Around about 1512, the Italian astronomer Copernicus wrote his book shocking the world and the church with the idea that the sun was the centre of our solar system. For the previous 1500 years, since the days of the Greeks, people believed that all celestial bodies revolved around the earth. Both Catholic and Protestants castigated Copernicus as a heretic and Martin Luther even called him a fool but, embarrassingly for the church, Copernicus was proved to be right. It took a while, but it eventually prompted a change of theology with scientific discovery ultimately helping to clarify Scripture.
A few years ago I spoke to a man whose son wanted to study civil engineering but he was told that if his son believed what the church taught him, about the age of the earth, he would never pass the exams. This was relevant to me because I also had studied civil engineering when I left school. It wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I got saved in a Baptist church, and one night saw a movie they were playing about creation, produced by Ken Ham, which I found brilliant and convincing. He regarded the Bible as a factually inerrant record of natural history. He proposed that the earth was about 10000 years old and believed that the earth and life were created in six 24-hour days. (Hebrew word for the day: Yom) It was clear to me then that my lecturers in geology were wrong about the age of the earth. Now I understood how the geological structures of the earth were created in the great flood and that, although the earth appears old, it was created instantly “mature” like Adam. Men and dinosaurs lived at the same time, and the proof of this found in the fossils record. The “young earth” adherents believe that there was no death at all on the planet until the fall of man.
What I didn't realize (back then) was that there is another group who believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, but also believe that the earth is as old as scientists say. People like the Christian Astrophysicist Hugh Ross, and many conservative theologians, embrace the old-earth idea. People like Francis Schaeffer, R.A. Torrey, Edward J. Young, John Ankerberg, Bill Bright, Chuck Colson, Hank Hanegraaff (Bible Answer Man), Jack Hayford, J.I. Packer, Lee Strobel (author of The Case for Christ ), and Dallas Willard, to name a few.
For them, the word “Yom” need not be a 24hr day but a long period of time, even an “age.” Respected scholar R.A. Torrey says “The use of the word ‘day’ is not limited to twenty-four hours. It is frequently used to denote a period of entirely undefined length…there is no necessity whatsoever for interpreting the days of Genesis 1 as solar days of twenty-four hours long.”
For these “old creation” believers, God created the universe from nothing (ex nihilo) and created life from non-life. He miraculously created the earliest primitive micro-organisms on earth approximately 3.8 billion years ago and then continued to create life through the “days” of creation (long epochs of time), including all plant life, sea and flying creatures, and land animals (including any primitive primates) without any evolution. Finally, God then created humanity’s actual historical parents, Adam and Eve (God’s “crown-jewel” of creation), from whom humanity’s sin originated. (It still could be six to ten thousand years back to Adam.)
Although they believe that Noah’s flood was a judgment on the sins of man, they also believe that the earth’s surface was formed through both rapid catastrophic processes (earthquakes, flash floods) and slow processes (plate tectonics; mountain building; formation of coal, oil, & diamonds; coral reef formation, etc.). Because of the age of the earth “old earthers” believe animal death was part of God’s creation long before Adam fell. Augustine also did not consider animal death to be a direct result of the Fall but that “animals were designed to be the nourishment of other animals. To wish that it were otherwise would not be reasonable”.

A few years later I left the Baptists and joined David McCrackens New Life Church, where he was teaching something different again which would be called the "Gap theory". This "gap" was a huge gap of years between the original creation millions of years ago (Gen 1.1) and the recreation of the earth as described in (Genesis 1.2-31). During this “gap” darkness somehow had come upon the earth but, over six literal 24 hour days, God restored the earth to how we know it today. This idea was very popular in the 1900s and held to by people like Oral Roberts, Cyrus I. Scofield, Arthur Pink, Finis Jennings Dake, and Chuck Missler. For them, the genealogies were complete, and a global flood took place. Earth appears old because it is old and there was death before the fall. By positing such a gap, the age of the Earth, the age of the universe, dinosaurs, fossils, ice cores, ice ages, and geological formations are allowed to have occurred as outlined by science, without contradicting a literal belief in a seven 24hr day “recreation”.
So there we have it, three versions of creation and they all defend their positions strongly with fairly complex reasoning. They cannot all be right, so who is right, and does it really matter? If you are not going to do engineering at university, a 10000-year-old earth will be just fine, and if you are going to study the sciences you have options!
Jesus mentioned Adam and Eve and the flood of Noah, so we can vouch for history back to the garden. Before Adam, timeframes are a little more debatable. This is not an issue of faith, salvation or orthodoxy but of hermeneutics and interpretation. Augustine once wisely wrote, “In matters that are obscure …in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith. In such a case, we should not so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further truth undermines this position, we too fall with it.” Unlike the Church in Copernicus' day, but as Augustine suggests, we should hold our views lightly. All three views are held by godly men seeking to honour God and the reason this means so much to all sides is that we live in a miraculous and wonderful world.
Have you noticed that people sing about love not about science, about beauty not cause? In his signature song, Louis Armstrong does not sing about how old and fertile the ground is, only that the grass is green, and the sky is an amazing blue. When he sees the beauty of red roses and rainbows, and the awesomeness of a mobile god-like creation being able to say “I love you” to another, how the Grand Canyon was formed seems unimportant. Instead, he sung of the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night and he thought to himself what a wonderful world.
The point of the Bible is not to tell us when or how the world was made but who made it and why. And the answer to that we find in Genesis 3, on the last day of creation where God came down in the cool of the evening to walk with His ultimate creation-mankind. God made the world for people who He wanted to love and with whom He wanted to live forever.
Apparently, Copernicus was wrong. The whole universe revolves around God and His greatest love - us!