“Deep Time and the Gospel”

Another newly accessible item has gone up — no charge! — on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:

Science & Mormonism Series 1: Cosmos, Earth, and Man “From All Eternity to All Eternity: Deep Time and the Gospel”

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article by Bart J. Kowallis originally appeared in Science & Mormonism Series 1: Cosmos, Earth, and Man (2016).

Abstract: Geology professor Bart J. Kowallis takes readers to the realm of “deep time,” referring to that vast length of time it took for the earth and heavens to reach their current form and station. On the way, he discusses three myths about time and creation: 

Myth 1. Scientific theories are just speculation; since they are not facts, I don’t need to believe or worry about them;
Myth 2. Official Church doctrine is that the earth is only a few thousand years old;
Myth 3. The earth is old because it was made from pieces of older planets.

***

A year or two ago, while flipping around the radio dial just a bit, I came across a Christian radio station that, at one point, featured an advertisement for a “biblical” tour of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, led by Pastor Somebody Or Other, during which participants would be able to learn about how the spectacular scenery of the park was created by the tectonic forces associated with Noah’s Flood.  Fascinating.  Life is just too darned short!

Which made me think of the geologist-apostle James E. Talmage (d. 1933):

According to the conception of geologists the earth passed through ages of preparation, to us unmeasured and immeasurable, during which countless generations of plants and animals existed in great variety and profusion and gave in part the very substance of their bodies to help form certain strata which are still existent as such. …

Geologists say that these very simple forms of plant and animal bodies were succeeded by others more complicated; and in the indestructible record of the rocks they read the story of advancing life from the simple to the more complex, from the single-celled protozoan to the highest animals, from the marine algae to the advanced types of flowering plant — to the apple-tree, the rose, and the oak.

What a fascinating story is inscribed upon the stony pages of the earth’s crust! … This record of Adam and his posterity is the only scriptural account we have of the appearance of man upon this earth. But we have also a vast and ever-increasing volume of knowledge concerning man, his early habits and customs, his industries and works of art, his tools and implements, about which such scriptures as we have thus far received are entirely silent. Let us not try to wrest the scriptures in an attempt to explain away what we cannot explain.

The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto, were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science or man-science. Holy Scripture will endure, while the conceptions of men change with new discoveries. We do not show reverence for the scriptures when we misapply them through faulty interpretation.

[From Dr. James E. Talmage, “The Earth and Man,” an address delivered in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on 9 August 1931 and eventually published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]

I can’t remember ever having been a young-Earth creationist.  But several hostile strangers have assured me online that I am, so it must be so.  And, truly, the roughly 4.5 billion-year existence that I ascribe to the Earth is pretty young compared to the nearly 14 billion years since the Big Bang.