In the middle of the nineteenth century Christians began thinking that the study of geology showed a very old earth. The days of believing the earth was created in 4004 B.C. began to disappear. When I was in seminary in the 1960's I knew of no Bible believing Seminary or undergraduale Christian college that held Genesis One to be literal.
I was taught that the days were figurative for the acts of God's creation encompassing millions of years. Other schools taught that Genesis 1:1 was the original creation but there was a gap of millions of years between the first verse and second verse. In that "gap" was an old fallen world that God destroyed and Genesis one was a restoring of the past earth.
THEN CAME THE BOMBSHELL! In the 1960's Dr. Henry Morris of VIP and Dr. John Whitcomb wrote the Genesis Flood. In that they explained that most of geology could be explained by the flood, and that the earth by this catastrophe was not the millions of years claimed by popular science.
The introduction of the book was written by the head of Geology at the University of Louisianna. He stated that Morris and Whitcomb had taken all the data of geology and explained it from the standpoint of a universal flood and a young planet. He humbly wrote that he would hope they are wrong! Because, this would mean that he and the universtiy had been wrong for 30 years!
In the next blog we will look at what does the Bible present as to the creative days. If they are literal, what about science? Are there scientific evidences that match a literal view of Genesis.
