Creation: The Wonderful Stories
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 and is gaining more and more attention in our modern culture.
Regardless of your particular worldview, the primary purpose is to present scientific, historical, logical, and/or sociological data in an empirical and defensible fashion, as much as possible written in layman’s terms, and in a format suitable for supplementing any homeschool curriculum whether you choose to believe the Biblical account — or secular guesses — about the origins of human life on earth.
The Wonderful Darwinian Story
It’s a story called “evolution.” It’s a story I taught my students during the first several years I taught university biology. For me, “evolution” was much more than just a scientific theory. It was a total world-and-life view, an alternate religion, a substitute for God. It gave me a feeling of my place in the universe, and a sense of my relationship to others, to society, and to the world of nature that had ultimately given me life.
Dr. Gary Parker, Creation: Facts of Life, Introduction (emphasis added)
Evolution tells a wonderful, magical story about what happened in the beginning. In the beginning, so the story goes, there was nothing — the absence of absolutely everything — and nothing magically creates absolutely everything.
Nothing gets dense and gets hot and explodes (which, by the way, are all exclusively NOT properties of nothingness). The expanding light gases attain angular momentum (which, they can’t do)and gets dense (which, they also can’t do) then the dense balls of “proto-stars” explode over and over (which can’t possibly happen and never happens now) producing more and more dense elements (which also can’t happen).
Then, galaxies, stars, planets, moons randomly and purely as acts of chance form in their perfect orbits (which is mathematically impossible). The entire randomly occuring universe — all of the natural forces and natural laws — just happens to be randomly fine tuned for life to exist (which is also mathematically impossible).
At first the earth was quite different from what it is now (which no evidence supports). Lightning flashed back and forth in an atmosphere of methane and ammonia (no oxygen!) for perhaps a billion years, producing organic molecules that rained down into the ancient seas. Then, entirely by random chance — purely by accident, without any plan or purpose — a group of molecules got together and life on earth began from a stupendously unlikely yet cosimically fortunate clump of organic molecules that somehow had the ability to survive in the “primordeal” environment and even reproduce.
With life came struggle and death. Those forms of life that inherited entirely by chance those randomly mutated traits that were somehow deemed more “fit” won the “struggle for survival,” killed off their competition, and paved the way for evolutionary expansion.
About 600 million years ago, fossils first began to form, in abundance, of those early, simple kinds of life, forms like the trilobites (inexplicably fossilised along side fish). About 400 million years ago, the first land plants and animals appeared in the iconic TREE OF LIFE (and nearly every living thing today can be found in the ancient fossil record in some form). About four million years ago, certain apes took those first upright steps toward becoming human beings and the smart apes somehow “evolved” into ORIGINAL white european types called caucasiods and the lower apes somehow “evolved” into “AB-“originals like mongoloids and negroids (This is the actual racist evolutionary mindset. I cannot make this stuff up).
Even though we have no absolute morality outside of might making right, we’re not without hope. Even though Darwinism assures us that one day the sun will burn out, the universe will expand or contract itself into oblivion, and life will be no more, this does not leave us hopeless.
After all, we’re already beginning to take control of the very molecule that controls heredity, DNA. Genetic engineering will let us re-make ourselves into our ideal image of what mankind really ought to be. We’re already reaching for the stars. There’s simply no limit to what human beings can do!
Think of it! We live in an age where if a thing can be imagined by the human intellect, that thing can be attained by concentrated human endeavor. Imagine! We can murder unborn infants and harvest their cells and organs for the benifit of the living. This is not ghoulish, but progress. We can kill off the “unfit” who are deemed a poissible “drain” or a “burden” and somehow we imagine this is just and fair and right. our methodology of relativism allows us to easily rationalize any judgements that may come our way. We are well on our way toward re-making ourselves into our own gods.
Darwinism begins with emptiness and nothing and spans its way to violence, amorality, and dead things. All living things — including every single human being who has ever lived or will ever live — are merely temporary intruders in the random chance cosmos, and death wins out in the end.
The causative agents in this story are chance and probability. It may be worth noting that chance nor probability are causative agents. They are only the odds of an event occurring once an agent has initiated cause.
It’s a WONDERFUL story full of magical but somehow still entirely “natural” events, scientific impossibilities, logical fallacies, and a long and distinguished history of fraud, deciet, fabrication, forgery, and outright lies.
Here’s the real catch.
No matter how wonderful the story, no matter how commonly accepted, no matter how much one can put one’s faith and final hope into the just-so story, ultimately it amounts to mere self-deception (and maybe even a little stupidity?) to believe a baseless story so religiously — if it isn’t true.
The Wonderful Biblical Story
My definition of God is a supernatural Being who is infinitely powerful, omnipotent, omnipresent, and all-knowing. He is a Being so far beyond our ability to conceptualize that it is nearly silly to try. He knows every event that has ever happened or will ever happen. He knows the number of every grain of sand on every beach on every planet in the entire universe. He is outside of all nature including space and matter and time. He is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the east and the west and all points in between.
According to the Biblical story, in the beginning was God.
With plan, purpose, and special acts of creation, God stretched out the heavens and clothed the earth with plants both “pleasant to the sight and good for food.” God created our first parents (Adam and Eve) in His own “image,” placed them in a garden in the middle of his perfectly created paradise to live forever, and asked only for their love and trust.
Unfortunately, our first parents sinned. By an act of their own free will, they rejected God’s love and put their trust in their own opinions rather than God’s Word. That self-centered arrogance ruined the world God had created and deemed “all very good,” and their sin brought death, disease, and disaster to the earth.
Each and every gift and virtue God had originally handed down to man, man corrupted, mocked, and marginalized. The early earth became so filled with violence, perversion, and corruption that God grieved that He had even created man in the first place. God destroyed the earth in a global flood to give the entire world a fresh start with those he preserved on the Ark.
Sadly, humanistic evil has again polluted God’s world. The present world is destined for another cleansing, this time by fire as God who can see all of time foretold. We know all of this, the entire story, because God revealed the story to us through special acts of revelation.
And even though this wicked earth is doomed, we’re not without hope. The very same God who created us, the very same God who daily cares for us, is the very same God who sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to conquer sin, death, hell, and the grave. He sent Jesus to raise us to new life, life that is richer and more abundant, that we can claim now and for all eternity. As new creations in Christ we minister to our fellow man and wait for a new heavens and a new earth where the lion will lie down with the lamb and where there will be no more pain, tears, or death. In that new creation, peace and paradise will be perfectly restored.
The Bible begins with grace and love and the life God creates. Death is a temporary intruder. Eternal life wins in the end with Christ’s return.
In the Biblical account, God is the causative agent and He leaves nothing to chance, providing redemption even for the error of man’s free will choices to defy their Creator. There is no randomness, no luck, no probability. There is a plan and a mind and there is love.
It’s a wonderful story packed with documented supernatural events described by the very Being who performed those acts Himself. It’s supported by scientifically sound evidences, mathematically possible occurrences, logical cogencies, and a long and distinguished history of faith, hope, and love for all mankind even in our admitted imperfection.
The Truth
It’s not only important to know and understand what we personally believe but why we believe it. Being comfortable and confident with our beliefs means that we have honestly considered the merits of beliefs that are different from our own. Understanding another’s beliefs helps generate respect and compassion, even if the disagreement is deep, profound, and absolute.
Science is an amazing body of knowledge. The Scientific Method is a magnificent method of investigation. The two are not the same. Most people simply assume that Darwinian evolution can be scientifically studied —but that the Biblical account of Creation cannot be. The fallacy is that the debate is between science and religion. That isn’t the case.
Both of these wonderful stories can be examined scientifically, logically, and critically. Both of these wonderful stories are more about faith than science. It isn’t science versus religion. It is worldview versus worldview. It is faith versus faith.
Personally, it took me years of re-examining the evidence before I abandoned my deep-seated belief in Darwinian evolution. It took even longer to slowly begin to molt and shed the scaly snake skin of social Darwinism in which I had been cloaked almost my entire life; that social Darwinism which led me to believe that sin including the wholesale murder of the old and the unborn (euphemistically called euthanasia and abortion) was somehow justified. In certain cases, I even perceived that evil as noble when it supported the so-called ‘common good’ and I blithely accepted the judgement of fallible human beings in determining right and wrong based merely on ethics without morality.
I thank God that I never fell into the bottomless pit of filthy racism espoused by Darwinism. For whatever reason — God’s grace or common sense — I never embraced that awful aspect of the Darwinian worldview. In fact, the racism inherent in Darwinism is one of the things that helped me leave it behind.
For the last 200 years, the unified front of Darwinism has looked at scientific evidence and pronounced conclusions that reflexively support the Darwinist story. However, in recent years, thousands of scientists are defying that unified front. More and more are now telling us that the scientific evidence actually supports the truth of creation as it is described in God’s Word, the Bible.
How can scientists—all using the same evidence—come to such vastly different conclusions about what that evidence means?
The truth is that it is incumbent upon every thinking individual to fully examine — and very often re-examine — the evidence in order to see which is more consistent with the truth.
Take your time. Be rigorously logical. Think critically.
Think it through from end to beginning and beginning to end and back again.
After doing so, if you are an intellectually honest person, I strongly suspect that you will either conclude that the Bible is true or you will stubbornly choose to remain agnostic on the question. Just as in the days before Darwin, thousands of scientists in recent times, and hundreds of thousands of laymen, have concluded that the Biblical framework is the more logical inference based on scientific evidence and observations.
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
Resources:
Additional Posts dealing with Creation and Darwinism
Hi Gregg,
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I hope you’re well.
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It’s interesting that you mention the cleansing of the world by fire because there are some groups which think that it’ll happen this Saturday.
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http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/
http://www.familyradio.com/index2.html
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I hope not…
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May peace be with you,
Neil.
Wow. How cool. Did you know that some groups think their ancestor was a rock and some dirt?
No, I didn’t.
Please, stop using words as “scientific evidence” to support your claims, since you have NO scientific evidence for what you are addressing. As a scientist, I feel very offended for how you smear science.
If you want to dismiss a theory, perhaps you should actually understand it first.
There is no substance to your comment. The mere fact that you “feel very offended” that I am able to deflate your non-resiliant worldview proves absolutely nothing … other than that you are offended and have a weak worldview. Tossing weak epithets my direction does not sustain any kind of valid point.
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I would entertain an actual scientific debate based on argument, logic, and intellect. If your “feelings” are so easily hurt and you are so easily “offended” when your weak worldview is destroyed using logic and intellect, perhaps you should choose a stronger and more resilient worldview. I can recommend one.