Was the World Created in Six Days?

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There are currently in the United States, and to lesser degrees in other English speaking nations and Europe, a variety of groups who oppose scientific discoveries regarding the origin of the universe, the age of the solar system, and the evolution of living species. There are Hindu, neo-pagan, new age, Native American traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Christians who have some objection to some aspect of science and would call themselves creationists. When I was the Director for Educational Programs at a small natural history museum, I met with representative members of all these groups and subgroups.

Among the most fervent were those individuals who held that the universe was created ex   nihilo (out of nothing) in six days approximately six thousand years ago and then destroyed and restored by God in a global flood. They have based all this on a literalist interpretation of the Book of Genesis and by summing up the "ages" of various geneological tables scattered in the Bible. We generally refer to these as young earth creationists. I recommend to the interested reader two recent books, “Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction” by anthropologist Eugenie C. Scott (2005), and "The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism" by historian Ronald L. Numbers (2006), both published by the University of California Press. Scott looks at the variety of creationists and addresses many of their factual errors, and Numbers traces how the modern young earth creationism was nurtured within the Seventh Day Adventist sect and burst into public with the 1961 publication of “The Genesis Flood” by John C. Whitcomb, and Henry M. Morris.

For the current discussion, I will be addressing the basic tenets of young earth creationism.