The Great Turning Point

Recently (while on a white-water rafting trip in the Grand Canyon host by Answers in Genesis) I heard Dr. Terry Mortenson make a startling statement. He said, 'prior to Darwin, the church had already bought into the idea of the earth being millions of years old'. I asked Dr. Mortenson if I had heard the statement correctly and he assured me that I had.

On today's program, my guest will be Dr. Terry Mortenson - speaker, writer and researcher with Answers in Genesis.

Dr. Mortenson's book, The Great Turning Point, dispels the widely promoted myth that belief in ‘young earth' creation is a recent phenomenon, popularized by Bible-believing Christians only in the past few decades. Based on his Ph.D. research in England, Dr. Mortenson shows that even before Darwin, there were a number of Christian writers who collectively became known as the ‘scriptural geologists.' For biblical and geological reasons they did not accept millions of years of earth history (an idea which was already becoming popular a few decades before Darwin published his famous book in 1859).

The sad history, as recounted in this book, is that many church leaders about 200 years ago ignored or rejected the young-earth arguments of the ‘scriptural geologists' and were being waylaid by the fallible opinions of secular scientists who were promoting an old age for the earth.