The problem with the internet is that it allows me to vehemently defend positions that I have held for all of three days and even have sources to back me up. This morning as I was writing down my final outline for my youth lesson today I just kept coming back to the other side of the intelligent design discussion, the side that holds to an older earth idea, but still a creator of man and a full belief in the inaccuracy of the Bible.

I think today, like the true Creationism Agnostic that I am, that I am really feeling like a believer in a middle ground between the young earth and old earth people. Let me make some totally uniformed bullet points that I will never be able to defend later, but represent where I am at this moment as I continue to research, pray about, and generally ruminate on this subject.

• I can fully believe that if God made Adam as a full grown man that he could have made the earth as already old.
• I believe in a universal flood, and that catastrophe of all catastrophes had a profound effect on the earth.
• In looking at the rest of the Hebrew scriptures I see many places where genealogies are problematic at best when it come to determining years. This doesn’t mean that the Bible is wrong, just that it isn’t real concerned with exact dates, but rather a retelling of major events.
• I still have a problem with a millions of years life cycle of dinos and other things that happened before the fall. I see the fall as a world breaking event.
• As such the death of thousands of created creatures (such as dinosaurs) would not be possible before Adam and sin

So I am now espousing a totally non-informed, opinion that I am calling the Middle Earth Creationism theory. (Which probably more accurately should be called the Adult Earth Creationism Theory, but I like the Tolkien sound of my way) This theory says that God created the world and that he made it in 6 days, but that we have no way of knowing when that time line happened so the time from Adam could have been 50,000 years or more. So the earth is both old and young.

See that at least makes my brain stop hurting for a while, but tune in tomorrow when I am sure to have a new theory partially cooked up from my own brain and partially misinformed by books and the internet. (Sometimes there is too much information in this information age).

Disclaimer: Just so no one yells at me about teaching this when I don’t even know what I believe, from the beginning (last week) I have been teaching that there are 3 major theories (evolution, old-earth creation, and young-earth creation) and trying to present the arguments that the two creation camps make. So tonight I will be doing the same.