Creationists get creative

The Bible is not a science book, in spite of the many novel and misguided attempts through the years to turn it into one.

Kurt Wise, one of the"young-earth" creationists quoted in this New York Times piece, says that “Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible." Continuing, he says, "If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.”

It is regrettable that the discoveries of modern science - including the vast body of evidence that supports the theory of evolution - should cause such crises of faith among the faithful. The great error of the creationists, it seems to me, is that they adhere to an overly-literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1 that fails to give an all-powerful and all-knowing God nearly enough credit. Why couldn't God have chosen to create life through a process of evolution?

Like it or not, the theory of evolution provides the most compelling explanation for how life developed on Earth. It is the fundamental theory of the biological sciences. It has been refined, but never refuted.

Is belief in evolution incompatible with faith in God? I don't think so. Nor do I believe that it is incompatible with the biblical account of creation. In Genesis 1, the author speaks of creation as a process, one that took several "days" to complete. Isn't that what we would expect? When an eternal God creates a universe that exists in space and time, then that universe and everything in it must certainly be governed by certain laws of space and time.

So it's not surprising that in Genesis 1, the author tells of how life developed - or evolved, if you will - in accordance with the laws that God himself established in the beginning.

And God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth." And it was so...And the evening and the morning were the third day. ...

And God said, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good...And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And God said, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind." And it was so. ...And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. ...And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

So, God created plants before he created sea creatures. He made sea creatures before he made land animals. And he saved man for last. It's remarkable how closely the progression of life described in Genesis corresponds to what the theory of evolution suggests. Where is the contradiction?

In Genesis 1, we also read several times, "And the evening and the morning were the n'th day." What are we to make of all those evenings and mornings? Did some critter exist at 1 PM on the sixth day that had not existed at 12:59 PM? Are we to believe that sometime prior to 1:00 God simply said, "Whoop, da it is!", and Lo, da it wuz? Or are we called upon instead to use our God-given brains in order to fill in the blanks? In the time since the book Genesis was written, we have become privy to mounds upon mounds of scientific evidence that has helped us fill in those blanks. I can't believe that the author of Genesis - who was without doubt a great lover of Truth himself - would object.