Is Dr. William Lane Craig Right That Young-Earth Creation Is “Intellectually Indefensible”?

Dr. William Lane Craig—one of the most respected Christian philosophers alive today—says that belief in the literal history of Genesis 1–11 is intellectually indefensible. But I say that Dr. Craig’s condemnation of young-earth creationism is intellectually indefensible. Below, I’ll tell you he is wrong. But first, read this one-minute summary (in his own words) of what he has been saying in various ways for many years.

When you investigate the merits of young-earth creationism, it is intellectually indefensible. The idea that the world, the universe, was created a few thousand years ago in six, consecutive, 24-hour days is indefensible. The idea that there was a worldwide flood within human history that exterminated all terrestrial life on earth, animal as well as human, is indefensible. The idea that all human languages originated from a ziggurat in Babylon a few thousand years ago is intellectually indefensible. So, young-earth creationism is an incredible embarrassment for the Christian faith today. It’s akin to defending a flat earth.1

This is a very strong condemnation of young-earth creationist Bible scholars and PhD scientists as well as lay people and students who believe Genesis. Is young-earth creation really intellectually indefensible?

Or is it his view that is intellectually defensible? Has he seriously investigated the merits of young-earth creationism in a fair and scholarly way? Let’s consider that.

Who Is Dr. Craig?

What are his qualifications for making this confident condemnation? He is obviously brilliant—an American evangelical philosopher, apologist, and theologian with a BA in communication from Wheaton College and two master’s degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), one in philosophy of religion and the other in church history.

He also holds two doctorates: a PhD in philosophy from the University of Birmingham, England, for a dissertation on the cosmological argument, and a ThD in theology from the University of Munich, Germany, defending the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

He is a prolific author or editor of over 40 books and 200-plus journal articles on philosophy, theology, and apologetics, has debated many prominent unbelievers, and has taught at TEDS and, for 30 years, at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. He has certainly earned the label “the scholar’s scholar.”2

Does He Understand the Relevant Sciences Regarding Origins?

Please note carefully that Dr. Craig has no degrees in biology, genetics, anthropology, paleontology, geology, or astrophysics. Given his academic training in philosophy, theology, and apologetics, it is safe to assume he has never studied natural selection in the field or mutations in the lab, or analyzed the DNA differences between apes and humans, dug up a fossil, looked through a microscope at soft tissue in dinosaur bones, done radiometric dating on a rock sample, traced a geological formation, or looked through a telescope at a star or galaxy to measure its size, distance, or the redshift of its light.

Although he is a brilliant philosopher, his two books on creation, evolution, and science show no evidence of understanding where the millions-of-years idea historically and philosophically came from. That idea did not come from rocks, fossils, or radiometric dating but from anti-biblical philosophical assumptions imposed on the geological evidence, as I have shown elsewhere and discuss below.3

In his book with philosopher Paul Copan, Creation Out of Nothing (2004), they assume that the big bang theory is proven scientific fact in their defense that God created the universe out of nothing. They discuss naturalistic cosmological models that try to explain the universe without creation out of nothing but fail to note that apart from postulating a divine beginning, the big bang theory is itself a naturalistic explanation for the origin of stars, galaxies, planets, and living things evolving (from the God-created singularity or tiny “cosmic egg”) into our present universe over billions of years of chance and natural law, with no scientifically discernable involvement of God.

In his more recent book In Quest of the Historical Adam (2021), Dr. Craig argues that Adam and Eve resulted from a divine mutation in two members of the Homo heidelbergensis group about 1,000,000 to 750,000 years ago. His chapter on “Scientific and Philosophical Preliminaries” unquestioningly accepts the evolutionary geological and archaeological timescales and the evolutionary classification of apes and humans. His chapter on fossil evidence considers only cranial evidence related to the “evolution” of the human brain, ignoring the rest of the anatomy—critical to the question—and again simply accepts evolutionist interpretations. The same is true of his chapters on archaeological evidence.

Dr. Craig’s ignoring of this scholarship is neither scholarly nor intellectually defensible.

So Dr. Craig’s “explorations” on the philosophical and scientific side of the origins debate are extremely deficient. He doesn’t question anything the evolutionists claim, and he ignores (or is unaware of) the anti-biblical, naturalistic (i.e., atheistic), uniformitarian assumptions controlling their interpretations of the evidence.4

In these books and his voluminous other writings, he has completely ignored the scholarly work of evangelical PhD creation scientists—in biology, genetics, geology, and astrophysics—who are eminently qualified to refute the pseudoscientific evidence for evolution and millions of years and to defend the literal history in Genesis. Dr. Craig’s ignoring of this scholarship is neither scholarly nor intellectually defensible.

On the basis of this ignorance of the scientific and historical facts related to Genesis 1–11, he has condemned young-earth creationism as intellectually indefensible. In so doing, he has blindly trusted what the secular, anti-biblical (indeed anti-Christ) scientific majority dogmatically claims about the big bang, geological history, dating methods, mutations, and human and ape fossils. This blind faith in the scientific majority is what drives his “mytho-history” approach to Genesis, a seriously flawed hermeneutic.5 Applied consistently to the rest of the Bible, it would lead to denying all its miracles, including the incarnation and bodily resurrection of Jesus, which the secular scientific majority that Dr. Craig trusts also considers fantastic myths.

Some Biblical Problems with Dr. Craig’s Statement

There are many biblical problems with Dr. Craig’s statement about young-earth creation being “intellectually indefensible” and with his views on Genesis 1–11. I will mention only a few of them here.6

First, to call belief in the literal history of Genesis 1–11 intellectually indefensible is an assault on the intelligence of Jesus and the New Testament writers because they clearly believed it.7 If they were so incompetent, why trust and submit to their authoritative words on any other subject, including the gospel?

Second, to believe (as Dr. Craig does) in millions of years of animal death, disease, and extinction and other natural evils before Adam in a time period God called “very good” is an assault on the character of God. Belief in billions of years of earth and cosmic history presents a very different God than the one revealed in the Bible. What kind of God would look at thousands of feet of sedimentary rock layers containing billions of fossilized creatures under the Garden of Eden and call it all “very good”? What kind of God would create the sun, moon, and stars so humans could tell time (Genesis 1:14) and then wait billions of years to create the humans who would use them for that purpose? Such an irrational, immoral, and impotent God is not the God of the Bible.

Third, belief in millions of years undermines the Bible’s teaching about the cosmic impact of the Fall (Genesis 3).8 Genesis 1:29–31 indicates that man and animals were vegetarian in the “very good” creation before sin; Genesis 3:14–19 and 5:29 teach that God then cursed the ground and animals so that creation is now in bondage to decay and suffering, waiting to be set free at Christ’s return (Romans 8:18–23; Revelation 22:3). If the millions-of-years story is true, Jesus is returning to fix an incompetent and wicked job of creating. But the Bible teaches He is returning to restore a world ruined by man’s sin and God’s righteous and holy judgment.

Dr. Craig’s view, like every other old-earth view in the church today, undermines the truth, clarity, and authority of God’s Word and assaults the character of God the Father and God the Son.

Fourth, what kind of Creator is Jesus (Colossians 1:16)? In His earthly life, He healed disease and calmed a raging sea to protect people from danger. For 2,000 years, His followers have built hospitals, responded to natural disasters with all kinds of aid, rescued endangered animals, and helped to prevent animal extinction. We all think that disease, death, extinction, and destruction are bad things. So why would Jesus use millions of years of disease, death, extinction, and natural disasters as His method of creating a “very good” world?

Dr. Craig’s view, like every other old-earth view in the church today, undermines the truth, clarity, and authority of God’s Word and assaults the character of God the Father and God the Son. That is an intellectually indefensible position for someone who claims to believe the Bible is the Word of God.

But What About the Scientific Evidence?

The scientific evidence against biological, anthropological, geological, and cosmological evolution and the associated billions of years and for the literal truth of Genesis 1–11 is overwhelming and increasing. Careful examination shows that evolution and millions of years are intellectually indefensible myths. I can only briefly defend that statement here but will point the reader to articles or videos that will expand on these points.

Biology

Natural selection and mutations (the two main mechanisms evolutionists rely on) do not prove the microbe-to-microbiologist theory of evolution. All plants, animals, and people are not descended (by natural selection and mutations) from a single-cell creature that popped into existence by chance from nonliving chemicals in the primordial ocean 3.8 billion years ago.

As Genesis 1 says 10 times (i.e., emphatically), God created different kinds of plants and animals to reproduce “after their kind.”9 There is strong scientific evidence that each created “kind” is usually equivalent to the level of “family” (not “genus” or “species”) in the modern taxonomic classification system (developed by the eighteenth-century creationist, Carl Linnaeus). God built into those original created “kinds” the genetic potential to produce variation (i.e., many genera and species) within each kind (e.g., great variety among domestic and wild dogs within the dog kind) but not for one kind of creature to change into a different kind over millions of years (e.g., a dog changing into a cat or some other non-dog, or a dinosaur changing into a bird).

As geneticist Dr. Georgia Purdom explains, natural selection is not evolution but actually the opposite of evolution.10 It is a conservative process, not a creative one. Nature only “selects” from what already exists; it doesn’t create a new kind of creature. Natural selection is simply how God-designed creatures, descended from the original created kinds, to survive and flourish in a changing, sin-cursed world.

Mutations are changes in the genetic code, but they do not enable one kind of creature to change into another, no matter how many millions of years you allow. Mutations nearly always reduce genetic information; at best, they duplicate or shuffle what’s already there. Mutations have never been observed to create new body parts or functions not already coded in the DNA of the parents or other members of the kind. As geneticist Dr. John Sanford demonstrates, in the long run, mutations lead to defects and death, not to the increased genetic information and fitness that evolution requires.11

The fossil record doesn’t support evolution either. What well-known, agnostic, Harvard University paleontologist, Stephen J. Gould, said in 1977 is still true.

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.12

As I explain in an illustrated lecture, the fossil evidence, natural selection, and mutations together overwhelmingly confirm the truth of Genesis and refute microbe-to-microbiologist evolution.13

Anthropology

Ape-to-human evolution is also a myth—one that Dr. Craig accepts, except that he imagines God tweaking two humanlike apes, via a mutation, to make the first humans. The 150-year history of defending this myth is littered with false interpretations, fraud, and suppression of evidence. As Dr. David Menton and Marvin Lubenow show in their scrutiny of evolutionist claims, the fossil evidence does not support the theory.14 Dr. Carl Werner video-recorded interviews with leading evolutionary paleoanthropologists and photographed their claimed fossil evidence at major museums worldwide. The statements and photos reveal that none of it stands up to careful cross-examination. In fact, he documented 150 incidents of fraud in this field including fossil alterations, hiding evidence, and knowingly giving false information.15 The world—including Dr. Craig—has been massively deceived.

Anatomical comparisons also show that man and apes are distinct kinds.16 And as two PhD geneticists explain, the genetic evidence refutes ape-to-human evolution and confirms that all humans—including neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, and Homo erectus—descended from Adam and Eve only about 6,000 years ago.17

Linguistically, evolutionists have no evidence that the first human language came from apes, as they imagine, nor that one language diversified by natural processes into all the languages we have today.18 God’s supernatural creation of Adam and His supernatural judgment at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) are the only intellectually defensible explanations for the origin of human languages.

Furthermore, it is impossible to harmonize human evolution (or Dr. Craig’s peculiar evolutionary view) with Genesis, as I explain in my illustrated lecture.19

Geology

Most scientists have been brainwashed ever since and therefore cannot see the geological evidence screaming Noah’s Flood and a 6,000-year-old creation.

The idea of millions of years did not come from unbiased investigation of rocks and fossils. It came from anti-biblical philosophical assumptions of naturalism imposed on the geological evidence 200 years ago, after a deliberate rejection of the global Flood and biblical chronology, led by James Hutton (1726–1797) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875) in Great Britain.20 Most scientists have been brainwashed ever since and therefore cannot see the geological evidence screaming Noah’s Flood and a 6,000-year-old creation, as I and geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling explain in illustrated lectures.21 The well-known evolutionary geologist Derek Ager describes that brainwashing this way:

Just as politicians rewrite human history, so geologists rewrite earth history. For a century and a half, the geological world has been dominated, one might even say brainwashed, by the gradualistic uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell. Any suggestion of “catastrophic” events has been rejected as old-fashioned, unscientific, and even laughable.22

If this is true even of old-earth, catastrophist interpretations of the evidence, then the scientific majority (including Dr. Ager) would label young-earth Flood geology “unscientific and laughable” and keep it out of secular scientific journals. The scientific majority is blind to the evidence for the unique, global Flood because it is committed, as Dr. Ager was, to the anti-biblical, naturalistic worldview.

Even though Dr. Craig acknowledges that Genesis 6–8 clearly describes a global Flood, not a local flood in the Mesopotamian valley (modern-day Iraq), he does not believe God’s Word. Why? Because, as I explain in a 30-minute video response to his 5-minute rejection of the Flood, he too has been brainwashed by evolutionary geologists and has ignored the published work of PhD creation geologists like Dr. Snelling above.23

Cosmology

The big bang theory is also a myth, one that Dr. Craig fully accepts as proven fact. But evolutionists do not know how the moon came into existence and became earth’s satellite. They do not know how the solar system came into existence: Their naturalistic theory of a spinning, condensing dust and gas cloud forming the planets is contradicted by much scientific evidence. They also don’t know how stars and galaxies came into existence. As one prominent atheist astrophysicist admits, “If none of us knew in advance that stars exist, frontline research would offer plenty of convincing reasons for why stars could never form.”24 Evolutionary cosmologists have only just-so, imaginary stories about the origin of these heavenly bodies—stories that have never been observed or demonstrated in the lab and that face plenty of fatal theoretical and observational problems.

Furthermore, secular scientific opposition to the big bang theory is not insignificant. A summary of the opposition is given in this revealing statement by a group of prominent scientists.

Big bang theory relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities—things that we have never observed. Inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent. Without them, there would be fatal contradictions between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory. But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. . . . What’s more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. . . . Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. . . . Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that “science is the culture of doubt,” in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding. Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.25

If evidence from secular scientists against the big bang theory is being suppressed this way, imagine what the scientific establishment does to creation scientists trying to publish in mainstream journals. Science today is controlled by a naturalistic worldview; the unbiased, objective pursuit of truth is not allowed.

World-famous cosmologist Dr. George Ellis explains the fact of the philosophical nature of cosmology, which the philosopher Dr. Craig has apparently missed.

People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations. For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations. . . . You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.26

One more point: The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered many things that contradict the big bang theory but that were predicted by a PhD young-earth astrophysicist before the telescope was launched.27

The theory is an idolatrous myth.

There is much observational evidence that points to a young, created universe. And it is impossible to harmonize the big bang theory with the account in Genesis 1.28

The theory is an idolatrous myth. It is attributing to time plus chance plus the laws of nature what only God could make. The well-known atheist astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it this way:

Our ancestors worshipped the sun. They were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and stars because we are their children. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, the iron in our skyscrapers, the silver in our jewelry—were all made in stars billions of years ago. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are stardust.29

Dr. Craig is also wrong to associate young-earth creation with the flat-earth view; all young-earth creationist organizations strongly reject it. Astrophysicist Dr. Danny Faulkner has shown in several articles that a flat earth is contrary to both Scripture and abundant scientific evidence.30 Scripture, by contrast, clearly teaches young-earth creation, and a wealth of scientific evidence confirms that history.

Conclusion

What I have presented above is just the tip of the iceberg of the scientific evidence, which in his writings on science and Genesis, Dr. Craig shows no evidence of seriously engaging because he only listens to and trusts the evolutionary scientific majority.

Dr. Craig says “young-earth creationism is an incredible embarrassment for the Christian faith today.” No, the real embarrassment is that Dr. Craig and so many other respected Christian leaders and scholars are not using their gifted minds to examine the scientific evidence that confirms Genesis and are not trusting what they profess to believe is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. The question is: why? I can think of two reasons. First, they are following 200 years of Christian compromise with millions of years.31 Second, knowingly or unknowingly, they have loved the praise of men and succumbed to the fear of man, just like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day (John 12:43, 7:13; cf. Proverbs 29:25)—wanting to be viewed by the secular academic and scientific world as respectable and scholarly and not labeled as ignorant and anti-science. All of us are capable of this sin if we do not fear God more than man and are not firmly committed to the supreme authority of His Word.

So it is Dr. Craig’s position, not that of young-earth creationists, that is intellectually indefensible.

Since he vehemently disagrees, I challenge him to a public debate on the question.

Christian reader, I urge you to believe God’s Word and to learn at least some of the scientific and biblical defenses of young-earth creation in the resources cited here. Stop treating evangelical theologians, apologists, and philosophers—brilliant but fallible and seriously ignorant on this foundational topic—as your authority for determining truth. Humble yourself and tremble at the Word of God (Isaiah 66:1–2) rather than trembling at the words of men. Like so many other respected leaders and scholars, Dr. Craig is gravely in error, promoting intellectually indefensible ideas about origins and leading Christians astray from the truth of God’s Word.