Apologetics Course Reflections, Session 1: Creationism

2003-04-26

“Creation evangelism” was a phrase that was used throughout the weekend as necessary for reaching people today, especially for kids growing up in the post-modern world. The four spiritual laws do not represent a good way to reach people who do not believe in sin, or do not know what it even is. Today are the days where you could talk about God, and they will ask, which one? Or they could respond that there is no God. People are angry at God, and do not believe in Him. This is because of the extreme bitter condition of the world. They want to know why cancer exists, why terrorism is escalating across the globe, and why there are guns in the schools. People want answers to the emptiness of the world they live in. What can the church offer them?

The church has stumbled at the point of creation by adding things to the Genesis account of creation. The church said to ‘trust the scientists, they know what they are doing.’ Now the church has bought into the mythological approach of evolution by either totally rejecting the Genesis account or creating theories such as the ‘gap theory’ which adds the missing tale of millions of years between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. People wish to believe unscientific ‘science’ over the God who recorded the real account of what happened a little over six thousand years ago.

If we add millions of years to the Genesis account, we are living according to the way we believe things happened, which leads us to the conclusion that the history of the world comes from a long line of death. Creatures are supposedly from a long line of death in which the most able creatures survived. There was no creation declared ‘very good.’

People believe that they are animals—animals in a world where it is nothing more than a rat race, and without hope. When we compromise the Genesis account, we take away the fact that people were created in God’s image, and that there is anything special about them. At the same time, we take away our responsibility toward God and the reality of sin. We take away the love of God, and His specialized care over the universe. The world, when divorced from God, loses all purpose and hope, and we wander through life that is meaningless and void. The relative morality that was a result, therefore, has borne fruit in our society where violence and sexual immorality are the ultimate fulfillment of their souls.

The evolutionist shares his propaganda to get the world to think that we are the result of millions of years of evolutionary progress. In our pride, we have chosen our origin and will choose our destiny. This is the great paradox—though humanity has evolved into its ‘greatness of today,’ we have lost our identity of being in the image of God, and have seen our hopeless state. The evolutionist has made bankrupt the contemporary world view. So the evolutionist has done what religions of antiquity have done—not to accept man as being in the image of God, but to make God in the image of man and in the form of animals.

One of the main points that Jonathan Sarfati wrote in his book Refuting Evolution 2 is that one of the main problems with evolution is that there is no evidence of any way that living matter can come from non-living matter. Evolutionists try to rectify their position by saying that organic compounds could have possibly come from inorganic material, bridging the gap between life and non-life. Nonetheless, this is where the scientists become bankrupt in their thinking.

Church history came into the discussion at certain points. From Christ’s ascension until the rise of Constantine, the church had little peace. They knew they had to suffer for the faith; they had to decide what scriptures were in the canon, to decide what they believed. When Constantine came to power, Christians received a favored status in the Roman Empire. Then in a series of councils, they discussed theological issues such as the deity of Christ. The first major compromise the church was involved in was the entanglement in governmental affairs. In the late sixth century rose of a pope (Gregory I) that furthered the position of the pope, and he had little theological training. There was a shift away from the Scriptures at this point. The eastern empire broke off, and the west rose up with the fall of Rome and the conversion of Germanic tribes. The pope ruled for centuries and grew in corruption. The major answer to the pope was the Reformation, and a return to the Scriptures. There were terrible wars such as the Thirty Years War. The Enlightenment came and people questioned Christianity when they saw people dying for the cause of the church. Scientific ideas began to emerge, philosophers arose that were moralistic, but took God out of the picture. Deism started to show up. Evolution was thought up. Once again there was a shift in from the scriptures, except the concept of God was totally eliminated from the world view this time. The church that embraced evolution in the last century and a half cannot answer the questions of the evolutionists. The compromise on the Bible this time had dug us in deep. We no longer turn to religious documents of the church fathers as superior to the Bible, as the church of the Middle Ages did, but now we have turned from all documents that are theological. We have turned a relatively short 6,000-year history of world civilization into an infinite universe in infinite time with infinitely existing matter. We are a breath and a heartbeat in time and a species that came from a long line of death destined for futility.

I had to reflect on church history, because it became very relevant to what was going on this weekend. The professor went over the three phases of church history to date. First there was the pre-modern world, where people began with faith, and then sought understanding. Then came the modern world, where philosophers such as Rene Descartes, where people began to have the believe-it-when-I-see-it mentality. Reason first, then faith, was the philosophy here (I must wonder, however, is this faith as we know it?) The post-modern world went to the next step, saying that faith is absurd, and that we cannot know anything for certain. What a bankrupt world we live in. This I say, not to look down on the world, but I say this in sadness. When I left the class this weekend, I felt extremely heavy. I felt a heaviness in the air when I looked at people around me. The world is truly a dreadful place without Jesus.

Now for an interesting aside: One other thing that I was sure to ask him during of the breaks pertained to ancient genealogies such as the ones from Seth to Noah and Arphaxad to Abraham. Are their generations missing? How does this affect the age of the earth? One thing that we found out to be on the same page with is that there must be strict holding to what the narrative says. If it reads X lived 200 years, begat Y, and had other sons and daughters, and lived another 650 years, and all the years of X were 850 years, there is no room to add years, nor is there room to add people. Though Luke adds somebody in his genealogy from the Septuagint in the first genealogy, the numbers are written in black and white in Genesis. If we hold to the literal interpretation of the Bible, then the Earth cannot be more than the six thousand years than what it accounts for, not ten thousand, 6 billion, or 8 google-plex years old. I just wanted to hear somebody else confirm this, and that was nice.