T. A. McMahon & Jay Seegert (Part 1)

Program Description:On today’s program, Tom welcomes author and lecturer Jay Seegert, from the Creation Education Center. Listen in as they discuss the various points of view on the six-day creation of the universe vs. billions of years.

Transcript:

Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with T.A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael. We’re glad you could tune in. In today’s program, Tom welcomes Jay Seegert, co-founder and principal lecturer of the Creation Education Center.  Now, along with his guest, here’s TBC executive director Tom McMahon.

Tom: Thanks, Gary. Our topic for today and next week is the age of the earth and the days of creation. Is the earth billions of years old, or only thousands of years old? Did God create the earth and its creatures in six days—meaning days as we think of our 24-hour days—or days as understood as great lengths of time? Now here to discuss the subject with me is Jay Seegert, the cofounder of Creation Education Center and its principal lecturer. His degrees are in physics and engineering, yet as you’ll hear, his heart and mind are first and foremost in the Bible. Jay is the author of Let There Be Light, and has produced an excellent DVD titled Creation in Six Days: A Biblical and Scientific Analysis.

Jay, welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7.

Jay: Oh, it’s an honor to be on the program today. I certainly appreciate the opportunity.

Tom: Yeah. Now, Jay, our discussion for this week and next week will deal primarily with the content of your DVD Creation in Six Days. Obviously, you feel the subject is very important for Christians to understand. Now why is that?

Jay: Well, it’s kind of interesting: ultimately, it’s not even about the days of creation or the age of the earth; it’s really about the authority of Scripture. Do we look at it that way as our ultimate authority as Christians, or do we kind of pick and choose and say, “Well, there’s certainly some great stuff in there, but I kind of know better in these other areas,” and so I’m just going to put in my own views, my own rationality, my own thinking, and taking input from the world and academic community, and then going to Scripture and trying to figure out what it means. It’s really—do we look at Scripture as inspired from cover to cover and allow the Holy Spirit to guide us to all the truth? Or do we come at it with a kind of “we know better” attitude or being intimated by the academic community and others around us into maybe interpreting it a little bit differently?

So the age of the earth, I think, is a significant issue, but it’s certainly not the most important issue. I think the gospel message is ultimately the most important thing, but when you start looking at Scripture seriously, you’re eventually going to be asking that question about the days of creation, and what you view about the days of creation will largely determine how you take much of the rest of Scripture.

Tom: Now, Jay, as you’re aware, The Berean Call is—well, we’re no stranger to controversy. Now, we don’t particularly like controversy, but it seems to come with the territory of apologetics, which—for those who aren’t aware of the term, it’s one’s attempt to defend biblical teachings as they’re being compromised or rejected by those in the world, and, sadly- we’re seeing more of this - those in the church. Now, that involves controversy. Nevertheless, we’re compelled to get into that ring throughout the Scriptures, which exhorts us to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”

Now, the interesting thing about our topic is there are true believers on both sides of the old earth/young earth controversy, and that’s not the case regarding most doctrinal issues such as beliefs… Many of the cults, their beliefs - or, you know, when we get into the doctrine of salvation, or the deity of Christ - if somebody takes an opposing view, well, that’s a huge problem. But why then address something that often separates true believers? Is it that important for Christians to have a correct understanding of the Genesis account?

Jay: Again, the way that I look at this is that pretty much every major doctrine that we believe as a Christian is founded in the book of Genesis. When you talk about sin: what is it, where did it come from? And you look at death and the curse, you look at marriage, work, and even ultimately the gospel message, you know, people oftentimes say, “Well, we should just be focused on Jesus. We shouldn’t even be worried about those things.” But then when you just probe a little bit and say, Well, what do you mean, “focus on Jesus?” And they’ll usually discuss the gospel message, our salvation, and …but then when you keep backing that up and like, “Okay, well, why did Jesus have to come?”

You know, obviously they’ll say, “Because we’re sinners, and he came to die for our sins.”

And then you ask, “Well, why are we sinners?”

And they eventually kind of back into the idea of, “Well, I guess because Adam sinned in the Garden, and then Jesus had to die for our sins.” So it does go back to Genesis, with a literal reading of the creation account, and that there really was an Adam, he really did sin, and that really did mess things up, so we really do need a Savior. So while it’s great to focus on Jesus, long before Jesus was Savior, He was Creator. So we need to take that just as seriously, and I would say…you know, you mentioned that there are true believers on both sides of this issue - you know, young earth and old earth, which are certainly relative terms - and I don’t doubt that at all. I…the people who tend to disagree with my view that God actually created everything in six days - six literal days - I do not doubt their sincerity, and I certainly don’t doubt their intelligence, and I don’t doubt their salvation, because their salvation is not based on their opinion of the age of the earth; it’s based on their personal relationship with Christ and the forgiveness of their sins through His death on the cross and resurrection.

So it’s not really that kind of an issue; it’s really more of an issue of how are we looking at Scripture? And, again, what we believe about the days of the creation will determine how we look at other major things in Scripture with, you know, when did sin and death enter the world? the flood, and other things that Jesus said, which I’m sure we’ll get to in this interview.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Jay: But we can’t dismiss it as antiquated or irrelevant like, “Oh, that’s just the creation account; it doesn’t matter how God created or when He created. We’re just supposed to focus on Jesus.” And it reminded me of an experience I had: I spoke at a church in Ohio, and the pastor was willing to let me speak to the youth, but he didn’t want the message for the congregation, and the woman who had set up the engagement was a little frustrated with that. And after I had spoken to the youth, she was even more fired up about the importance of the message of creation in Genesis and the inspiration of Scripture, so she just talked to the pastor again and just said, you know, how foundational this really is, and the whole congregation needs to hear the message. And he said, “Well, wait a minute!” He goes, “You’ve got to be careful trying to tie the New Testament into the Old Testament,” and I just thought that was shocking for a pastor from an evangelical church to say that the two just really don’t get tied together that well. I think it’s very dangerous when we try to separate those things.

Tom: Yeah. You know, Jay, you bring up a point that concerns me: the calling to be a pastor is, to me, it’s one of the toughest callings that there is - most difficult, except maybe for being a youth pastor, okay? [laughs] That’s going to be even more problematic, but as a pastor, you have a flock, you have a congregation, and there are going to be lots of issues. And one of the sad notes to that - and it’s certainly more of the flesh than anything else on the basis of pastors - is that you don’t want to rock the boat, and that’s why apologetics has sort of gone by the boards, because if you have apologetics, you have differing views. If you have differing views, and these are among your sheep, then you’re going to have issues that may put them in conflict, and there we go rocking the boat.

So I understand that tendency, but it’s a huge problem, because just as you’ve been saying, Jay, these are important issues. This is the full counsel of God! This is something that we need to understand and be informed about. Well, I mean, how can you share your faith when your faith is based on a biblical perspective that’s antithetical to what the world believes and what the world does, and how they go about things?

So it’s a problem, but we have to get past it if we’re going to truly be biblical Christians. And yeah, it is shocking, the view that that pastor takes, but he wouldn’t be the only one. There would be some who say, “No, we are biblical Christians. We go by the Bible,” but they’re avoiding these issues that, as I mentioned earlier, that involve some controversy.

Jay: Sure. It happens way too often. Just in the 28 years I’ve been speaking now, I have a lot of different interesting experiences, and one of the biggest problems we’re dealing with right now is that anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of students from Christian homes - evangelical, fundamental homes - are walking away from their faith before they finish college, and the problem isn’t so much college or even the public high schools - they can certainly contribute - but it’s a problem that they don’t…they’re not really where we thought they were to begin with, and they’re not as stable; they don’t really know why they believe what they believe; they just grow up in a Christian household and they’re taught what to believe, and that’s fine for them, but eventually they start thinking for themselves, and it doesn’t make sense, and we’re not preparing them to defend their faith.

Another experience I had talking to a pastor about a potential engagement - and I could tell that he just wasn’t really interested in discussing origins and Genesis and all that, and so I didn’t want to push the issue, but I did say, “I have a question.” I said, “Do you guys have a youth group at your church?”

He said, “Oh, yeah, we’ve got a great group of kids,” and he told me all about it.

And I said, “Tell me, these kids are going to very soon be going off to college, and when they get there, they’re going to face a lot of challenges to their faith,” and then I went through a list of a bunch of them, and I asked, “What are you doing to prepare them for that?”

And he said, “We’re just telling them about Jesus.”

And for a second I thought, Okay, you know what, now he’s going to say, “You know what, maybe it would be really good for you to come in and address some of these really challenging issues.” But he still wasn’t interested. He was just saying, “As long as they know who Jesus was, they’ll be fine.” And knowing who Jesus is is very important, but we need the whole of Scripture; we need Jesus’s background of where He came from and why He came to do what He did. So when we don’t address these things and they get off to college, college will force these issues to come up, and now you have Christians who aren’t prepared, and they even wonder, “Why didn’t my parents tell me about this? Why didn’t my pastor say anything? How do I answer this question of ‘Did God really create things?’ Is evolution true? Did He use the Big Bang?”

It seems to be contrary to what Scripture’s teaching, and now they have a choice of what we call a false dichotomy and they feel that they either have to believe science or the Bible, and when they’re off in college, they’re thinking, “Hey, I’m paying good money for this education, and I’m learning about the real world here. You know, I’m going to stick with science, because the Bible—it was written a long time ago by a lot of different people, and they weren’t really that sharp back then, and it’s been translated so many times, and apparently it’s full of errors and contradictions. And science has just proven the creation account and on and on, so why stick with you and the Jesus stuff?” And again, that’s why a lot of them are walking away.

Tom: Yeah. Now, folks, if you want some confirmation of what Jay’s been talking about, I did an interview with my daughter - and this isn’t nepotism involved here - but she’s in leadership for the women at the college level, and she just reinforced in our two-part interview what Jay is actually talking about, what he’s saying; so there it is at the next level in my daughter, involved with a collegiate Christian fellowship at the University of Oregon. She’ll spell it out in spades. She’ll give you what she has to deal with when young women in particular - because that’s her part of leadership - but young men and women who go off to college, and how these things happen and how they’re not prepared, and what they’re up against.

Anyway, so, Jay - okay. So this is a point of controversy. Now, is there a reasonable compromise view that satisfies those who hold to an old earth perspective and those who believe the earth and its creatures were formed in six days? Can we just kind of smooth this over?

Jay: Well, my experience, that’s what the vast majority of people would like to do, because I’ll give different presentations, and afterwards I inevitably have someone come up to me and say, “Hey, I’ve got a theory! You want to hear my theory?” And I almost always know what it’s going to be, but I say, “Sure, what do you think?”

He says, “I think that God used evolution! End of story, case closed. And on the surface, it seems to solve a lot, and the same thing with, you know, there are many Christians who don’t necessarily accept evolution, but they accept much of everything else of secular astronomy and geology where they say, “Yeah, I don’t believe in evolution, but I think that God used the Big Bang. He caused it, and then here we are; doesn’t matter.” Again, case closed. And again, on the surface, it sounds wonderful, and it sounds like it solves a huge problem. Now we don’t have to argue with anybody. Whatever the astrophysicists come up with, or geologists, we can say, “That’s fine. That’s how God did it.”

And I think most of these people are being very sincere, again, and just thinking it solves an issue that’s out there, but unfortunately, it really doesn’t. But what happens is whatever comes from the secular academic community is typically not questioned; it’s just like, “Well, hey, that’s science; these are professors and scientists,” and you can’t really question that, because they feel like science is black and white. It just is what it is, and you can see it right there, whereas the Bible - it’s pretty flexible; you can look at it different ways. There are really bright Christians out there who, you know, accept evolution, or the Big Bang, and so that’s fine for them.

So any kind of “compromised view” typically compromises Scripture, but it doesn’t really compromise the science. That doesn’t budge a whole lot. It’s kind of a given in their mind. They’re forced to kind of work with that. And so there’s really nothing that ultimately satisfies both a “young earth” or a six-day literal creation, and, you know, the concept of billions of years - maybe 13.8 billion years for the universe, because nothing in the middle helps. If someone says, “Hey, I believe that God created 500 thousand years ago,” people on both sides are looking at them thinking that doesn’t really cut it, because it really isn’t support it by Scripture, and the scientists are not looking for 500 thousand years - they’re looking for 13.8 billion years for the universe and about 4.6 billion years for the earth.

If I can interject here also just a really quick background as to why are we even discussing these things - because for most of Christian history, we accepted that God created in six literal days. It really wasn’t an issue. That’s what Scripture seemed to teach; that’s what we accepted. Today, many Christians - a very high percentage - feel that, “Well, maybe God did use the Big Bang, and the earth and universe are very old,” because that’s what they’re hearing from kindergarten on up. You know, they say dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago, became extinct about 65 million years ago, and the earth and universe, again, are billions of years old. We hear that over and over and over, so they tend to want to bring that into Scripture somehow and make it fit so that they can have credibility with the secular world around them.

So how did that change? Well, in a nutshell, there’s - we could go on for hours and days and weeks with this - but just before Darwin’s time, and Darwin wrote Origin of Species in 1859 - just before his time, two guys popped onto the scene: James Hutton and Charles Lyell. These guys were both kind of geologists; James Hutton was here first. The year he died, the next guy, Charles Lyell, was born, so they were back to back. But James Hutton kind of looked around and said, “You know what, the features we’re looking here at on the earth - they weren’t formed as part of the catastrophic flood or anything that the Bible talks about. They’re just here by just natural processes continuing on and on and on,” and I think he was the one who said he could really see no beginning or end to the whole process of plates, of recycling, and all this, so he said it wasn’t created in a short period of time. Everything’s very old. Could be hundreds of thousands or millions of years, or maybe even infinite.

And then Charles Lyell kind of piggybacked on that and said, “Yeah, at the present, what we’re seeing today - the slow, natural processes we see today - they are the keys to the past. So when you look at the Grand Canyon and all the layers there, or Mt. Everest, we can explain that just by the slow, natural processes that we actually observe in the present.”

So, therefore, the Grand Canyon was not formed by a catastrophic flood in Genesis 6-8, it was just slow, natural processes.

And if that’s true, that certainly would take millions and millions of years, and at that time - again, just before Darwin - the Christians who were scientists back then looked at the Word and said, “You know what, this really isn’t legitimate. You really don’t have to worry about it.” But the Christians who were theologians kind of got intimidated by that and said, “Wow, we’ve got to do something with this. Maybe we could go back into Genesis and look at it differently and figure out a way to accommodate these newly found hundreds of thousands or millions of years.”

And again, I think most of them were fairly sincere in doing so, but unfortunately they took a bad scientific concept and tried to wedge it into the Bible, and ended up coming up with ideas like the Gap Theory and the Day-Age Theory, which - I won’t go into a lot of detail right now, but the Day-Age Theory - you just basically take the days of creation, stretch each one of them out so they’re each then millions or billions of years, so yes, God in a sense created in six days, but they’re not regular days; they’re millions of billions of years each, and that’s the way you can accommodate the billions of years for the earth and universe.

The other one, the Gap Theory, people said, “You know what, Scripture just doesn’t support stretching those days out, and so what else can we do? Well, put it in a gap. God created everything to begin with. It was perfect, it was fine, but then Satan fell from heaven, cast to the earth, and it sat in ruin for millions and millions and millions of years as all these slow, natural processes were going on, forming the Grand Canyon and Mt. Everest. And then God started recreating everything in six literal days so that most of what we see in life forms and all that were created in six literal days, but Mt. Everest and Grand Canyon, those things formed in millions and millions of years during that gap.” So they came up with different views that are often called “compromised views,” but they basically take bad scientific concepts and put it into Scripture and give us bad theology, and…

Tom: You know, Jay, you bring up a point that just shocked me—well, the theologians at the time, you know, just right after Darwin and with these other guys, they bought into some of this. And when I went back…and some of these guys are heroes of the faith with regard to their theological perspectives, but they were pseudo-evolutionists! I mean, they were influenced by that! And that’s a bit shocking.

Now, I want to stay with the controversy problem for a moment before you start dealing with the issues - we’ll probably have to get to most of them in our next session - but I want to demonstrate how convinced a very influential Christian personality can be on this subject. We’re going to play a clip from Pat Robertson on his 700 program - so, Gary, you want to run that clip?

Pat Robertson, excerpted from The 700 Club: I appreciate the fact that you’re trying to grapple with it, and this old earth/new earth…the truth is, you have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to think that this earth that we live in only has 6,000 years of existence. It just doesn’t. I’m sorry. You know, I’ve got some interest in oil, and you’re down drilling in the Jurassic zone 65 million years ago when those dinosaurs were here; they were rotting in the earth and making oil, and there’s no question about it. There’s no question that there were dinosaurs, and no questions that radiocarbon dating …they were 65 million. There’s no question that some of the other things were much older than that, and we have so many geological records.

Now, the question is, if you look at a day - day one, day two, day three - what is a day? Well, a day is how long it takes the earth to revolve on its axis. But what about a solar day? Well, that would be how long it would take the sun to travel around the galaxy we’re in. Well, what about a galactic day? That could be how long it takes a galaxy to transverse the universe, and so now you’re talking about billions of years. You don’t know how long it is. So day one, day two, and day three - it’s all accommodated if you look at it that way.

But the idea is that you first have Adam, and then you’ve got a billion years, and then you get Noah or something - that’s nonsense. I think what we’re looking at is there was a point of time after the earth was created, after these things were done, after the universe was formed, after the asteroid hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, after all that - there was a point of time that there’s a particular human being that God touched, and that was the human that started the race that we are now part of, and I think prior to that, who knows what was here?

But we haven’t worked all the wrinkles out, but I think to deny the clear record that’s there before us makes us look silly, and you’ve got the old earth/new earth - there’s no way that all that you have here took place in 6,000 years! It just couldn’t have been done! Couldn’t possibly have been done!

Tom: Jay, we could do a two-hour program on just the errors of logic, science, and the Bible, but my point in playing the clip is to show how adamant some Christians are in support of views that supposedly accommodate science. Now, is Pat—is he unique in this stand, or do you find others just as resolute?

Jay: Well, ultimately, it would be nice if he was unique, but he’s really not, and when I travel around and speak, these types of things come up. And I very often don’t even necessarily mention a name, because there are so many out there that I really don’t need to single anyone out. Now, when someone is as dogmatic as Pat Robertson has been, and he’s got a venue where he’s reaching millions of people…

Tom: Right.

Jay: …sometimes it needs to be addressed. But again, I’m not trying necessarily to just put him down for this or be disparaging just about him, because he’s just one of many that are out there. But unfortunately, because he has such a large audience and many things that he shares are biblical, he’s got quite a strong following; but in many people’s minds, then, everything he says is gospel, and you don’t question it. And he himself was starting from a standpoint of accepting pretty much everything that is coming from the secular community, and he’s talking dogmatically about areas that he does not have any expertise in, which is kind of interesting - many Christians will do that. They’ll say, “You just…it cannot be six days. There is no way. There is so much evidence from geology and astronomy and all the scientists. They all accept the billions of years. You just cannot deny that.” But then many of those same Christians will say, “Well, no, evolution’s not true. We know that’s false, because God said that He created Adam and Eve, and this and that,” but so then they’re willing to accept the testimony of the vast majority of these other Ph.D. scientists who tell us that they believe evolution’s a fact. So they’re not being consistent when they’re saying you have to accept the geologists and astronomers, but then they’re willing to reject the biologists, even though these Christians aren’t in a position to refute necessarily what these other secular biologists are telling us.

Tom: Right. Now, we just have about three minutes left in this session. Folks, we are going to get to the issues; Jay is going to address them. But, bottom line, does the biblical mandate for Christians to regard Scripture as their authority for matters of their faith and practice—does that include matters of science, or does it just deal with spiritual things?

Jay: Well, the simple answer people like to say—“Well, the Bible just talks about spiritual things and salvation and heaven and all that, and we have to really go to science to learn things about, you know, real history and science and origins and all that.” But that’s a very huge misconception. Jesus himself said in John:3:12If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?
See All..., I think it was, He said, “If I have told you of earthly things and you believe Me not, how will you believe Me if I tell you about the heavenly things?” You know, Jesus talked about history, He talked about Genesis, and if we don’t believe Him about those historical things…if we don’t believe Scripture about its history, how can we trust its spiritual message?

So the Bible should be our final authority in all matters, whether it’s spiritual or physical, although we obviously don’t look at the Bible as being a science textbook. We don’t want it to be. Science textbooks have to be corrected and updated all the time when we discover new things. We don’t expect to get the mass of an electron out of Scripture. What the Bible does do, however, is gives us an excellent framework to properly understand the physical world around us.

Just one quick example: you look at the Grand Canyon - it’s an absolute fact there are many layers there. No one disputes that. They are there. But they’re just there. They are layers; they don’t say anything. So when you look at it, we ask ourselves, “How can we explain that? Why would that be here?”

Secular scientists said, “Well, I guess we just see natural slow processes; that’s probably what happened, and they took millions of years to accumulate,” whereas a Christian can say, “Hey, God’s Word says there was a worldwide flood, Genesis 6-8. A worldwide flood would lay layers down all over the planet.”

And guess what? That’s what we’re seeing: “Hey, I can explain this through the flood.” And so we use the Bible as a framework to properly understand astronomy and biology and geology and such. So that’s the way we need to approach it as Christians.

Tom: Mm-hmm. You know, one of the points that you made - and that we’ll have to close with this - but, Jay, as I said, your materials are terrific. I loved your DVD, and your booklets are really terrific, but one of the things that I remember is…hey, wait a minute! Why don’t we go on the basis of someone who was there? I mean, scientists can only extrapolate, speculate, give their opinions, but they weren’t there! But we know God was there, okay? God…you know, so His perspective, first and foremost…I mean, it’s true. Absolutely true.

So my guest has been Jay Seegert. He’s the president and cofounder of Creation Education Center, and this has been terrific, Jay. I really appreciate it. Look forward to next week when we’re going to get into some of the very specifics of these things. So folks, I hope you’ll join us. This is really good stuff. Thanks again Jay.

Jay: Well, I’m looking forward to it. Thanks.

Gary: You’ve been listening to Search the Scriptures 24/7 with T.A. McMahon, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. For more information about Jay Seegert’s ministry The Creation Education Center, go to cecwisc.com, or call 262-422-1918.

We offer a wide variety of resources to help you in your study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials and a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, contact us at PO Box 7019 Bend, Oregon 97708. Call us at 800-937-6638 or visit our website at the bereancall.org. I’m Gary Carmichael. Thanks for joining us and we hope you can tune in again next week. Until then, we encourage you to Search the Scriptures 24/7.