Progressive creation is careful to identify its position as NOT involving a God-guided evolutionary creation mechanism.  However, it still claims the geological ages and record as understood by secular science.  In other words, the sedimentary layers containing the fossil record were laid down over 3 billion years (give or take 500 million).

 This position requires two things to be true:

#1.  Animals must have been living for around 3,000 million years (yes, that is another way of saying 3 billion – it just helps better illustrate that it is a really big number).

#2.  Animals must have been dying for around 3,000 million years (as evidenced in the fossil record).

To straightforwardly embrace the geological ages, along with its record of millions of years of animals living/dying, also requires a reconciliation of the following:

 

1. If the universe, earth, plants and animals had been around for thousands of millions of years before God created man, then what purpose did that creation have?
2. If animals had been dying for three thousand million years before man was even created, then what of the earth’s bondage to death and decay as a result of man’s sin?
3. If death and decay had been taking place for thousands of millions of years before man was created and sin entered the world, then what of God’s creation that He described as “good”?
4. If animals had been living and becoming extinct (as evidenced in the fossil record) for millions of years before man was created, then what of the Dominion Mandate?

To hold to an old earth position, one must now reconcile the requirements the Progressive Creation position demands with these core doctrine (this is what was meant by the implications of how embracing one doctrine can affect others).

Point #1:  God created us ultimately for his glory (Isaiah 43:7, 21; Jeremiah 13:11).  That is a core doctrine.  What purpose would there have been in thousands of millions of years of death and decay before God created man?  Genesis 1:14 explains the reason for the stars, sun and moon: “And let them be for appointing time and for seasons, and for days and years.”  Why have the universe exist for fifteen thousand million years just to act as a clock for us for a few thousand years – a mere blip on the radar?  Yes, “the heavens declare” God’s glory too – but declares to who?  Us!

Point #2:  From a Progressive Creation point of view, death, decay and mindless geological processes have been taking place for billions of years before the fall.  As a church, we cling tightly to the doctrine of man’s inherited sin nature and the earth’s bondage to death and decay (began in Gen 3:16-19 and described in Rom 5:12; 8:19-23).  A large part of the theology surrounding salvation hangs on it.  The theology of sin nature, death and decay are core doctrine to our Christian beliefs.  They are clearly presented in Scripture.  If death and decay were already taking place, then how impotent was the sentence issued to man and the earth because of the fall?  We also anticipate a day when the earth will return, as in Eden, to an absence of death and decay as foretold in Isaiah 11:6-9.  “The wolf will lie down with the lamb, and the leopard with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together.  The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”

Point #3:  Progressive Creation also must explain how God could call the thousands of millions of years of a cold, cruel process of geological upheaval and death, “good.”  What of God’s creation that He described as “good” at the end of each creation day?  What did God mean by his comments on the end of the sixth day recorded in Genesis 1:31, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good”?  Death, extinction, pointless processes, catastrophic volcanic events… doesn’t sound too “good.”

Point #4:  The Dominion Mandate spelled out in Genesis 1:26-30 and clarified again in Psalms 8:4-8 clearly sets man over creation.  He was to name it, subdue it, populate it and live off of it.  It would have been anarchy to issue such a stewardship mandate over a system that had been created and set into motion billions of years earlier.  In this scenario, what purpose was served by the animals that had become extinct before man was created?

 Note that Progressive Creation still holds to a special creation of Adam and Eve, fully formed (Gen 1:26; 2:7) with an appearance of age within the same timeframe young earth advocates propose for the creation of the earth.  Why wouldn’t God create everything with an appearance of age – not to deceive us, but to give us a working useful creation from the start?  If he created eggs and embryos first, who would have cared for them?  If he created stars without creating the light between them and the earth, we wouldn’t have been able to see them.  For the sake of clarification, God did not create the fossil record to make the earth appear “old” – that would be deception.  The geological table and the corresponding fossil record were laid during the flood of Noah.

Other articles in this series: 

Is Young Earth Doctrine Important?

Historical Reasons for a Young Earth

Theological Reasons for A Young Earth