Hundreds of millions reject biblical creation because of the age of the Earth problem. According to biblical history, the earth is only about six thousand years old. Scientists often claim the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe began more than 13 billion years ago.

A hermeneutical interpretation attempts to understand the Bible's natural history as a contemporary would. A historical-grammatical approach requires that one study ancient literature, language, culture and history. This is not easy for us. For example, ancient Hebrew did not use verb tenses. No society in the Old Testament era held the modern concept of time. In English, we find it difficult to communicate without using tensed verbs n every sentence. Time, in the western system, is inseparable from reality. Our mindset about time is a powerful force that constrains our thinking processes.

This section attempts to understand creation from the perspective of the ancients for whom time did not have a private existence. For them, time never existed apart from events. Furthermore, events always changed speed. The length of winter daylight was different from summer daylight. They used different scales in their water clocks at different times of the year. A winter night watch was longer than a summer night watch because the cycles of nature varied throughout the year. Everyone in the Old Testament era, pagans and Jews, also believed that ancient days and years were ponderously slow compared to later days and years. They believed that the earliest people lived for eons but later generations did not. If they had drawn a time line for history, ancient centuries would be represented by very large intervals while later century-marks would be closer together. This non linear concept of time is supported by the words of the Bible in several passages.

Ancient people thought differently than we do because they were NOT trained to think with our basic assumption.

The Western basic assumption first began in the mind of a pagan Greek philosopher, Aristotle. Fifteen hundred years later, a mendicant Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas, argued that Christians should adopt Aristotle's metaphysics. Metaphysics are elementary assumptions used to interpret the world around us. Historically, Western science was constructed on the  idea that the properties of matter are fixed, not intrinsically changing. If atoms change intrinsically, they would change themselves, change relationally as they age. The literal words of the Bible agree with this ancient way of thinking.