First, some Christian scholars will try to step around this
problem by insisting that the long life-spans of the antediluvians (Pre-Flood greats like Seth, Enosh, Methuselah etc) is
metaphorical. Perhaps, it is suggested, these recorded ages were an
indication of their importance culturally/ religiously, or analogous to
something else, like the generations that revered them, or the amount of their
learning, OR some numerological significance now lost to us. For an interesting look at this view, see
BioLogos give it a whirl: here.
But as you will see, they don’t offer sound reasons WHY the ancients would mark ages in this way (# of years = something
other than years), or why they would then switch to marking age in a normal way
(# of years = 365 day periods of life).
And the numerological math they do in this article is dizzying and frankly too convoluted to be
convincing. It feels too “ad hoc” – that is,
contrived specifically to accommodate a uniformitarian view of the past.
Of course rejecting that hypothesis, we’re left with only
two options: One is ditching the bible
as a truth source. But if you, like I,
are inclined to trust the Bible for other reasons, both historical and uncanny,
then we have to take these ages seriously, as a statement of
actual age, and then see if we can find some harmonization with science and
observation which currently says, of course, that people simply cannot live that long.
The hope of finding archaeological evidence for really old
humans is going to be difficult. In any world where humans actually
live to be 900 years old, the aging process must be entirely different.
Modern CSInvestigators can determine the age
of human remains by certain skeletal markers, and they might presume the exact
same physical/chemical body processes would be at work to find the same markers in the remains of a 900 year old man. But can we
reasonably assume this? The remains of a
900 year old man, if he aged under the same physical and chemical burdens we
observe today carried out over 9 centuries, would look like a shriveled shell, a totally c-shaped, decrepit,
living fossil, whose bones would be so brittle, so small, and so malformed, it would be practically unrecognizable as human remains. If this is the evidence we’re looking for, it
seems predestined to never be found.
More reasonably, we have to assume that to live that long,
something about the way we currently age (and therefore the way we assess age
in human remains) would HAVE to be different than it is now. So this would change our task in finding
corroborating evidence for the bible’s claim that ancient people lived very
long lives. Instead of finding people
who display the same aging processes/makers, only sustained artificially over centuries, we should look for some evidence that aging itself as we know it, is
plausibly changeable, and could be different under different conditions. This sort of evidence is more reasonable to come by.
So at Reasons To Believe, Hugh Ross and company go into the
details of what we currently know causes aging.
In some ways, I was surprised to learn that the human can (and maybe was designed to) live much longer than the current outer limit of 120 years (which BTW,
matches God’s judgment in the Bible in Genesis 6:3). In other words, rather than early death being
“natural” and 900 year life spans being “unnatural”, when you consider what look like governors on aging, the truth may be the reverse.
In studying fruit fly aging, it looks as
though a genetic mutation in the current population ensures shorter life spans
- and when that gene is altered, the flies can live literally 100% longer. Other factors are considered, including large
scale radiation from a specific supernova event which we now know coincided with early
human development (and perhaps the time just before the flood, 40,000 years
ago). We know radiation plays a role in
cellular breakdown and thus faster aging.
The increase in radiation from a celestial event like that also explains
the gradual decrease in recorded ages in the Bible (from pre to post flood)
rather than an immediate reduction right after God’s decree. See all their lines of evidence in the
article posted here: Reasons to Believe
Finally, there is a bit of circumstantial evidence that is
corroborative while not convincing all on its own. That is, the fact that the Bible is not alone
in attributing long ages to people who lived in the ancient past. The Egyptians and the Sumerians also have
lists of ancient kings who lived very long indeed.
In fact, by comparison the ages of the Bible’s antediluvians is sober
and positively conservative! One Sumerian
king was said to rule for 28,000 years!
What’s interesting is that these extra-biblical sources not only show
long ages for those who lived before a great flood, but also that the ages
quickly reduced directly after the flood.
To get a feel for what those Sumerian sources reveal, look here: Old Sumerian Kings
In any event, the existence of long-lived predecessors
presents us with an opposing view of humanity.
The current one is that people are continually upgrading through micro
mutations into something better and better, but the antediluvians suggest that the human
genome was in a purer (more fit) state in the past, and that people are
continually degrading through mirco mutations – devolving rather than
evolving. John Sanford wrote a book
called Genetic Entropy that makes the claim that devolution in terms of the
human genome is a well-established fact.
Check out this video of him, beginning at 13:08: John Sanford - Human
