Where do creationists come up with their theory of the earth only being a few thousand years old?

Answer 1

Here is an answer from Dr. Terry Mortenson:

The Bible clearly teaches that God created in six literal, 24-hour days a few thousand years ago.

The Hebrew word for day in Genesis 1 is yom. In the vast majority of its uses in the Old Testament (OT) it means a literal day and where it doesn’t the context makes this clear.

Similarly, the context of Genesis 1 clearly shows that the days of creation were literal days. First, yom is defined the first time it is used in the Bible (Gen. 1:4–5) in its two literal senses: the light portion of the light/dark cycle and the whole light/dark cycle. Second, yom is used with “evening” and “morning.” Everywhere these two words are used in the OT, either together or separately and with or without yom in the context, they always mean a literal evening or morning of a literal day. Third, yom is modified with a number: one day, second day, third day, etc., which everywhere else in the Old Testament indicates literal days. Fourth, yom is defined literally in Gen. 1:14 in relation to the heavenly bodies.

That these creation days happened only about 6,000 years ago is clear from the genealogies of Gen. 5 and 11 (which give very detailed chronological information, unlike the clearly abbreviated genealogy in Matt. 1) and other chronological information in the Bible.

Exodus 20:11 blocks all attempts to fit millions of years into Genesis 1.

This verse gives the reason for God’s command to Israel to work six days and then take a Sabbath rest. Yom is used in both parts of the commandment. If God meant that the Jews were to work six days because He created over six long periods of time, He could have said that using one of three indefinite Hebrew time words. He chose the only word that means a literal day and the Jews understood it literally (until the idea of million of years developed in the early 19th century). For this reason, the day-age view or framework hypothesis must be rejected. The gap theory or any other attempt to put millions of years before the six days are also false, because God says that in six days He made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. So He made everything in those six literal days and nothing before the first day.

Noah’s Flood washes away millions of years.

The evidence in Gen. 6–9 for a global catastrophic flood is overwhelming. For example, the Flood was intended to destroy not only all sinful people but also all land animals and birds and the surface of the earth, which only a global flood could accomplish. The Ark’s purpose was to save two of every kind of land animal and bird to repopulate the earth after the flood. The Ark was totally unnecessary, if the Flood was local. People, animals and birds could have migrated out of the flood zone before it occurred or the zone could have been populated from creatures outside the area after the Flood. The catastrophic nature is seen in the nonstop rain for at least 40 days, which would have produced massive erosion, mud slides, hurricanes, etc. The Hebrew words translated “the fountains of the great deep burst open” (Gen. 7:11) clearly point to tectonic rupturing of the earth’s surface in many places for 150 days, resulting in volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Noah’s Flood would produce exactly the kind of complex geological record we see today worldwide: thousands of feet of sediments clearly deposited by water and later hardened into rock and containing billions of fossils. If the year-long Flood is responsible for most of the rock layers and fossils, then those rocks and fossils cannot represent the history of the earth over millions of years, as evolutionists claim.

Jesus was a young-earth creationist.

Jesus consistently treated the miracle accounts of the Old Testament as straightforward, truthful, historical accounts (e.g., creation of Adam, Noah and the Flood, Lot and his wife in Sodom, Moses and the manna, and Jonah in the fish). He continually affirmed the authority of Scripture over men’s ideas and traditions (Matt. 15:1–9). In Mark 10:6 we have the clearest (but not the only) statement showing that Jesus was a young-earth creationist. He states that Adam and Eve were at the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning, as would be the case if the universe was really billions of years old. So, if Jesus was a young-earth creationist, then how can His faithful followers have any other view?

Belief in millions of years undermines the Bible’s teaching on death and on the character of God.

Genesis 1 says six times that God called the creation “good” and when He finished creation on Day 6 He called everything “very good.” Man and animals and birds were originally vegetarian (Gen. 1:29–30, plants are not “living creatures,” as people and animals are, according Scripture). But Adam and Eve sinned, resulting in the judgment of God on the whole creation. Instantly Adam and Eve died spiritually, and after God’s curse they began to die physically. The serpent and Eve were changed physically and the ground itself was cursed (Gen. 3:14–19). The whole creation now groans in bondage to corruption waiting for the final redemption of Christians (Rom. 8:19–25) when we will see the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21, Col. 1:20) to a state similar to the pre-Fall world, when there will be no more carnivore behavior (Isa. 11:6–9) and no disease, suffering or death (Rev. 21:3–5) because there will be no more Curse (Rev. 22:3). To accept millions of years of animal death before the creation and Fall of man contradicts and destroys the Bible’s teaching on death and the full redemptive work of Christ. It also makes God into a bumbling, cruel creator who uses (or can’t prevent) disease, natural disasters and extinctions to mar His creative work, without any moral cause, but calls it all “very good.”

The idea of millions of years did not come from the scientific facts. It was developed by deistic and atheistic geologists in the late 18th and early 19th century. These men used anti-biblical philosophical and religious assumptions to interpret the geological observations in a way that plainly contradicted the biblical account of creation, the Flood and the age of the earth. Most church leaders and scholars quickly compromised using the gap theory, day-age view, local flood view, etc. to try to fit “deep time” into the Bible. But they did not understand the geological arguments nor did they defend their views by careful Bible study. The “deep time” idea flows out of naturalistic assumptions, not scientific observations.

Radiometric dating methods do not prove millions of years. Radiometric dating was not developed until the early 20th century, by which time the whole world had already accepted the millions of years. For many years creation scientists have cited many examples in the published scientific literature of these dating methods clearly giving erroneous dates (e.g., a date of millions of years for lava flows that occurred in the past few hundred years or even decades). In recent years creationists in the “RATE project” have done experimental, theoretical and field research to uncover more such evidence (e.g., diamonds and coal, which the evolutionists say are millions of years old, were dated by carbon-14 to be only thousands of years old) and to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years dates to thousands of years, confirming the Bible.

Prominent young-earth creation scientists
There are thousands of Ph.D. and M.S. scientists around the world (and the number keeps growing) who believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old, as the Bible teaches. It is simply false to say that creation scientists do not have reputable degrees, do not do real scientific research and do not publish in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. Visit our creation scientist section to read about a few of them, past and present.

Answer 2

The date, customarily given as October 23, 4004 BC, comes from Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who calculated it in the early 1600s. He added up the ages of all the biblical patriarchs named in the Old Testament and came up with this computation, 4004 B.C..

A little thought shows that this date could not possibly be right. By reliable evidence that has nothing to do with evolution or even with life at all, we know that the stars are huge distances away. The Andromeda galaxy, for instance, is 2 million light years away. The light that we are seeing today left Andromeda about two million years ago, so clearly the universe could not be less than 2 million years old. (And, in fact, it is many orders of magnitude older still.)

Answer 3

I have heard that is comes from a couple of differnt places. One is the bible. They can find events in the bible that can be traced to history. From there, they work backwards using the timeline in the bible and the ages of the people listed in the bible to get back to Genesis. That is method #1. Another method was done by some geologist or geolgist wannabe using cooling methods and models of a molten earth. His calculations determined that it took about 6000 years for the earth to cool from a molten state to where it is today.

Both methods are very questionable.

Answer 4

Stories from both the Bible and other ancient texts (especially from China) that depict the earth as having experienced a worldwide flood. This is paired with the fact that the world's oldest living tree is only 4,767 years old, very good agreement with the date of the Biblical flood.

Answer 5

There was actually a priest in the 19th century, I can't remember his name but I believe he was Irish or English. He basically took the ages of everyone in the old testament and added them up. He did a family chronology. The answer of the sum of the ages of everyone came out to be around a few thousand. That's how they got it. Sorry I can't give you his name.

Answer 6

Well they used the bible and the family trees mentioned in there to count back about 6000 years to Adam and Eve.

Go to the link below, you can download about 7 seminars by Dr. Kent Hovind about Creationism. It's from a Christian point of view, but very, very interesting.
http://www.drdino.com

Answer 7

Only a small percentage of creationists are "Young Earth" believers. They think they can date the creation from the bible.

Answer 8

From their asses...