Creation vs. Evolution
Creation vs. Evolution?
 The Creation Week
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-2 (KJV). Where did we come from?The Bible maintains that God is the creator of all life and that a creation week containing six literal days of creation followed by a seventh day of rest formed a weekly time period cycle still in occurrence to this day via the seven day week! Nowhere in the sun, moon or stars do we get the weekly cycle of seven days. The months may give us our seasons and tides and the time it takes the earth to complete a full rotation around the sun gives us our planetary year but the seven day week? The Bible answers all these questions and more including: Why do we have a seven day week? Where did we come from? What is the origin of life? Did we evolve or where we created? By accepting that God created all things in six days and rested on the seventh day (as the Bible states) there is no room for a theory such as evolution that even scientific analysis contradicts.
Are the creation days literal days?A theory called the age-day theory attempts to harmonize the Bible account with current scientific theory by claiming that the six days of creation were long ages of time, rather than literal days of twenty-four hours. Age-day theorists point to fossils and geological data as proof that the earth is millions of years old and that a twenty-four-hour day meaning is impossible because the sun isn’t recorded as created until the fourth day, so solar days couldn’t exist during the first three days. Other theorists identify the Hebrew word for day, yom, and claim that it is used elsewhere in the Bible to indicate longer periods of time other than twenty-four-hours (Psalms 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8, Zechariah 12-14). In contrast to this, when you look at the entire Bible story in its entirety its evident that when yom is used with a specific number, in this case six days, it always means a twenty-four-hour day. Examples of this would be the forty days Moses was on Mt. Sinai and the three days Jonah was inside the great fish. In Exodus 20:11, it again identifies the six days of creation as twenty-four-hour days. More than 700 times in the Old Testament, the plural of yom is used and always has twenty-four-hour days in view. In respect to the argument that the first three days could not be solar days, the Genesis account clearly reports “there was evening and there was morning, one day.” Even without the sun, there was an operation like that of the solar days to follow. God could have caused things to operate on the kind of rotation and sequence in preparation for the sun’s creation on day four. There is no compelling reason to abandon the solar day when the Bible so clearly describes an evening and a morning as a single day six times during creation.
What is evolution?Let’s first define the term evolution. If it is defined as simply “change” such as the process of development as seen in an infant to an adult or a change within a kind (such as a dog or a cat) then this evolution or developmental change within certain kinds is completely consistent with the Bible. However the theory of evolution goes far beyond this process of change. The theory of evolution states that complex elements and living organisms have sprung from non-living chemicals, by chance or by association. This theory is less of a scientific theory and more of a philosophy about the origin of life and attempt to explain the meaning of mankind. In summary, the theory of evolution is contradictory to the true Bible story of creation found in Genesis 1:1-2:3. The Genesis account records ten different times how God created plants and animals after their kind with no crossing of the kinds. Man was fully developed as man at his creation (as was woman) with no long gradual time period of development.
Hasn't evolution been proven?Evolution not only contradicts the Bible, but it also contradicts some of the basic laws of science. For example, the second law of thermodynamics implies that when left to itself, everything tends to become less ordered, not more ordered or “Complex”. This rule is an observation of what is obvious. Things get old, run down and eventually die or decay. They lose their structure. The theory of evolution says that things develop their complexity and structure over time. This is not the case. Evolution also claims that changes or mutations are beneficial, while nature shows almost all variations are harmful. The theory contradicts observable phenomena. Neither the theory of evolution nor the theory of biblical creation can be proven scientifically (that is, they cannot be repeated in a laboratory environment) the Bible creation story occurred once in the past, and evolution is too slow to observe. Both theories can be called faith assumptions, and on the basis of the evidence one must choose one or the other. A believer in the Bible should not be embarrassed for believing the Genesis account of creation, since it not only fits better with observable facts but was also the view of the Jesus Christ (Matthew 19:1-6)
Doesn’t science disproved creation?The origin of modern science rests entirely upon the truth of the Bible. The fact that there is a God who created and designed an ordered universe prompted men like Newton to search for certain scientific laws to explain this order. Science has not disproved or eroded the foundation of the Bible account of creation but it does find its roots there. The Bible is not a text book on science and wasn’t written to explain in technical terms the data of the natural world in contrast it deals with spiritual things. It is neither scientific nor unscientific, but it describes in words that are non-technical and often general, so that even the common reader can follow the thought. This does not at all mean the statements are incorrect; it means that they were written from the viewpoint and in the language of a non-technical observer for readers in general. The statements in the Bible concerning scientific matters are on a different level from the other literature of its time. For example, the Vedas (Hindu Scriptures) teach that “the moon is approximately 150,000 miles higher than the sun and shines with its own light, that the earth if flat and triangular, and earthquakes are caused by elephants shaking themselves under it!”. Historically it was widely believed that the earth was flat (see Ptolemy). We may laugh at these statements for how wrong they have proven to be however there are no absurd statements like these found anywhere in the Bible. Science and the scriptures do not cancel each other out. They simply look at the world from different perspectives, but are not finally contradictory.
Isn’t the earth millions of years old?Most scientist seem to believe that the earth is millions of years old however the Bible view of the Genesis account doesn’t need to be harmonized with science, but science needs to be harmonized with the Bible. The geological and fossil evidence does not conclusively prove an earth age of millions of years, and can in large part be explained by the apparent age theory. This is the theory that God created everything at full maturity, with the appearance of having gone through the normal developmental states. For example, Adam and Eve were created fully grown, and the wine Jesus created in Cana was fully matured in an instant of time. This would explain the earth’s appearance of millions of years of age, while in reality it was only recently created (approximately 6,000 years ago). Some of the fossil evidence and geological data can also be explained by a universal flood depositing strata and fossils.
What about dinosaurs and other extinct animals?Only a small minority of the many species of animals are actually mentioned in the Bible. The Genesis story records that God created all living creatures of the sea, and of the earth, and of the sky, then labels them in general terminology such as cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth and winged creatures. Only animals that are significant to human history are mentioned in the Bible specifically, cattle, oxen, goats, sheep (important to the economy), plus the specific list of clean and unclean animals in the Levitical law, etc. Many animals are not specifically named in the Bible and dinosaurs are among them. Lack of mention only means that dinosaurs did not come into the history of man in a way significant or necessary to record them. That dinosaurs existed is apparent from the fossil records found and the pictographs left in Africa and North America, and from fossil evidence of human and dinosaur footprints in the same formations that were presumably preserved by a catastrophe such as a flood. Unless the sediments which entrapped them hardened very rapidly into stone, these remnants would have decomposed, but the remains that have been discovered are whole bodies intact. A catastrophe such as the flood would explain having such remains.
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