Creation: A Brief Query
A Sunday guest post by my brilliant husband, Gregg.
Every Sunday, my clever husband offers me a “day of rest” by taking over the homemaker duties here. His primary topic, the Biblical Truth of Creation vs. Darwinism, is a subject that has broad reaching scientific, social, and metaphysical implications for believers and non-believers alike whether you choose to believe the Biblical account — or secular guesses — about the origins of human life on earth.
A Brief Query
Ahem.
What living thing has ever created itself out of something that was not also living?
The above question comprises my entire post this week.
Thank you for your brief attention.
The Truth
“These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” (Genesis 2:4)
There are two accounts of creation in Genesis, with the above text marking the dividing point. In the first (Genesis 1-2:4), the name used for the Creator is “God” (Hebrew Elohim), and its termination is the summarizing “signature,” if you will: “These are the generations (Hebrew toledoth) of the heavens and of the earth when they were created.”
The second account (Genesis 2:4-5:1) normally uses the name “LORD God” (Jehovah Elohim) in chapters 2 and 3 (except where the serpent and Eve used Elohim when she was being tempted) and then simply “LORD” (Hebrew Jehovah) in chapter 4. This second creation account ends with Adam’s signature: “This is the book of the generations |i.e., toledoth| of Adam.”
Note also that “create” (Hebrew bara) is used seven times in Genesis 1, never in Genesis 2-4. In that second account, “made” and “formed” (Hebrew asah, yatsar) are the words used. Genesis 2:3 stresses the fact that “create” and “make” are different, when it tells us that God rested “from all his work which God created and made.” Evidently the verb “create,” which always has the Creator as its subject, refers to His work in calling entities into existence; “make” refers to systems constructed (by either God or men) out of previously created entities. The heavens and the earth were both “created” and “made”
Critics claim that the two accounts are contradictory. Actually, as anyone can plainly see, they are complementary. The second account merely gives more details of the events of the fifth and sixth days of the creation week. The Lord Jesus was there as the Creator and later used them both, quoting from each (Matthew 19:4-6) at the same time in the same context.
The truth is there are no contradictions in God’s holy word.
I commit to you that I will publish every single comment that meets this blog’s commenting criteria. You may want to review that criteria before adding your opinion here.
God Bless you and yours.
Gregg
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Hi Gregg,
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Nothing can create itself. For something to do anything as active as create, it must exist before it does the creating. It follows that for something to create itself, it must exist before it is created. But this is impossible since creation is the beginning of existence, so it follows that nothing can create itself.
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This doesn’t present any difficulties for my world-view.
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May peace be with you,
Neil.
It only presents a problem to a world-view that is consistent with logic.
Hi Gregg,
When I became a Christian, it suddenly hit me that my old world-view wasn’t logical. It’s quite strange. For many years I believed all these things, and now they seem to make no sense. I asked my pastor about it, and he showed me something in the Bible where it said that Satan blinded the minds of non-Christians.
I don’t like to think that my mind was ‘blinded’ but that’s exactly what it feels like. Why couldn’t I see at the time that my beliefs were illogical?
Dave
Your question could have been intended to be understood as a simple literal question or as a more complex question including its implications as you would envision them. Your italicized phrase could have been meant literally and deliberately or it could have been intended more casually to include a wider meaning.
Neil answered the simple literal question that you asked, in particular the literal meaning of the italicized words “created itself”. There is nothing in his literal response that is a problem for a logical worldview. Your response to his comment implies a wider meaning to your query than its literal meaning. Perhaps you could rephrase your query so that your intended question is explicit and not just implied.
For example, maybe the next query could be something like this:
Instead of
…”What living thing has ever created itself out of something that was not also living?”
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You could ask:
…What living thing has ever come into being out of something that was not also living?
(For ‘something, you might include nonliving chemical materials, natural forces, a sequence of natural unplanned events.)
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To that question, a possible answer would be that at this point no living thing has been observed by anyone to have come into being out of material that was not also living.
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I am guessing that you think your query and the answers to it have implications, and that you want to draw a conclusion from them, or you think the conclusion is implied.
What implications do you make from your query and these answers, and what explicit conclusions do you expect your readers to be making, if any?
Nonliving chemical materials, natural forces, and any sequence of natural unplanned events lack a mind — they lack an intelligence. They also lack specified complexity. The specified complexity and interdependencies witnessed in the “simplest” living thing have never come to being in anything that is not alive.
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Lacking a mind, they lack a will and they lack highly specific complex information. They have no ability to plan, or perform even simple logistics. Rocks and dirt cannot simply decide to create a living cell. It is impossible.
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Randomness does not create order. Not ever. Not ever, ever, ever. Randomness only ever creates disorder. Random, “unplanned” events by definition cannot plan, forecast, and logistically perfectly time the kind of specifically complex set of directions required to assemble a living thing and nothing but living things have ever been shown to infuse life into organic structures.
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From a secular world view, one loses sight of the simple logic in the above facts. The third law of thought, the law of the missing third, can also be shown as the fallacy of bifurcation — that there are only two choices. For example, you might say, we can only explain how this could have happened naturally through a series of completely random undirected circumstances, or else we cannot explain YET how this could have happened naturally through a series of completely random undirected circumstances. This is a logical fallacy in that you leave out the possibility that these events might not have occurred naturally through a series of completely random undirected circumstances. These events could have been directed. They could have been planned. They could have occurred supernaturally.
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When your world view does not allow for any supernatural events, you are automatically closing your mind to all of the possibilities and thus closing your mind to real logic.
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God Bless,
Gregg
I kicked myself for a while when the light bulb came on. It seemed so obvious to me in hindsight that I was ashamed that my intelligence and my intellect in general could have become so enslaved to the secular world that it inhibited my ability to think clearly and with rigorous logic.
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Today, the challenge is to set other minds free of those chains.
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God Bless,
Gregg
Thanks for that clear explanation. I appreciate it.
My pleasure. Thank you for the kind remark.