Young Earth creationists are fond of saying that when you read Genesis 1 the text clearly teaches that the world is only 6000 years old. Now their interpretation is clearly pretty silly in and of itself and it also contradicts a lot of scientific evidence. Critics have said that Genesis 1 came from a bunch of ignorant shepherds in the Middle East. Young Earth creationism has been a boon to atheism and a plague upon Christianity. Christians would expect God to get the creation story right. Why, then, does Genesis 1 come out looking so bad?

There is an easy answer as to why Genesis 1 comes out so bad: when you read the text you bring along with you a hidden assumption about the world that simply isn't true. If, instead, you came to the text with the right assumption about the world, you'd read the text and you'd interpret it correctly and all would be well.

So, what is this hidden wrong assumption and what is the right assumption? Well, the wrong one is something that people acquired from the vast majority of scientists while the right assumption is what you get from understanding God in the Bible. As it happens, modern physics ran into the correct perspective over a hundred years ago but even so most scientists still don't know about it.

The fatal assumption is what philosophers call presentism. Presentism is the belief that the way the world works is that there are all these particles moving around according to the laws of physics. With this paradigm, particles change their position over time. Only the present exists, the past is gone and the future isn't "out there" yet. Of course, it is really easy to get this idea because all WE ever see is what we call "now".

So, if you believe in presentism, when you read the text, it looks like God takes one "day" to do this, one "day" to do the next thing and so on for six "days". After each thing is created it automatically starts moving around in space according to the laws of physics. At the end of six "days" everything is simply moving around according to the laws of physics. Then young Earth creationists figure the time from Adam to the present is about 6000 years.

But Christians are always saying that God has a "God's eye view" of the world. They always say God sees the past, present and future and the past and the future are just as real to Him as the present is to us. They are always saying that God knows everything about us, even everything we haven't done or thought yet. In MODERN physics, they recognize that the past, present and future are all "out there". The past does not go away and the future is already there and it is fixed. They call this world of everything that simply IS, the block universe or sometimes the blockworld. Philosophers call this idea that everything exists across all of space AND TIME, eternalism. It only looks like things are moving around because our consciousness is moving through the block universe where we see what God has created.

Now, here are some of the places in the Bible where the block universe idea, the God's eye view idea, shows up. First, one of the neatest quotes comes from psalm 139:16 where we have David saying:

This makes it quite clear that all of David's life was set in stone before he was born. God saw every day of David's life because every day of David's life was already really "out there" long before David was born. Of course, it wasn't just David's life that was set before he was born, everyone's life was fixed before everyone was born. Then in Jeremiah 1:4-5 it says:

In Isaiah 22, Isaiah is given a message from God for the people of Israel about an invasion that will be happening in the future, how terrible it will be and how the Israelites will respond:

From Ephesians 1:11:

So, in other words, everything that happens in this world was fixed in advance! It's like we're actors and actresses in a play or a movie! And God has written the script. This idea that God fixed everything in advance comes up in a number of places in the Bible. Here it is again in Ephesians 2:10:

Here in Psalm 148:5-6 it mentions how everything that came into being will last forever:

Here in Revelation 13:8 in Young's literal translation (and many other translations) there is this phrase where it speaks of Christ as:

Or in other words, when the world was made, Christ's crucifixion was already present. Then over in Genesis chapter 2, from verses 1 and 2 we have:

During those 6 so-called "days" of creation, God MUST have created a block universe because that is what we actually have. And He's finished. So, for instance, all those miracles that Jesus was going to do when He shows up on Earth, MUST already be there. They were there "before" Adam and Eve sinned. If the miracles were not there, God would have to go back to work to do them. There is just no indication in the Bible that God has gone back to work. He is still in his seventh "day" of rest. You can find statements to this effect in Hebrews Chapter 4, verses 1 to 11. Here is just a portion of what it says, from verses 3 and 4:

So, again, Christians often say that God has that God's eye view of everything and the above Bible verses establish that. But, then, when it comes to interpreting Genesis 1, they fall back on using science's old 19th century concept of presentism where only the present exists and we have particles being moved around by forces according to the laws of physics. Clearly, when God created the universe and the Earth during those six so-called "days", He created everything from the Big Bang out into the future, as far as that future goes. In terms of physics, those six days should really be thought of as 6 stages of God's construction project that takes place along another dimension of time. During each of those six stages, God works across all of space AND TIME. For instance, during one stage God adds in all the plants that exist during the whole history of the Earth. During another stage, God adds in all the animals that exist during the whole history of the Earth. During another stage, He adds in all the people who exist during the whole history of the Earth. So, when God created people, He created Adam and Eve and their children and their children's children and so on, all the way to the present and beyond. So we're looking at six stages of creation rather than six 24-hour time periods along our dimension of time. And you can't claim that those six stages tell us anything about how old the Earth is. If they were six days along our dimension of time you could argue for a young Earth, but they were six time periods along a second dimension of time. So we are left with no indication of how long the Earth has existed.

So, the young Earth creationist interpretation of Genesis 1 comes out badly because of a hidden viewpoint people bring to the text. It's a viewpoint that comes from the atheistic scientists that young Earth creationists despise, rather than the viewpoint you get from God in the Bible. Of course, old Earth creationists are making the same fatal error. They, too, have failed to realize that God made it clear in the Bible that He created everything across all of space AND TIME. Of course, atheists have made the same fatal error. Atheists, however, are less guilty than the Christians who should have picked up God's viewpoint in the first place by studying the Bible.