As many of you are aware, today there is a raging debate--many call it a war--between old-earth evolution proponents and young-earth creation proponents over the origin of the earth and mankind. For you and I, as Christians, this war becomes especially confusing and dangerous because we are torn between two conflicts: the necessary objectivity of science in understanding the world around us through fact, and our belief in the infallible truth of the Bible.
It gets worse. Genesis directly contradicts old-earth evolutionary science models of the world's and man's origins. In science we are told that the universe and the earth were formed by the "Big Bang," an explosion of matter; in Genesis we are told that God SPOKE the stars, the earth, and all matter into existence at different intervals (Gen 1:1-8). Again, direct contradiction, where evolution claims human beings have slowly evolved from other creatures, where Genesis says God made Adam from the dust of the earth and Eve from the rib of Adam. There is no getting around that He made them fully formed; the language allows no other interpretation. One final blow is the issue of time; scientists agree the earth and life took millions upon billions of years to shape and form; Genesis says that God made all of creation in a week and then lists genealogies of family lines to link us directly to modern day history: if you follow the genealogies and Genesis literally, you can arrive upon an age of the earth that is anywhere from 7000-15,000 years old. Now that is a young earth.
This problem has proved immensely troubling to Bible believers. There have been several responses to this contradiction, which I want to list off to you:
- Some have concluded the Bible is fallible
- Others have concluded the Bible is using figurative language, and cannot be taken literally
- Still others have concluded that modern science is wrong and believed in the Bible
There are no other possible responses. Now, if you are like me, you probably think that the first is morally wrong, the second is a compromise which bends the Bible incorrectly, and the third is insanity. I want to encourage you today that the third is not insanity.
Let's talk a little bit about the old-earth, Big Bang evolutionary model of origin. In order for this model to be true, two things must also be true:
1) The earth must be very old (time)
2) All of creation must have been able to occur through random mutation (chance)
If these two stipulations are not true, evolution crumbles. These two theories are the "pillars" of evolution. What you probably didn't know is that there is a lot of evidence that these two theories are not true; we see in fact strong evidence for a young, designed earth as opposed to an old, random one. The immediate question that you will ask is, "Why have I not heard your so-called evidence sooner? Why, if it is so groundbreaking, is it not broadcasted around the world?" I have no good answer to this question, other than that this war of "Science" is actually a war to remove the necessity of God from our thinking. I literally believe modern science silences the other side because they want to go on believing in pure atheism. You may or may not agree, but first allow me to present my evidence.
1) Time. The old-earthers say that we have dated rocks and bones around the earth and found them to be very, very old. They have an entire history of the earth written out, complete with full color drawings in every high school textbook. They've even named every "period," each of which consist of several hundred million years. This is very nice, but there are big flaws with their method of discovery this 6-billion year-old history, which start with their dating methods.
There are several ways to date an object. There is carbon-dating, which checks for how much carbon is left in a bone, finds out how much carbon that bone began with, finds out how much carbon leaves the bone per year, and then discovers the age of the bone based on how many "years worth" of carbon has left the bone. There is a well-known problem with carbon dating, however, even according to evolutionists: it is only accurate up to ten-thousand years, because at that point all carbon has left. Thus, most dating for "millions and billions of years" is done using a different method, radiometric dating.
Radiometric dating works like carbon dating: radioactive materials slowly leaves dead organisms, they say at a constant rate. But it is not a constant rate. Any number of atmospheric changes could drastically change the age radiometric dating finds in a bone or rock. There are so many fluctuations with radiometric dating, when a bone is dated the machine turns out a list of possible ages from 100 to 100 billion years, and the person who found the bone, the paleontologist, actually gets to pick which age they think most likely from the list. That's not science, it's imagination!
It gets worse. A team of creationists went to a beach and found a half-eaten seal. They then used radiometric dating to date the fleshy part of the seal 20,000 years old and the eaten part 40,000 years old. That's how wild radiometric dating figures can get. The seal couldn't have been more than a day old because it hadn't decomposed yet but radiometric dating turned up 20 and 40 thousand years.
So we cannot trust the dates that evolutionists give us. What's more, if there were a worldwide flood (as the Bible says there is), this would completely change radiation levels all around the earth, making things much older than they seem because of all the radioactive discharge during the surge of water. Uh-oh. The old-earth can no longer proven to be old.
2) Chance. If you have never read Darwin's "Origin of the Species," the original theory of evolution, I recommend you check it out. Particularly, you should look at chapter 9, "Problems with the Theory." In this chapter, Darwin spells out potential theories which, if proven true, could completely destroy his theory of evolution. One was the theory that if any living organism were shown to not be able to come about by chance, in other words, if this organism had such a complex design that it could never have come about by chance, it would invalidate evolution.
One biological structure which caused Darwin to fear this idea true was the human eye. He saw that the human eye had many complex, necessary structures which made it work, and without each one, it would not work at all. The eye has an iris, a pupil, retina, transistors, rods, cones, electrical pathways and many other structures which all work together in strange harmony to allow us the gift of vision. Darwin feared that no amount of evolutionary chance could ever produce such a structure.
He didn't even know the eye as well as we know it today. The eye has 19 parts which, if any one is removed, would cease to function. This means either one evolutionary leaps gets all of the functions in one successful mutation, or the creature is merely mutating a useless organ which would not help it become the fittest and survive (ala survival of the fittest). If even 18 of those parts are placed exactly correctly in all their complexity, but one is missing, the eye is a useless organ and a weak spot for the creature because it is soft tissue leading directly to the brain (easy target).
One scientist put the probability of this kind of complexity occuring randomly, by chance:
"The probability of evolution generating life as we know it today is the same probability as a hurricance sweeping through a junkyard and assembling an operational 147 B1 Bomber airplane. It's impossible."
There is much more evidence which leans toward young earth and design, and destroys the pillars of time and chance. If you are further interested, check out
http://www.answersingenesis.org/
or call me up and I will get you the scientific journals for the facts I've listed.
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I'm not so sure if any of you guys recall remembering what I said about my official stance on this very contentious issue within the Creation vs. Evolution debate.
It all started right at around mid to late December 1999 (I think), I was a young 16 years old sophomore livin in "The OC" (sarcasm). This was right at time when I was a young believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. Anyways, I was browsing through the web at the Aliso Viejo Public Library and all of a sudden, at a search engine, I accidentally went to a website (I can't seem to remember) which mentioned very methodically as to why Darwinism Evolution is not compatible with Biblical Christianity and how life itself didn't get created by random chance. Its just isn't practical or made any sense to me.
I just can't see God created me from a primordial soup. Anyways, to make a very long story short, I said to myself that I no longer believe in the "theory" of evolution.
Ever since that time, I been reading up on respectable biblical creationist authors such as Dr. Henry Morris from the Santee-based Institute of Creation Research and Australian born Ken Ham from AIG (Answers in Genesis Ministries).
Even though that it has been nearly 7 1/2 years since my conversion from an evolutionist to a creationist, I'm still feel like that there's a lot for me to learn, grow, and understand about the scientific theories and evidences that has contributed as well as articulate the wonderfulness of God's creation.
In case if you want to know what I'm, I tend to lean as a young-Earth Creationist. My brief stance as a YEC (Young Earth Creationist), I don't believe in the idea that the Earth or the Universe, for that matter, billions of years old. I also don't believe in the Big Bang, or this ridiculous theory of a pre-Adamite group of people. I'll probably post some more comments about this later. Man, I wrote a lot.
A DISCLAIMER: Sorry guys for the deletions of the last two posts that I did. I had some issues to some of the grammatical and spelling errors in my old comments. I can a grammar/spelling Nazi at certain times.
If you look around at many churches here, many believers are beginning to get themselves wrapped around in compromise, meaning, that people would normally say that, "I'm a Christian and I believe in Evolution at the same time" or an another person said to me years ago that "God in the Book of Genesis used Evolution to get where we are." These two quotes alone is enough to convince me that many in the Body of Christ are following this dangerous concept of theistic evolution. Theistic Evolution tries to equate God's creation with modern evolutionary thinking. That's like mixing apples and oranges to me.
Seabiscuit, thanks for the comments.
I'm with you on theistic evolution. In contradicts the Genesis account in many ways. Did God speak creation into existence, or did random mutation make us over billions of years? They couldn't get more opposite to me.
What's more, even for genuine theistic evolutionists, they seem to strip all power of creation away from God and give it, again, to random chance. More of the degodding of God, He might as well have not even been a part of such a "creation." Genesis cites a miracle, not a natural process spurred onward by supernatural force.
Patro, thanks for responding to my comments.
Its like what we had discussed earlier in the group last night, God existed before Genesis occurred. Life was and is the by-product (if I could use this phrase) of God's majestic creation. God didn't create the dinosaurs and other form of life before Adam and Eve were created. It just doesn't make any sense to me that life had to be destroyed before God decided to create human life. No where in the Bible did it made clear that God had to design life in this fashion. Anyways, I don't want to hog too much of the posting here. Thanks though for answering.
A fellow brother in Christ once told me that many in the young-earth creationist movement is destroying and de-legitimatizing (if this is even a usable word) the creationist movement. He felt that the many young-Earthers are embarrassing themselves by not having a proper scientific basis to formulate a debate with an evolutionist.
To put plainly, he's an old-earth creationist who favors the thesis and the scientific articulation of this well-known Old Earther named Dr. Hugh Ross.
I'm not a big fan of TBN (the Trinity Broadcasting Network) but one day, as I was flipping through the channels, and I watched Dr. Hugh Ross' show on TBN. I was kinda shocked that a Pentecostal-leaning TV network carries his show. Anyways, to put it lightly, Dr. Ross promotes his reasonings for Christians to accept his thesis on Old Earth (or Progressive) Creationism and reject Young Earth Creationism as pseudoscience.
What I find his Old-Earth teachings very troubling is the fact that:
1.) rejects the flood as global but rather local
2.) He asserts that the Earth is billions of years old rather than the 10,000 years old that many like myself believe.
3. He establishes a view that life itself was formed by a "supernatural agent" through a progressive sequence of different lifeforms in slow stages.
Patro, how on Earth can such believers and non-believers alike even formulate such ridiculous theories (such as Old Earth Creationism and Darwinian evolution) that denies or compromises God's creation according to Genesis? Let me if I need to slow down in my writings.
Dude thts cool, Ive only ever heard the otherside of the story. I was one of those believers who were confused about whether we should believe both the bible and science.
I was always one of those beleivers who were confused about the infallibility of the bible, but still wanted to keep a firm belief that science actually supported the bible. This was cool for meto read.
Galaphile, every believer in the body of Christ has always ask themselves this common question on whether or not the Bible is 100% infallible. I have to say that I was one of them who also questioned in its entirety. Genesis is the foundation of the Bible, without it then the Bible is completely useless. A pastor once said to someone that Christianity will collapse if either one book (like Genesis) or even one verse in either the Old Testament and the New Testament proves to be fallible.
According to Dictionary.com, the word infallible means "absolutely trustworthy" or "immune from fallacy or liability to error".
As finite human beings, we cannot claim or understand all of the facts. The Bible proves itself to be infallible since we have all of the theological, historical, scientific, and geographical information to back it up.
I know that it sounds a bit of an impasse for me to say this: "science and the Bible are inseparable". In plain English, they do coexist towards one another. I may not have all the answers but perhaps, someone within our small group can best articulate about this better than I can. I hope this helps.
Seabiscuit and Galaphile, excellent discussion. I'd love to hear more thoughts and even arguments from the opposing side.
Seabiscuit, in answer to your question:
It is very important I believe to take both Creation and Evolution as RELIGIONS.
Creation begins with the idea that God spoke everything into existence , then looks for evidence to prove this idea.
Evolution begins with the idea that everything happened by chance mutation, then looks for its own evidence to back up this idea.
The problem is, "science" by definition is using our five senses to study the world around us. How can we study the world "thousands" or "millions" of years ago if it is no longer the same world? We'd need a time machine.
As a result, a lot of belief is required to think that either one of these ideas is true. Science can back them up, maybe even conclusively, but it hasn't necessarily yet--too much guesswork.
I recommend you listen to some creation/evolution debates. See if you can find mp3s. At a certain point in many of these debates, the evolutionist will have a question from the creationist regarding fact that they have no response to. When this occurs, you typically hear this type of response. Call it a "mission statement" or "theme."
"Evolution is a theory which bends and adapts to any condition. No one fact can prove evolution wrong, but rather evolution provides a new answer."
You know what other kind of "truth" works this way? A lie. Catch a child doing something wrong and he will make infinite reasons and excuses for why he was there. For each new "evidence" of his guilt, he brings a new "reason" or excuse.
Evolutionists believe in evolution like we believe in God: it can't be proven wrong because they just believe.
The problem is getting them to admit this.
Thanks, Patro. This message board and the entire blog has been really inspiring. It has meant a lot to me. :)
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