Gap creationism

Gap Creationism is a term used to describe a particular set of Christian fundamentalist beliefs about the creation of the Universe and the origin of man.

Gap Creationists accept that science has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the Earth is in fact far older than can be accounted for by merely adding up the ages of Biblical patriarchs as given in the Book of Genesis where the age of each one's father at his birth is given and adding the "six days" of creation and thereby arriving at an age for the earth, which is essentially what Young Earth Creationists do, generally arriving at a conclusion that the Earth is only 6,000 - 7,000 years old. In order to hold the two seemingly-contradictory viewpoints that the Bible is inerrant in all matters of fact as well as faith and doctrine and that the Earth is very ancient, they must account for the supposition that certain facts about both the human past and the age of the Earth have been omitted from the Biblical account rather than falsified by it. The most straighforward approach to this problem is to state that between the six days of Creation and the Fall of Man and the subsequent initiation of human history there must have been a "gap" in the story of thousands of years, perhaps even tens of thousands or millions of years.

Most postulate that this gap occurs between the seventh day, the one of rest, and the account of the fall of Adam and Eve and hence that of Mankind though the agency of the tempation of Satan in the form of a snake. According to this theory, this amount of time would be sufficient for all of the geologic events which have happened to make the appearance of the earth to be quite old. No satisfactory amount of time can be exactly derived by this group, some see it as being merely thousands of years at the most on the basis that "a day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day" (see: Day-age Creationism). Others feel that it must be considerably longer than that; this group is at considerable variance from what has come to be seen as classic fundamentalism.