Deep Time in Genesis

By Steven R. Webb

The early chapters of Genesis have generated a battleground between people that believe the Earth is very young (on the order of 6000 years) and those that believe it is much older. What has been mostly missing from this battle are the observations of professional Christian geologists. Webb invites you to join his world to see the kind of work that geologists do that leads them to draw certain conclusions on this subject. It is written in laymen's language and is designed to unite a variety of issues ranging from Noah's Flood to dinosaurs to early hominids to the Garden of Eden, etc. while maintaining the integrity of Scripture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512735987

Steven R. Webb

Steven R. Webb is a recently retired professional geologist and a lifelong follower of Jesus. He has A.S., B.S. and M.S. degrees in geology and a Master of Divinity degree. His professional specialty in sequence stratigraphy, a branch of sedimentology, positions him perfectly for understanding the age of the Earth and related scientific issues in the Bible.

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Copyright © 2016 Steven R. Webb.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-3597-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-3599-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-3598-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016905052

WestBow Press rev. date: 03/29/2016

Table of Contents

About the Author

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1 - What Christian Geologists Believe and Why we Believe It

Chapter 2 - Interpreting Science From the Bible – Some Past history

Chapter 3 - Why it Matters

Chapter 4 - The 6000 Year Threshold

Chapter 5 - A day in Genesis

Chapter 6 - Other Scriptural Considerations

Chapter 7 - Dendrochronology and Other Techniques

Chapter 8 - Some Pertinent Geoscience History

Chapter 9 - Revival of the Young Earth Belief

Chapter 10 - Radiometric Age-Dating

Chapter 11 - High Seas in the Gulf of Alaska

Chapter 12 - Noah’s Flood

Chapter 13 - Dinosaurs

Chapter 14 - Who Were the Cavemen?

Chapter 15 - Garden of Eden

Chapter 16 - Bible Genealogies

Chapter 17 - Hebrew-Judaeo World View

Chapter 18 - Interpretation Options

Chapter 19 - Conclusion

Notes and References

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Steven R. Webb is a recently retired career geologist and a lifelong follower of Jesus. He has A.S., B.S. and M.S. degrees in geology and a Master of Divinity degree. His professional specialty in sequence stratigraphy, a branch of sedimentology, positions him perfectly for understanding the age of the Earth from a scientific perspective. He currently resides with his wife on a farm in southern Wisconsin.

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to my beloved wife Diana, who has somehow put up with me for forty years, and has added to the writing of this book with immensely valuable suggestions. It is also dedicated to my parents, Ray and Roberta, who provided me the rock-solid foundation in life I needed to chase my dreams. I express appreciation to Liberty University for the use of their library resources. In this, and all else, I give glory to God for the things he has done.

INTRODUCTION

Therefore, it is my judgment that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles.

Acts 15:19

I am writing this book because, as a career-long professional geologist, I am unhappy with the way the subject of creationism has generally been handled by the community of Christian believers. When people want legal help, they go to a lawyer. When help is needed with car repair, they go to an auto mechanic. When a toothache is felt, a person goes to a dentist. However, when the subject of age of the Earth and scientific evidence supporting or not supporting it arises, a host of self-appointed ‘experts’ weigh in who have no true training or expertise on the subject. Everyone becomes an expert on geology, failing to realize the depth of knowledge required and the amount of information that is known today in this field of science. The history of our continents, mountains, volcanic arcs, oceanic trenches, etc., how they formed, when they formed, and where they came from, is only learned after much study and work experience. Popular Christian websites that do battle on this subject typically staff their organization with people who sometimes have impressive sounding credentials but upon further inspection we learn they have minimal geology education and / or no hands-on experience in it.

A good example of this is the book In Six Days, written in 2001 and edited by John Ashton.¹ It is a compilation of fifty short chapters by fifty scientists who believe the Earth was created in six literal consecutive 24-hour days. Of the fifty, only a meager three turn out to be geologists. This is not a bit surprising in that there are very few Christian geologists who subscribe to a young Earth. Let us look at the three geologists who contributed to the book. First, Elaine Kennedy holds a PhD in geology but her experience in the field beyond her education is nebulous; as of the time of the chapter she wrote, she had apparently never worked as a career geologist unless you count her time with the Geoscience Research Institute, a Creationist institute of the Seventh Day Adventist Church (an organization that has no professional standing or research accomplishments). The second person, Andrew Snelling, has a PhD in geology from the University of Sydney. So far as I could learn, he had never worked as a professional geologist as of the time of the book, outside of working with Answers in Genesis (a Creationist organization to be discussed later), followed by working for the Institute for Creation Research, also a Creationist organization. The third person, Kurt Wise, has a PhD in geology from Harvard. He is the director of the young Earth organization, Creation Research Center, and at the time of Ashton’s book, had apparently never worked as a professional geologist.

I do not doubt the integrity or sincerity of these three individuals (or any like them). But a university education, even an advanced degree in geology, does not buy the kind of knowledge that is obtained after years of working with vast amounts of hard data not seen in college text books, the results of which are judged not by whether or not a particular theory sounds good, but by whether it works and produces successful results. On the way to obtaining those results, the work needs to pass through difficult peer review critiques and multiple management reviews. A geologist fresh out of university, no matter their degree, does not have the knowledge needed to do this job adequately until after around five years of on-the-job training (similar to other fields of science), and even then they have a long way to go. When I finally left the university after seven years of studying geology it was daunting to find how little I knew about it. A full 80%-90% of what I know about geology has come post-university. All schooling did for me was to give me a basic foundation so that I could proceed with learning the science. In contrast, transitioning from university to a small cloistered organization committed to a single Bible interpretation hermeneutic, as the three cited above have done, is not the way to obtain broad-based knowledge of this subject and to continue their learning. Instead, it isolates them from the much larger community of Christian geologists, their learning, and their stimulating interaction about how geology really works. Young Earth creationists (YECs) are actually doing pseudoscience. They are myopically seeking evidence to support a foregone conclusion while blinding their eyes to any evidence of alternate interpretations. As Christians we do not need to fear scientific observations that are made honestly. We are free to look at all data and see where it leads. The same God that made our Bibles made our science. Science is nothing but a discovery of the way God did things. The following quote from Kurt Wise (one of the three young Earth creationists cited above) is indicative of much young Earth thinking:

"Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young Earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I stand."

This quote represents an admirable position if God, or our theology, demands it. If it does not, then Wise is doing a disservice to himself and to the church at large while creating a barrier to faith in front of some people who might otherwise be receptive to the gospel. His brave stand turns into a recalcitrant doctrinal wall where he is figuratively taking the place of the Catholic Church in its stand against Galileo. Is Wise correct? Where do we stand on this issue? Which side are we on? I write this book to try to help Christians everywhere answer these questions.

CHAPTER 1

What Christian Geologists Believe and Why we Believe It

For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. Layers become history and, released from the enchanted sleep of eternity, life’s motley, never-ending dance rises out of the black depths of the past into the light of the present.

—German geologist Hans Cloos, 1954

This book is not about me, and I would prefer to not write about myself at all, but due to the huge amount of misinformation that circulates on the subject of geology, and especially after critiquing the credentials of others, it is necessary to say some things about my background and the kind of work I do as a professional geologist. First of all, I am sixty-five years old at the time of this writing and have worked as a career geologist for forty years, most recently working this past year as a consulting geologist in Gurgaon, India. I have BS and MS degrees in geology from Texas Tech University (with a student body of twenty-five thousand at the time I was there and an esteemed geoscience department). I was recruited directly out of Texas Tech to work as a geologist for the world’s largest oil company (and by some measures, the world’s largest company), with whom I worked for thirty-three years before retiring from them and forming my own consulting business. In addition, I have theology credentials, with an AS degree from York Christian College, a master of divinity degree from Liberty University, and non-degree theology courses from other schools.

Over the course of my career, I have lived and worked as a geologist in six countries outside the United States (Indonesia, Nigeria, Kuwait, Russia, Argentina, and India, plus a lot of time spent in Qatar) in addition to living and working in the cities of Houston, Midland, and Corpus Christi, Texas, along with Denver, Colorado. Within the United States, I have years of expertise working the geology of the Gulf of Mexico, the Permian Basin, the Great Basin (Nevada), the Ardmore Basin (Oklahoma), offshore California, and multiple regions in Alaska. My career has consisted of working nonstop with geological data, and it has been with the best data that geology has to offer. Why do I make this latter statement? One of the advantages of working for the largest international oil company is that it opens the door for access to the best datasets that exist, because my company had the money and prestige to make it happen. I have worked with a lot of data that most geologists would love to see but are unable to because there is so much competition and secrecy involved in the oil business due to the fact that finding oil equals finding money. For example, under tight secrecy terms, foreign governments from Kuwait, Qatar, Indonesia, and Russia readily worked with me and provided me with seismic records; well logs, mud logs, and core samples; geochem data, biostrat data; gravity, magnetics, radiometric measurements; and other data that are not available in the public domain.

In addition to data access, a further advantage is that I was provided yearly training of such quality that it is the admiration of the rest of the

Reviews for Deep Time in Genesis

[Dialectic Observer · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

One star. Want a non religious biased scholarship. Christian bias is worthless in evaluating this ancient writing.

[scottdf-526200 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is: Clear and cogentLucid and readable Most of all, pertinent to where the discussion is happening among people. While other books create discussion points, this book addresses points already being made. Most books of this type, even by well-known authors, have a chapter that tends toward speculation over readily established fact, often a chapter on a 'pet' belief of the author. This book got close, but pleasantly did not cross that line and I thank the author for it. I may come to a different conclusion on a couple chapters, but none make the book unable to be shared with others. I move it to the high shelf of books to share with those who yet have questions, or want to be able to dialog with those who have questions. Highly recommended.