Creation Or Evolution?

Creation or Evolution?

The creation account is taken primarily from the book of Genesis in the Bible. It is in opposition to evolution for one main reason: the evolutionary theory does not include God in its explanations. Genesis chapter 1 and verse 1 says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

When creationists see explanations of the origin of life without the mention of God, then the creationists feel that it is seriously flawed. Not all creationists are Bible thumpers. Some are very well educated. Educated creationists believe that the scientific evidence can be honestly interpreted in such a way to support the creationist view. One reason that there are so many evolutionists is that evolution is taught in many colleges and universities as though it were a fact, and the creationist views are never explained in detail from a scientific perspective.

In science there is the Law of Gravity. It is called a law because it can be observed and proven every day. At least evolutionists have enough intellectual honesty to present their ideas as the theory of evolution, not the law of evolution, even though some of them emotionally view it as a law.

Some of the reasons that evolutionary ideas are held so strongly:

1. From a standpoint of the explanation of scientific evidence, many people have only heard the evolutionary interpretation, and therefore have a normal human bias towards it.

2. Much of the scientific literature in biology of the last 100 years has been written by evolutionists and again has their bias and assumptions.

3. Some of the creationists are not well educated and do not present their ideas in a way that can be easily accepted by the scientific community.

4. Even the creationists are divided when the details are discussed. The Bible is not a science book. It says that God created the world, and that God created the life that is in it in 7 days. But are those 7 days 24 hour days, or are they symbolic of periods of time? Also, are there gaps in the Biblical account? The Bible obviously does not tell us everything that happened: it tells us only the few things that God has chosen to reveal.

Some of the scientific details where creationists feel that evolutionists have gone wrong:

1. The fossil record. Scientists who are creationists feel that evolutionists have grossly misrepresented the significance of the fossil record. Scientists who are creationists feel that the fossil record is much more an evidence of a worldwide flood that is recorded in the Bible than it is evidence in support of evolution. An example of errors that evolutionists have made with the fossil record: For many years the Coelacanth was considered to be an extinct fish millions of years old because of where it appeared in the fossil record, until several living Coelacanths were caught in the depths of the ocean off the island of Madagascar.

2. Uniformitarianism. The theory of evolution is greatly dependent upon the concept that processes have always taken as long as they now appear to be taking. For example, evolutionists will look at a canyon and the amount of water flowing in the canyon and the hardness of the sandstone, and they will calculate millions of years for the canyon to have been formed. In order for their calculations to be true, they must assume that the circumstances that are now observed were always present. Creationists point out that with looser sediments and greater masses of swirling water, the canyon would have been formed much more quickly than calculated by the evolutionists. This is true with many other things such as volcanic activity, ice flows, the uplift of mountains, and continental drift. Creationists state that many, many events can be accounted for by sudden, cataclysmic events. Of course, the greatest of these events is the event of creation itself.

3. The missing links. There are a vast number of living species on the earth. According to the evolutionists, each of these species slowly evolved from something else over millions of years, which slowly evolved from something else over millions of years, which slowly evolved from something else over millions over millions of years. If this really happened, there would be many more creatures that spanned the various stages of development than we have evidence for. Where are all the missing links? Where are all the intermediate species? Creationists recognize that species do adapt to new environments and to changes in the environment; but this phenomenon should not be confused with developing a new species. Similarities between species can be accounted for by the fact that they all have a common Creator.

4. The aggressiveness of evolutionists to find evidence for their theory where it does not really exist. Creationists point out that some evolutionists will find one rib of one individual in a desert somewhere, and then out of their imagination they have created some sub-human species with a high forehead, a lot of dark hair, and a drawing of the individual that looks strangely ape-like!

The Bible says in Genesis chapter 1 and verse 1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” From a physical and material standpoint once there was nothing, and then something happened and there became something. What happened was God’s creative work. Order does not come out of chaos without intelligence. Creationists view the universe in this way. Creationists contend that the scientific evidence can be honestly interpreted in a way that is consistent with the Biblical account. Anyone who does not say, “In the beginning God,” has made a serious mistake.

One way of looking at Genesis chapter one is that it is an earth-centered view of creation. Very little is said about the initial creation of the universe other than God created it. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This verse gives no hint as to how long ago that was, and therefore is in no one way in conflict with any scientific discoveries concerning the age of the universe or the age of the earth. It is important to notice Genesis chapter one and verse 2. It says in the first two phrases of this verse, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep…” To say that the earth was “without form and void” means literally that the earth was a wasteland with the obvious emphasis on the fact that no life yet existed on the earth. Also, the earth was in “darkness.” The light of the earth comes from the sun because of the earth’s orbit around the sun. Therefore, if the earth was in darkness, it was still in the darkness of outer space, and had not yet come into its orbit around the sun.

When Genesis 1:3 says, “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light,” it means that light came into being in regards to the earth. This would be the time when the earth came into its orbit around the sun. The earth and the sun were created in “the beginning” with the rest of the universe. That creation of the universe including the earth and the sun might have been millions of years before the earth came into its orbit around the sun as recorded in Genesis 1:3. The first day of creation was a 24-hour period, but such a 24-hour period was only possible once the earth came into its orbit around the sun. The earth rotating on its axis as it travels in its orbit is what makes a day last 24 hours. It says in Genesis 1:5, “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” The first day was the first 24-hour period. This first 24-hour period would happen as soon as the earth came into its proximity to the sun and thus began its first orbit around the sun.

All of what is said above is perfectly consistent with science, but not with the “theory” of evolution.

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