Sunday, April 24, 2011

Hugh Ross/RTB - Overview (section 2 of 7): A Day

One of the more well-known characteristics of Hugh Ross and RTB’s position is the interpretation of “day” (Hebrew, yom). Whereas, “young universe Christians claim that the Bible can only [emphasis in the original] be interpreted as teaching that all creation took place in six consecutive 24-hour days about 10,000 years ago. Old-universe Christians say the text allows ample room, with no compromise of biblical inerrancy, for creation days of longer duration and even for a cosmic origin date of just over 10 billion years ago.” 7 Ross continues,
According to the Bible, God’s unlimited power meant he could have chosen any time scale, short or long, to perform his creative work (see Isa. 40-48). Concerning the six ‘days’ of creation, the Hebrew allows for more than one literal interpretation. In Genesis 1, the word translated ‘day,’ yom, could have any of four different definitions: (1) a portion of the daylight hours, (2) the entire daylight segment of a twenty-four-hour day, (3) a twenty-four-hour day, and (4) a long but finite time period.8
Such a view, according to Ross, also offers a means by which the fossil record might be explained. 9

One of the evidences that RTB uses to show that “the universe cannot be very young [is] because most radioactive isotopes have decayed away.” 10  However, I would emphasize that just because there may be scientific evidence in favor of an old earth (or, as Don DeYoung describes, a mature 11 earth) does not necessitate a Scriptural interpretation of the Hebrew yom (“day”) longer than twenty-four hours. One reason for this is because the Bible does not present what God created as being inherently dependent upon when He created it. In other words, a creation that manifests age or maturity is not necessarily inconsistent with the biblical account of creation.



7 Ross, A Matter of Days, 18.

8 Hugh Ross, More Than A Theory: Revealing A Testable Model for Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2009), 83. This point on the definition of yom (Hebrew, “day”) will be covered in detail in a future paper. Here, Ross refers to the Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB), Gesenius’ Lexicons as well as the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT) definitions when making this statement. While it is true that the Hebrew word yom can denote different time durations in various Hebrew contexts, does not mean that all definitions of yom might be open to an arbitrary length of time when used in the opening chapters of Genesis. It is necessary to look at the context in which yom occurs to determine whether such usage indicates a 24-hour period.

9 “If the Genesis 1 creation days are long time periods, the Bible offers an explanation of the fossil record enigma. It tells why so much animal speciation occurred before the creation of humans and why virtually no animal speciation has occurred since: after God created Adam and Eve, He stopped creating new life-forms.” Ross, A Matter of Days, 129.

10 Ross, A Matter of Days, 157.

11 Don B. DeYoung, author of “Thousands…not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth” (Green Forest: Master Books, 2005) has some very pertinent comments on this subject. In an ICC (International Conference on Creationism) paper, he writes, “In the ‘mature’ or ‘fully functioning’ creation view, one can speculate on the extent to which ‘apparent age’ details were imbedded into the fabric of creation. Would it be deceptive to instantly create daughter elements which normally arise over a long time period from radioactive parent nuclei? There is no definite answer to this question, since the Creation is described as fully functioning. For all we know, created details such as isotope abundances might be essential to the integrity and stability of the universe. One can only conclude that a mature creation is consistent with biblical data.” Don B. DeYoung, Extinct Isotopes and the Age of the Earth, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism (Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship and Dallas: Institute for Creation Research, 2008), 337.