Gap creationism
Gap Creationism, also called Restitution 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.
One 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 Gap Creationists 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 temptation 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.
Another popular approach is to assume that the gap occurs between Gen 1:1 and Gen 1:2. This postulates that the earth was initially created whole and complete and that all geologic events pointing to an old earth (and, perhaps, even evolution) occurs before some event that throws the earth into the chaos described in Gen 1:2. One explanation for the event that throws the earth into chaos is the fall of Lucifer (Satan) as the creation account does not describe when his fall occurred, but at least two Old Testament accounts, and one account recorded in the Gospels as having been spoken by Jesus, describe the fall of Lucifer. Those who hold this viewpoint on when the gap occurred point out that the "clock" on the "six days of Genesis" could not have started "ticking" until the (re)emergence of light in Gen 1:3 as that verse indicates that is was the evening and morning that make the first day of Genesis, and light had to be present to initiate an evening. This viewpoint makes the events within the "six days of Genesis" an act of re-creation (restoration of the earth) rather than initial creation, and is part of the ideas held in Dispensationalism as recorded by Clarence Larken in his book 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.
See also
