Who Are They, OEC's and YEC's?

There are Creationists, OEC"S, YEC's, Theistic Evolutionists, and just plain Evolutionists, as well as Atheists, but who are they really, and what do they believe. Pastors preach from the pulpit that you can't believe in Creationism and Evolution at the same time, but do they really understand the difference. This post, and following posts,are intended to clear up any misconceptions of what  the two groups believe and why.

There are two main groups of Creationists, The Young Earth Creationists and the Old Earth Creationists, and the difference between them is mainly over the age of the earth.

YEC's or Young Earth Creationists believe that the Bible is to be taken literally in its description of the Creation and that the 'days' mentioned are actually earth, and man-defined days. Its followers include both Christians and Jews. From calculations of the ages of the patriarchs from Jesus back to Adam it is not hard to compute the time when God began "The Creation of the Heavens and the Earth". I must give credit to an author named Frank R. Klassen for a comprehensive work in this area, and his book "The Chronology of the Bible", which makes clear, graphically, how long each of Adam's descendants lived and who their children were.

From Klassen's calculations Adam was created on April 1, 3975. BC.  This is different from Archbishop Ussher, who in 1650 published the Ussher chronology, a chronology dating the creation to the night preceding October 24, 4004 BC. Young Earth Creationists believe that everything in Genesis should be taken as 'letter perfect', without any attempt to apply an "informed interpretation" to any part of it. They believe in the "Global" flood of Noah, and that the statement "All that God created was destroyed", means "all life" except for that saved on the Ark. 

Creation Science is a body of philosophical thought that has sprung up to defend those views, with explanations of the different geological layers in the earth and when and where the dinosaurs came from. The Protestant Reformation Hermeneutic, inclined some of the Reformers and later Protestants toward a literal reading of the Bible as translated, believing in an ordinary day, and maintaining this younger-Earth view.

These views have found a following lately in sufficient numbers that it has led to the establishment of a number of Young Earth Creation Science organizations such as the Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, and Creation Ministries International. YEC's strongly oppose any Darwinistic views on evolution.

In contrast to the Yec's are the Old Earth Creationists, who accept the book of Gensis as accurate but interpret the time period mentioned in the beginning as not 'earth' days but as a form of "cosmic" time based on the expansion of  the universe.

They reject the 'global' extent of Noah's flood and the YEC's explanation of the origin of geological features of the earth and life forms but hold to a close interpretation of the other parts of Genesis as accurate. They point to "universal" terms used in Genesis, such as "All", "Whole World", as misinterpretations of words meant to apply only contextually to a certain region, or part of God's creation. An example would be the Hebrew word "Erets", which was translated as "world" by early Hebrew scribes, when it could just as accurately mean "land, country, ground".

Progressive OEC's" accept the speciation differences as due to interventions of nature, and as one of God's tools for forming the various life forms on the earth, while rejecting transitional evolution as one of those tools.

There is another group of OEC's that maintain that there is a "gap" in the first two verses of Genesis that can explain the ancient age of the earth. As given in Wikopedia,

""In the beginning ... [when] the earth became formless and void." (It is argued that the word 'was', hayah, can also be correctly translated as 'became'.)

"This is taken by Gap creationists to imply that the earth already existed, but had passed into decay during an earlier age of existence, and was now being "shaped anew". This view is more consistent with mainstream science with respect to the age of the Earth, but still often resembles Young Earth creationism in many respects (often seeing the "days" of Genesis 1 as 24-hour days). This view was popularized in 1909 by the Scofield Reference Bible."

 These two competing views of the Bible are at odds today over which is the correct interpretation of Genesis, but both agree, and emphatically affirm, that God was the Creator of all that they study.

On the other hand there are the Evolutionists, the Theistic Evolutionists, atheistic Evolutionists, Preterists, and just plain atheists,  as well as other categories within the two groups defined today, but those will be discussed in a later post.

Some parts of this post were taken from Wikopedia.