The creation/evolution debate has been recently stirred up by the bill that went before the Tennessee legislature that would prohibit high school science teachers from teaching evolution as fact. I am somewhat hesitant to wade in on this issue because my beliefs on the subject are likely to draw criticism from both sides. Nevertheless I will offer this article as an attempt to bring some measure of understanding to both sides. First of all, let me say emphatically that I am a creationist. I believe as the Bible teaches that a transcendent super-intelligent Person created all things, the God of the Bible. Having said that, I will try to articulate my understanding of what the Bible has to say about origins. The Bible teaches that time and space had a beginning. This coincides with science's most respectable cosmological theory that all matter and energy came into existence in a colossal Big Bang. The Bible teaches that when God first brought the earth into being, it was not like we now know it, but that incremental changes took place over several time periods that Genesis calls "days". Paleontology and geology agree with this. I believe that there is ample Biblical precedence for interpreting these Genesis days as ages, or epochs, perhaps of exceedingly long duration. The Hebrew word for "day" is the word "yom", which has multiple uses in Scripture. "Yom" is used in Isaiah 43:13 to mean "eternity", in Daniel 12:13 to mean "age". Hebrews 11:2, recapitulating the Old Testament, literally reads "the eons were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible." Hebrews 4 implies that we are still in the 7th day, the day of God's rest. Since the 7th day has not been closed out, that means that the other 6 days could also be exceedingly long.
The Bible teaches that the original earth was dark and water-covered. This agrees with many planetary theories that say that the earth was originally covered with water and had a cloud layer so thick that no light could penetrate to the surface. The Bible teaches that in the earliest age, light appeared on the earth's surface, "Let there be light." This was not the initial creation of light, which would have happened in the Big Bang, but describes the fact that the atmosphere underwent a transition that allowed light to penetrate, first becoming translucent (Day 1), and then finally transparent (Day 4), when the sun and moon and stars eventually could be visible in the night sky. The Bible teaches that simple life preceded complex life, that vegetable life preceded animal life, and that aquatic life preceded terrestrial life. All of this agrees with the fossil record, and yet was known to the inspired Genesis writer without massive scientific evidence to go on. The Bible teaches that Mankind came last, not first. Man-made myths of creation would not put Man last, but chronologically first.
The Bible teaches that species reproduce more of their own kind, rather than evolving into different species. In other words the speciation of this planet, even though it may have taken place over a long period of time, did so under the careful management of an intelligent and meticulous Master Gardener (cf. John 15:1) who worked things according to His own design. This is where the Christian worldview parts company with Darwinian evolution. The problem facing paleontology today is that the fossil record itself parts company with Darwinian evolutionary theories. Though certainly natural selection and other natural processes operate so as to produce minor variations within species subgroups, the fossil record has almost none of the transitional forms that would characterize gradual evolution. This is why the world's most noted paleontologist Stephen J. Gould has proposed an alternative theory to Darwinian evolution called "punctuated equilibrium" in an attempt to explain the fossil record. The recent discovery of the fossil record of the Cambrian explosion which took place 580 million years ago shows that many of the major forms of life (the phyla of the animal kingdom) all came into existence simultaneously within a very brief time period.
The Genesis account of beginnings presents prehistory in very broad brush strokes, and in a language that pre-technological humans could understand and pass down from generation to generation. Certainly the Holy Spirit who inspired Genesis knew what happened in the first three minutes after the Big Bang, and all about quarks and muons and pi particles, and the separation of strong and weak forces. But He couldn't begin to communicate such things to a person in Moses' day. It is not surprising that Genesis alone cannot satisfy the human scientific curiosity about details of origins, and it was never meant to. The Biblical account of creation was to establish a few important facts about Man's existence: that God made all things according to His divine plan and purpose, that God made us for a purpose (we did not make God), that God loves us so much that He gave all things into our hands, and that ultimately God was willing to die for us. God, who created all things great and small, has always been willing to answer all questions great and small, if we approach Him with humility and reverence.
@ copyright 1996 by Scott H. Northrup. All rights reserved.