Pat Robertson says idea that universe is 6,000 years old is 'nonsense'

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Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson rejected the belief that the universe is only 6,000 years old, calling it “nonsense.”

“This universe that we live in is … 14 billion years old and there’s no question about it and we have tremendous geological records and all the rest of it and that 6,000 year stuff just doesn’t compute,” the host of CBN’s “The 700 Club” said on his show Tuesday.

Robertson, 89, was responding to a viewer who was confused by what she learned in church — “that the time of creation was 6,000 years ago — versus what science says — that “dinosaurs are … millions of years old.”

He noted that the school he founded, Regent University, teaches the Old Earth view. When “they were trying to hustle around [a course] called creation science, it was just nonsense and it was so embarrassing,” he said.

“So we wanted to make sure we told the truth.”

“We as Christians need to know the truth and when we know the truth you stand in awe with the God who created everything and that’s His name. His name is He who caused everything to be. He brought it all into being. Look at the vast solar system and the galaxies, and the stars, there are about a billion trillion stars … in the universe. It’s huge. So let’s give God credit for what He did, not try to limit Him to 6,000 years.”

Pastors are split on the age of the Earth. A 2011 LifeWay Research survey showed that 46 percent of pastors agree that the Earth is 6,000 years old while 43 percent disagree (the survey has a sampling error of +/-3.2%). Those with graduate degrees are less likely to agree with Young Earth Creationism.

Young Earth creationists arrive at 6,000 years (for both the Earth and the universe) by adding five days of creation (since Adam was said to have been created on the sixth day in the Bible), around 2,000 years between Adam and Abraham, and around 4,000 years between Abraham and the present (scholars say Abraham lived about 2,000 B.C.)

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A film — titled “Is Genesis History?” — was released in 2017 to support the Young Earth view and debunk the notion that those who hold such a position are “unscientific” or “stupid.”

“We live in a time where the current scientific paradigm is infiltrating a lot of the seminaries and a lot of the hierarchy in evangelical Christianity because people have been led to believe that science has settled this issue of deep time," said Del Tackett, creator of Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project, when promoting the film then.

"I would tell Christians, 'If you are going to put your trust in those and you're going to say that God's Word is now just an analogy, or it's just some kind of simile, you're twisting the Word of God because of a paradigm that is already really shaky.' I would say, 'You have that backwards. We start with the Word of God. We start with the record that God has given to us and stand on that, then begin to view the world around us. That's when things will make sense.'"