A Conversation Worth Having

Consider a believer who has spent the better part of three decades investigating the creation-evolution question from the science side. He has read the evidence. He has moved from one position to another based on that evidence. He has come to faith. He is not a person who has avoided the hard questions. He has engaged them, and he has arrived at young-earth creationism not despite his study but through it. His faith is genuine. His engagement with the evidence is genuine. He is exactly the person this book is for.

In a conversation about the age of the earth, he says something like this: we all have the same physical evidence, but we choose to interpret it differently. I chose to trust God and take him at his word.

That sentence deserves to be heard carefully before it is examined. It is doing three things at once.

First, it is making a claim about epistemology — that interpretation of evidence is always a choice shaped by prior commitments, not a neutral reading of brute facts. That is correct. Every interpreter of evidence brings assumptions to the work. The geologist who reads deep time into a rock stratum and the young-earth advocate who reads flood geology into it are both interpreting. The question is not whether interpretation happens. It is whether the interpretive framework is doing its job.

Second, it is claiming that trusting God is the reason for the young-earth conclusion. This is where the load-bearing assumption becomes visible. He is not saying: I have examined Genesis carefully and concluded that it teaches a young earth, and I trust that conclusion because I trust the text. He is saying: I chose to trust God, and trusting God means accepting a young earth. Those are different claims. The first can be examined by reading Genesis more carefully. The second cannot be examined at all — because examining it means not trusting God, and not trusting God is not an option for a believer.

Third, and most importantly, the framework has been made immune to evidence by being fused with faith. If young-earth creationism is what trusting God looks like, then any evidence against young-earth creationism is evidence against trusting God, which means it can be dismissed without examination. The framework wears the clothes of faith while functioning as a closed epistemic system.

The question to ask — gently, directly, as one brother to another — is this: can you identify your load-bearing assumption here?