Can a person who refuses to believe the verdict of science in this matter really be trusted to have sound judgment on anything else? After all, it takes a geologist to tell us that the Earth is older than 7,000 years, but anybody who receives communion in a Catholic parish on Sunday can tell he is eating bread and drinking wine

“I wish he would explain his explanation,” wrote Lord Byron in response to the obscurantist poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like Byron, we often find ourselves unsure of why people provide the explanations they do; an explanation of the explanation is needed.

A prime example is the recent controversy that has erupted over Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s response to a GQ interviewer’s question about the age of the Earth.

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

Sen. Rubio correctly realized that the question was not really about the age of the Earth but a polite way of determining, “Are you one of those young-earth creationists?” My friend Ross Douthat says the question has a “gotcha” edge:

It drops out of the blue in the midst of the interview, and it’s clearly designed to get Rubio to either take a swipe at the 40-plus percent of Americans and majority of Republican voters who doubt the evolutionary narrative about human origins (though some percentage of those doubters, it should be said, probably believe in an older-than-10,000-years Earth) or look like an anti-science rube. Rubio tries to be simultaneously deferential to the authority of scientists, the authority of scripture, and the authority of parents to teach their kids as they see fit.

But Douthat also adds, ” . . . the fact that this kind of question is a ‘gotcha’ at all is a much bigger problem for American Christianity than for Republican politicians.”

Another friend, Rod Dreher, agrees, “[C]ould we please have a rising GOP star who would, for once, defend both science and religion on this question?”

Peter Wehner has a similar take, “It can be discrediting to a political party—as well as religious institutions—to stand against (or deny) overwhelming empirical evidence on any subject.”

Douthat is Catholic, Dreher is Eastern Orthodox, and Wehner is Evangelical. Yet all three Christians think that Rubio’s mild support for Young-Earth Creationism is somewhat embarrassing.

Even though I myself believe that that the Earth is about 4 billion years old (give or take a decade), I wish these gentlemen—and others who are criticizing Rubio—would explain why their—or, I should say, our—beliefs are preferable to our fellow Christians who believe the Earth is 10,000 years old

If you pressed us to give an explanation for our explanation (without the aid of Wikipedia) we could probably say that it has something to do with radiometric dating. But even though each of these men are highly educated, I doubt they could give a sufficient explanation for how the process works, much less how it can be reliable enough to make a measurement of billions of years (I certainly could not).

In fact, I suspect that if you ask most scientists, they would be similarly stymied. Their answers—like the ones Douthat, Dreher, Wehner, and I would give—is that we have faith that the people who understand that sort of thing and have taken the measurements know what they are talking about. We may not know these people personally or even know people who know them. But we have great faith in the presumed knowledge of these people we don’t know because other people also have faith in them. Our epistemic warrant—our justification for reasonably holding such a belief—is based on our faith in what other people know.

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Joe Carter is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator.