RESEARCH PAPER on “How the Bible and evolution clashes, why is the knowledge of the Doctrine of Creation is important to understand?”

THEO 525 LUO (fall 2013)
Systematic Theology I

Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary

October 11, 2013

Creation and Evolution clashes, when there are changes being made to the age of the earth and the creation of man. The structure is described in the Bible as God created it; however, it describes the earth before the six days of creation. When thinking about the integration of evolutionary principles, as far as the scientific laws are concerned, there is no difference between the origin of the earth and all of its life. Could the Big Bang theory have happened? The Gap Theory, everything made out of nothing. Is the Gap Theory real? Luther sided with the Bible and creation, is his blessing relevant today? Was the earth created out of nothing, no previous atoms did God use? God created the heavens and the earth in six days so we had the seventh day for Shabbat. The Progressive Creation explains the Genesis flood and the six days of creation. So the question is could God really have created everything in six literal days? If so, where did the origins of life come from; and what about the Law of Nature, their survival of the fittest? How big is the rift between the evolutionist and the creationist? Can we trust the Bible to tell us the truth? These are the questions that I will be looking for an answer to.
In evolution and creation of religious idea about how the Earth came into existence? “In America alone, the conservative number of scientists who believe in creation is more than 10,000.” Both creation and evolution offer a belief system; both use the same information to present their view of the origins of the earth. “Creationists maintained that there is a reasonable and logical belief system, backed up by the weight of evidence is observable in the present.” By using present-day science, creationist can prove that the earth and man was created and not evolved.
By using the term evolution, we will use the definition “believe that all things have made themselves by means of their own natural properties, with no supernatural input. Chaos has become cosmos, all by itself; particles have given rise to planets, palm trees, pelicans and people, with no help from the outside of the properties and the matter of energy.” As teaching evolution to my students, my question has been to them, if we came from a single cell amoeba with no intervention, how can some cells grow and change into thousands and millions of cells while others remain single cell amoebas? It is a question that we always look at and attempt to solve. Evolutionists believe that cells are constantly changing, but if they are, why do we still have single cell amoebas? Since evolutionists try to involve a God in the process, most evolutionists strongly reject any intelligent direction. “Even many academic theistic evolutionist scientists, who claim to believe them, both evolution and God insist that the process was entirely natural, this evolutionary creation process supposedly took place over billions of years in which countless creatures struggled, suffered and died, with forceful ruthlessness wiping out the weak at many points.”
God, the true Designer, is the foundation of all the religions of the world, not just Christianity. If you are an atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist you don’t believe what others may believe, therefore, you don’t believe that others should force their beliefs on you. You can do whatever you want to do without concern for the outcome. If you’re Christian or one of the other world religions who believes that God created the earth, there are consequences for the way you may or may not live.
When God created the earth, there was no sin; therefore there was no shedding of blood, no death, and no pain. It is only when sin entered the world through rebellion, that death, pain, and suffering entered the world.
“English botanist Nehemiah Grew, during the earliest history of palynology, took particles that were collected from the air, water and deposits of any age that included pollen and spores which is seemingly evident to the rapid formation of coal spores in Australia, where today they are found in homegrown swamps.” Also, “many southern hemisphere coal deposits showed no sign of anything which could represent the fossil oil that was allegedly grown.” “Researchers at Argonne national laboratory in the United States have shown high grade black coal results from the following procedure. They took lignin, mixed it with some acid- activated clay and water, and heated it to 150°C in an air-free quartz tube. Geologically this is not very hot at all; there is nothing exceptional or unnatural about any ingredient. This process does not take millions of years either, just 4 – 36 weeks.” From an evolutionists point they believe that it takes millions of years for coal to form but it doesn’t. It takes the right set of circumstances for high quality coal to form in as little as four weeks.
Darwin father of modern day evolution would have us believe that there should be in between types of fossils that we can find. The problem is we don’t find any half winged, or half legged, or feather and scaled fossils. There is no link to prove evolution in the reptile or animal kingdom. Is evolution happening today? Yes, evolution is happening today. If you compare the height of humans from 150 years ago to present day we have grown taller. Does that mean that other parts of the human race have evolved, no? It simply means that we’ve grown taller, not that we’ve grown an extra finger, and extra eye, or an extra arm, we’ve just grown taller.
What is the estate evolution? Theistic evolution has 10 principles about it, they are as follows: “The basic principle, evolution, is taken for granted. It is believed that evolution is a universal principle. As far as scientific laws are concerned, there is no difference between the origin of the earth and all of the life and their subsequent developments. Evolution relies on the process that allows increase in organization from the simple to the complex, from the non-life to the life, and from the lower to the higher forms of life. The driving forces of evolution are mutation, selection, isolation, and mixing. Chance and necessary, long time epochs, ecological changes, and death are additional indispensable factors. The timeline is so prolonged that anyone can have as much time as he or she likes for the process of evolution. The present is the key to the past. There was a smooth transition from non-life to life. Long range, evolution will persist” The evolutionists have covered all their bases so any form of life could have lived by their definition. If we take the timeline for example; you can draw the time out for as many years as you think it would take in whatever you’re trying to prove that will happen. Creation is cut and dried as to the length of time? “In addition to these evolutionary assumptions, three additional beliefs apply to theistic evolution: God used evolution as a means of creating. The Bible contains no usable or relevant ideas which can be applied in present-day origins of science. Evolutionistic pronouncements have priority over biblical statements. The Bible must be reinterpreted when and where it contradicts the present evolutionary worldview.” God doesn’t use solution resources for creation, He speaks it into existence. He didn’t need to let things evolve when he had the power to simply speak it into existence. It is totally false when they say that the Bible has no relevant ideas which can be applied to present-day science. God simply said let there be…..whatever He was creating at that moment. All throughout Genesis 1 –2 God spoke everything into existence.
“In this system God is not the only One of the Lord of all things, as His Word has been taken seriously by all men, but he is integrated into the evolutionary philosophy. This leads to 10 dangers for Christians: Misrepresenting the nature of God, God becomes God of the gaps, The denial of central biblical teaching, The loss of the way of finding God, The doctrine of God incarnation is undermined, The biblical basis of Jesus’s work of redemption is mythologized, The Loss of biblical chronology, The loss of creation concepts, The misrepresentation of reality, The missing the purpose.” The Theistic Evolution tries to join two doctrines together which it does not do very well. So the conclusion that I can draw is there is no real support for Theistic Evolution in the Bible. In Genesis 1-2 it does give details about how God created the earth. Therefore the Theistic Evolution as a scientific theory could not have happened.
The Big Bang Theory seems to be even more impossible to have occurred then evolution. Gunton and Augustine stated: Moreau, not in a restricted sense, but is concerned with the warmth of human action in and toward the world, including, therefore, ecological and the aesthetic, of the corrective toward the historical emphasis on the notional the doctrine of creation. Most dogmatic people who believe in creation state: “I believe in God the father Almighty, maker of the heavens and the earth” from Genesis 1. Most Christians are concerned about the formation of the earth. Gunton believes that Christians spend too much time on the first 11 chapters of Genesis, and we don’t look at books like Exodus where God reveals even more of himself. God reveals himself not only Genesis but throughout the whole entire Bible all 66 books. I’ve not read one book yet because he is not revealed some part of his personality about himself; therefore I believe Gunton is wrong in the assumption that Christians spend too much time on only the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
Only if You Take the scientific view of the Bible can you support the Gap Theory and Ruin-Reconstruction Theory. Five persons have perpetrated the Gap Theory and Ruin-Reconstruction Theory for the last roughly 500 years. The Gap Theory waters down the Bible by questioning the day age theory which waters it down more to Theistic Evolution Theory.
That Gap Theory places time between versus Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. Ruin-reconstruction theorists believe millions of years existed between the two scriptures. This accounts for the fossil record. Some theorists also believe this is when they fell. All Gap Theory imposes non-biblical ideas that further compromise the Bible. Consider tracing the Gap Theory back to the Dutchman Episcopius (1583-1643) and Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) a Scottish theologian while bringing in geologist Buckland to popularize the theory. Drakes Scofield reference Bible has had the biggest influence in our generation talking about the Gap Theory and promoting it. Scofields study Bible: “relegates fossils to the primitive creation and no conflict of science with the Genesis cosmogony remains.” While Drakes reference Bible talks about “when men finally agree on the age of the earth, then locate the many years over the historical 6000 between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, there will be no conflict between the book of Genesis and science.” These are a quote that supports science in the Bible. Pember a modern day theologian struggles with the Gap Theory. Pember reconciles the long ages with Scripture and justifies the Gap Theory saying, “There is room for any length of time between the people in the second verse of the Bible.” Westin Fields Gap Theory suggests that the heavens and the earth were perfect until Satan fell. He was the ruler of the earth but when he fell God’s judgment was to flood the earth, then the Ice Age came because light and heat was removed. The plants animals and human fossils before Lucifer’s flood, do not match the plants animals and fossils living today. In the Septuagint, which was prepared about 250 – 200 B.C. it does not say anything about the Gap Theory. The Gap Theory imposes interpretation on Genesis 1:1 – 2. “Many Christians have invented interpretations of Scripture to avoid intellectual conflicts with popular science ideas.”
The theological issue that is at stake is scientific theology, to believe in scientific theology or in the Word of God. Is there scientific evidence to be proven in the Gap Theory? I don’t believe so. I believe Episcopius, Chalmers, Dake, Pember, and Fields had the idea of Scripture in Genesis 1:1 – 2 incorrect. I believe that the five men somehow added what they wanted to believe about creation, into what the Word of God clearly states to be true in Genesis 1:1 – 2.
God made everything “out of nothing” he created the matter that formed every atom in the universe. Nothing existed before God created it. The inhabitants that God has created are too complex to randomly happen, and therefore creator had to create. In the Septuagint it makes it clear that six literal days were all that it took God to create the earth and the heaven and everything in it. The Septuagint does not say that it took 1000 years to count out the day; it speaks of six literal 24-hour days to create. If creation took 5500 years, we can believe that God created everything, and it stood for all those years. The evidence hasn’t changed in the last 500 years to make the gap theory truthful.
Ken Ham is coming from Scripture to prove that the Bible is believable. He made many statements about the Gap Theory to disprove it. An example is: “the Gap Theory is logically inconsistent because it explains what it is supposed to accommodate – supposed evidence for an old earth.” Ken Ham uses scriptures in Exodus, Romans, Genesis, Peter, 1Corinthians, and Hebrews to pray that the gap theory could not have happened. Ken Ham detailed the thought in the Gap Theory: “1. A literal view of Genesis. 2. Believe in an extremely long unidentified age for the earth. 3. An obligation to find the origin of most of the geologic strata and other geologic evidence between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. Geologist opposes evolution but believe in an ancient origin of the universe.”
Ken Ham supports Biblical systematic theology with the belief in the inerrancy of the Word of God to back up what he believes and supports. He does this by using Scripture over and over again throughout his writings. His goals are to convince the reader that the Bible is the word of God and is inerrant; that God created the earth and the heavens just as He said He did. Ken Ham takes you from the beginning Genesis 1:1 – 2 and he explains using scripture how Chalmers, Dake, Pember, Fields, and Episcopius’ theories about evolution could not work. Ken Ham’s strengths are his biblical references which he uses to support all of his ideas. His weaknesses are; if you don’t know the Bible you would need to look at the information. Also if you’re thinking scientifically and you don’t believe the Bible, I don’t know if his writing would persuade you to believe in creation instead of evolutionists thinking. Some applications that arise are the diagnosing of Genesis 1:1 in Genesis 1:2, how are they interpreted.
Most post-Reformation philosophers rejected Scholasticism. The debate between Christianity philosophies goes back to the beginning of time. Some modern scientists do not ascribe to the nature of science. “Descartes for example denied that the final causes are operative in nature; a modern physics was based upon the presumption that the final causes are not operative in nature. Locke declared the real essence of nature’s objects was unknowable; the modern empirical science of nature presupposes that the real essences of the objects are also unknowable. In utterance; every modern philosopher described to nature and character what constituted a possible object of modern natural science in advance of actual establishment of that science.”
“The Aristotelian doctrine of nature maintained in the scholastic philosophy; precisely the element in them which modern natural science is distinguished from the science of the Greeks and the Scholastics. Thus, to make the same two examples, Whitlock asserts that the real essence of the natural objects is unknowable; he is both contradicting Aristotle by the same assertion as grabbing the nature of the characteristic which necessitates in the science of it that in empirical quality by which the modern inductive sciences are distinguished from any science which had preceded them. When Descartes declares that only efficient causes operate in nature, he is substituting for Aristotle the difference between the Cartesian and the Aristotelian concept of nature as the ground of the difference between the modern sciences of philosophy in ancient counterpart.”
Luther also writes a blessing in 1529 that has held true even today; it has several different parts to it to show that God created the earth and every living thing in it. The text is modeled after the doctrine of justification. “God justifies the center without any bearing on our part, so does God create the world without any help from any pre-existing material world.” Luther identifies with the fact that God has the ability to create everything out of nothing. He also states that being created means that you’ll be with other creatures. “The person is born into a field world of creation, and the beginning immersed in a network of relations.” We have humans born with bodies and souls with the ability to obtain meaning through the five senses, so humans can interpret the significance of life through rational reflection and active involvement in this world. Luther doesn’t shy away from involving farm animals, husbands and wives and children even the clothing that we wear or the house that we live in. He thanks God for the physical universe that we live in also, for the rhythm of nature and all the animals and plants that live here.
“The doctrine of creation, ex nihilo, proclaims anonymous pointed manner the absolute and conditional nature of creation and specifies the Omnipotence of its sole ground”. The formula “to create out of a non-being appears in the Hellenistic-Jewish theology, in rabbinic Judaism, and in the early Christian thinkers like Aristides.” The idea is that God has created everything and everything that was created has been around for thousands of years. It holds more than tradition to the Jewish people; it is part of their faith. If Christians are grafted into the vine it seems that this should be our heritage as well.
If Aristotle 384 BC, Luther 1529, and Worral 1994 all agree that God made the earth and everything in it from nothing, considering the span of time, it appears it would have to be the truth to have stood the test of time over many years.
In the Jewish faith, of the Old Testament, observant Christians every week celebrate Shabbat… Shabbat simply means; from Leviticus 23:3: “six days shalt work be done, but the seventh Day is the Sabbath of the solemn rest.” In the book “Celebrate Stories of the Jewish Holidays” I used for many years to teach about Judaism in my History class; it talks about the details of how God created the heavens and the earth in six days. It explains how God formed the earth, made all the living vegetation, created all the animals, and it speaks about how God created humans, saying “It was all good”.
Many Christians try to add millions of years to the Bible in order to make it fit with modern geological theories, or to try and look good in the eyes of the world. Was the earth created in six days? Science has shown that the earth and the universe are billions of years old. The sun wasn’t created until day three; what happened the previous three days? Where was the sun during the first three days? And on day six, in one day Adam actually named all of the animals? These are some questions that I will try to answer in the contents of this paper.
Ken Ham gives details about how God created the earth in six days, taking it back to Genesis. He takes us from day one to day seven and gives us the biblical background to reference it all. He answers all the main questions that anyone would have about how the Earth was created, and how it could be created in six days.
Was the earth created in six days as we know them to be 24 hours? Romans 3:4 declares: “let the Lord be true, and every man a liar.” For everyone who does not accept the days to be 24 hours in a day has been influenced by ideas outside of the Bible. This leads to a communications breakdown because words being used will not have the same meaning. I agree with this statement. Throughout history people have tried to say a day is as a thousand years, to say that it took 6000 years to create the world. This comes from a Greek allegory which influenced the early church.
Ken Ham and Terry Mortenson speak of the six days of creation. They go to the text in “Genesis 1 that clearly states that God supernaturally created all of the earth in six actual days.” It is also qualified by the number of 24 hours by the designation “evening and morning” and for one day, the words “light and darkness.”
“Evolutionary theory holds that the first form of life was marine life, while the Bible says that God created land and plants first. Reptiles are supposed to have predated birds, while Genesis says that birds came first. Evolutionists believe that land mammals came before the whales, the Bible teaches that God created whale’s first.” What evolutionists are saying here does not make sense when the Bible states Genesis. You cannot have land animals before you have vegetation or they will starve to death. You can see creatures without vegetation in the oceans for them to eat starved to death.
Why six days? In Exodus 31:12 the commandment to rest on the Sabbath was given. Exodus 31:15 – 17 Talks about God being refreshed on the seventh day. In Exodus 20:11 the fourth commandment is given that commands us to keep the Sabbath and keep it holy. “The phrase heavens and earth in the Scripture is an example of figurative speech called Merism, where two opposites are combined into an all-encompassing single concept, in this case the totality of creation.”
If we were not created by God on the sixth day and we evolved like the evolutionist believes, there are some questions to be asked. How did the DNA code originate? “Sophisticated language systems with letters and words where the meaning of the words is unrelated to the chemical properties of the letters to the information on the page, is not a product of the chemical properties of ink. How can accidentally mutate copied mistakes, create huge volumes of information in a living thing.” Why is natural selection, principal reorganization by creation, taught evolution, as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life? “By definition, it’s a selection process, so it is not a creative process.” How did multicellular life originate? How did cells adapt to individual survival, learn to cooperate and specialize in creating complex plants and animals? Why are the expected countless millions of transitional fossils missing? “Darwin noted the problem and it still remains. The evolutionary family tree and the textbooks are on imagination, not on fossil evidence.” There are many more questions that could be asked of the evolutionist on the origins of life. Karl Popper, said “Darwinian is not a testable scientific theory, metaphysical (religious) research programmer…” Michael Ruse admitted, “Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
On this side of the spectrum, we have Locke speaking of the Law of Nature. Locke talks about the workmanship of God in terms of God’s property, power, and authority. Locke says man belongs to God because “God made us to last for His and not our pleasure, and every man has a property of his own person; the utmost property man is capable of doing is the right thing by not destroying anything by using it.” Locke suggests that God has authority over the people on earth.
In the modern scientific field, Bacon and Descartes along with Kant have come to the general knowledge that “science completes natural philosophy in some way, rather than to say replaces it. A particular knowledge of the natural world being more distinct and detailed, but also less general, therefore cannot replace it.” Bacon and Kant’s dismissal of speculative knowledge and paper practical science is a source for thought. “The essence of being in the most literal sense is; that they are creatively taught by God. To do away with the understanding is ultimately to eliminate intelligibility altogether and with modern science as well.”
Creationists and evolutionists, Christians and non-Christians will have the same evidence about the earth. In the same fossil layers, the same plants, and animal fossils, same stars looking at the same information. How did we get different interpretations of the same materials? Presuppositions are started at different points. “Christians claimed that we had a record of the past in the Bible. They have a book called the Bible which claims to be the word of God that has always been there, and has rebuilt the major events of the past that we need to know about.” Evolutionists on the other hand “have certain beliefs about the past/present that they presuppose; e.g. no God or at least non-preformed acts of special creation, so they build a different way of thinking to interpret the evidence from the past.”
Man may not agree how the earth was formed, how living creatures came to dwell on this earth, or how man came into existence. In Isaiah 55:11 the Word says: “so is my word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me empty, but it will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I’ve sent it.” God does not expect his word to return to Him void, he expects man to gather from what he has told us. In Psalm 111:10 it says: “The fear of Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise.”
I’ve been told time and time again how He created the heavens and the earth. He also shows us on a daily basis that He is in control of this world. You know that he is around us all the time, the ocean knows how far to come up, you feel when you don’t see something, and someone is controlling it. Someone with much more power than any human being, it would have to be the creator God.

Table of Contents

Title Page Page 1
Introduction Page 2
Part 1-Earth Structure Page 3
Part 2-Integration of 10 Evolutionary Philosophies Page 4
Part 3-Big Bang Theory Page 5
Part 4-The Gap Theory Page 6
Part 5-Doctrines of Creation Page 7
Part 6-Luthers Theology of Creation Page 9
Part 7-Create out of Nothing Page 9
Part 8-Reason for Shabbat Creation of the World Page 9
Part 9-Six Days of Creation Literal Days Page 10
Part 10-Progressive Creation Page 10
Part 11-Questions for Evolutionist Origins of Life Page 12
Part 12-Law of Nature Page 13
Part 13-Rift Between Evolutionist and Creationist Page 13
Part 14- Can We Trust the Bible? Page 14
Conclusion Page 14
Table of Contents Page 17
Bibliography Page18 Carl Wieland, “Stones and Bones Powerful Evidence Against Evolution” Creation Book Publishers (2011)

Werner Gitt, “Compromise Refuting Non-Biblical Interpretations of Genesis 1: Ten Dangers of the Theistic Evolution” (2011)

Michael Kirwan, “The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics,” History and Philosophy (1999)

Ken Ham, Compromise Refuting non-biblical interpretations of Genesis 1 (China, 2001)

M.B. Goster, “The Christina Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind New Series. 43, No. 172 (October 1934)

N.H. Gregersen, “Grace in Nature and History: Luther’s Doctrine of Creation Revisited,” (2005)

Vigiliae Christianae, “Creation out of Nothing,” Creatio Ex Nihilo (1994)

Gilda Berger, Celebrate! (Scholastic Trade Paperback Printing: USA, 2002)

Ken Ham, Compromise Refuting non-biblical interpretations of Genesis 1 (China, 2001)

Question Evolution Thinking Questions for Evolutionist, evolution: the naturalistic origin of life and its diversity. Accessed August 25, 2013. http://creation.com/15-questions.

A.W. Sparkes, “Trust and Theology: Locke’s Politics and his Doctrine of Creation,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (December 1973)

Scott Hefelfinger, Science, Intelligibility, Creation: H, Delineates, and Ennobles Modern Science, A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture (Spring 2011)

Ken Ham, Creation: Where’s the Proof? A Pocket Guide to the Bible: How do we know it can be trusted? (China, 2012)