Last week as part of his daily show, popular Catholic Conservative blogger and political commentator felt the need to explain to his substantial audience why he believes in an old earth, and why Christians who don’t are a hindrance to the faith. Obviously, I think Walsh is wrong. However, since he is very popular with a lot of Christians, I felt that it would be good to respond and perhaps educate Mr. Walsh on why his view is incorrect.
Walsh starts off his rant( which really describes most of his videos) by saying he doesn’t take the Bible literally. I would concur there. The Bible is meant to be taken naturally. This means that when Isaiah makes a prophecy, we know he is using word pictures to explain something. The same could be said for Jesus’ parables. However, this is where Walsh veers from sound doctrine. He attempts to extrapolate these areas of metaphor and prophecy to Genesis. This fails for a lot of reasons. We coud point to Hebrew scholars who almost universally agree that Genesis is narrative. Walsh then stumbles further by claiming that the Bible is not a science textbook. He has that right. In fact, I don’t know of any Biblical creationist who thinks that. However, Walsh then builds on that to say that, since science has “proved” the earth is millions of years old and thus the Bible cannot be used for science. This is absurd if you accept that the Bible is inerrant, which I believe Walsh does. Either God is right when He talks about science, or He isn’t. if He isn’t right when He speaks about science, why trust Him on anything else?
Walsh then attempted to address the Biblical creationist point that “day” in Genesis means a literal 24 hour day. In doing so he demonstrates either ignorance or willful deception. He attempts to claim that there could not be a literal 24 hour day before the sun was created on day four because the sun is required for a day. This demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of what a day is and how it is defined. You could completely remove the sun and we would still have a literal 24 hour day, though we would have no light to tell us this. A day involves the time it takes for earth to rotate on its axis. Walsh uses a specious definition of day to try to make his point but it falls flat when the most important point is considered. The word “day” as Walsh correctly observes, has multiple meanings. However, when used as it is in Genesis with the word “evening”, the word “morning”, or a number it always means a literal 24 hour day. In Genesis 1, all three words are used with “day.” This is fairly easy information to find if Walsh had bothered to do any research on the topic. This forces me to conclude he is either ignorant or being deliberately deceptive.
Mr. Walsh is a political commentator by trade, so I do not expect him to be perfectly informed about science and his political commentary is decidedly Biblical. He’s strongly opposed to abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism and so on. I find it bitingly ironic that Walsh attempt to defend social values that the vast majority of Christians have held over the millenia, but then proceeds to turn around and lay dynamite next to the foundation of those values. Why is human life valuable? We’re made in God’s image. Where do we learn that? Genesis 1. Why is marriage one man and one woman, not two men or two women? Because God made them in the beginning male and female, something Jesus affirmed in the New Testament. Where do we find that? Genesis 1. See everything, ultimately relates back to Genesis. It is the foundation for our faith. Without Genesis, why believe the rest of the Bible?
Ultimately, this is Walsh’s major error. He chooses to believe man’s fallible word, over God’s infallible Word. Because a group of unregenerate scientists believes the earth is millions of years old, it must be so. What is most troubling is Walsh accepts miracles…yet scientists claim those are impossible too. So should we throw out the resurrection too? How about the feeding of the five thousand? Or the raising of Lazarus? Walsh would never allow scientists to dictate to him that those were mythical. Yet he does exactly that on Genesis. The cognitive dissonance there is just unfathomable. Mr. Walsh is a very intelligent man, who writes very informedly on politics and culture. But in this instance, he has either been fooled or intimidated by the white lab coats into believing a lie. The earth is not millions of years old. If you want further information on this topic, I’d suggest you read a blog post that Ken Ham made recently which lists a ton of articles to fully rebut just about everything Mr. Walsh said.
In His Image 
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