It is essential for anyone claiming to be a Christian to believe in a literal 6-day creation timeline. Upon that basis rests the entirety of God’s revealed word in the Bible. My employer has recently added a page defending evolution on its website, and I am very disappointed in that move. Evolution cannot speak to origins of life. Since no one was around to record how the earth was created, the only valid understanding of origins is provided in God’s account, as recorded by Moses in Genesis chapters 1 & 2.
The cornerstone of evolutionary theory is that there is no God, or that if He exists, He merely started everything off, perhaps giving some divine guidance along the way, but that natural processes have accounted for the formation, and deformation of life as we know it. Evolution is more than just a way of explaining natural processes. It claims that life can arise from non-life, that mutations can be beneficial and be passed to offspring in such a way as to promote the development of new and better versions of themselves, and that this process has been in place for billions of years. Evolution claims that we are all the product of dumb luck (evolutionists would word it ‘chance’, but it’s the same).
Besides the incredible mathematical improbabilities of every mutation as we see it now having begun with chance interactions of chemicals in some primordial ooze spawning the first form of ‘life’, evolution and its proponents have other bizarre realities to contend with. A prime example is the supposed age of the universe. Based on current estimated rates of expansion, these scientists can claim to calculate the initial time of the universe’s ‘big bang’ at approximately 10-12 billion years ago. Since there are stars 10 billion light-years away, they say, and light travels at a more-or-less constant speed, the light we are seeing now from those stars was first started that many years ago (minus a slight adjustment for the fact that the universe is apparently expanding).
However, if the light we are seeing from these incredibly distant stars is in fact that old, why are we seeing stars near the end of their life spans? Light arriving from those distant objects should show the state of stars near the beginning of their existence, not the end. Yet, the light we are now observing coming from these distant stars, constellations, and galaxies is ‘old’. We should be seeing the early stages of galactic formation, and should be observing more and more stars in an on-going fashion.
Contrasting that position, Christians understand that God created the world in 6 days, resting on the 7th, and the deterioration of the universe is the fault of a single man’s transgression. Evolutionists, and even some claimed Christian theologians, claim that the universe is billions of years old, and that God could not have possibly made the earth, and everything it contains in 6 literal days. The earth, they say, looks too old. But there is a problem with their thinking: no one knows what a ‘young’ earth looks like. We’ve never observed a planet being formed. By merely flipping the time-table around, and saying that things have proceeded in the past as we observe them now, scientists can claim to know how old the earth and universe are.
The laws of thermodynamics, among which state that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can only merely be translated into a different form, argue against evolution also. If it is true that matter and energy can not be created or destroyed, then the universe must not have originated in the ‘big bang’, but that it must be eternal. Since everything is in a state of constant decay (observe any chemical or physical process, and how there is loss due to friction, noise, heat, etc), thermodynamics, which scientists claim to believe, bluntly shows that things are not getting better, they’re getting worse.
Scientists who believe in evolution as the source of life merely transpose their faith from an infinite, eternal God who made them in His image, as the crowning element of creation, for whom the universe exists, into a faith in the eternality and infiniteness of space, matter, and time.
My journal entry’s title is important. Without a literal 6-day creation period, Christianity (and Judaism, too) falls apart. When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, He flatly announced the reason for keeping the Sabbath Day holy: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” [Ex 20:11]. If the days listed in the creation account in Genesis are not literal days, then the reason given in the fourth commandment for observing the Sabbath is groundless. Previously, in Exodus 16:26, God tells Moses that the people may only gather the manna He miraculously provided for them on the mornings of the 6 days of the week, and could not gather any on the seventh day, since it was the Sabbath, and God was not going to provide food that day. The day previous to it He would provide twice what the people needed, so they would have enough for the next day, but the Sabbath was to be a day of rest. The entire Mosaic Covenant falls apart if the creation week is not literal.
Jesus Himself declared that He was ‘Lord of the Sabbath’, since He was the Son of God. Declaring Himself to be ‘Lord of the Sabbath’ would have been irrational if the creation days are merely figurative and do not reflect accurately the amount of time God spent to create the universe.
God really did make the earth, universe, plants, animals, and mankind in their full forms in 6 days. The ‘evenings’ and ‘mornings’ recorded were not figurative, they were real. Just like days we have now. It has been said that the word ‘day’ or ‘days’ can be taken to mean several different things, such as a 24-hour period, the daylight hours, a period of time (‘in those days’), or a reminiscing (‘back in my day’). However, every time a numerical qualifier is used with the word ‘day’, it indicates a real, honest-to-God day. The repeated use of the phrase, “and there was evening, and there was morning the 1st day” (and 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th) can only lead you to understand that each day is a ‘real’ day.
Another issue that evolutionists have to deal with is the matter of reproduction and maturity. According to the Biblical account, each creature was made and then told to “reproduce after their kind”. When God specially made man on day 6 of the creation week, he told him to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” God would not have told an infant to “be fruitful and multiply”. He would not have brought “every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens to the man to see what he would call them” if the ‘man’ was an infant and not a ‘man’. Nor would it make any sense to have made a “helper fit for him”: “So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” Infants don’t need spouses, they need parents! The evolutionist’s solution to this conundrum is that, since life started with single-cell organisms, as those organisms got larger and more complicated, they gradually adapted ways of raising their young. Unfortunately for them, though, many (if not all) single-cell creatures do not reproduce sexually, they just get to a point where they’re too big to continue as one cell, and divide into multiple cells, who then each go their own way. There really is no logical reason for single-celled critters like amoebae to ever evolve into a form that needs to reproduce sexually: their reproductive manner works fine, why change? With the inerrant light of God’s holy word, though, it is obvious that God intended for there to be multiple ways of reproducing, myriad different types (that had the ability to speciate over time), and that mankind did not come from ‘lower’ life forms.
The wholesale rejection of God and His word by modern science is disheartening. Paul, in writing to the Roman believers says in Rom 1:18-23, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” (emphasis added). God’s astonishing creative diversity is witnessed billions of times a day all over the world. Yet, even with His incredible daily displays of variety, order, uniqueness, and beauty, scientists propound that God did not create the world, that we’re all a giant cosmic experiment, an accident, just one of an infinite number of possibilities that could have been.
Truly, those who espouse belief in evolution have professed themselves to be wise, and yet are fools. God’s word is clear about what will happen to them: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” [Rom 1:24-25] & “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” [Rom 1:26-32].
Man’s refusal to acknowledge God has led to every form of evil in the world today. Our refusal to believe God’s revealed self has devolved our race into murdering, thieving, lying, coveting, idol-worshipping, adulterous people. God has revealed so much of Himself in creation that no man has an excuse to not believe in Him. But, to shut up their consciences, to make themselves feel good about not believing in God, men have come up with ‘alternate’ theories of how things came to be. Their proclaiming of evolution is an act to appease their minds and consciences. By making other people believe their lie, they feel better about it themselves.
If we really are no better than the animals, laws have no purpose. If we really are just a ‘higher’ life form, societal structure doesn’t matter: there is no right and wrong; there is no crime; it’s an “every man for himself” environment.
But not even the evolutionists really believe that. They may profess to believe the current philosophy du jour, that morals are all relative, and your truth is good for you, and my truth is good for me, but they don’t hold to their professed ideals. Everyone demands justice for acts committed against themselves. They may demand it in different ways, but they all want retribution, vengeance, vindication, justice.
Fortunately, God has provided a way of escape from this enslaving mindset: He sent His Son to die on a cross to pay for our sins and transgressions against Himself. Hebrews 9:22b, “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” Jesus came and lived a perfect life, proclaimed a perfect kingdom, died a perfect death, offered Himself as a perfect sacrifice, and rose from death never again to die, but having conquered death, has proffered us, fallen humanity, to have the reward of His perfection by giving us eternal, perfect life in fellowship with God.
I pray for those who hold firm to their evolutionary beliefs. I pray that God will open their eyes to see their error, and to believe Him and His perfect word. I don’t want to see these people suffering eternal judgement for their erroneous beliefs and their spreading of such a heinous lie. I want to see them saved, to join the throng worshipping God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for all eternity with me.
