Do Humans Only Occupy the Last “Six Seconds” of Time?

According to evolution, earth is 4.5 billion years old. That’s an inconceivable amount of time—no one can truly wrap their minds around a million years, let alone four and a half billion years. In order to make such a vast time frame understandable, a popular science article, using a metaphor from the US Geological Survey, described all 4.5 billion years of supposed evolutionary history as one full 24-hour day, with each second of that day representing 52,000 years, each minute 3.1 million years, and each hour 187.5 million years.

So what does this mean?

Well, according to the article:

• Earth forms at midnight.
• Life emerges at 4:16 a.m.
• Dinosaurs evolve at 10:46 p.m.
• Dinosaurs are wiped out at 11:39 p.m. (only 21 minutes left to the “day”).
• Home sapiens evolve at 11:59:54—just six seconds before the end of the day.
• “Recorded history” begins at the final quarter second.

In other words, humans are just a mere blink on this planet, barely making it in after an incomprehensible amount of time has passed. This is how the article describing all of this finishes up:

Earth is not a human stage with a long prelude. It is a 4.5-billion-year planet on which humans are a final-second phenomenon. Life is ancient. Microbes are ancient. Dinosaurs are late. We are almost impossibly recent.

That perspective can feel humbling, but it is also clarifying. The modern world, with its satellites, cities, farms, languages and histories, is not the main body of the day. It is the flicker at the end.

Compress Earth into 24 hours and the planet becomes a lesson in proportion. Life wakes early. Dinosaurs stride in near the end. Human beings arrive with the clock already touching midnight.

Everything we have written, built, remembered and argued over belongs to the final seconds of a day that had already been running for almost all of time.

And this article didn’t even address the evolutionary belief that the universe is much older than the earth. If you include the supposed evolutionary history of the entire universe in our 24-hour “day,” human history is so short that it’s barely perceptible. Now, of course, I reject this entire idea because I start with the Bible’s history, which necessitates a young earth and universe. But I want to think about this idea from a theistic evolutionary perspective for a moment.

According to theistic evolutionists and other old-earth Christians, God used evolution and/or millions of years to create or, at the very least, to prepare earth and the universe for mankind. But think about that “clock.” If it’s true, God spent an incomprehensible amount of time slowly forming things (and supposedly using death, suffering, and disease to do it, when the Bible is clear death and disease came after sin), all for the purpose of creating mankind. But mankind wouldn’t arrive until a “flicker at the end,” a barely perceptible blip after eons and eons and eons of life coming and going. Aside from all the problems when compared with Genesis and how the New Testament also takes Genesis as historical narrative, consider these verses:

For thus says Yahweh, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it; He established it and did not create it a formless place, but formed it to be inhabited),

    “I am Yahweh, and there is none else.” (Isaiah 45:18)

Isaiah says God formed earth to be inhabited . . . but in the evolutionary worldview, nothing inhabited earth for a long portion of history, and then when life finally did arise, it was microscopic for the vast majority of history with multicellular life arising very late and human life only at the very tail end.

The heavens are the heavens of Yahweh,
But the earth He has given to the sons of men. (Psalm 115:16)

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

Psalm 115:16 says God has given the earth to mankind, and in Genesis, we read that humans are to take dominion. But if humans are extreme latecomers to this planet, how is earth really for us? And why does it need us to have dominion and be good stewards? It had already existed for supposed millions and millions of years with no human presence. In that view, earth isn’t really for humans—it’s mostly just for microbes!

Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love . . . . (Ephesians 1:4)

Jesus said that God created Adam and Eve from the beginning of creation.

The Bible teaches that God’s plan of redemption for mankind was in place “before the foundation of the world.” But the old-earth perspective requires that God planned for our redemption (before He created time), and then when He began His plan by first creating life and the universe, He took 13.8 billion years to get around to finally creating the very people He’d planned to redeem. It simply doesn’t make sense with what we read in Genesis about God powerfully creating everything by His Word and then His plan of redemption immediately beginning (Genesis 3:15), with detailed chronologies to take us through human history from Adam to Christ. “But from the beginning of creation, God ‘made them male and female’” (Mark 10:6).

Jesus said that God created Adam and Eve from the beginning of creation. The last six seconds of earth’s history is certainly not “the beginning,” not even close. So was Jesus in error when He said that or was He lying? Either is a serious charge to bring against the sinless Son of God, who is Himself the Creator of all things!

See the many problems that arise when people try to add man’s ideas about the past into God’s Word? It ends up undermining Scripture over and over again in so many different ways.

Instead of trying to somehow fit incomprehensible amounts of time into the Bible, adding death and disease before sin, and destroying the historicity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis, let’s start with God’s Word and build our thinking from there. When we do that, we have the proper framework for understanding all of human history:

• God created everything in just six 24-hour days, including mankind on day six, about 6,000 years ago.
• His creation was “very good.”
• Adam and Eve sinned against God, and all of creation fell.
• God promised a Savior who would someday crush the serpent’s head,
• God judged mankind’s wickedness in Noah’s day with a global Flood (this is why we have fossils and rock layers),
• God judged mankind’s rebellion at the Tower of Babel, creating different people groups.

It’s this history that gives us the proper worldview for understanding the world around us. Humans aren’t some late arrival on a planet that was slowly and gradually shaped by natural forces. Humans are the crowning jewel of God’s creation, created at the end of day six, given dominion over creation, and so loved by God that He Himself came as a man to redeem fallen humanity so that we could be with Him forever.

The grand history of the cosmos isn’t summarized by a clock, with us sneaking in at the end. It’s summarized in two verses:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.