“Deep time has a way of obliterating God. If you have enough time, you can do anything, you can make the argument for anything, you can make the rocks stand up and sing.” That’s why he believes adherence to the deep time paradigm of billions of years is a spiritual issue rather than a scientific one, particularly given evidence that researchers have uncovered in recent years.

IN A 2014 STUDY, BioLogos, a research group founded on a belief in evolutionary creationism, confirmed what large polling organizations have consistently found over the years. A plurality of Americans, fluctuating between 40 and 47 percent, still believe in a literal interpretation of the Biblical creation story. That is, they believe in a literal six-day creation and a literal Adam and Eve. And they’ve believed it in more or less the same numbers for the last 30 years.

However, by drilling down to deeper questions of certainty, BioLogos also found that most of those people aren’t very confident in their beliefs. For example, when they asked a nationally representative group of more than 3,000 adults if Adam and Eve were real people, 56 percent said they were. But when the researchers further asked whether they were “absolutely or very certain” of this, the number dropped to 44 percent. A similar drop occurred when the pollsters pressed respondents on their certainty that God created the world in six literal days and that the earth is about 10,000 years old, going from 37 to 31 percent and 26 to 15 percent, respectively.

What this suggests is that a lot of people want to believe in a straightforward reading of the earliest accounts of Scripture but aren’t sure scientific evidence allows them to do so. Is Genesis History?, a new documentary that will premiere in a one-night-only event at 700 theaters across the country on Feb. 23, aims to give them a scientific basis for confidence in God’s Word.

Del Tackett, former president of the Focus on the Family Institute and founder of the Truth Project, teamed up with Compass Cinema to look into research in a variety of disciplines that make the case for viewing Genesis—Adam, Eve, global flood, and all—as a factual account of events. Throughout the documentary he interviews a variety of scientists in the fields of biology, geology, astronomy, and paleontology who present evidence against the singular theory that provides the foundation for nearly all scientific rejection of Genesis. He calls that theory “deep time.”

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