#359 Young Earth, Old Earth, or Theistic Evolution? | Dr. Tricia Scribner
The Alisa Childers Podcast
Alisa Childers
4.9 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2026
⏱️ 103 minutes
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Summary
Today’s episode tackles a topic I’ve wanted to explore for years: the age of the earth and what Christians should really believe about origins. Is the earth young? Is it old? Did God use evolutionary mechanisms to bring about life as we know it? And most importantly, what actually matters theologically?
Joining me in the studio is Dr. Tricia Scribner, whose PhD research focused specifically on these questions. Together we unpack the key differences between young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and theistic evolution. These are distinctions that are far more significant than they first appear. We also discuss the overlap between progressive Christianity and Theistic Evolution.
Ultimately, we examine why confusion about origins is growing in churches, seminaries, and Christian universities — and how Christians can think carefully, biblically, and charitably about these issues without turning secondary questions into unnecessary dividing lines.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today's episode is all about a topic that I have wanted to do an episode on for years. |
| 0:14.3 | We're going to be talking all things age of the earth. |
| 0:17.7 | Is the earth young? |
| 0:19.0 | Is it old? |
| 0:19.9 | Did God use some mechanism of Darwinian-like evolution |
| 0:24.8 | to bring about everything that we see today? And what matters, theologically? What does the |
| 0:30.8 | Bible actually teach about these things? Well, there's nobody better to have a conversation about |
| 0:35.6 | this than my friend, Dr. Trisha Scribner. |
| 0:38.3 | This is literally what she wrote her PhD thesis on. |
| 0:41.6 | And we covered all sorts of questions like the difference between the Young Earth view and the |
| 0:46.0 | old earth view and the theistic evolution view. |
| 0:48.4 | Because I personally find that a lot of Christians don't really understand that there is a vast |
| 0:53.3 | difference, actually, between |
| 0:54.5 | the old earth creationist view and the theistic evolutionary view. And so we're going to talk |
| 1:00.0 | about the theological implications of all the views. What does the Bible actually have to say |
| 1:04.9 | about the exact age of the earth? And I am just excited for you to hear this. Now, this is going to |
| 1:10.5 | be a part of a two-part series. So today's episode will be with Dr. Trisha Scribner. The next episode will be with Dr. J.T. Bridges to cover more of the philosophical foundations that undergird what we think about these things. So I'm so excited to bring this to you. It's something I've wanted to do for years. So here is Dr. Trisha Scribner. Dr. Trisha, so great. You are our first in studio guest in our new space, so I'm so thrilled to have you. We're going to talk all about theistic evolution today. Now, this is a topic that I have wanted to cover on my show since I started my podcast in 2017. But it's really not an area |
| 1:46.3 | of specialty for me. So I'm so excited that it is for you and that you're here. Before we even |
| 1:51.6 | get into it, just for anybody who's unfamiliar, what is theistic evolution? So if people say, |
| 1:58.6 | you know, everything came about, all living things emerged and diversified |
| 2:02.6 | according to natural mechanisms, and those are the Darwinian ones, you know, natural selection, |
| 2:08.4 | genetic mutations over a long period of time, and we all came from one common ancestor. |
... |
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