Young Earth Creationism is the view that God created everything that exists – including the earth – in six literal consecutive days and rested on a literal seventh consecutive day according to a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, specifically the first eleven chapters.
Central to the argument by Young Earth Creationists is the fact that the Hebrew word ‘Yom’ translated into English as “day” in the Genesis account of Creation is used throughout the Old Testament. And every other time that word ‘Yom’ is used throughout the Hebrew Old Testament it is understood most directly to mean a literal 24-hour period of time.
Another core argument Young Earth Creationists use is the explicit nature of the phrase “and there was morning and evening on the [such and such] day” used with each successive day of Creation described in Genesis.
Proponents of an Old Earth, poetic, symbolic, or figurative reading of Genesis are fond of pointing to where in the Scriptures the prophet tells us that “a day is as a thousand years" and "a thousand years is as a day” to the Lord. And by connecting that passage to a figurative interpretation of Genesis, they assert that the days being described in Genesis could be any other length of time whatsoever – even millions or billions of years. And thus they excuse themselves for accommodating modern, secular science in its claims that the universe and the earth are millions and billions of years old, and that all life on earth arose by random, unguided, evolutionary processes which God could have initiated.
Young Earth Creationists meanwhile typically oppose this accommodation on the grounds that there is no need for it. There is no need to compromise with the mainstream of modern science and its secular humanism. But there is a great deal of need to not compromise with it.
Modern science, after all, rejects as a rule all references to divine revelation like the Bible, and similarly rejects all supernatural explanations that would amount to giving God credit for Creation.
Accommodating modern secular science in its purely naturalistic insistences about our origins, or the origins and age of the Earth, opens the door to compromising on everything else God’s Word tells us God ever did to intervene or reveal Himself throughout history. And that includes but is not limited to the incarnation, the virgin birth, and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
As should be obvious, if we throw out the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ then we have nothing left of Christianity. Our entire faith is based on the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead after living a sinless life and atoning for our sins through his literal death on the cross. And if we don’t believe that, we’re not Christians. It's as simple as that.
So how far do we compromise with modern science when the claims of modern science contradict what the Bible teaches? That’s really the central question, and Young Earth Creationists like myself have a simple answer. 'Not at all.'
