Longtime Christian punchline Pat Robertson has said all kinds of insane things over the years, but when it comes to Creationism, he’s been surprisingly dismissive.

He has said for years that Creationists’ belief in a young Earth “wasn’t inspired by the Lord,” that “you have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to think that this Earth that we live in only has 6,000 years of existence,” and that trying to rationalize a young Earth “just doesn’t compute.”

On yesterday’s episode of The 700 Club, a viewer asked him how he reconciled the age of the Earth with “the account of Creation in Genesis that the Earth was created in seven literal 24-hour days.” (I guess she forgot that God took a smoke break on Day 7.)

Robertson had every opportunity to give her one of his surprisingly accurate responses… instead, he got weird.

… You used the term “literal 24-hour days.” The Bible doesn’t say that. It says Day 1, Day 2, and so forth. But what is a day? A day is how long it takes the Earth to revolve. That’s one way of looking at it. But another day could be a lunar day — how long it takes the moon to revolve around… Another one would be a solar day — how long does it take the Sun to revolve? Another could be a galactic day — how long does it take a galaxy to move around? And a universal day would be how long does it take to traverse the entire universe? And any one of those could be a day. So, you know, the Bible doesn’t say a literal 24 hours, okay?

Got that, everyone? The Bible is true… but when Genesis says God created the universe in six days, the Bible might have been referring to six galactic days. Not day days. Even though galactic days aren’t really a thing. And solar days are roughly the same length of time as “regular” days.

It’s a strange way to appease the Ken Ham crowd by not denying the validity of Genesis while still denying the core of what it says.

Robertson gave the right answer with the wrong explanation. It’s true the Earth isn’t a few thousand years old, but it’s not because the Bible was vague about how long it took for God to poof it into existence. No theologian is claiming God really created the universe in six lunar days.

He should’ve just told the viewer that Genesis shouldn’t be taken literally. Instead, he tried to rationalize the Bible and everyone came away a little dumber than before.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I expected better from Robertson.

