What is Old Earth Creationism?
There are two kinds of Old Earth creationism. One view allows for evolution and the other does not.
The view that God did not use evolution
Old Earth Creationism, Non-Evolution View. People in this camp also believe the events in Genesis 1-11 are real historical events involving real places and people. Like Young Earthers, they also believe life was created in distinct kinds (it did not evolve). But unlike Young Earthers, this view agrees with the majority of the scientific community that universe is 13.8 billion years old (earth being 4.5 billion years old).[1]
This long span of time suggests there might be other ways to understand the days of Genesis instead of taking them to mean twenty-four-hour days. They believe that it is possible to hold any of these views while still being entirely faithful to the biblical text. These options are shown in Illustration 1 and can be explained as follows: (1) The creation days were ages or long periods of time (Day-Age View). (2) God took a single week to reveal creation events to Adam, but the act took much longer (Revelatory-Day View). (3) The mention of “evening and morning” could have been just a literary technique not meant to be taken strictly (Literary-Framework View). (4) The creative acts were done in single twenty-four-hour days with long gaps of time between creative acts (Alternate-Day-Age View). (5) There could have been a long gap of time between Gen. 1:1 and 1:2 and/or between 1:2 and 1:3 (Gap Theories). Finally, (6) God could have created the universe with the appearance of age (Ideal-Time View). The 24-Hour Day View (7) is included for comparison.
Illustration 1. Common Views for “Day” in Genesis 1[2]
The View that God did use evolution
Old Earth Creationism, Theistic Evolution View. This view holds that “God created the universe, earth, and life over billions of years, and that the gradual process of evolution was crafted and governed by God to create the diversity of all life on earth.”[3] Natural selection and other evolutionary mechanisms have been acting over long time periods of time to bring about gradual speciation of new life forms. It is virtually the same as Darwinian evolution except that they believe that God guided the evolutionary process (hence the name theistic evolution).
Both Old Earth creationism views are opposed to Young Earth creationism, which says that the universe is no older than six-thousand years.
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- Ham, Four Views on Creation, 13. ↑
- Adapted from Norman L. Geisler, Systematic Theology, Volume Two: God, Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2003), 644–646 and Hugh Ross in Ken Ham et al., Four Views on Creation, 72. ↑
- Deborah Haarsma in Ken Ham et al., Four Views on Creation, 125. ↑