CREATION BITS No 2.
Difference Between Creation and Evolution
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Author: Curt Sewell |
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The creation-vs.-evolution conflict is just one part of a larger battle. We need to see the whole picture in order to properly evaluate the smaller portions. The chart below shows the major differences between the secular position of materialistic evolution and the Biblical position of God's miraculous creation.
To be logically consistent, a person should choose one of the two sets of beliefs and go along with each of the points listed. Each is a logical consequence of those above it. However, most of us are not completely logical in our emotions and beliefs; many people would choose some points from one column and some from the other. But this is like trying to mix oil and water -- it doesn't work too well. I tried this for many years, with considerable frustration. The conflicts were painfully obvious.
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Supernatural
Creation Origin There is an all-powerful personal God, who can and did intervene in this world. God gave us the Bible, and inspired its writing. It is reliable for history, science, and theology. The universe, our world, and all its inhabitants were created by God, as He told us in the Bible. The complexities we see in everything around us are strong evidences of God's design, testifying to the truth of the Biblical account. Divine creation includes:
The creative period only took 6 days.
The Great Flood of Noah covered the entire earth. Most of the sedimentary strata, with their fossils, were caused by this flood. A remnant of each kind of animal life was saved in Noah's Ark.
We were created in the image of God, and have an everlasting life, either in Heaven or in Hell, both of which are real places. God loves us, and sent his Son, Jesus, to pay the penalty for our sins. The Bible tells us to believe and accept Jesus as Saviour. |
Materialistic
Evolution Origin If there is a God, He doesn't interfere in the affairs of this world. He's outside of the realm of science, and can't be part of a scientific theory. The Bible is just mythology and folklore. All that we see, including humans, developed in a purely materialistic, random way. There cannot be any design in nature. That would require a designer (an intelligent supernatural power) -- a violation of the starting premise. Materialistic origin includes:
This development took a very long time.
Uniformitarianism and naturalism can explain all the surface features of the earth. There was never a world-wide flood, but there have been several mass extinctions that eliminated majority of species. Our bodies are simply blobs of chemicals, and when we die that's the end of it. There is no eternal soul and no after-life. The idea of a God becoming man, coming to Earth, dying, then coming back to life, and going back to Heaven, is nonsense. |
But why can't we accept the scientific theories, and just recognize
that God was behind it all? Wouldn't that be a good compromise?
Many people have tried to do that. That's what I tried for many years. I believed in evolution, because that's what my teachers taught me, and what most of my associates at work (in a science laboratory) believed. But I was also a Christian, and tried to rationalize the two sets of beliefs. But that's not a very good solution. It really doesn't satisfy either side. It just doesn't make sense.
- Scientific theory won't allow any supernatural intervention. All evolutionary changes must be from random causes (usually from mutations), and "Natural Selection" is the agent of preserving certain changes and rejecting others. If God guided this, it would no longer be natural, and any God-guided activity is outside of the realm of science, because it can't be included in any scientific experiment. Scientists would scoff.
- The Bible claims that it is the inspired word of God, and thus is the foundation of Christianity. If we reject the truth of the Bible, we're removing the foundations of our faith. Our religion becomes one of human logic, because we'd be putting ourselves as the judge of what parts to accept and what parts to reject. Hebrews 11:6 says that in order to reach God, we must have faith and believe in Him.
- Genesis 1 describes in good detail the timing of the various parts of God's creation -- this took six ordinary days, and each day had an evening and a morning (ordinary 24-hour days). Exodus 20:11 restates that, and adds that the seventh day of creation is just like the seventh day of the week, and is the Sabbath. Every scholar agrees that the primary meaning of these verses is "six literal ordinary days."
- Genesis 3 teaches that our human sin is the cause of death, and that there was no death before that first sin. Yet if evolution happened, millions of years elapsed before the first human, and creatures died during all those years. Thus evolution requires vast numbers of deaths before sin ever took place.
- Genesis 5 and 11 list the geneologies from the first man Adam until the birth of Abraham. The number of years included in this interval can be easily calculated -- about 2000 years according to most translations. There's no way this could be stretched more than about 12,000 years.
- The Bible contains many verses, all through the Old and New Testaments, that refer to God's miraculous creation. There's not a single verse whose primary meaning allows an evolutionary interpretation. You have to deliberately distort the meaning of scripture to force evolution, or billions of years, into the Bible.
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