I found the following video on Robert Carter’s site Biblical Genetics. The key take-away from this video is that the ultimate benefit of all of the genealogical data in the Bible was to trace the ancestry of Jesus back to Adam.
Most people (including myself) skip over the biblical genealogies unless they know what to look for. Carter says it is like looking for a fossil in a river basin. If you know what to look for you can find an amazing fossil. If you don’t, well, there are plenty of other things to enjoy.
Robert Carter and Chris Hardy were the authors of a paper on Creation Ministries International that I keep going back to called The biblical minimum and maximum age of the earth. The creation year of the minimum age supported by at least one biblical manuscript tradition is 3822 BC. The creation year of the maximum age is 5665 BC. That’s a difference of 1,843 years.
Many Christians support the younger age close to James Ussher’s chronology with a creation date of 4004 BC. Since that was a bit over 6000 years ago many of them also get tempted by speculations of the end of the age.
Early Christians along with Henry B. Smith, Jr at the Associates for Biblical Research support an older creation year of around 5500 BC. Based on this chronology the rabbinic tradition of the Messiah coming during the 6th millennium has already been fulfilled by Jesus. Smith, Jr’s argument in favor of the older age is available at the 2018 International Conference on Creationism called The case for the Septuagint’s chronology in Genesis 5 and 11. It’s another one of the papers I keep going back to.
At the moment, I favor Smith, Jr’s view, but I am a recent supporter of creationism. I am still learning. I only began taking the Bible seriously, that is, more seriously than, say, the Bhagavad Gita, about five years ago.
Over five years ago, I would have thought the earth was a gazillion years old. Why? Because that’s what I was told. My religious traditions were a mix of Catholic Teilhard de Chardin new age leaning mysticism and Protestant William Lane Craig atheist leaning rationalizations. Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with those two names. I wish I weren’t as well.
When I was about 10 years old I remember telling my aunt that chickens came from dinosaurs. Why? Because that’s what I was told. Looking back on that incident as an adult who has now listened to many children talk I imagine she thought I was a cute kid, but stupid.
I realize today that she was right about the stupid part. Or, better put, deceived part, but then those telling me the “truth” were deceived as well. They are not the enemy. I forgive them. Today I have more important things to do like taking back all that stolen life, stolen hope, stolen joy and stolen peace.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 