Pat Robertson denounced young-earth creationism—the view that God created the earth roughly 6,000 years ago—as “embarrassing” and “nonsense” on Tuesday’s episode of The 700 Club. Robertson’s remarks came during a question and answer segment, in which he responded to a viewer named Sheila who wrote, “Pat, I learned in church that the time of creation was 6,000 years ago. How does that work, compared to science saying dinosaurs are thousands or millions of years old?”
Robertson replied:
One of the reasons I have added a course in what’s called cosmology to the curriculum at Regent School of Divinity is that I wanted to counter this business. There was a Bishop Ussher who added up all the years the Bible speaks about between Adam and Eve and us, and he added up 6,000 years. Well, the truth is that you know the dinosaurs were extinct maybe 200, or 100, or 50—excuse me, I’ll get it right, about 50 billion years ago. And this planet has been around much longer than that. There’s a course that they were trying to hustle around called “Creation Science.” It was just nonsense. And it was so embarrassing. So we wanted to make sure we told the truth.
You know, this universe that we live in is 14 billion years old, and there’s no question about it. And we have tremendous geological records and all the rest of it. And that 6,000-year stuff just doesn’t compute. But we as Christians need to know the truth. When you know the truth, you stand in awe of the God who created everything. That’s His name. His name is He who caused everything to be. He brought it all into being—the vast solar system and the galaxies and the stars. There are about a billion trillion stars outside of our sun in the universe. It’s huge! So let’s give God credit for what He did and not try to limit him to 6,000 years, all right?
To hear Robertson’s remarks, watch the 700 Club episode embedded above. He begins discussing creationism shortly before the 45-minute mark.
