The Origins Conundrum
The argument, as defined for roughly 159 years since Darwin, is this: Either the origin of the world and life as we know it is the result of spontaneous generation arising out of eternal matter into mindless and purposeless biological evolution requiring billions of years to accomplish, or the world and life as we know it are the special creation of God, Whom the Bible reveals, as loving and caring about His creation, particularly His human creations. This argument is a serious conundrum, because there just doesn’t seem to be any other alternative than these two options, but I beg to disagree.
Any alternative must take into account the presuppositions of both sides represented in this argument. I think that both sides have one common shared presupposition that rules out any alternative. If I can identify that presupposition, I might discover a reasonable resolution to the origins conundrum. That is what I propose to do in the following posts of this series on the age of the world.
Troubles with the Origins Conundrum
For people of sincere Bible based Christian faith, such as me, the dilemma arising from the “origins conundrum” is that neither of the two polarized positions is satisfactory. Our environment is just too well organized, too carefully constructed, too wonderfully adjusted to the manifold forms of life to be explainable by the proposed near infinite mutations, adaptations and co-adaptations required by the hypothesis of evolution. Furthermore, in awe we observe that the whole life spectrum speaks eloquently in witness of a masterful creative intelligence.
At the same time, observation of the many “rocks of ages” in our present world transports us in awe far beyond the petty testimony of a few thousand years. Surely our Rock of Ages in the Bible is presented as One whose existence and perambulations hearken back an unfathomable period of time, which is immeasurably beyond humanly comprehensible thousands of years.
But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of Judah, From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, From the days of eternity. (Micah 5:2)
When the Ancient of Days sits in august majesty and the Son of Man comes on the clouds of Heaven (Daniel 7:9-10, 13-4), time perceptions melt in the flames that surround His eternal throne and we, like Job, confronting the ultimate reality of God, must retract our petty notions of time and repent of our dusty presumptions.
Therefore I retract, And I repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:6)
In other words, attempts to confine God’s creative power in humanly comprehensible measurements detract from the reverence due Him. God’s infinite nature is beyond our time notions, and His creative fingerprints in this time shackled world are too vast to be subsumed by a few thousand years of human reckoning.
The Shared Presupposition
In view of the above, I think it helpful for Bible believers to think outside the box that the argument over origins confines us in. Inside the box I find this shared presupposition from both sides, both young world and ancient—The world we live in is the same world that was created by God in Genesis 1 and 2.
Well of course it is, you protest! How could it be otherwise?! This presupposition obviously must be correct! But for untold eons it was obvious that the sun, moon and stars rotated around Planet Earth as the center of the universe! Yet, when Copernicus put forth his “suggestion” of a different presupposition (a sun centered environment), men began to examine their “obvious presupposition” and ultimately found it misleading. The truth of a heliocentric world ultimately was discovered, accepted, and prevails today.
In the same manner I think we should question the common presupposition that the world we live in today is the same world described in the creation account of Genesis 1 and 2. As an alternative view, I suggest that the creation described in Genesis 1 and 2 is God’s creation of Paradise in His eternal real estate, where the days of creation are very different from the 24 hour earth rotational days we experience in the present fallen creation. Our present world is the recipient of the first sinful rebellious couple, who were cast out of the very good creation of the first two chapters of Genesis. If my suggestion is correct, then the origins argument pursued at such length today is moot. Genesis is not describing the same world that secular science is examining, so there is no argument! Can any evidence be found for my seemingly “ridiculous” suggestion?
Evidence for Different Creations
Yes there is evidence, but it obviously cannot come from secular science. This evidence must come from the Bible, since science restricts itself to the fallen world of death that we presently occupy. As briefly explained above, I think that the argument for the present world that we inhabit being ancient is both scientifically observable and biblically consistent. The ancient nature of our present world has been so extensively publicized and argued in innumerable other publications that I will not pursue it here. Let it be noted, however, that time spans, even vast billions of years, do not permit biological evolution, however much evolutionists might wish it were so.
Once the secular atheistic hypothesis of evolution is divorced from the fact that the world we presently live in is billions of years old, not a few thousand years, we can examine evolution without denying that the world is extremely old. The error that young earth creationists make is in not separating the error of evolution from the awesomely ancient character of the world they examine. Hence they defend a very young earth against overwhelming evidence, and their valid objections to evolution are thrown out with their unsupportable young earth hypothesis.
There are extensive writings, pro and con, regarding the so-called “science” of evolution, and I do not intend to rehash those here, since the issue has not been (and probably never can be) resolved scientifically. But what I can do in the debate over origins is examine the origin of the philosophy of evolution. The philosophy of evolution has abundant documented atheistic anti-biblical roots that are easily available for examination.
Evolution is a necessary point of view for those who reject the God of the Bible. Their purpose in evolution is to deny divine creation. This fact is obvious in evolutionists’ own repeated and mutually consistent statements over time. We can examine representative examples of these statements and their common thread of bias in the following pages. Evolutionists’ statements reveal common assumptions that are representative of the whole tone of evolutionistic philosophy. The philosophy lacks solid scientific support, and the plethora of philosophical rhetoric by its proponents exposes the skimpy science behind it.
Confessions of Evolutionists
Christian faith is often ridiculed by secular scientists and others of an atheistic world view. But nowhere is faith more prevalent than in the practice of science itself. The word science comes from the Latin scire, which means “to know.” Science believes (has faith) that it can “know” everything about the physical world in which we live and organize that knowledge into a logical unified system to understand the world. This faith drives and sustains such arcane pursuits as discovery of the origins of all of life. Regarding the faith of the scientist, Darwin’s staunchest advocate, T. H. Huxley said,
“The one act of faith in the convert to science is the confession of the universality of order and of the absolute validity in all times and under all circumstances, of the law of causation. This confession is an act of faith, because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions is not susceptible of proof.”[1]
In other words, this scientific faith believes that what is true in one place in the universe is equally true at every other place and time. But this cannot be proved, and must be accepted in a mental process that evolutionists ridicule as “blind faith” when practiced by Bible believing Christians. But atheist mathematician Alfred North Whitehead agreed with Huxley,
“[Experimental science] began its discoveries and made use of its method in the faith, not the knowledge, that it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a Creator who did not act upon whim nor interfere with the forces He had set in operation. The experimental method succeeded beyond men’s wildest dreams but the faith that brought it into being owes something to the Christian conception of the nature of God.
“It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.”[2]
Scientific faith leads to hypothesis and experimentation. Below are outlines of three examples of the experimental scientific method. In the first, the initial hypothesis was found false, in the second the hypothesis was proved true, and the hypothesis of the third example has wavered in uncertainty for nearly two centuries, supported more by the faith of its atheistic devotees than by sound experimental science.
[1] Darwin, Francis, son of Charles Darwin and editor. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Vol. 1, D. Appleton & Company, 1919 p. 553. T.H. Huxley “On the Reception of ‘The Origin of Species.'”
[2] Eiseley, Loren. Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958, p.62.
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