The Effects of Creationism in a Postmodern World

2003-02-21

Introduction and Comparison of Worldviews

The doctrine of Creation is fundamental to the Christian faith. It is the very backbone of the entire Bible, which is the inerrant revelation of God. The Genesis account is filled with explanations of how we came to be who we are now. Compromising the doctrine of Creation and the Genesis account destroys the Christian faith. To restate this in another way, it is impossible to have Christianity fused with any form of evolution; they cannot coexist. Just as a fallen house that was built on a foundation of sand, Christianity will not stand, if you take away its foundation in Genesis. This is precisely what has happened in the world today, including in many churches.

What is so important about the early Genesis account? It provides the foundation not only for Christianity, but also for the current state of the world. The origin of life, sin, death, the concept of right and wrong, marriage, clothing, the seven-day week, and languages are things that are explained in Genesis. The day we lost our reverence for what the biblical text says and succumbed to evolutionary theory, our beliefs on all of these things were shaken, and our compromise has brought our culture into what we now know as the postmodern age.

In Genesis 3, when Adam (made in the image of God, cf. Genesis 1:26; 5:1) sinned in the garden, the entire earth was cursed (3:17) and death was brought to all of humankind (3:19). These very verses explain the nature of the world we live in, and the rest of the Bible reveals how terrible the world is without God.

Today’s world, through the goggles of an evolutionary worldview, states that life only advances through death; that only the strongest species survive, and that people are only descendants from animals. Death always was, and there never was a world that was perfect. The postmodern culture believes this, and the reaction is to live like an animal, do what you will to survive, and that the world with its ever-present death is just the way it always was and always will be. There is no hope, so people live like there is no hope. Human life is trivialized, since death is normal and people are animals, and not in the image of God. Symptoms such as abortion are the fruit of this line of thinking.

In Genesis 2:24, the Lord ordained marriage; a man will leave his parents and be joined with his wife. This is the basic unit of the family: the husband and wife. Together they are a partnership to rule the world on behalf of God (Genesis 1:27-28; 2:18).

The postmodern world’s response to marriage departs from this, with examples such as fornication and homosexuality. Hedonism is king because there is no basis for the normal family structure; the Genesis account is the only authority of what marriage should look like. Sexually transmitted disease, divorce, domestic violence and broken homes are the fruit of the evolutionary worldview.

Clothing is also found in the Genesis account (3:21) as a consequence of sin. Animals were killed to be made into coverings to cover the ashamed Adam and Eve. This is an early account testifying that it is necessary for blood to be shed for humanity to be covered from their sin (cf. Hebrews 9:22).

For the evolutionist mind, clothing has no place. Clothing for today’s world is not modest, but sometimes is hardly clothing at all. Once again, things once considered shameful are now approved. Pornography could be considered the fruit of this worldview.

This is just a small frame of reference of how both biblical Christianity and evolution cannot coexist. The more the American culture (or any culture) moves toward the evolutionist worldview, the more lawlessness abounds. Children of this generation are now obsessed with violence, reinforced by films and video games. Children from unwed mothers skyrocketed. Rapes and divorces shot up in great numbers, along with sexually transmitted diseases and child abuse rates. These things all began when God’s word began to be seen as fallible and public prayer became taboo (for example, prayer was removed from public schools in the United States in the 1960’s).

People are angry today. They are angry with God because they believe He created and tolerates evil. As Christians, we need to meet people at Creation. They need to know that God does not condone evil, and that there is a day that He will stop it all. Finally, people need to know that evil came into the world because of sin, and there is a personal loving God who wants them to turn to Him regardless of their sinful past.

Why Christianity and Evolution Cannot Coexist

There is no room for any evolutionary theory, including theistic evolution, the gap theory, the day-age theory, or any other mythological tale in the Biblical account. Evangelical churches generally hold to the infallibility of the Bible. If this is true, then they must hold to every last word in the Genesis account, which is the foundation of our belief system.

Six times in the Creation Hymn (Genesis 1:1-2:3), the phrase ‘and the evening and the morning was the X-th day.’ When the word day is ever put next to a numeral, the word for evening, or the word for morning in the rest of the Old Testament, it means it is a literal twenty-four hour day. Moses wanted to emphasize to his people that their God created the world in six literal days. However, only here in Genesis 1 is this syntax questioned, because of people’s desire to make their own history for themselves, and not listen to what God says on how He created the world. If we sacrifice the standard principles of hermeneutics and exegesis here, then why do we not do it elsewhere?

Even if one were to try to reconcile their reading of evolutionary theory into the Genesis account, there will be a huge theological cataclysm with which one will have to face. In Genesis 2:17, God emphatically (note the use of the word ‘surely’) tells Adam that he will definitely die if he eats from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Death had not entered the world by this time. In Genesis 3, Adam is sentenced to death because of his sin in the garden, and throughout the rest of the Old Testament, death reigns over all people.

Evolutionary theory, however, states that death came into the picture far before humans walked the earth. If death came before Adam (or before all of humankind), then death is not a consequence of sin like the Biblical text says it is. If death is not a punishment, then Jesus Christ, who died, taking the punishment for our sins, died for nothing, because He did not bear any kind of punishment. There can be no death before Adam, because if there is, there is no reconciliation in Christ.

Also, if death was before Adam, and has reigned ever since life existed, then God must have created death and an imperfect world. The Bible says otherwise that the world He created was ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). If God created an imperfect world, then how can we trust God’s goodness? Is He really good? And if so, how can we reconcile that with the terrible world we live in? These are the questions to which people want to know the answers.

Often evolutionists state that the universe began with the ‘big bang,’ where matter exploded out and formed most of the elements from just a few kinds of elements such as hydrogen. From there, planets were formed, and somehow, life spawned from non-life. Scientists, however, to this day have not observed life coming from non-life. This is one of the main arguments that Sarfati puts forth in Refuting Evolution 2 against evolutionists. The biblical account agrees in the respect that man was created from the ground (Genesis 2:7). We should not be surprised that our bodies are made up of the same elements found in nature. The difference is that the Biblical account shows the transition from non-life to life: God breathed life into the man, who was created from dust, and only then did he become a living soul (Genesis 2:7).

Evolution also supports the idea that humankind is the height of the evolutionary process. The biblical record offers the opposite theory of ‘devolution’: that humankind is at its lowest by the end times as it goes through the Tribulation period in Revelation. Genetic mistakes (as well as sin) increase as the generations pass by. This is the reason for the eventual law that forbids marriage to a close family member, which was otherwise feasible in the early chapters in Genesis (see 4:17, Adam’s son Cain would have legitimately married one of his sisters, cf. 5:4). At this point of time, we are the product of a long line of sinners; as it is written in Exodus 20:5, we see that the sting of sin shows up for generations after the sin has come to pass. Newborn sinners now have the sting of sins from the previous generations, but they will also have their own sins that they will commit in their lives as they grow up. It is no wonder that we see throughout the Bible how sin escalates toward a point where God must release His judgment (cf. Genesis 15:16).

The conclusion is that we cannot have both Christianity and evolution. The creation doctrine is fundamental to the Christian faith, and when the Christian compromises with what the non-Christian scientist believes, the Christian believes in a paradox. Since we are sinners, what comes from our own hearts is exceedingly deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). Theories like evolution are the fruit of the deceitful heart. As believers, we have the Bible, which has no paradox, yet the evolutionists have their own paradox. They are at the height of evolved existence, but they see themselves as mere animals... the pride of evolution coexists with their hopelessness.

What the Main Problem Is

Unbelievers always have had false beliefs to which they held. When the Gospel went forth from Jerusalem in the early chapters of Acts, evangelists had to overcome serious cultural barriers, such as Paul when speaking to the diverse groups of philosophers in Athens in Acts 17. Most of the philosophers laughed at Paul when he talked about the resurrection from the dead, because the contemporary Greek philosophy believed that the flesh was evil.

Later on in that century, Gnosticism became widespread throughout the world, and many Christians were reconciling Christianity with Gnosticism. This is impossible, as John refutes in his epistle, that he who confessed that Jesus came in the flesh is of God (1 John 4:2). Jesus had to come in the flesh in order to redeem us; He had to be truly God and truly man in order for the redemption of humankind to take place. There was a paradox that had to be brought to light, and people had to see the difference between the authentic and the fraudulent gospel messages. This Gnostic worldview became widespread, and was an obstacle in the early centuries of the church, and there were fatal consequences of Gnosticism. Some Christians that believed also in a Gnosticism believed that they could sin any way they wanted in the flesh without consequences because the flesh was evil.

Evolution is our ‘Gnosticism’ of today. A lot of the world believes it, and like the philosophers in Athens and the resurrection, the world today cannot believe in or understand an intimate Creator who created the world in six days. They have been conditioned to think and see through evolutionary lenses, especially the younger generations of today who have been taught evolution since elementary school.

The main problem, however, is not with heresy in itself. Heresy has been around since the beginning of the fallen world. The real problem lies with how churches respond to heresy. If a church embraces heresy, it will fall apart, which is seen in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. This is what a lot of churches have embraced over the past several decades: that it is okay to believe the heresy. When the church compromised God’s word in that way, then all of the fundamentals in Genesis, which were discussed above, fall apart. An example of this is how the marriage can be defined now in any way that humankind wants. We are moving away from God’s word, to do whatever is right in our own eyes. When many of the churches embraced evolution, then the ‘light of the world’ was put out, and in a country that was no stranger to Christianity a door opened for lawlessness to spring forth.

The New Obstacle in Evangelism is to Overcome the Postmodern Worldview

The challenge to reaching people for Jesus Christ today is to bring them back to Genesis. We need to bring them back to the God who created the world that was ‘very good,’ and that humankind’s sin defaced the world God had made. More generally, we need to know how to answer questions that unbelievers bring us. Unlike William Jennings Bryan, we need to know even simple things, like where Cain’s wife came from and to defend the Genesis account at every step. If the Bible-believing Christians can explain simple things such as the Genesis phrase ‘day plus evening plus morning plus numeral’ cannot mean anything other than a twenty-four hour period, then we will stand firm on the biblical testament and the consistency of the entire message of the Bible.

We need to be able to know flaws in the evolutionary theory. Evolution cannot be science if they cannot observe macroevolution by walking through the steps of the scientific method. We can know that God created the world in six days, if we have a personal relationship with the God who created it. Scientists cannot explain satisfactorily the day or time period it took for nonliving matter to allegedly evolve into living creatures. But if we explain that God took dust from the ground and breathed His breath into the newly formed man, then we have the missing link the scientists cannot explain. Dinosaurs coexisting in the same world as humankind, along with a universal Flood that instantly created layers of sediment and fossils defend the biblical argument. Bible-believing Christians, when they have this knowledge, can shed some light on some pertinent information, and they do not have to be scientists to do so.

Throughout the Bible, especially in Johannine literature, we are told that love is the greatest apologetic, and is a commandment of the Lord Jesus. This says a lot in the context of this argument, because when we confront others who are angry in a meaningless world, we can meet them where they are, and they might listen to us. Love, in a way, disproves evolution. As Christians, if we act like immoral, loveless animals, then the Gospel message is discredited. But when we love people, we depart from the world of evolution and we will bring hope to hurting people.