Hugh Ross wrote that “many of the early Church Fathers and other biblical scholars interpreted the creation days of Genesis 1 as long periods of time.”[1] However, the Church Fathers endorsed a six-twenty-four-day creation to combat “Greek thought [that] included kinds of evolutionary and uniformitarian concepts even before the time of Christ.”[2]

For example, Lactantius (c A.D. 250-325), a rhetorician who tutored Constantine’s son wrote, “Plato and many others of the philosophers, since their ignorance of the origin of all things, and of that primal period at which the world was made, said that many thousands of ages had passed since this beautiful arrangement of the world was completed .... Therefore let the philosophers, who enumerated thousands of ages from the beginning of the world, know that the six thousandth year is not yet completed.”[3]