Creation or Evolution?
The creation account is taken primarily from the book of Genesis
in the Bible. It is in opposition to evolution for one main reason: the evolutionary
theory does not include God in its explanations. Genesis chapter 1 and verse 1
says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
When creationists see explanations of the origin of life without
the mention of God, then the creationists feel that it is seriously flawed. Not
all creationists are Bible thumpers. Some are very well educated. Educated
creationists believe that the scientific evidence can be honestly interpreted
in such a way to support the creationist view. One reason that there are so
many evolutionists is that evolution is taught in many colleges and
universities as though it were a fact, and the creationist views are never
explained in detail from a scientific perspective.
In science
there is the Law of Gravity. It is called a law because it can be observed and
proven every day. At least evolutionists have enough intellectual honesty to
present their ideas as the theory of evolution, not the law of evolution, even
though some of them emotionally view it as a law.
Some of the
reasons that evolutionary ideas are held so strongly:
1.
From a standpoint of the
explanation of scientific evidence, many people have only heard the
evolutionary interpretation, and therefore have a normal human bias towards it.
2.
Much of the scientific
literature in biology of the last 100 years has been written by evolutionists
and again has their bias and assumptions.
3.
Some of the creationists are
not well educated and do not present their ideas in a way that can be easily
accepted by the scientific community.
4.
Even the creationists are
divided when the details are discussed. The Bible is not a science book. It
says that God created the world and the life that is in it in 7 days. But are
those 7 days 24 hour days, or are they symbolic of periods of time? Also, are
there gaps in the Biblical account? The Bible obviously does not tell us
everything that happened: it tells us only the few things that God has chosen
to reveal.
Some of the
scientific details where creationists feel that evolutionists have gone wrong:
1.
The fossil record. Scientists
who are creationists feel that evolutionists have grossly misrepresented the
significance of the fossil record. Scientists who are creationists feel that
the fossil record is much more an evidence of a worldwide flood that is
recorded in the Bible than it is evidence in support of evolution. An example
of errors that evolutionists have made with the fossil record: For many years
the Coelacanth was considered to be an extinct fish millions of years old because
of where it appeared in the fossil record, until several living Coelacanths
were caught in the depths of the ocean off the island of Madagascar.
1.
Uniformitarianism. The theory
of evolution is greatly dependent upon the concept that processes have always taken
as long as they now appear to be taking. For example, evolutionists will look
at a canyon and the amount of water flowing in the canyon and the hardness of
the sandstone, and they will calculate millions of years for the canyon to have
been formed. In order for their calculations to be true, they must assume that
the circumstances that are now observed were always present. Creationists point
out that with looser sediments and greater masses of swirling water, the canyon
would have been formed much more quickly than calculated by the evolutionists.
This is true with many other things such as volcanic activity, ice flows, the
uplift of mountains, and continental drift. Creationists state that many, many
events can be accounted for by sudden, cataclysmic events. Of course, the
greatest of these events is the event of creation itself.
2.
The missing links. There is a
vast number of living species on the earth. According to the evolutionists,
each of these species slowly evolved from something else over millions of
years, which slowly evolved from something else over millions of years, which
slowly evolved from something else over millions over millions of years. If
this really happened there would be many more creatures that spanned the
various stages of development than we have evidence for. Where are all the
missing links? Where are all the intermediate species? Creationists recognize
that species do adapt to new environments and to changes in the environment;
but this phenomenon should not be confused with developing a new species.
Similarities between species can be accounted for by the fact that they all
have a common Creator.
3.
The aggressiveness of
evolutionists to find evidence for their theory where it does not really exist.
Creationists point out that some evolutionists will find one rib of one
individual in a desert somewhere, and then out of their imagination they have
created some sub-human species with a high forehead, a lot of dark hair, and a
drawing of the individual that looks strangely ape-like!
The Bible says in Genesis chapter 1 and verse 1, “In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” From a physical and material
standpoint once there was nothing, and then something happened and there became
something. What happened was God’s creative work. Order does not come out of
chaos without intelligence. Creationists view the universe in this way.
Creationists contend that the scientific evidence can be honestly interpreted
in a way that is consistent with the Biblical account. Anyone who does not say,
“In
the beginning God,” has made a serious mistake.
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Copyright; 2002 by Charles F. (Rick) Creech
All Rights Reserved