Tag Archives: Creation

Age of the Earth

Genesis 1

“For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is …” (Exodus 20:11)

There is no argument that the age of the earth debate between evolutionists and creationists has no resolution because there can be no middle ground for compromise on either side. At issue is the question of origins: did all that exists come about by random chance over billions of years through natural causes, or did an omnipotent, omniscient Creator bring it all into being? It is one or the other, and the one who holds either view holds that view religiously and tenaciously. There is no “give.”

Lamentably, the real battle exists in the Christian camp (among “brothers”) where a variety of opinions persist. Is the earth 4.5 billion years old as the evolutionists claim, or is it only 6,000 years old as the Bible seems to indicate? Most Christians accept that God created all that exists, but beyond that opinions vary as to how God created. That God spoke everything into being as the Bible records is too simplistic an answer for some. There are basically two major divisions in this debate. The first group contends that God created everything in six 24-hour days around 6000 years ago. The second group comes in several flavors, but basically they agree with the evolutionists that God created everything over 13.7 billion years ago and used evolution in one form or another to create life. However, they will contend that man was a “special” creation of God and did not evolve from lower life forms. My intent here is to give a brief defense of the first group. The second group is indefensible in my opinion.

I wish to respond to three questions recently posed to me. (1) Where, exactly, does the Bible say that the earth is only six thousand years old? (2) How do we know that the creation spoken of in the Bible took place in six literal 24-hour days, as opposed to uncounted eons of time? (3) In 2 Peter 3:8, it says “that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”  Is this passage pointing to God as being outside of time, or is it the basis for the 6-day/6-thousand years belief?

In answer to the first question, the Bible does not give an age for the earth per se. God did not exactly “date stamp” His creation. Archbishop James Ussher determined that the earth was created in the year 4004 BC by using the genealogies found in Genesis along with other sources.[1] When one begins with the Genesis account of creation (Genesis 1) and counts the generations from Adam to the Flood, one gets about 1656 years. From the Flood to the birth of Abraham was 297 years for a total of about 1953 years.[2] We can round that off to about 2000 years. Then we have about 2000 years to Jesus and from Jesus until now we have another 2000 years for a total of 6000 years – give or take a couple of hundred years.

Second, God created everything in six literal days. The Hebrew word used for “day” is yom, and it almost always means a normal 24-hour day. On those few occasions when it does not mean a literal 24-hour day, context lets us know that, as in the case of “the day of the Lord.” Furthermore, just in case it is not clear enough for us, God further specifies that “the evening and the morning was the first day, second day, third day,” etc., making it clear that God means a literal 24-hour day (Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). Later, in Exodus 20:11, as God gave the commandment concerning the keeping of the Sabbath, God says, “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” In other words, God is saying, “I gave you the example by creating in six days and resting on the seventh, and I want you to follow My example.”

The third question deals with what a “day” means to God. When we look at 2 Peter 3:8 we need to keep the context in mind. Peter is talking about the Second Coming of Christ, and he is encouraging his readers, in the midst of persecution, not to lose heart in waiting for Christ’s return. In essence he says that God does not mark time the way we do; He is not bound by time as we are. Furthermore, Peter employs simile when he says “one day is with the Lord as [or “like”] a thousand years, and a thousand years as [or “like”] one day.” Notice what he DID NOT say: “one day is with the Lord a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day.” We need to take care when reading the Bible not to read into Scripture what is not there.

There is no scriptural reason not to believe in a young earth, nor is there any scientific reason to not to believe in a young earth; but I will let the scientists at the Institute for Creation Research argue those finer points of science. Trust what God says in His Word – ALL of it! Seriously, who would you rather believe? The words of fallible man or the Word of Infallible God?

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Time for Pride to Grow

“. . . when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:7)

A common question that arises from time to time is, “When did God make the angels?” A corollary question to that is “Was there enough time for pride to grow in Satan and for the war in Heaven to occur within the first few days?”

In the Job passage quoted above, God is telling Job that the angels were there at the time when He formed the earth. As to whether there was sufficient time for Satan’s pride to grow, we must ask, “How much time does it take for pride to grow?” In our own experience, does it take a long time to develop pride, or does it just seem to flare up unexpectedly? I would say the latter. Pride is one of the most basic sins. Human beings are naturally selfish and self-centered. Recall that very shortly after Creation, Satan was able to tempt Eve with “the pride of life” (1 John 2:16): “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). It does not take a great amount of time for pride to grow.

The angels probably were created on the first day of the creation week. We cannot be dogmatic about this. The Bible does not specify when the angels were created, but the above passage in Job indicates that they were at least around to see the creation taking place. The angels, therefore, were created before man. Perhaps the reason for not focusing more attention on angels is that the Bible focuses mainly on the relationship between God and man. Angels play a part, but they are not central to God’s redemptive plan. But what does God say about man? “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26, emphasis added). Did God say that about the angels? Did God give dominion over His creation to the angels? Can you see anything there that would give rise to pride and jealousy?

It would not have taken a long time for Satan’s pride to grow. Having been created first and then given lower status than man, Satan said, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:13-14, emphasis added). Satan hates man because God has bestowed upon man greater status than the angels. “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet” (Psalm 8:4-6, emphasis added). The English phrase “a little lower than the angels” is not an accurate translation. “Angels” is the Hebrew ‘ĕlôhîym referring to God rather than the normal word for angels mal’âkîm. This is a messianic passage describing the condescension of Christ in taking human form, but this also has a secondary meaning as applied to man. Having been created in the image of his Maker, man holds a higher status than the angels, and this infuriates Satan.

This being the case, Satan most likely rebelled on Day Six of creation or very shortly thereafter. Seeing that man was God’s prized creation, Satan turned his ire toward destroying man. Knowing that man was created in the image of God, he employed that fact to cause man’s demise: “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). If one analyses the source of any sin, it all goes back to pride – man wants to be his own god. This has been true from the beginning when Satan witnessed the creation of man, and since the fall of man in the Garden (Genesis 3). It really takes no time for pride to develop. It is nothing that requires any nurturing. On the contrary, it is something must actively be suppressed, and this cannot be done through human strength. It requires the supernatural power that only comes from God through the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised, “ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you” (Acts 1:8), and it is in that power alone that pride can be conquered.

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The Fallacy of Time and Chance

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In the beginning, God created … (Genesis 1:1)

If you had not eaten in over two weeks and you found a dollar, would you spend it on a burrito (a sure thing) or on a lottery ticket and a chance to win $10 million (not a sure thing)?  If all you have to do is pick five correct non-repeating numbers in no special order, your chance of picking all five correctly is 1 in 71.5 million.  If, on the other hand, the numbers must be in the correct sequence the odds decrease to 1 in 8.6 billion.[1]  With those kinds of odds, I am sure I would buy a burrito rather than a lottery ticket!

The odds for spontaneous generation of life from non-life are greater than that of winning the lottery.  “So even by the wildest ‘guesstimates,’ the universe isn’t old enough or big enough to reach odds like the 1 in 103,000,000 that Huxley, an evolutionist, estimated as the odds against the evolution of the horse.”[2]  With odds like these, one may as well consider evolution a veritable impossibility.

When one considers the irreducible complexity of the simplest single-cell bacteria, the evidence  should suffice to convince even the most recalcitrant skeptic, provided he has not abandoned all reason.  The motility of a bacterium is accomplished by a whip-like tail called a flagellum.   “The flagellum is constructed of 40 proteins, 10 of which are used in other structures in the cell, and 30 of which are unique to the flagellum.  The flagellum will not function unless all 40 proteins are put together the right way … If the flagellum is missing even one protein, it will not function.”[3]  I might also add that if only one protein is out of order, the flagellum will not function.

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Like creation, evolution cannot be proven scientifically or mathematically for that matter.  It takes an enormous amount of faith to believe “in the beginning hydrogen.”  Therefore, the only thing we can do is to consider the scientific evidence and see which origins model makes more sense or is more reasonable.

First of all, the universe and all that is in it “looks” designed.  Design demands a Designer.  Consider again the bacterium’s flagellum.

 

The flagellum has a motor that is about one-tenth of a micron in diameter, and a tail that turns at up to 100,000 rpm and acts as a propeller. The motor can reverse direction within a quarter turn. The electric motor of the flagellum is precisely analogous to our electric motors, but on a fantastically smaller scale, and it functions better than anything we can make.  One of the smallest man-made electric motors is 2 mm in diameter and was invented for use in boring plaque out of coronary arteries.  It involved the work of visionary cardiologists, as well as biomedical engineers.  These scientists, of course, stood on the shoulders of previous electricians, mathematicians, and engineers.

But the bacterial flagellum is 20,000 times smaller than this motor, works better, and turns faster!  The flagellum is fastened securely to the bacterial cell wall and has all the analogous parts of a man-made electric motor: It has a hook, or universal joint; a bushing; a rod (drive shaft); and an electrically-charged rotor and stator.[4]
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Intelligent scientists and engineers took years to design a tiny micro-motor that is clunky in comparison to the motor that drives the bacteria’s flagella, and yet we are amazed at the genius of the men that designed it.  But therein lays the answer:  men with intelligence designed it; it did not “evolve” on its own from an assortment of miscellaneous junk parts.  The same is true of the bacterial flagellum; it is of impeccable design, and only a fool will attribute its existence to the “blind watchmaker” of evolution.

From the smallest bacteria to the greatest galaxies, our universe displays incredible design and precision.  Evolution, on the other hand, wants to take credit for all that exists by claiming that 14 billion years ago some nondescript cosmic egg exploded, and that from all of the chaos of that primordial explosion, all that we now see “organized itself” into what we understand our universe to be.  It makes for a nice story, but it lacks substance.  Dr. Henry M. Morris offers five solid reasons why this “big bang” theory is a load of poppycock:

1.        The primordial explosion should have propelled all the matter/energy of the cosmos out radially from its center, and by the principle of conservation of angular momentum, none of it could ever thereafter have acquired any kind of curvilinear motion.  Yet there are all kinds of curving and orbiting motions of the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, a situation that seems quite impossible if the universe began with the big bang.
2.        Sensitive measurements in recent years have increasingly been showing that the background radiation is not homogeneous and isotropic (that is, the same in all directions), as it should be if it had been produced by the big bang, but is “anisotropic” in all directions.
3.        The universe is anything but uniform in large-scale structure, as both the big-bang and steady state theories require, but instead is full of huge agglomerations of matter in some regions and vast empty spaces in others, scattered around the cosmos in far from any uniform manner.  Some astronomers are now trying somehow to justify a primeval lumpy big bang!
4.        In the context of the primeval fireball, it is hard to justify the accumulation of any amount of matter in any one location such as a star.  If the explosion is driving all galaxies apart in the resulting expansion, how could it fail to drive all atoms apart before they came together in galaxies?
5.        The most serious objection comes back again in the second law of thermodynamics.  Explosions produce disorder, not order!  The primordial super explosion surely would have produced absolute chaos and the most utter disorder.  If the universe is indeed a closed system, as evolutionary cosmogonists allege, then how in the name of sense and science could this primeval chaotic disorder have possibly generated the beautifully organized and complexly ordered universe that we now have?  The big-bang idea, viewed in this light is as absurd as the steady state idea. [5]

“In the beginning hydrogen?”  Not hardly.  Order cannot come from disorder.  Life cannot come from non-life.  Evolutionists will attempt to deny, or otherwise skirt the issue, but the fact remains that even in the simplest form of life, all the creature’s parts must be present concurrently or the thing will not live, let alone survive.  Evolution from non-life would require that all the necessary proteins and amino acids come together instantaneously and in the proper configuration in order to produce life.  This has been attempted in the laboratory, and what was touted as a great success (the creation of a few amino acids) was in fact a miserable failure.[6] The resultant “building blocks” of life were the wrong blocks, and they did not fit together in any way to produce life.  Of course, that was conveniently left out of the headlines.

This fact alone should discredit the illusion of evolution, but the averse will adamantly cling to the myth claiming that all life originated from a single source billions of years ago.  Although it has been shown that spontaneous generation is next to impossible, let us assume an original source from which all life sprang.  Surely the fossil record would bear some evidence of transitional forms of one kind of life changing to another.  Without a doubt, several “proofs” have made the headlines only to be exposed as frauds, the lie to be revealed only in the most obscure sections of the printed media.  The fact is that the fossil record is remarkably silent on transitional forms.  Everything in the fossil record appears suddenly and fully formed, but bless their hard little hearts, the evolutionists continue their desperate search.

The Bible says that God created everything: space, time, matter/energy, earth, sky and sea, all plant life, sun, moon and stars, sea animals, land animals and at the top of His creation was man – created in the image of God.  All things were created in six 24-hour days, and at the end of each creation day, God declared His creation “good.”  Then on the final day of creation, He declared His creation “very good” – that is to say, “perfect.”  Declaring that each act of creation was good suggests that there was no need for improvement, i.e. “evolution.”  Plants were to bear seed “after its own kind.”  Animals were to reproduce “after their kind.”  This is what the fossil record bears out.

Neither creation nor evolution can be proven scientifically, but when compared side by side, creation, as recorded in the Bible, makes much more sense.  “In the beginning hydrogen?”  No!  In the beginning God!


[1] Calculation done on WebMath.Com: http://webmath.com/lottery.html

[2] From Answers in Genesis, “The Odds of Evolution,” http://aigbusted.blogspot.com/2007/11/odds-of-evolution_07.html

[3]  The Institute for Creation Research, The Creationist Worldview Program, Module 4, Course 2, Lesson 1, “Is Intelligent Design Unscientific?” Section : “Design: Purposeful Arrangement.”

[4] Ibid.

[5] Morris, Henry M., The Biblical Basis for Modern Science, (Green Forest, AZ, 2008), pp. 132-133.

[6] See article “Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem with Chirality” by Charles McCombs, Ph.D, http://www.icr.org/article/evolution-hopes-you-dont-know-chemistry-problem-wi/

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