When I was doing my Reader Training
we were told to view the first 10 chapters of Genesis – including this
morning’s reading - as myth.
Our teacher told us that the stories
of Creation, Adam and Eve and Noah were somehow less reliable than the rest of
God’s word and were simply attempts by early man to account for the world they
found themselves in.
I however fundamentally disagree with
this view and this morning I want to try and explain to you why I disagree –
from both a spiritual and a scientific viewpoint.
Firstly the teaching about Adam and
Noah runs through the whole bible. For
instance Luke traces Jesus’ ancestry
back to Adam, and Jesus himself makes reference to the first two chapters of
Genesis in Matthew and Mark’s gospels, when he is talking about divorce.
He says to the Pharisees – have you
not read that in the beginning God created them male and female.
Jesus also refers to Noah in Matthew
and Luke’s gospel when talking about his second coming. He says; “As it was in
the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the
days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in
marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing about what
would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will
be at the coming of the Son of Man.”
We’ve been looking at Paul’s letter
to the Romans recently in which Paul bases some of his teaching on Adam. Adam
is also mentioned in some of Paul’s other letters
And Peter in his letter, tells us
that following his crucifixion, Jesus went and preached to the imprisoned
spirits – to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in
the days of Noah while the ark was being built.
And perhaps most famously in the ten
commandments recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, God tells us to
remember the Sabbath day and to keep it holy, because in six days the LORD made
the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and he rested on the
seventh day.
So, the problem with viewing the
first few chapters of Genesis as myth is that these chapters also feature
prominently throughout the bible - in both the Old and New Testaments – and if
these chapters are somehow unreliable – how reliable then is the teaching of
Jesus and Paul, not to mention Peter or indeed the ten commandments?
The bible is like a tapestry and the
teaching in the early chapters of Genesis is like a thread that runs through
the entire tapestry. If this teaching is somehow unreliable - then the whole
tapestry starts to fall apart.
My own view is that all scripture -
including the first 10 chapters of Genesis,
is God breathed and thoroughly reliable - and that Adam and Eve just
like Noah - were most certainly actual historical characters.
But surely science disproves the
early chapters of Genesis some of you will say. But does it?
I think not. On the contrary there is
a lot of very good Creation science backed by numerous Professors and Doctors particularly
in the United States - which not only supports the idea of Noah’s flood – but
which also points towards the earth being much much younger than many
evolutionary scientists would have us
believe.
The trouble for Christians –
particularly in this country - is that such is the grip of Darwin’s theory of
Evolution on the scientific community – that anyone who questions it is
labelled as some sort of fruitcake – even if their evidence is very strong.
So what are some of the problems with
Darwinian evolutionary science which is repeatedly presented to us as being
factual when in fact much of it is theoretical?
Firstly the fossil record is a big
problem – because it doesn’t show evolution occurring as Darwin envisaged it.
There are huge evolutionary gaps across
all sorts of species - with dinosaurs for instance suddenly appearing in the
fossil record with very little evidence for their forbears.
Likewise although some scientists
confidently proclaim that some fragments of skull which they’ve just dug up are
a missing link in the human evolutionary chain - frequently this is conjecture
at best – and actually what they’re looking at is either a human or monkey
skull.
Some of you may have heard of Piltdown
man for instance which was supposed to be a "missing link" a mixture
of human and ape with the noble brow of Homo sapiens and a primitive jaw.
However instead of being almost a
million years old, the skull fragments were found to be 500 years old, and the
jaw in fact belonged to an orangutan.
I mention this story as it
demonstrates how desperate evolutionary fossil hunters are to find evidence for
Darwin’s theory and how easily they can be duped.
Similarly, Coelacanths - a fish - were
said by evolutionists to have become extinct 70 million years ago and to have
been the forerunners of fish which supposedly turned into air breathing land
animals. However one was caught off the coast of Africa in 1938 and others have
been caught since- and they haven’t evolved at all.
And there are significant problems
with the whole Geological Table which supposedly classifies the ages of various
rock layers found around the world.
Starting with the Pre Cambrian rock
strata and going all the way through various stages including Jurassic and
Cretaceous – this table supposedly records the times and orders in which various
rocks were laid down as the earth evolved over many millions of years.
However, in addition to missing
strata in many places, and strata in the wrong order, with supposedly older
strata on top of supposedly younger strata, sometimes the same rock sequence is
repeated many times.
Moreover these rock strata in which
fossils are found, have been dated by geologists in order to allow time for Darwinian
evolution to occur – but there are huge problems with dating rocks.
Radiometric dating which is commonly
used - relies on making various assumptions about constant decay rates and
unknown original levels of argon, lead, potassium and thorium in rocks. But
this is a very unreliable method.
For instance, two hundred year old rocks
from well-documented Hawaiian volcanoes which erupted in 1800 and 1801 were
radiometrically dated as being somewhere between 140 million and 2.96 billion
years old.
In fact the whole notion of trying to
date rocks – or parts of the universe - is a bit of a nonsense because when the
world was first created the rocks and planetary systems would already have
looked extremely old.
When Adam was first created – if you
asked someone his age they’d have probably said early twenties. And when Jesus
turned water into wine – the wine would have appeared to have been a good
vintage - but was actually brand new.
And rather than there being millions
of years between each layer of rock strata as evolutionists suggest, there is
lots of evidence for the strata being laid down very quickly, for instance as the
result of a worldwide flood – just like Noah’s flood - with millions of
creatures being rapidly buried under huge mud flows and then fossilised.
I mean if someone asked you to bury a
dinosaur – even if you had a JCB digger - you’d be a bit put out.
What calamitous event could bury so
many of these huge creatures rapidly and preserve their remains as fossils?
A flood fits the bill very well.
And furthermore floods leave the
layers of strata that we see all over the world – with creatures being buried
under the flood debris according to their ability to escape the rising waters.
As floods settle out – initially the
heavy rocks fall to the bottom followed by smaller rocks – and the heavier
soils – and then the lighter soils and then sand and silt – and you end up with
the layers of strata which we see all over the world.
And far from being millions or even
billions of years old as evolutionists would have us believe – looking at the
evidence, it is more likely that these layers of earth formed rapidly as the
flood waters started to recede.
This is why in some places you can
find fossilised trees that penetrate several of the earth’s strata (see above) – and why in
some places the rock layers are bent and folded over – although the rocks show
no signs of cracking.
If the layers were still moist when
they were laid down – of course there would be no cracking.
Now please don’t suppose that I’m
saying that all evolutionary theory is untrue. Creationists believe in micro
evolution but not in macro evolution.
Micro evolution is a single species
evolving with small changes – as opposed to macro evolution which is one
species evolving into another.
So for instance we can see how
several breeds of dog have micro - evolved from early breeds of dog - but the
point is they are still dogs.
They haven’t grown wings or feathers.
In fact most animals seem to have a blueprint of what a healthy member of that
species should be like – and the further away they get from that blueprint the
less fertile they become.
Some dog breeds for instance have
suffered with fertility problems as their breeding has become extreme.
And evolutionary scientists have done
numerous experiments with fruit flies – bombarding them with various doses of
radiation in order to get them to evolve.
The experiments have merely resulted
in dead or deformed fruit flies and showed that fruit flies could not evolve.
Similarly, Michigan State University
evolutionary biologists have searched for signs of evolution in bacteria for 20
years, tracking 40,000 generations. In the end, the only changes that had
occurred were degenerative.
And in addition to the numerous
problems evolutionists have with the fossil record, dating rocks and failed
laboratory experiments – there are several other strong scientific reasons which
Creationists point to, which suggest a young earth.
I haven’t got time to go into any detail
but I’ll give you a brief overview of just a few of these.
According to evolutionary theory,
comets, which are basically large chunks of dust, ice and rocks, are supposed
to be the same age as the solar system - about 4.6 billion years old. Yet each
time a comet orbits close to the sun, it starts to thaw and loses so much of
its material. Most comets have typical ages of less than 10,000 years.
The total energy stored in the
earth's magnetic field is decreasing. At the current rate of decrease this field
could not be more than 20,000 years old.
DNA decays and cannot exist in
natural environments longer than 10,000 years, yet intact strands of DNA have
been recovered from fossils allegedly many millions of years old - including dinosaur
fossils.
The radioactive element carbon-14
breaks down quickly—within a few thousand years – but it is still found in
fossils that are supposedly millions of years old.
I could go on but hopefully you’re
starting to see that when David Attenborough tells you that such and such
animal has evolved over millions of years – you need to take what he says with
a large pinch of salt.
It is clear to me that bees for
instance didn’t evolve their ability to make honey but that God created and
designed them with that ability.
Furthermore he designed honey so that
it would taste good.
It is clear to me that the world we
live in is intelligently designed by God.
I mean if you blew up a million piles
of random bits of metal, would you find anything as simple as a bicycle wheel
in the debris? The answer is no – because a bicycle wheel is intelligently
designed.
And as well as creating the Universe
the writer to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus also sustains it. He says - The
Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,
sustaining all things by his powerful word.
Jesus keeps the whole planetary system
in order including the earth’s orbit round the sun.
What happens if you take your hands
off your steering wheel? Your car will veer off course.
And it’s the same with our whole
planetary system. If God didn’t sustain it planets would start careering off
course.
There would be no order – there would
be chaos and all life would end.
So to conclude I hope this morning
that next time you read the early Chapters of Genesis – you’ll be able to see
that perhaps the idea of God creating the world we live in in six days isn’t
perhaps quite so ridiculous after all.
And that perhaps the evolutionary
science we’re bombarded with – isn’t quite as conclusive as many would have us
believe.
And perhaps there was indeed a
catastrophic worldwide flood – and the fossils which are found all over the
world bear testimony to that flood.
In the name of the living God. Amen
By the way if any of you would like
to find out more about Creation science, I’d recommend looking at the website of
the Institute for Creation Research which is very interesting.
