Page 24 - Advanced Genesis - Creationism - Student Textbook

5. The even more unsatisfactory state of the comparable secular chronologies of Egypt and
Babylonia.
6. The even less satisfactory results derived from radiocarbon and other physical methods of dating.

Considering all of these difficulties from extra-Biblical sources the only remaining method of
determining the age of the earth since creation would be to use the Bible itself. Biblical dates essentially
cluster around the following framework:

1. Genesis 1 gives the time from the creation of the universe to the creation of man.
2. Genesis 5 gives the chronology data from the time of the first man to the Flood.
3. Genesis11 gives the chronology from the flood to Abraham.
4. The Historical books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, 1&2
Samuel, 1&2 Kings, 1&2 Chronicles) contain the chronologies of the nation of Israel from Abraham
to the captivity.
5. The Prophetic books (especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah) contain the
chronology of the captivity and restoration of Israel.
6. The Intertestamental period chronology must depend on either secular chronology (especially the
very questionable chronology of Egypt) or the chronology implicit in Daniel’s seventy-weeks of
Daniel 9.

The best known chronological system based on the Biblical data is that of Archbishop James Ussher
(1581-1656). He computed the date of creation at 4004 BC. Evolutionary thinkers today ridicule this
date. But Sir Isaac Newton accepted Ussher’s dating implicitly and even took the Egyptian writers to
task because they suggested the origins of their monarchy extended before 5000 BC.

In fact the Egyptian list of kings extends back to a little before 3000 BC and before this there is no
written record. Actually all historical records agree with the Bible’s short chronology. A longer
chronology which is needed to accommodate evolution must be based on uniformitarian extrapolation
of certain present physical processes. All these calculation are based on a number of unproved and
untestable assumptions. Further, there are many physical processes which even with uniformitarian
assumptions agree with the Bible’s short chronology and only a very few give a long enough chronology
to support evolutionary ideas.

The weight of scientific data is heavy on the side of a recent creation as we will see in this course, and a
chronology of history in agreement with Biblical records.

Here are a few other chronologies from reputable scholars
1. Ussher - 4004 BC
2. Jewish - 3760 BC
3. Septuagint - 5270 BC
4. Josephus - 5555 BC
5. Kepler - 3993 BC
6. Luther - 3961 BC

The idea that the Biblical account of chronology of creation at several thousand years is plausible and
defendable, even more so that the 14.5 billion proposed by evolutionary thinking. The exact date for
creation may be somewhere between 10,000 BC and 4,000BC with the likelihood that it is closer to the
lower end.

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