The Beginning (2)

This is part 2 of 4 of the second chapter of my book, Biblical Glasses.

Can it be explained?

Unfortunately, the brief explanation above is not enough for many people. God’s Word, despite the evidence reviewed in the previous chapter showing its accuracy, is doubted, even by true Christians, more on the topic of creation than on any other. So we need to briefly look at the different theories of universe existence under the scientific microscope to see if there is evidence to support one theory over another. Keep in mind, since the beginning cannot be tested and observed, we cannot scientifically prove the date of creation. No one alive today was an eyewitness to the origins of the universe, so any origin theory must be taken on faith. We can, however, prove with a preponderance of the reliable evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe is young, just as the Bible says. Before considering the Biblical account in more detail, we need to determine how the universe came into existence. There are really only four possibilities:

- It is an illusion. No one lives emotionally or morally as if the universe or their life is an illusion. It is not The Matrix.
- It is eternal. Scientific evidence shows a beginning and constant decay toward an end.
- It evolved from nothing. Science has never observed anything to support the lie of evolution.
- It was created by an eternal being. Evidence supports this fact beyond a reasonable doubt.

The creation account in the Bible, traced through Biblical genealogies to the first human, Adam, transpired about 6000 years ago. Biblical creation occurred around 4200–4000 B.C. Not surprisingly, we do not observe in archaeological findings any remnants of human civilization authentically dated before this time.

What does the Bible really mean when it gives the creation account? Some people argue the Bible’s words are not to be taken literally regarding the creation account; how to interpret the Bible is an issue among Bible believers. Do we take the text completely literally? Should we look at certain parts of the text in a figurative manner? Does a particular verse in one Bible version say the same thing as that same verse in another? Taking individual verses out of context allows all sorts of variation from intended meanings.

Many liberals believe the Bible should not be taken literally, that every part of the Bible, with perhaps the exception of the Gospel, is simply meant as allegory. The Catholic Church maintains it exists to determine answers to these questions through its tradition and the pope’s infallible authority. We have certainly seen throughout history that the pope is not infallible; much of Catholic tradition, as we will see in chapter eight, is un-Biblical. The Protestant Church has divided into many denominations over Scripture interpretation issues. God wants none of these things.

The most important themes in the Bible include: God’s creation of man, man’s sin and the consequence of death, God’s love for man and desire to redeem him, Jesus Christ’s perfect life, death, and resurrection as a sacrifice to provide forgiveness of sin, man’s reconciliation to God through Christ’s atonement, the free gift of salvation by God’s grace through our faith in Christ, God’s judgment of sinners at the end of time, and the restoration of all things in the creation of a new heaven and new earth (see Isaiah 65:17, 66:22; 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1). God wants His people to agree on those points and study the lesser points together. According to Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, the Bible should be taken literally whenever possible and figuratively when obvious. We are free to have our own opinions on issues where the Bible is silent, so long as they are consistent with Biblical teachings.

Many fundamentalist Christians take the Bible literally regarding the creation account. This means creation took six days, each approximately twenty-four hours in length. When we look in the Bible at the original Hebrew word for day, which is yom, we see it used primarily to mean a standard twenty-four hour day, but it is also used occasionally to refer to an unspecified period of time. Yom, preceded by a number as in Genesis 1, is used over 400 times in the Bible; each time it refers to an ordinary twenty-four hour day. Despite this fact, in the past 150 years or so, with the rise of Darwin’s evolution theory, many theories besides Darwin’s have popped up trying to get Biblical history to fit with evolution theory.

One popular explanation describing creation is the Gap Theory, which says God performed the activities in verse one of Genesis billions of years ago—in the beginning. Then, according to the Gap Theory, God came along and formed the earth, added light, and performed all of the other creation activities during the Biblical six day creation, which begins in verse two of Genesis with the word now. So the Gap Theory says the earth itself is billions of years old, but the formed earth, similar to the way we know it today, is 6000–10,000 years old. While this notion attempts to make Biblical creation conform to evolutionist ideas that the universe is 10–16 billion years old and the earth itself is 4.6 billion years old, the evidence does not support its claims.

There is another theory attempting to support the six day creation story in the Bible. This theory is commonly referred to as either old earth creation or progressive creation10. It says the six day creation actually occurred over billions of years, with a Biblical day being equal to thousands or millions, even billions, of years. As I previously mentioned, the Hebrew word for day, yom, is meant to say a single day when a number precedes it.

Although this important detail seems to get overlooked, the main argument against this theory is destruction, disease, death, and decay before sin. Old earth creationism supports dinosaur extinction and other deaths having taken place long before man existed. The Bible is clear there was no death before Adam’s sin. God pronounced His creation very good. A universe with billions of years of death, decay, pain, and suffering would not be very good to God.

There are hundreds of additional arguments against progressive or old earth creation; they are best discussed in Creation and Time: A Report on the Progressive Creationist Book by Hugh Ross, written by Mark Van Bebber and Paul Taylor. (Call Eden Communications at 1-800-332-2261 or order online at www.christiananswers.net/catalog/bk-ct.html.) One of the most easily seen arguments, besides the meaning-of-yom and death-before-sin concerns, is that plants were created in day three, but neither the sun nor insects were created until days four and five respectively. If the days were millions of years, then plants could not have survived without the sun for that long and certainly not without insects for pollination. In fact, a simple ecology lesson shows how entire ecosystems rely on the entire unit to function in unison to thrive and even survive.

Next we come to the theory of evolution. Many people today think the universe and life just produced themselves. They think, “In the beginning, nothing became dirt, which slowly grew to be alive by chance over billions of years.” Charles Darwin (1809–1882) formed this theory of evolution. While evolution is the most widely held belief on both the origins of the universe and life, it is not scientifically valid, because there are no evidences or observations of the kind of evolution required to create life from non-life or enhance pre-existing life. The theory of evolution basically teaches that the world and everything in it are getting better (evolving), but this teaching, the first of many flaws, violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which, as we mentioned earlier, essentially says that the world and everything in it are deteriorating (devolving). Scientific observation has clearly proven the Second Law of Thermodynamics, yet many scientists consistently support evolution theory as fact, despite observing nothing concretely supporting it. What a flaw! As we will see, the twisted, illogically extrapolated evidence many scientists use to support evolution actually supports creation.

Can something come from nothing all by itself? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which came first, the male or the female? We could ask all sorts of questions like these. Remember, science is knowledge that comes from observing and testing. Science has never observed life forming naturally from non-life; but it has observed things deteriorating at an increasing rate. Evolutionists say all the matter in the universe was densely packed into a tiny dot smaller than the size of an atom; they are strangely silent when asked about the origin of all this matter. Nevertheless, the dot containing all the matter in the universe, which apparently exists without cause, exploded with a Big Bang and formed everything we have in the universe today, including life.

Evolutionists go on to say this Big Bang occurred approximately 10–16 billion years ago. Then over the next 6–12 billion years, the universe formed itself with galaxies, planets, suns, stars, comets, moons, black holes, etc., all rotating and moving at incredibly rapid speeds in perfect order and unison. The earth formed itself, situating itself at a perfect distance from the sun (which had formed itself) with a moon (which had formed itself) revolving around it! Then, a couple billion years later, life formed. Of course, the atmospheric content and the water content, among literally trillions of other conditions, had to be perfect for this to happen. (Even under perfect laboratory conditions, life coming from non-life has never been observed.) Evolution has been explained, “From goo to you by way of the zoo!”

Over the next several billion years, the life that formed itself became grass and trees, dolphins and snakes, dinosaurs and owls, donkeys and humans—in that order! I say again, there has never been an observation of anything remotely close to this! That is because it is impossible! The chances are zero! Consider the chances of a tornado ripping through a junkyard and assembling a fully operational 747 in the process. There is no chance! But the odds for that strange event are better than for evolution! Science has let itself down and been corrupted by supporting this theory of evolution, which is not in any way true to science.

To the credit of Charles Darwin, he certainly got the ball rolling on studies of natural selection, mutation, and fossils. Many scientists who study the evidence for natural selection, mutation, and fossils extrapolate the evidence to show evolution is possible, but even the top evolutionists admit this extrapolation is neither logical nor rational. For the name of science, they have agreed natural selection and mutation do not support evolution; instead, they actually support creation!

Natural selection, the concept of survival of the fittest, is most often shown by an example involving black and spotted moths. This case in point is found in most textbooks as an illustration to support evolution. The study shows how spotted moths were naturally selected to thrive in a region where trees had moss to camouflage them from predators. The black moths in that region were selected out, because they were not camouflaged from predators. In other words, the black moths died and the spotted moths survived on account of their environment.

However, in a different region of the country, the black moths thrived, because the trees had no moss. The black moths blended in with their environment, and predators had a difficult time finding them. In that same region, the spotted moths were selected out, because they were easily recognizable to their predators. This simple example in no way helps prove evolution. It supports creation, as the variations in the moths better suit them to fill the whole earth according to God’s will. Moths of different colors and styles can thrive throughout the world, not just where the trees have or lack moss.

In the same way, people groups are better suited to live in certain environments. There is clearly no gain of genetic information in these variations, as we will continue to see. The Sherpa people of Nepal would not flourish as nomads in the Sahara Desert. The reverse is also true; Sahara Desert nomads would not thrive high in the Himalayan Mountains. As human and, more obviously, animal populations filled the earth according to God’s command, natural selection allowed certain people and animals to survive in specific locations better than others. In time, these creatures lost genetic information that their ancestors had. In other words, the genetic information for particular traits was selected out as creatures continued living in certain regions of the world. The spotted moths living where the trees had moss lost the ability to produce offspring with no spots, thereby limiting their survival to a particular ecological region. They became incapable of survival anywhere else. Furthermore, they did not evolve to produce grasshoppers or birds. They were and still are reproducing as moths.

Mutations, although rare, do occur in all forms of life and are, like natural selection, also used as an attempt to prove evolution. It is critical to note mutations do not promote evolution, as they neither allow new and beneficial genetic information to be introduced nor enable the creature to change into another kind of living thing! In fact, the mutations scientists observe are usually detrimental to those mutated creatures, causing such nasty diseases as sickle cell anemia, diabetes, and cystic fibrosis, among over 3000 others. In other words, mutations keep the creature from doing what it needs to do to survive in its environment.

Using my own intuitive example, say a mutated frog was born without a sticky tongue. It was unable to catch flies, so it died of starvation. Had the mutated frog mated with a normal frog before dying, it would have only a slim chance of having offspring without a sticky tongue. Even then, the offspring would have starved to death. Because a frog without a sticky tongue cannot survive, we know the frog’s sticky tongue did not come from mutation. That would require a gain of genetic information, which is and always has been impossible. The frog’s genetic code has always contained information for the sticky tongue. God created that creature with the sticky tongue for the purpose of survival. Furthermore, a mutation never makes a frog become an elephant or any other type of creature! Mutated frogs are still frogs. Mutations, like natural selection, in no way support the theory of evolution.

Those human cultures that marry only inside their own groups, such as the Pennsylvania Amish or Australian aborigines, are far more susceptible to mutations than the rest of the human population. Every human gets two sets of chromosomes—one from the mother and one from the father. If both parents have corrupt chromosomes, rather than only one or neither parent, for any given trait (i.e. skin shade), then their offspring has a greater chance of inheriting the mutation (i.e. albinism).
After several generations of human existence, God commanded humans not to marry a close relative, because the chances for mutation were greater (see Leviticus 18). Information is eventually lost when making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, etc. The table below shows an example of what Adam and Eve’s children may have looked like. They could have had a child with any skin shade, because their genetic code contained all possible human traits! Humans have the same skin color demonstrated in lighter and darker shades based on the melanin in their genes.

(The following Punnett Squares are my own simple creations and represent only two genes, A and B, contributing to skin shade with two alleles each, Aa and Bb, for dark and light characteristics. The letters in each cell within the tables represent the alternative genotypes: Homozygous dominant, homozygous recessive, heterozygous, etc. The descriptions for each shaded cell are the phenotypes: Very dark, medium dark, neutral, medium light, very light, etc. These tables depict a very basic reality, but they convey neither the enormous amount of detailed information each cell and each gene contain, nor the vast numbers of genes actually contributing to skin shade.)


Notice there are also semi-dark and semi-light alternatives in the table above. This next table shows the possibilities of two light skinned parents. They will only have light skinned offspring. A similar table would show that two dark skinned parents will only have dark skinned offspring.

The final table shows how one dark skinned parent and one light skinned parent will pass on their genetic information. With each generation, we see only a maintaining or a loss of genetic information.

There is never a gain of previously absent genetic information. Evolution cannot be supported by natural selection or mutations. If you need a different example, take ice cream. You can start with just about any flavor of ice cream and lose ingredients to get to plain vanilla. You cannot start with vanilla and get other flavors without adding ingredients. God started the world by creating an amazing abundance of unique life forms—lots of flavors of ice cream. In time, natural selection has caused many of these wonderful creatures to go extinct. The fossil record, discussed below, elaborates on this idea.

Darwin, despite admitting fossil evidence “may truly be urged as a valid argument against the theory of evolution,” certainly encouraged scientists, paleontologists, and archaeologists to dig in and learn more about fossils. Fossils are abundant throughout the world, and in the past 200 years, fossil evidence has shown amazing creatures, including dinosaurs, that roamed this earth in the past. But ninety-five percent of all fossils are marine invertebrates, mostly clams; only one-eighth of one percent (.00125) of all fossils consists of more than a single bone of a vertebrate creature. Nevertheless, the fossil record has been used as the strongest support of both evolution and creation! How can this be? What does the fossil record really show us?