So why does earth need to be young for the bible to be true?
"God, what's a million years to you?"
God says, "It's just a second."
"God, what's a million dollars to you?"
God says, "A penny."
"God, can I have a penny?"
God says, "Sure, in a second."
First off, 2 Peter 3:8 does not mean God can’t tell time. If you read the full Chapter it is a promise that God has not forgotten. His mind is so great that He can remember 1000 years as clear as we remember yesterday.
God told Moses it took Him 6 days. Exodus 20:11, if Genesis 1 isn’t enough proof.
Jesus told us to believe Moses’ writings: John 5:46-47
God's use of the term "day" was a revealed time period to Moses when he wrote the book of Genesis, which was roughly 24-hours. God could have created the entire Earth in a blink of a human eye, but chose to reveal to us that He did it in stages. A young Earth is not Christian doctrine but the 6,000 year claim came from a young monk that was tasked with a chronological accounting from Genesis to his current time and he stated that he could only account for 6k years.
What it boils down to is this, we are only able to understand a limited amount of what is available to us to analyze. As we gain more understanding of something through scientific inquiry and discovery, our science changes. We adapt and postulate new theories then repeat the scientific method. The history of mankind is relatively short. How long it took the Creator to make something is irrelevant. That He made it, is not.
When evolutionary scientists attempt to join proteins in a controlled lab environment, it is hailed as earth-shattering news. When a creation believing scientist demonstrates how something once believed to take eons can be done relatively quickly, it is called junk science. This reveals the political and ideological bias of the reporters.
A lot of Evangelicals and just about all fundamentalists follow a system of numerology that says God will destroy the earth after 7,000 years and usher in paradise, before that there is a 1,000 year Millennial Kingdom and so by their way of thinking the earth MUST be right around 6,000 years old now. Their hope for salvation, heaven, depends on this timeline working out just like their system says it should. So when some preacher says “the Gospel stands or falls” on the timing of some event in Genesis, he really believes that. The obsession with numerology and constructing past and future timelines is an unfortunate thing and can be misleading and distracting from more important things.
Because God is not the author of confusion.
My larger concern is the idea that carbon dating has validity in the long scale
Regardless of what man claims, this earth is not young... However, God had Peter pen exactly how God counts time ... IIPeter 3:8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
Peter also describes that flood of Genesis 1:2 ... in what Peter calls (II Peter 3: 5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
“There is nothing in the bible that says how long a ‘day’ for god is, since he’s timeless and the 24 hour day is a human invention based on rotation of a planet around a sun, both of which didn’t even exist before God made them. For all we know a ‘day’ in God’s immortal terms is 10 trillion years as we understand time.”
A 24-hour day is not based on the earth going around the sun. That is how a year is defined. A day is defined by the earth’s rotation on its axis.
The Genesis creation story describes a seven day period of God’s creation and rest (on the seventh day). Genesis, like the book of John, begins with “In the beginning...”. This is an indication that time itself had a beginning. Jesus specifically identified this time, in which Adam and Eve were created / formed as “the beginning”.
Matthew 19:8
He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”
We can easily trace and count the unbroken genealogies of people in the Bible starting with Adam along with events which took place at known times historically to give us a fairly precise measure of time since the “beginning”. And that time frame is approximately 6000 years.
There are a lot of people who will do mental backflips to accommodate the Bible to the assumptions of modern science. And yes, it is possible to misread the Bible and foolishly ignore scientific observation. Asserting the earth is flat and does not move around the sun because the Bible talks about the four corners of the earth and that the earth can not be moved is an example of this.
On the other hand, modern science stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the Biblical record. Science will take other historical records into account, and for more recent events in history will consider the Bible. But for what science considers pre-history it is considered unscientific to consider the claims of the Bible. Endless speculations are ok, just not the Bible.
Not saying we are clones, but if limited man can discover and produce clones, how much faith does it take to believe that the Creator of EVERYTHING, including physics, all matter, and life, can create plant life, animals, and people, in as short as six days? How is it possible? How do I know; I’m not God. But one thing’s for sure, assuming that we are NOT evolved from animals, there’s no way an embryo (implanted in whose womb?), can be born (of whom?), and grow from a baby into a functioning adult, without another adult present to feed, clothe, and nurture it. Therefore, God had to have created the first human beings, as fully formed and functioning ADULTS. The only other way to explain it, is by evolution, which is never Scriptural. And even if it were, into whose womb were the first mammals, those closest to our way of growing, and our environmental needs, etc., implanted, and by whom? The earth MAY have been created over time, as the Bible says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”, so that there could have been a long period between that being done, and bringing forth life, except that it describes the water, land, moon and stars being brought forth on certain days, and there is nothing to indicate that the first 4 days, was any different a time period, than the next 2 days, when life forms were created. If a person acknowledges God as Creator, there’s really no way to argue that the creation is anything other than what the Bible describes it to be. So that either God is God, or He is NOT. That settles it for me. God can do ANYTHING. I have seen a very small, yet profound creative miracle. I watched a man’s short leg, grow out to match the normal leg. I was there, in person, and saw this happen right in front of me. I saw a blur appear between the end of his foot, and the lower part of his leg, as it grew out to be even with the other leg. This was many years ago, before anything but basic computers were invented, and decades before any special effects had been invented. It was real, and unexplainable, other than God doing the impossible. “For with God, nothing shall be impossible”. Luke 1:37