Jesus We Talk About Creation By Evolution
Dear Thomas,
You ask in question number twelve, “Does it really make any difference if a person believes in evolution, either pure or God-directed, or the seven-day Genesis Bible story?” The short answer is yes! It makes all the difference in the world. The viewpoint a person holds leads to different conclusions on the meaning of life and the meaning and purpose of Scripture.
One’s viewpoint will affect belief or unbelief in Adam and Eve as first parents, assign significance or insignificance to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and color the understanding of the full history of God’s redemptive or rescue plan.
I think a person’s viewpoint will also affect one’s understanding of the purpose of mankind as a species as well as one’s explanation for the brokenness found in mankind and the world at large.
Certain aspects of the book of Genesis have always posed a struggle for those who try to make the Genesis account into a literal description of the beginning of the earth in its physical form as well as its varied life forms.
Certainly, the Genesis creation account doesn’t illuminate our modern understanding of science in the areas of astrophysics, geophysics, geology, paleontology, plate tectonics, radiocarbon, and so forth.
Scripture deals with a Creator God, the first causation in the realm of first causes and sustainer of all that is. It deals with the spiritual nature of mankind.
It deals with the problems of a broken world and broken humanity. In short, it deals with evil, the sin problem, and a just and effective remedy for that problem.
It seems to me that the importance of Genesis is to provide us with a sense of our human origin as persons who think, will, ask, feel, and relate to a God who is all-powerful yet intensely personal and loving. It also reveals the beginning point of God’s rescue plan and why the need for it.
Though the Genesis account with all its particulars could be understood in allegorical form, it nevertheless expresses truths that are essential to the unfolding of the redemptive history of mankind. It also gives essential truths about the nature and character of the God behind that history.
Genesis begins with the who of the creative events, “In the beginning God—” (Gen. 1:1) rather than addressing the origin of the universe or our planetary system. Biblical cosmology in Genesis doesn t reveal the creative and natural processes within creation but reveals the person behind it.
Did it start with the Big Bang and slowly develop from that point to the Eden of Creation week? Was the creation week vast periods of time, or was it an actual six-day process with a seventh day of rest? What does the Bible mean in Genesis 1:2 when it says, “Now the earth was formless and empty”?
Keep in mind that the creation story was not written in our language within our culture or from our perspective and knowledge of world history and scientific discoveries.
Today we can view the Earth from outer space and have instant knowledge of events happening anywhere around the globe. The writers of scripture lacked those advantages.
In fact, their world was restricted mostly to the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Red Sea. Even so, Scripture was written for us and all others down through history. As the Bible says in 2 Timothy 3:16.
I would put forth that the Bible is a revelation of a creative and personal God who, upon the loss of a relationship with mankind at his very beginning, revealed and recorded His rescue plan and man’s reactions to it.
Christians run into problems correlating Scripture with science when they try to take our current or modern worldview and inject it into the Genesis account.
I think there is another element at play in the subject of creation and its correlation with science, and that is the element of faith. “Faith makes us certain of realities we do not see,” says Hebrews 11:1, and verse 6 in the same chapter says, “Anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who search for him.”
If God were to reveal Himself and the nature ofall things so absolute and plain, so beyond any ability to question or doubt, the whole purpose and process of freedom within the redemption plan would be jeopardized.
God does not overwhelm us to the extent that we lose our power to choose. As we discussed before, free will is at the very core of redemption and exists for the sake of freely given love.
The evidence revealed in Scripture about God and His love for us and involvement with human history is more than adequate for a love relationship with Him, but it is not so overwhelming that we are forced to acknowledge Him and believe.
God has always given adequate evidence, but it is still by faith coupled with our reason that we establish that balance between biblical revelation, inspiration, and scientific observation.
Obviously, pure evolution theory contradicts the concepts of creation. Charles Darwin, the father of the evolution theory, published his famous work The Origin of Species in 1859.
This noncreation theory of adaptation by environmental necessity or natural selection eliminates any need for God or at least a personal one. It throws all the concepts about God back into what might be called the power of myth in the human experience.
In my opinion, pure evolution theory is one of Satan’s greatest deceptions to destroy the truth of the gospel in exchange for a worldview that eliminates God or any necessity for Him.
As we know, pure evolution is taught as a fact in the majority of educational institutions around the world. It is the foundation of Marxism (the collective) and secular humanism (individual progression).
I don’t think a person can believe in both the theory of pure evolution and the gospel of Jesus Christ without distorting or perverting that gospel.
The concepts of first cause, a God who is creative and personal, humanity’s first parents, the origin of evil, the sin problem, the redemption of man through the second Adam (Jesus Christ), and the resurrection of the dead all conflict with pure evolutionary theories.
Evolution denies a supreme being who created and is continuously involved with His creation (see Gen. 1:1; John 1:1-5; Col. 1:15-19; Rev. 21:1-2).
Nonetheless, there is still evidence of the geological column to consider. Earth’s history, including its extinct life forms and its geological forms, tells of a very long history.
How do we square the scientific evidence with the story of Genesis 1, beginning with verse 3 and onward? Modern thinkers have struggled with this in a number of ways
One explanation is that of theistic evolution, where all evidence of living things either in the fossil record or living today was created by God through the evolutionary process. Theistic evolution says that the Genesis record is not a literal period of seven twenty-four-hour days, but rather each day represents vast periods of time.
God indeed may have had His hand in the earth’s beginning and let it evolve to the point of recorded history. Within this understanding, the Genesis account of creation is a mere stage of evolution, and seven twenty-four-hour days are only allegory.
Within this understanding, no real first humans (Adam and Eve) existed. Acceptance of this concept, therefore, changes our origins and negates the belief of a common family line in Adam.
With Adam and Eve as our first parents, however, we all belong to one another, and thus, all the nations of the earth extend from these original parents (Gen. 2:7, 22-23; 22:15-18; 26:4; Rom. 5:12-14, 18-19).
Another thought is God-directed evolution. This is evolution through guided natural selection. It comes from an alternate interpretation of Genesis 2:7, which says.
When proponents of God-directed evolution are asked, “What about man? Is he made in the image of King Kong or King God? Was Adam the son of an ape or the son of God’s creation?” they might answer, “Both.”
In their view, a human body evolved from lower life forms, and at this point, God made man into His image by breathing a spirit soul into his body. Since the soul of man is what sets him apart from the other animals and gives him stewardship over God’s evolved creation, they see no essential conflict with the creation of man in the Genesis account.
However, this begs the question of what would happen to other humans in the evolutionary process if God breathed a spirit soul into only two initial human beings. Keep in mind that the Bible does not mention Adam and Eve’s parents or any other humanlike beings before them or around them.
Then there is the gap theory. This understanding asserts that a stop notice should be interjected after Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” They propose that the time frame of this phase could represent billions of years, during which time the “original” earth came into being.
Then, Genesis 1:2, which says, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters,” could be speaking of another great span of time. This would be the “chaotic” earth, which included the now-extinct life forms shown in the fossil record.
Then, Genesis 1:3, which says, “And God said” could mark the beginning of the six twenty-four-hour days of the creation story. This would be the earth that Adam and Eve and their heirs experienced prior to the flood story of Genesis 6-9 and would include all its current life forms.
Could we postulate that God has done a number of do-overs with the earth over billions of years, just like He did a do-over in the Noah flood story? The reasons for the do-overs through eons past are not suggested.
What could be suggested from this perspective, however, is that the doover in Genesis 1 was the reshaping of the earth for human habitation. It is also speculated that there may well have already been extinct life forms in the fossil record as the earth was reshaped for human habitation.
Then there is the often left-out element in the creation story of the cosmic conflict between God and Satan. What might have taken place in Earth’s history prior to the creation week, during the time when the Earth was chaotic and without form? Could Satan have been given some DNA, seeing he wanted to be a creator like the Most High?
Could there have been an age of the earth that existed with life forms that were later destroyed by an asteroid? Might there have been another age that supported a series of life forms that were destroyed by vast volcanic activity?
Might the geological record show gaps between ranges of life forms when the earth was Satan’s playground, and he unsuccessfully tried to be like God? Might his playground have been self-destructive rather than God-directed evolution, God’s direct creative activity, or even pure evolutionary work?
Might Satan’s earthly playground have been so self-destructive that eventually, the earth was without form and void? Could it be that, at a certain point in time, God decided to show the onlooking universe His creative work and thus adjusted, reshaped, and prepared the earth for the habitation of man and pronounced it good?
It seems to some that this cosmic conflict could very well have played a role in the geological record, but this is pure speculation on their part.
Could certain rocks be millions of years old as to their age, but the fossils embedded in the rocks a much younger age? I suppose that God could have created an aged earth.
But why? What would be the point of tricking mankind with this vast geological record of fossils buried in very old matter? Some people take the view that all things within our solar system were created in a literal six-twenty-four-hour-day period.
Some believe that geological layering and the extinction of prehistoric dinosaurs and other creatures were all due to the universal flood of Genesis 6-9. And some feel that fast-moving tectonic plates at the time of the flood literally turned the world upside down. From the biblical description of the “fountains of the deep” (Gen. 7:11), they conclude that the earth’s surface was ripped open like a zipper, and the waters poured forth.
This caused the earth’s mantle to break and slip with great speed and energy, thus creating the earth’s land masses as we know them today. The residual of this mantle movement is seen in the earthquakes and volcanoes still featured in our earth’s topography.
Others within the literal seven-day-creation concept interpret the “heavens” and “firmament” in Genesis 1 as the understanding of those living in the Egyptian culture of Moses’ time. This would include the belief in a flat earth and a domed sky.
The domed sky was the space in which birds flew and clouds floated. The sun, moon, and stars appeared suspended in this clear atmosphere, which, prior to the creation week, was obscured from view.
The difference between the gap theory (God’s breathing of the soul into an evolution-developed man) and the literal seven-day creation understanding is insignificant to the meaning of our salvation in Jesus Christ.
Both espouse a literal man who is spiritually alive and created in the image of God prior to the entry of sin. Both assert that God created Adam and Eve as our first parents and that they were spiritually alive.
However, the gap theory does great harm to the nature and character of a God who stands behind the evolutionary process of Adam and Eve and a carnivorous, chaotic prehistoric earth.
Evolutionary man in the context of a carnivorous, chaotic prehistoric earth makes irrelevant and nonexistent the concept that God is love and created the world for love.
Furthermore, the life cycles of procreation and death change the message of Genesis that man was to live continuously in a loving relationship with God. However, the Eden story suggests that man was not created to live and die in normal life cycles as we know them today.
If we understand the Genesis account to affirm that God created all life forms in a seven-day creation week on earth that was already in existence, then Adam and Eve are certainly our first parents. This also affirms the beginning point of all life on earth.
However, as mentioned earlier, the fossil records would then show life forms only fifteen thousand to forty thousand years old buried in matter that could be billions of years old.
Nonetheless, regardless of how we come to terms with the Genesis account of creation and all the scientific information of a very aged earth, if biblical redemptive history is to have meaning, it must affirm that Adam and Eve are mankind’s first parents.
And this is not just first parents in the form of allegory expressing theological and philosophical truths but real, flesh-and-blood parents who lived and walked upon this earth.
The Genesis creation account certainly gives strong expression to the existence of a Creator God. It also shows His relationship and His relevance to us, the humans who were created in His image.
It puts our lives in a contextual whole and provides answers to the haunting questions of where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. However, it reveals all this without explaining the methods or processes of how everything came into being.
Could it be that the Genesis account is outside any purpose of providing an explanation of scientific cosmology other than to say that God is the first cause of all that is?
Again, there is a problem if our first parents, Adam and Eve, are only allegories. But being real people in real-time and through their disobedience to God, sin entered the world but found its redemptive solution in Jesus Christ.
Whether we accept a historic beginning point for man within the concept of the gap theory or within a literal theory of seven twenty-four-hour days, the truth of God’s redemptive plan revealed in Jesus Christ can remain (through some of the gap-theory hazards mentioned earlier).
All other theories ignore the love and justice of God as revealed in Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. In other words, if God in Jesus Christ is the Redeemer, He must also be the Creator.
This is the very foundation of the Christian faith. The book of John and the book of Hebrews both begin with that affirmation, that truth. And that affirmation and truth lie at the very heart of a person’s Christology of the who of Jesus Christ.
In conclusion, the Genesis creation story is foremost about the nature and character of a God who wants to give expression to His communal character of love. Coupled with this is the sad history of mankind’s fall, his choice to separate from God, and the broken world that resulted.
It addresses in theological terms and within our physical reality the nature of our human existence. Behind that human existence is a personal, relational, all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present Creator God, the giver and sustainer of all that is.
Yet this is a God who allows us our freedom and free will for the sake of His love for us and our love for Him in return. Our ultimate understanding, it seems to me, must be consistent with this truth.
When I get to heaven, I personally want to see a fast-forward DVD showing how it all happened. I’m sure that many of our understandings are likely to be wrong. With all the different ideas and theories on how things came to be, how might we pray for an understanding of how things began?
God, creator, and sustainer of all that is, how can I best see You through the ages of history? What should I think about the vast spans of time that are so apparent?
Was history included and part of the world’s creation? Were Adam and Eve created as full adults, complete with mature language, reasoning skills, and even knowledge of what death means?
Lord, though I may not have a correct understanding of the facts on how everything came into being, I ask You to help me to accept the loving and gracious who behind any of the understanding that I do have. Amen.
Your friend,
Matt