Introduction
Among the many types of challenges that atheists raise against the Christian worldview, scientific challenges rank quite high in frequency. Many Christians find themselves in disagreement with other Christians about how particular challenges are resolved, and these disagreements have resulted in many heated theological debates. Many atheists argue that the Bible teaches that the universe is young yet they believe the universe to be ancient. The way to resolve this is one of the hot debates within the Church. Young earth creationists (YEC) believe that the Bible teaches a young universe and that the universe actually is young. Old earth creationists (OEC) believe that the Bible either teaches an age longer than YECs believe or that the Bible is silent on the issue and that the universe actually is ancient. While there are numerous areas regarding origins that can be agreed upon and the fact that this debate is certainly not worth dividing over, it is important that we discuss it for the sake of defending the true worldview against challenges to even the details (see my post "Internal Debates and Apologetics" for more on this aspect of defending the faith).Over the course of many discussions of this question with fellow Christians, one challenge that young earth creationists believe is a defeater for the old earth creationist view is the analogy found in the fourth of the Ten Commandments:
"Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God...For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy."- Exodus 20:8-11 (NIV)When I held to the YEC position, this was one of the passages of Scripture that I would often use as a proof text of my view that the days of Genesis could be no longer than 24-hour periods of time (and that the age of the earth and universe were no more than a several thousand years). When I saw that God's creation revealed a history going back billions of years rather than just thousands, atheists would often use this same supposed defeater to demonstrate the falsehood of the claims of the Bible.
Every now and then this challenge comes back up in my discussions with both Christians and atheists, and its most recent appearance has been in comments on Facebook regarding my critique of the Christian documentary "Is Genesis History." In my critique, while taking the position that Genesis 1-11 accurately records the historical events of origins within its pages, I disagreed that Genesis teaches that the earth and universe are young (between 6,000 to 10,000 years old, as the creators of the documentary defended). So, today I want to take some time to address this challenge.