The Evolution of a Creationist

Chapter 1 - THE EVOLUTION OF A CREATIONIST

The Lord
  By wisdom hath founded the earth;
    By understanding hath He established the heavens.
      By His knowledge the depths are broken up,
        And the clouds drop down the dew
           (Proverbs 3:19,20)

Frustration was not an adequate word to describe my feelings! Which was true—evolution and billions of years, or creation in six 24-hour days? Two of my students at Baylor College of Dentistry had challenged me to investigate the possibility that the God of the Bible had created everything in six 24-hour days, as described in the first chapter of Genesis. My first reaction was, “Only an ignorant fool would believe in those ancient myths of the Book of Genesis.”

I was an evolutionist. My years as a biology major at Bucknell University and a dental major at the University of Pittsburgh had convinced me that we are here because of evolutionary processes—all very logical and explainable through the Scientific Method. This was A.D. 1971! We were living in the days of modern, hi-tech-science which had “proven” evolution to be true. And yet, these two dental students were brilliant young men. They held advanced degrees in the sciences. Surely, there must be a simple way to prove that their six-day view of creation was wrong. One of the questions those two dental students asked me was this: “Doctor Martin, have you ever heard of the concept of God creating things with the appearance of age?” At that point in my pilgrimage, I certainly had not, but it sparked a desire to learn more. And thus the frustration began.

FLASHBACK

The seed of my frustration was planted in September of 1966. I was attending USAF Basic Medical Training at Wichita Falls, Texas. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and I had been given orders to report in at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., upon completion of Basic Training. I was to be one of five dentists to serve the pilots and crews of President Johnson's presidential fleet—the 89th Military Airlift Wing.

The seed was a brief prayer. As I sat at the Officer's Club that September night, I decided to clear things up with the God of the Bible (if He was really there). If He could part the Red Sea, turn water into wine, and raise the dead, He could answer a simple prayer. This was my prayer: “God, if you are up there, you have two choices. Either you can show me the girl I am going to marry, or you will see the wildest Air Force officer you have ever seen.” I instantly thought, “Whew, nobody heard that prayer, I'm going out and live it up!”

Except God did hear that prayer. I met my wife-to-be that very day! We had a date the next night, and I told Jenna Dee that I was going to marry her. I knew I would. The God of the Bible had answered my specific prayer on the day that I uttered it to Him.

Upon my arrival to Washington, D.C., I decided to go to church and learn more about God. As I left church that first Sunday, the pastor shook my hand and asked if there was anything he could do to help me spiritually. I told him that anything he could do would help me spiritually, because at that point I was a big zero. Pastor Charlie Warford asked me to get up on Monday mornings at 6:00 a.m. and read the Bible with him. I used to like to argue with people about the Bible, but I'd never really read it. So we read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and we were in John, chapter 3, verse 16, when God got my attention. This verse said, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” It was the first phrase that got my attention. I was part of the world, had a heavy commitment to the world, and I knew it. That verse said to my heart that God loved me! I got on my knees with Pastor Warford and committed my life to the Lord Jesus Christ. The seed had been planted and was beginning to sprout.

At the point in time I came to faith in Jesus Christ as my Savior, my sins were all forgiven, and I was given everlasting life. But something else happened which I was only later to realize. I had gone from being an “agnostic evolutionist” to being a “theistic evolutionist.” That meant that now I believed in God and that He used evolution over billions of years to create the universe and everything in it. I honestly believed that evolution was the only scientifically accurate option for how we got here. It was the “Big Bang,” plus time, plus chance. Or, in other words, “nothing plus no one equals everything.”

EVERYONE BELIEVES BY FAITH

My university science professors had not told me that I was making some significant assumptions by believing in the Big Bang model. The “Big Bang” is the belief that the universe and all it contains is the result of matter, so dense that the matter was invisible, suddenly exploding in a mega-explosion labelled by evolutionary scientists as the “Big Bang.” [1] Many scientists believe that this explosion occurred between eight and twenty billion years ago. To accept the Big Bang, one must assume the existence of matter and energy to be eternal. The Big Bang model only attempts to explain the ordering of matter and energy, not their origin. Matter had to be eternally present before the Big Bang or there would have been nothing there to go BOOM! We discover here that everyone on earth believes in something eternal by faith. It is either faith in eternal matter and energy or faith in eternal God.

Why is this belief by faith? Because it is beyond the reach of science to test. There are no experiments that can test who or what was here when the universe began. Consequently, when we speak of origins, neither the creation model nor the evolution model can be tested or verified by reproducible scientific experiments. This takes both models of origins out of the realm of science and into the arena of faith.

God in His infinite genius has designed His creation so that, no matter which view of origins you believe, you are face to face with God. If matter and energy were eternal, they would be—by the time of the Big Bang—in a state of equilibrium. That means everything would be equal and non-reactive. A car is like that. The car sits there in neutral and doesn't do anything until it is turned on. Starting the engine explodes the gasoline which gives the power to move the car. Science tells us that when matter is somewhere for a long enough time (eternity past), it will eventually stop doing anything and just sit there in neutral like a car. This is a part of the second law of Thermodynamics and is called Zeroeth Entropy. Before the Big Bang, all matter and energy, if eternal, would be in neutral. It's like the car when it is turned off and in park on a flat driveway. It will not move until someone starts it up.

So, if everything was in neutral before the Big Bang, what made the Big Bang go BOOM? If you believe in the Big Bang and eternal matter and energy, you believe by faith that an outside “force” acted on this matter-in-neutral to supply the energy necessary to explode it into action. In reality, you are face to face with God. “In the beginning, God!” The question becomes either, “Do I believe by faith in eternal matter and energy?” (This gives me the problem of how did the Big Bang go BOOM?) or “Do I believe by faith in eternal God?” Everyone believes by faith in something eternal.

Philip E. Johnson, a First Amendment attorney who teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that the media all too often presents creationists as if they do not use or understand science. Johnson writes:

In fact, there is a great deal more to the creation/evolution controversy than meets the eye, or rather than meets the carefully cultivated media stereotype of “creationists” as Bible-quoting know-nothings who refuse to face up to the scientific evidence. The creationists may be wrong about many things, but they have at least one very important point to argue, a point that has been thoroughly obscured by all the attention paid to Noah's flood and other side issues. What science educators propose to teach as “evolution,” and label as fact, is based not upon any incontrovertible empirical evidence (scientifically proven facts, ed.), but upon a highly controversial philosophical presupposition. The controversy over evolution is therefore not going to go away as people become better educated on the subject. On the contrary, the more people learn about the philosophical content of what scientists are calling the “fact of evolution,” the less they are going to like it. [2]

Like many of us, Johnson is concerned that public school science teachers and university professors have moved out of the realm of “science” and into the sphere of religious teaching (faith) when they address the evolution of molecules to man as if it were scientific fact. In my years as a science major at Bucknell University and the University of Pittsburgh, I was taught that science and fossils prove evolution to be true—that the important transitional steps in the evolution of one creature into another “occurred within its gaps.” I now agree with Johnson when he questions current evolutionary theory and its adherents. The evolutionary model's “...mechanism accomplishes wonders of creativity not because the wonders can be demonstrated, but because they (evolutionists) cannot think of a more plausible explanation for the existence of wonders that does not involve an unacceptable creator, i.e., a being or force outside the world of Nature.” [3] The political correctness of the day in which we live also dictates the abhorrence of any credibility or reality to a literal God who is, in fact, greater than science, because He is the Creator of all.

GOD, THE CREATOR

Though the idea of Creator God outside the world of nature is unacceptable to the majority of evolutionists, the Bible teaches that eternal God created the universe and He did so by and through and for His only eternal Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. The eternal Son was there in the beginning of creation as can be seen in the plural pronouns of Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” That He, the Son, was instrumental in the creation of all things is taught in the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. (John 1:1-4)

These verses of John verify that Jesus is the Creator, and that all things were made by Him. The book of Hebrews is another testimony that Jesus is the Creator of the world: “God..., Hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;...” (Hebrews 1:1-2). The letter to the Colossians also refers to the Lord Jesus as the Creator of all things, and it goes on to name Him as the One Who “holds all things together”. (Colossians 1:15-17)

Scientists say, “We have a problem. There are not enough stars and moons and asteroids to hold the universe together.” This is called the “Missing Mass” problem. Everything should be flying apart, but it is staying together. A creationist can say, “I know what holds the universe together in spite of the ‘Missing Mass’ problem—the Lord Jesus, the Creator holds it all together by His great power (Hebrews 1 and Colossians 1).” When the Bible refers to science, it may not be exhaustive, but it is accurate. We can trust it.

The Scriptures tell us that the world came into being, not as a result of cosmic chance, but as a special creation with a unique purpose. God desired someone who would bring glory to Himself and with whom He could have fellowship. Ultimately, the Creator would step into time and His creation to become the Savior. But more about that later.

In the ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament a word is repeated to emphasize it. For example, Isaiah 6:3 uses repetition to tell us that God is infinitely holy: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.” You cannot get any holier than God. The Hebrew language uses the same word three times to show the total absolute holiness of God. In a similar way, Genesis emphasizes the fact of creation. Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, writes:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created (Genesis 5:1-2 emphasis added).

MAN, THE CREATED

Man was created, created, created! You cannot get any more emphatic than that. The Bible does not say man evolved, evolved, evolved. If God wanted to indicate that man had come about through ages of evolutionary changes, He surely could have. But His Word is Truth and the Truth says man was created.

Not only was man created by the Lord Jesus, but he was created in God's own image. Did God, who “spoke the creation into existence,” have to use millions of years of evolutionary mistakes to finally achieve His own image in man? Of course not!

If people really did evolve from monkey-like creatures, then the question arises, “What about the Virgin Mary? Was Mary, the human mother of the Lord Jesus, composed of made-over monkey genes?” If Mary was a highly evolved, distant relative of monkeys, then is our Lord also genetically related to the primates? Mary was created in the image of God, not in the lineage of monkeys.

The Bible tells us that God created man in His own image as an instant creation (Genesis 1:27). Jesus, the Creator, verifies this in Mark 10:6. He states: “But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female.” The context of Mark 10:6 is divorce. We all know that cockroaches, rabbits and rats do not get divorces. The creator is talking about people. People get divorces. The Creator of one-man/one-woman-'til-death-do-us-part marriage tells us that divorce is not His solution to problems of pride and selfishness in marriage. (If you would like to read some of what the Bible says about this please refer to Malachi 2:13-16; Deuteronomy 24:1-5; Matthew 5:31,32; Matthew 19:3-12; Mark 10:1-12; Luke 16:18; I Corinthians 7:10-16). People, created instantly in God's image, were there in the beginning. [4]

If we believe what the Bible says (and this book will argue that there is no “scientific” proof not to), Mark 10:6 alone destroys all evolutionary teaching. There were male and female people on earth from the beginning. The Creator says so. That leaves no room at all for billions of years of transitional animal forms (missing links) gradually evolving from a single cell through monkey-like creatures to man.

MAN CREATED FULLY MATURE

If it is true that there were people here as male and female people from the very beginning, then God created them as instant adults. He created Adam, a full-grown (totally mature) adult who was only one second old. From Adam's rib (taken during the first general anesthetic!), God created instantly the first woman, Eve, complete and mature. Adam woke up and did not see a baby girl. He was introduced to Eve, his fully grown wife.

If Adam had asked, “Eve, how old are you?” she would have answered, “One minute old, Adam.” She was created with the appearance of age. She looked perhaps 25 years old, but she had to wait a whole year to celebrate her first birthday. If Eve said, “Adam, I'm hungry,” he could have reached out and picked a ripe peach, though its tree was only three days old. God also created fully mature trees. They looked old, and bore ripe fruit, but they were only three days old. These three-day-old trees were growing in soil that was created fully developed. In this soil, ferns were thriving and flowers blooming. Huge, minutes to hours-old dinosaurs were walking the earth with Adam and Eve. (Fortunately, they ate plants and not people at this point. See Genesis 1:30.) Even the light beams from the stars could have been created at the instant God created the stars. It might appear to scientists that light from the farthest stars took millions of years to get to earth, but if God created fully mature systems then that light beam may only be as old as the star itself. (For further discussion of this subject, see Chapter 10, Light From The Farthest Stars.)

When I am addressing the issue of creation with maturity (or the appearance of age) with a class of college students, invariably a hand will go up at that point of the discussion. The student will say, “Then God is a liar. He created something that is not what it appears to be if He created Adam, Eve, and dinosaurs full grown. They looked old, but were not old.” No, God is not a liar. He told us exactly what He did in Genesis l and 2. Our problem is that we do not think we can believe it. Instead of believing the Bible, we have accepted the speculative theories of evolution.

Remember that in Hebrews 1, Colossians 1 and John 1, God tells us that Jesus is the Creator. Is it outside of the ability of God to create with the appearance of age? The Creator stepped into space-time-history as the Savior. He performed His first miracle during the wedding feast at Cana as recorded in John 2.

JESUS CREATED AGED WINE

Decades before Jesus and the Apostle John walked the streets of Cana, the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek. This translation is called the LXX or the Septuagint. As John wrote the first two chapters of his gospel, he seemingly had in mind the first two chapters of the Septuagint (Old Testament in Greek). Not only is the use of the Greek language similar, but John 1 and Genesis 1 talk about the beginning of the world and John 2 and Genesis 2 deal with a man and a woman moving into marriage.

As recorded in John 2 the marriage party at Cana had run out of wine. There were six stone waterpots full of water, which Jesus turned into wine. The servants took some of this new wine to the headwaiter. After tasting it he said, “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10).

How is good wine produced? It must be aged. How old was this wine? Only a minute or two. The Creator steps into time and performs His first miracle to “manifest forth His glory” (John 2:11). He wants His disciples to make no mistake as to who He is. In doing so, He creates something (wine) with the appearance of age. The seconds-old wine tasted like aged wine. How many water pots does the Biblical account of John record? Six! How many days did God work in the creation week? Six! As John writes his Gospel he could be thinking about Genesis 1 and 2. In Genesis, God created the universe with the appearance of age in six days. In John 2, God created wine with the appearance of age in six water pots.

Scripture has one interpretation; however, it can have many applications. One of the applications of John 2 is that the Creator does not need time. He can create whatever He wants to create and make it appear to "have some years" on it. Creations that are new can appear to have gone through a process that required time—but there was no time. Jesus manifested His glory as He performed His earthly miracles, without the use of time, just as He had created each aspect of the universe, instantly complete and fully functional.

PETER AIMS TO KILL

When Judas Iscariot came with a mob to betray Jesus, Peter grabbed a sword and aimed it at the head of one of them. The person ducked, and Peter succeeded in cutting off only the mobster's ear. Did Jesus pick up the ear, get out His suture kit, sew the ear back on and say, “Come back in two weeks and we'll take out your stitches?” Of course not! He put the ear back on the person—no stitches, no healing process, no time involved. You see, the God of the Bible does not need time. There is no way to reattach an ear without the process of days of healing…unless you are God. Our Creator does not need time to do what we humans (limited and finite) would dogmatically say requires time!

GOD CREATED TIME

God created time. He is not subject to it, since He is eternal and time is temporary. That is the message of II Peter 3:8, “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” II Peter 3:8 does not teach that each day of the creation week was 1,000 years or a longer period of time or vice versa (1,000 years as a day), but rather it shows that God is above time. The context of II Peter 3:8,9 is that time means nothing to God as He waits for us to come to repentance!

All of the miracles of our Creator, with the exception, perhaps, of walking on water, appear to have needed time! Our Lord did not need time for His miracles, and He did not need time to create the universe. For us to believe that God created the universe in a literal six-day, 24-hour/day week (as recorded in Genesis), we must assume that He can and will create things with the appearance of age. His miracles tell us that this is consistent with His power and His character. We can believe the Bible in the normal historical and grammatical sense of its meaning. As we will see in the chapters ahead, there is no scientific reason not to believe the Holy Scriptures as they are written. Of course, I did not know these things back in 1971, and twenty-three years later I am still learning. As I talked with those Baylor students, I began to realize that evolutionary theory and the Biblical creation account cannot be merged. Even the belief that God used evolutionary processes over extended periods of time to change primitive molecules into you and me (Theistic Evolution) is inadequate. It portrays a vicious, stupid God who needed millions of years (of ferocious animals eating animals or “survival of the fittest”), to produce something He considered perfect enough to announce that man was finally in His own image. Evolution destroys God, His infinite power and His image. Furthermore, evolution enslaves God to the restrictive boundaries of time.

Could it be that molecules-to-man evolution is not based on true science, but upon many unprovable assumptions? We will consider this in Chapter Two but one more thought first. The first verse of the Bible (Genesis 1:1) says: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew word for “God” is a plural word, and the same word is sometimes translated “gods.” The verb created, is third person singular, “He Created” in the Hebrew. Did God make a grammatical mistake in the very first verse of the Bible by putting a plural noun with a singular verb? Not at all! God is telling us, in His first written words to us, that He is a plurality and at the same time a singularity. He is the one true God in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He is the Almighty Trinitarian God of the Bible, the three-in-one!

God’s universe speaks of His attributes. The universe is composed of three elements: space, time and matter (which includes energy). “In the beginning”—time, “God created the heavens”—space, “and the earth”—matter. The universe is a trinity. Space is a trinity composed of width, depth and height. Time is a trinity of past, present and future. Matter is a trinity of solid, liquid and gas! In one short verse (Genesis 1:1), the God of the Bible describes His universe.

Footnotes:
[1] “The universe began as a particle that was infinitely dense and occupied no space.” Robert Augros and George Stanciu, The New Story of Science (Lake Bluff, Illinois: Regnrey Gateway Pubs., 1984), pp. 54-64 (condensation and paraphrase).

[2] Philip E. Johnson, Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism (Dallas, TX: Haughton Publishing Company, 1990), pp. 1,2.

[3] Ibid., p. 7

[4] I heard this argument first on a tape dealing with the evolution/creation controversy by Floyd Jones Ministries, 8222 Glencliffe Lane, Houston, Tx 77070.