This is a question that invariably comes up when Christians are confronted with people who lean more toward scientific views and evidence.

So this is an article that will try to shed light based on scriptures and scientific evidence. Before I lose you, keep in mind that God set the laws of physics in motion, as well as designed them, and as such, they must be taken into account.

When did it all start? Genesis 1:1 is our foundation, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Perhaps The Big Bang as science looks back to the beginning and agrees that there was some kind of major event that set everything in motion. Being consistent with all the Scripture that tells us the nature and character of God, we know that He is perfect and therefore when He creates something, to be consistent with His nature, it would also have to be perfect.

Genesis 1:2 continues (?) “and the earth was without form and void.” Obviously no one was there to record these events, so when the author of Genesis wrote these words in Hebrew, it was under the direction of Almighty God. The Lord uses words in the Scriptures for a very specific purpose, and the words that have been translated into English, “formless and void” is “tohu wabohu”, which means “to become totally, totally, and unrecognizable ruined” or a “uninhabitable wilderness” and it is only used one other place in all of Scripture, in Jeremiah 4:23 about a nation that was a land that had been filled with milk and honey, but was about to change due to the disobedience of Israel. Just look at Israel today and how hard the land is to grow just about anything.

The reason this is important is that in Genesis 1:1 God had perfectly created all the heavens and the earth and by Genesis 1:2 it had deteriorated to a place that was totally, utterly, beyond recognition ruined and uninhabitable. This is commonly known as the “gap” theory, skirting around the possibility that a certain amount of time has elapsed between these 2 verses. It cannot be argued that the state of the earth is different in these 2 verses. It started out perfect, a while goes by, now it’s ruined. How long, the scriptures don’t tell us, but given the laws of physics and geological studies show it could be hundreds of millions or even billions of years. I will cover more on this later.

So if the Earth was created perfect but fell into ruin, some event had to have happened. In Matthew, Jesus says that he saw Satan fall like lightning to Earth. We also know that Satan ruins and destroys everything he touches (John 10:10). So is it possible that Satan was cast down to Earth hundreds of millions of years ago and by Genesis 1:2 completely, totally, and beyond recognition ruined the Earth, turning it into an uninhabitable desert? Could be.

Let’s address this “aging” issue. Yes, it seems that God created Adam (first man) to be an adult. Suppose Adam was created and although he was in fact only 1 day old, he was able to be fully functional as if he were, say, 20 years old. Likewise, the Lord probably did the same thing when he created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Perhaps all living animals have been created as aged beings. In these cases, starting at “conception” would not have been a valid starting point. So what came first, the chicken or the egg? Probably a fully grown hen and her mate. Adam may have been created 10 minutes ago but he appears to be 20 years old, can we intelligently argue that he is only 10 minutes old when all of science would say he was 20?

Next, let’s take a look at the Universe. Science estimates that the Universe is 14 billion years old, which means that light has been traveling for 14 billion years at the beginning of the Big Bang. The Hubble telescope has been able to see systems in which light has been traveling toward Earth for hundreds of millions, if not billions of years, at the very least, supposedly.

So here is the 6000 year scenario, in Genesis 1:1, God put in the light that would have been emitted by galaxies, solar systems, planets, etc. in various places in the universe since its origin as if they were maybe hundreds of millions of years old or billions of years old but they never really existed and God just placed the light in the right place in the whole universe to get to the planet Earth in one Es time that we can see these events now.

Our solar system is 26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. That would mean that light has been traveling for at least 20,000 years BEFORE the creation of the Earth, so we can now see its center. It does not make any sense. What would God have to gain by deceiving us when science would suggest that he was much older?

This is just a small sampling of events that could be analyzed for which we would need to come up with reasonable answers so as not to seem like we were ignorant creationists with no regard for science, science that our Almighty God set in motion.

In conclusion, it is quite easy to count back some 6,000 years to get to Genesis 1:3, but holding that Genesis 1:1 and 2 were simultaneous events is clearly articulated in Scripture is an assumption and I think just the opposite is true. . What would God possibly have to gain by aging an entire Universe to “appear” older than 6,000 years when he was like Adam, only a fraction of what he appears? If, in fact, Almighty God has made everything “seem” over 6,000 years old, how can we intelligently argue that it isn’t? We just can’t.

Personally, I have no problem with the Universe being literally 14 billion years plus or minus a few billion years, the Earth being 4.56 billion years old, the Grand Canyon taking millions of years to form, the dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago about 55 million years ago, an ice age that lasted millions of years and diamonds took millions of years under millions of pounds of pressure to form. And it makes us look ridiculous to try to explain this away, ruining any possible credibility to be heard about The Truth That Can Set People Free.

None of these events contradicts the Scriptures or alters the very nature of Almighty God. Nor does it cover evolution, especially evolution within species that Darwin espoused, e.g. humans “evolving” from apes, God made man in His image (creation), not apes and then somehow the turned into humans. I believe that the Scriptures and science are compatible and would go a long way in moving believers from being seen as ignorant and backward people to intelligent people who have also embraced faith in God and received His love and forgiveness through His Son. Jesus Christ.