Bringing the Real World to Genesis: Geologic Time: The Scientific Evidence and the Genesis Record
A number of articles back in this series, “Bringing the Real World to Genesis,” we met Dr. Peter Edgar Hare, who showed us how the common scientific understanding of the age of the earth has modified over the past few hundred years from a belief of it being on the order of a few thousand years to the current understanding that it is several billion years old. In that former article Hare notified readers that his main goal was to show how science had reached its conclusions about an ancient earth well before radiometric dating was able to confirm these conclusions.
We now meet Dr. Hare a second time in the article posted below. It was published some five years after the earlier article. He makes clear that he is fully committed to both scientific data and the Genesis account of creation. So he takes the reader on a journey into the details of geological science, and explains in a rather engaging way why science has reached some of the conclusions it has about the age of the earth. But he is well aware that many dismiss any scientific findings that do not mesh with preconceived interpretations of scripture, and therefore proposes that some of our problems may well be interpretations of scripture. With this in mind he attempts to develop a framework for thinking about Genesis that he believes may be helpful in light of some of the data.
Even though this article was written more than thirty years ago it has a fresh currency about it that contemporary readers will likely find very relevant.
To conclude our “Bringing the Real World to Genesis” series, curated by Jan M. Long, we will republish 10 articles from the Spectrum journal. Previous “Bringing the Real World to Genesis” articles can be found here.
Photo: Crater Lake, Oregon
