain the fact that there are no humans in the fossil record with the dinosaurs or deeper with the trilobites, which supposedly lived hundreds of millions of years ago?

In the early nineteenth century, the apparent lack of human fossils in most of the sedimentary rock layers (except those layers near the top of the “geological column”) was a major reason why most Christians quickly rejected the roughly 6,000-year-old age of the creation that had been accepted as clear biblical teaching by most Christians for the previous 18 centuries. Old-earth proponents at that time insisted that the rock layers containing extinct creatures had to have been formed long before God created man.

In those early decades of the nineteenth century, a number of Christian authors, who collectively became known as the “scriptural geologists” and who were young-earth creationists, contended that there was indeed evidence of human fossils with extinct creatures in lower rock layers but that the evidence had been either ignored or misinterpreted by those who were advocating millions of years in earth history. Old-earth geologists ignored or dismissed (as being uninformed) this evidence and the scriptural geologists’ many other geological and biblical arguments. By 1850, most of the church had rejected the historically orthodox young-earth view.2

Young-earth creationists contended that there was indeed evidence of human fossils with extinct creatures in lower rock layers.

Once the church had compromised with millions of years, it had very little defense when Darwin’s theory of evolution was published in 1859.

Darwin’s friend Charles Lyell was the champion of uniformitarian geology and the most influential man in persuading the church to completely reject the global flood and biblical timescale. But in 1863, he revisited some of the evidence presented in the early nineteenth century for the contemporary existence of man and extinct creatures.3 While the scriptural geologists had used this evidence decades earlier to argue against the great antiquity of the earth, Lyell now used the same evidence to “prove” the great antiquity of man (well beyond the biblical chronology).

In addition, several scriptural geologists emphasized that the argument for the nonexistence of man (or indeed any other creatures) in earlier times, based on the absence of fossil evidence, was geologically and philosophically unsound. Today, there is much geological evidence that this argument still is invalid. Many examples can be given to show that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.4 Therefore, the fact that we don’t find humans with dinosaurs or trilobites in the rock record doesn’t mean that humans didn’t live at the same time as those creatures.

The Progression of Compromise

Soon after Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), many in the church were not only accepting evolution as the explanation for the origin of plants and animals, but many also began to reject the supernatural creation of Adam from dust and Eve from his rib. By the 1880s, the then-editor of a Christian journal estimated that “perhaps a quarter, perhaps a half of the educated ministers in our leading Evangelical denominations” believed “that the story of the creation and fall of man, told in Genesis, is no more the record of actual occurrences than is the parable of the Prodigal Son.”5

So here is the progression of compromise over the past 200 years. First, the church accepted that the earth is millions of years old, insisted that plants and animals were supernaturally created (not evolved), and believed that Adam was created supernaturally by God about 6,000 years ago. Then came the view that the earth is old and animals and plants evolved over millions of years, but Adam was created by God about 6,000 years ago. Later, many Christians insisted that Adam was supernaturally created but long before 6,000 years ago. Others said that Adam’s body evolved from some lower animal, which changed into a human by the infusion of the divine image. Now, we have professing Christians who believe that Adam never existed as an individual but rather mankind evolved spiritually and physically from some apelike creatures over the course of thousands of years.

The church’s compromise with millions of years opened the door to further compromise of biblical truth.

The church’s compromise with millions of years opened the door to further compromise of biblical truth over the next two centuries, including the current growing denial of a literal Adam and a literal fall. Once the slippery slide started on the age of the earth, there was no stopping the theological compromise, except with those who returned to the supreme authority of Scripture and believed God rather than the majority of scientists. The claim of millions of years is the foundation to this current battle about Adam. We can’t just contend for a literal Adam, critically important as that is. We must also contend for a young earth because the same Word of God that teaches a literal Adam and literal fall also teaches that the whole creation is only a little more than 6,000 years old.