Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Young Earth creationism" in English language version.
Creationism is about maintaining particular, narrow forms of religious belief – beliefs that seem to their adherents to be threatened by the very idea of evolution.
I have said above, that six days were employed in the formation of the world; not that God, to whom one moment is as a thousand years, had need of this succession of time, but that he might engage us in the consideration of his works.
The first question was whether Moses could really have been the author of the Five Books of Moses, since the last book, Deuteronomy, described in great detail the precise time and circumstances of Moses' own death. Other incongruities soon became apparent: the biblical text was filled with literary asides, explaining the ancient names of certain places and frequently noting that the evidences of famous biblical events were still visible "to this day." These factors convinced some seventeenth century scholars that the Bible's first five books, at least, had been shaped, expanded, and embellished by later, anonymous editors and revisers over the centuries.
By the late eighteenth century and even more so in the nineteenth, many critical biblical scholars had begun to doubt that Moses had any hand in the writing of the Bible whatsoever; they had come to believe that the Bible was the work of later writers exclusively. These scholars pointed to what appeared to be different versions of the same stories within the books of the Pentateuch, suggesting that the biblical text was the product of several recognizable hands. A careful reading of the book of Genesis, for example, revealed two conflicting versions of the creation (1:1–2:3 and 2:4–25), two quite different genealogies of Adam's offspring (4:17–26 and 5:1–28), and two spliced and rearranged flood stories (6:5–9:17). In addition, there were dozens more doublets and sometimes even triplets of the same events in the narratives of the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, and the giving of the Law.
The first question was whether Moses could really have been the author of the Five Books of Moses, since the last book, Deuteronomy, described in great detail the precise time and circumstances of Moses' own death. Other incongruities soon became apparent: the biblical text was filled with literary asides, explaining the ancient names of certain places and frequently noting that the evidences of famous biblical events were still visible "to this day." These factors convinced some seventeenth century scholars that the Bible's first five books, at least, had been shaped, expanded, and embellished by later, anonymous editors and revisers over the centuries.
By the late eighteenth century and even more so in the nineteenth, many critical biblical scholars had begun to doubt that Moses had any hand in the writing of the Bible whatsoever; they had come to believe that the Bible was the work of later writers exclusively. These scholars pointed to what appeared to be different versions of the same stories within the books of the Pentateuch, suggesting that the biblical text was the product of several recognizable hands. A careful reading of the book of Genesis, for example, revealed two conflicting versions of the creation (1:1–2:3 and 2:4–25), two quite different genealogies of Adam's offspring (4:17–26 and 5:1–28), and two spliced and rearranged flood stories (6:5–9:17). In addition, there were dozens more doublets and sometimes even triplets of the same events in the narratives of the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, and the giving of the Law.
Proverbs 3:19 speaks of God's wisdom founding the earth and His understanding establishing the heavens, not His patience over billions of years as He directed slow changes in the works of His hands.
Nor will they abstain from their jeers when told that little more than five thousand years have elapsed since the creation of the world.
We can allow geology the amplest time … without infringing even on the literalities of the Mosaic record
...there is an approximately sixty-four-million-year gap in the fossil record when there are neither dinosaur nor human fossils.
In 1701, the Church of England adopted Ussher's dates for use in its official Bible. For the next two centuries, Ussher's dates so commonly appeared in Bibles that his dates 'practically acquired the authority of the word of God.'
