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2009
Biblical creation impedes evangelism? Plus yet another uninformed atheist.
Published: 4 April 2009 (GMT+10)
First, Matthew P, a Christian evolutionist from the UK asserts
that young-earth creation is harmful to evangelism. Dr Jonathan
Sarfati shows the opposite, and explains the baneful consequences to the
Gospel of denying its foundation in Genesis. Then NH, an atheist
from the US, hurls elephants about science and asserts that God deceived us and
set up Adam and Eve to fail. Dr Sarfati explains some of the science and why God
did NOT entrap the first couple.
Matthew P (UK):
Dear creation.com
I first of all apologize for this email coming under the heading of scientific feedback.
Really, it should feature under theological feedback as well.
Well, theology used to be called the queen of sciences, reflecting the
Christian presuppositions that led to the rise of modern science (see a
recent feedback explaining this).
I came across your website via a link to a video of a creationist stumping Richard
Dawkins. I watched it because of a lack of respect for Dawkins work.
Quite so. We have a number of articles on the Apostle of Antitheism.
I am a physicist, but that doesn’t mean that I have to ignore other academic
disciplines such as history and philosophy.
I know what you mean. I am a physical chemist, but must study geology, biology and
astronomy, as well as theology, for my work here.
I have to confess a certain prejudice towards creationism. This is, I’m sure,
a prejudice you have come across many times through different people. I am a Christian,
who believes in Jesus’ resurrection, and believes that he died for our sins.
I believe in a powerful God who can break the fundamental laws that I study.
Or else, add to natural laws, which is how I regard
miracles.
However, I do not believe that God would leave clear evidence that the universe
is a certain age if this were not the case.
Neither would I, and He hasn’t—see The earth: how
old does it look? I also don’t believe that He would give crystal-clear
propositional revelation that He created in six normal-length
days about 6,000 years ago, and that
death is the result of sin, if this were not the case. There were plenty
of Hebrew ways of expressing long ages and
goo-to-you evolution if that were what He had intended, not saying something
diametrically opposed to this—in time frame, events, order
of events, and explanation of the origin of mankind and death.
Obviously I cannot say anything about evolution (although I do believe in it) as
I am not a biologist.
Several feedbacks ago we cited Gordy Slack, an evolutionist
himself, agreeing that “some proponents of evolution are blind followers”.
One wonders how many other evolutionists believe in evolution because of “consensus”,
unaware that the heads they counted to arrive at this consensus themselves arrived
at it by counting heads.
However, it seems quite clear to me that the universe is 12–14 billion years old,
and the earth itself is some 4.5 billion years old (the former confirmed to me through
my own calculations).
Depends on what assumptions you made before you performed them. Here’s a simple example and some applications.
My prejudice therefore was that creationism clearly tries to use pseudo scientific,
crack-pot theories that have very little scientific merit.
That’s a standard line of atheistic skeptics, which has sadly influenced some
less discerning Christians to be wary of “young-earth creation” Christians.
In reality, the skeptics are elephant hurling,
and it is evolution that is grossly pseudoscientific.
I am sorry to say that this position has not been completely reversed, but study
of your site has led me to believe that you are thinking hard and rationally to
overcome what you perceive as a conflict between the scientific and biblical accounts
of creation.
Good on you for at least perusing some of the articles on our website. However,
you clearly have a long way to go yet with your “study” of our more
than 6,000 articles available here, as many of these issues/objections you are raising
are already answered on our site.
I suppose this message transpires because of the problems creationism has caused
me in any evangelistic work I try to do.
Luke said Jesus came via Noah from Adam, who is called ‘son of God’
not the son of an ape-like creature or rearranged pond scum (Luke 3). But if the first Adam is a metaphor, then how could
he be the ancestor of a historical Person like the Last Adam.
So how do you manage to explain that Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
as per the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15? Paul explained that Jesus was the last
Adam, who came to conquer death brought by the first man Adam. In contrast, evolutionary
theory entails there was no real first man, and that death long predated sin. A
Gospel without Genesis is dangling, not anchored in the Scriptures.
Who is Jesus? Luke said He came via Noah from Adam, who is called “son of
God”, not the son of an ape-like creature or rearranged pond scum (Luke 3). But if the first Adam is a “metaphor”
as many evolution-accepting Christians like to say, then how could he be the ancestor
of a historical Person like the Last Adam?
While your theories are not quite as crazy as it first seems, they do seem fairly
desperate, and they are based mainly on conjecture rather than any rigorous proof
(I realize this is going to cause offense, and I am truly sorry: I just think it
is important to explain why I have a Christian objection to your stance).
Rigorous proof is found in logic and mathematics, not science. But if you really
want lack of rigor, try the evolutionary just-so story telling,
accepted because of an a priori commitment to materialism, as
Lewontin admitted.
Non-Christians will understandably pounce on your arguments, and form opinions of
all Christians based upon them. And these are unlikely to be favorable opinions.
‘If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if
the story of the Fall is merely an instructive ‘type,’ comparable to
the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Paul’s dialectic?’—Thomas
Huxley
Indeed, just as our Lord, and His prophets inspired by the Holy Spirit, have warned
(e.g. John 15:18–20, 17:14; Romans 12:2; 1 Corinthians 3:19; Colossians 2:8; James 1:27, 4:4; 1 John 3:13, 4:1–6). And it’s
worth noting that non-Christians tend to form even less favorable opinions
on Christians who don’t really believe their own book! For one example, take
Dawkins, who thought it was barking mad to believe that Jesus
would die to overcome the death brought by a symbolic Adam.
And as my boss Dr Carl Wieland wrote on this site:
The fatal flaw for all long-age views
In fact, if long ages were true (which means that the fossils existed before people),
God must like such things as death, cancer and suffering—because He states,
after people were created, that this world is all very good. But if He were looking
at an ‘old earth’, He would be describing a graveyard of eons of cancer,
suffering and death as ‘all very good’!
Such evolution-compromising evangelicals are unwittingly sawing off the branch on
which they (and all Christians) are sitting. One of our ministry speakers a while
back was at a university meeting in Sydney, Australia. While he was talking to one
of those ECEs (evolution-compromising Evangelicals), a student was keenly taking in the whole conversation, as the ECE
ducked and weaved about all the inconsistencies in his stance. After a while, the
student interrupted and said, ‘I have to leave now, but listening to you two,
I want to say something. I’m not a believer yet, but you [pointing to the
CMI speaker]—you make sense. As far as you’re concerned [pointing to
the ECE], you’re full of it!’ With that he spun on his heels and walked
out, giving a friendly ‘thumbs up’ to the creationist. I know that in
my own experience when I was an atheist at university, the ‘compromisers’
got very little respect for their position from myself and my fellow (at that time)
humanists. Evolution/long-ages is so obviously not what the Bible teaches that the
various ‘woolly compromise’ positions on Genesis are seen as an obvious
cop-out.
ECE’s are often afraid that intellectuals will be ‘put off’ by
a straightforward Genesis, but time after time we see the very opposite (think only
of the 30 Stellenbosch University students that professed publicly receiving Christ
after the CMI presentation, recorded on our new DVD
Creation: The Key to Dynamic Witnessing.).
And in his book Walking Through Shadows,
he describes his own impressions when he was an atheist at university:
I had heard many feeble attempts by Christians to try to weave the millions of years
into the Bible, but they had turned me away from Christianity. These notions
seemed not only highly contrived and “slippery,” they glossed over huge, glaring
inconsistencies with what the Bible so plainly taught. … all my atheist/humanist
acquaintances at the time thought the same. We held such seeming deviousness in
contempt.
For more examples of the “very opposite”, see:
I also remind you that the Intelligent Design movement
also advocate downplaying biblical authority, yet the misotheists hate them just
as much. So we may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. So my new book By Design
is subtitled Evidence for nature’s Intelligent Designer—the God of the
Bible (see below, and review here).
Image wikipedia.org
Thomas H. Huxley
In fact, what you advocate is hardly anything new. It didn’t impress
Darwin’s Bulldog Thomas Huxley in the 19th century either:
‘I ask, if one may play fast and loose with the story of the Fall as a “type”
or “allegory,” what becomes of the foundation of Pauline theology?’
‘If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if
the story of the Fall is merely an instructive “type,” comparable to
the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Paul’s dialectic?’
I remember watching appalled at a recent University mission event, when four students
were asked some questions about the creation after a talk on science and religion,
and all four said that the world was created in 7 days.
In that case, they were wrong, because God created in 6
days and ceased/rested on the 7th!
Now, they are entitled to that opinion, but having a unanimous voice means that
everyone in that talk would go away, assuming that that was the general view of
all Christians, and therefore all Christians are ignorant.
This is par for the course. Paul said that the message of the cross was foolishness
to those who are perishing too (1 Corinthians 1:18).
I think the 7 day creation was fine for Moses when it was told to him.
It is either true or false.
After all, humans need to know something about their world. And what God revealed
to Moses was true, after a fashion.
“After a fashion”?! This is double-talk. As I’ve pointed out before,
there is a big difference between simplification and error. For example, a mother
might tell her four-year-old ‘you grew inside my tummy’—this is
not false, but language simplified to the child’s level (‘tummy’
as a broad term for the abdominal region, but not as specific as ‘uterus’).
Conversely, ‘the stork brought you’ is an outright error.
Applied to the Bible, it is not an error to use the earth as a reference frame,
as we do today with terms like “sunset”. This alone should silence skeptics who crow about the Galileo controversy. This
is somewhat analogous to “you grew in my tummy”. But if evolution were
true, then Genesis would be like “a stork brought you”.
When Jesus told his disciples about the good samaritan, he was also telling truth,
albeit in an allegorical framework.
This then is my opinion about the story in Genesis. It is a metaphor, a beautiful
story that tells us a little about how God made the world (and I’m sure it
did feel like 7 days to him — time is a little immaterial to an all powerful
God),
We have already pointed out above what calling Genesis a “metaphor”
does to the historicity of Jesus. In relation to the Creator’s perspective
on the days of Creation, note that God is outside time, so does NOT experience it!
So His revelation of 6 days was for our benefit, not His. As I wrote in Refuting
Compromise, ch. 2:
The days were ‘God’s days’ not ‘man’s days’
Some critics claim that the Days of Creation Week were ‘God’s days’,
and chide creationists for thinking that they are the same length as ‘man’s
days’. So, despite the overwhelming evidence from the rest of Scripture that
the context of Genesis 1 indicates ordinary-length days, they still assert
that Creation Days are a special case, and so don’t have the normal meaning.
Ross himself has made such a claim, which also impinges on the previous section
(C&T: 45):
‘The same author of Genesis (Moses) wrote in Psalm 90:4, “For a thousand years in your sight are
like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch [4 hours] in the night.”
Moses seems to state that just as God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:9), God’s days are not our days.’
God wrote the Bible to teach (2 Timothy 3:15–17), so He wrote to be understood.
Scripture would have no ability to communicate if words didn’t mean the same
to God and man.
But as pointed out in Ch. 1, God wrote the Bible to teach (2 Timothy 3:15–17), so He wrote to be understood.
Scripture would have no ability to communicate if words didn’t mean the same
to God and man. A reductio AD absurdum of
this idea is to consider any other word in Scripture. Perhaps what God meant by
‘steal’ or ‘murder’ in the Decalogue isn’t what man
means either? After all, this was a ‘special case’ where God wrote with
His own finger. And since Jesus is God and He was in the grave for three days, were
these days not literal either? This whole approach is existentialist nonsense.
Also, as mentioned, the point of Psalm 90:4 is that God is outside of time, so He doesn’t
experience time as we do. So what is ‘God’s day’ supposed to mean?
To take another example, 1 Kings 2:11:
‘And the time that David reigned over Israel was forty years; he reigned seven
years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem.’
Did God experience the seven and 33 years in the same way David did? No! Were those
still ordinary years? Yes!
Therefore, when He said ‘day’, in the context of Genesis, He meant day
from our perspective, since we are the creatures in the created space-time dimension
who experience time. He even told us that they were ordinary days by the comparison
in Exodus 20:8–11 in the same Decalogue.
but never does anything as crass as to describe God’s literal timetable for
the creation of the world.
More prejudicial language. Yet Moses used this “crass literal timetable”
as the basis for the Fourth Commandment. Or were the Israelites really meant to
work for six million years and rest for one million years?
I would like to know your opinion on my alternative explanation for Genesis. I will
quickly add that Jesus did not explicitly tell people that he was telling a parable
when he spoke about the samaritan (e.g.),
But it is implicit. Matt. 13:10 ff., Mark 4:11–12 and Luke 8:10 explain why Jesus spoke in parables—to
hide the truth from the unbelieving masses. Jesus spoke in parables after
the religious leaders accused him of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub
(Matt. 12, Mark 3). But these passages also explain that Jesus
spoke plainly to His disciples. Luke 10, which records the Good Samaritan, occurred after
Matthew 12,1
so it is in the period where He was speaking in parables to outsiders.
Also, parabolic literature is of the form: ‘there was a man with two sons’,
‘a farmer went out to sow his seed’, ‘suppose a woman has ten
silver coins and loses one’, and then is explained in the text. For
example, in the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13, Jesus says:
As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears
the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word,
and it proves unfruitful.
Likewise, in the Good Samaritan, there is an explanation of what is represented:
[Jesus said] “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor
to the man who fell among the robbers?”
He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”
And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
Note also that the parables don’t name actual people.
Conversely, Genesis has the literary structure of Hebrew historical narrative, as
we have often explained.
The Scripture is God’s Word to man, designed to teach us (2 Timothy 3:15–17), so He wants us to understand Him,
as also explained in 2 Corinthians 4:2 and Proverbs 8:8–9, as I’ve explained
to another post-modernist. Yet if you’re right, most of the
church has misunderstood God for 1800 years.
so there is no reason while God would when telling the parable to Moses (this is
an argument that often comes up when talking to creationists about this).
The rest of the Bible takes Genesis as history, not parable. So too did most biblical
scholars before the rise of long-age geology accept Genesis as written, including
Josephus and later Jewish scholars, most church fathers including Basil the Great,
medieval apologists like Thomas Aquinas, and all the Reformers including Luther
and Calvin.
Yet the rest of the Bible takes Genesis as history,
not parable. So too did most biblical scholars before the rise of long-age geology
accept Genesis as written, including Josephus and later Jewish scholars, most church
fathers including Basil the Great, medieval
apologists like Thomas Aquinas, and all the Reformers
including Luther and Calvin.
If you continue your study of this website you will see this pointed out many times,
including in articles like Church of England apologises to Darwin:
Anglican Church’s neo-Chamberlainite appeasement of secularism. If
the parlous state of the national church in your own country is cause for concern
for you, then please think further, lest you repeat its mistakes.
I would also be very interested to know what you think about my allegation that
a creationist viewpoint (and more to the point, a vocal creationist viewpoint as
demonstrated by this site) is detrimental to evangelism.
Just that: it’s an allegation, devoid of evidence. I’ve
already presented evidence to the contrary, but see also Role
of educational factors in college students’ creation worldview, a
study that showed:
What one believes about origins is a significant component of an overall worldview.
… Following the apologetics course, which was taught from a young-earth creation
perspective, a large number of students showed a much stronger creation worldview.
In particular, the number of students in the ‘conservative biblical theism’
category doubled from 64 to 128 (out of 195 students in the study). These results
demonstrate the importance and the clear impact of teaching students from a young-earth
creation perspective.
Once again, apologies for the harsh tone in places.
Oh well, of course. Harsh comments to biblical creationists are allowed. But I’ve
noticed before that riposte from biblical creationists can bring out the mimophantic2 nature of our critics, as
well as the WFJs (Wimps For Jesus), who seem unaware of
Jesus’ skill at challenge-riposte (see also a previous feedback
CMI slammed over Singapore slammer).
I truly do love you all as my brothers and sisters in Christ.
God bless
Same to you
by Jonathan Sarfati
NH, USA:
How do you reconcile strata layers, tree rings, carbon dating (of all kinds), half
life measurements of various elements with the idea of a young earth? Uranium turns
into granite after it has released all of its radioactive properties. The rate at
which it becomes granite is constant and well documented. In this process heat is
a natural biproduct. If the earth is only 6000 years old then the heat release for
all of that uranium to have turned to granite would mean that our planet would be
a miniature sun. How do you reconcile this? Why would God leave all this false evidence
behind. Is he a god of deception? Is he setting us up for failure (like he did Adam
and Eve)?
We think you will be able to find answers to many of your scientific questions about
the age of things on this site, e.g.
You might like to start by learning some elementary facts about radioactive decay.
Uranium decays into lead, via radium, radon etc. Granite is a rock
comprising several minerals that have nothing to do with uranium, which is only
a trace impurity.
Once again, we are reminded of evolutionist Gordy Slack
agreeing that “some proponents of evolution are blind followers”.
We can see that you, too, have a strong emotional commitment to this issue, judging
by your email and your email address (involving “against religion”,
oblivious to the strong religious nature of his own atheistic
faith). It is not simply a matter of evidence, because the Bible says that
there is plenty of evidence for the reality of God’s power and nature in the
world around us. It is a matter of heart. Again, the Bible says that people tend
to willfully suppress the truth. So, our starting point is not the evidence, but
our attitude. We would encourage you to be more open in your attitude toward
God. Don’t be so upset and hateful toward him but be more open to find the
truth about God and His purpose for your life.
No, he is not a ‘God of deception’. You deceive yourself by ignoring
his clear propositional revelation in Scripture and instead accepting mere circumstantial
evidence to the contrary.
To answer your question about whether God deceives: no, he is not
a “God of deception”. You deceive yourself by ignoring his
clear propositional revelation in Scripture and instead accepting mere circumstantial
evidence to the contrary. See The Parable of the Candle
for an illustration.
God most definitely did NOT set up Adam and Eve for failure; rather, He set them
up for success. He gave them each a land of plenty, easy work, no pains
or diseases, and they had the most compatible, intelligent and physically attractive
spouses ever, and only one prohibition to obey: refraining from just one
of the fruits out of the many delicious ones available. And they failed to obey
that one easy requirement.
Furthermore, apologist and CMI contributor James Patrick Holding
points
out :
Also, did the incident constitute “entrapment”? No — our “modern-day
courts of law” have some pretty detailed descriptions of what constitutes
“entrapment”, and this doesn’t fit it, even if the purpose of
the Tree was to test/tempt the obedience of the First Couple. Entrapment as a defense
first was brought up in the case of Sorrells vs. United States in the late
1870s. Since then, there has been quite a bit of discussion and definition about
it, but it is fully agreed that “entrapment” only occurs when an official
intends by actions or words to encourage someone to commit a crime, exercising
direct influence upon them in some fashion. To quote the definition from that case:
“Entrapment is the conception and planning of an offense by an officer, and
his procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except
for the trickery, persuasion, or fraud of the officer.” Let’s illustrate
with some practical examples:
- A police officer who leaves a bale of marijuana in the street and orders people
who see him do it not to touch it or smoke it is not engaged in
entrapment.
- A police officer who leaves a bale of marijuana in the street and says nothing
to anyone about it, but instead waits around to see if anyone picks it up or smokes
it, may be engaged in entrapment. This is where the courts have had a lot
of discussion, but entrapment is more likely to stick as a defense if the person
who ends up committing the crime is not inclined to commit such crimes in the first
place or has no record of committing the crime, and yet the officer does something
to actively encourage the crime. (I.e., “Hey, wanna smoke some dope?”
— repeated even after refusals!)
- On the other hand, “If the accused is found to be predisposed, the defense
of entrapment may not prevail.” Thus, “sting” operations are not
considered to be entrapment.
So which of these fits the Garden situation? The first one does, but of course we
would never see any police officer do such a thing anyway! Some might see the second
as what actually happened, but they would have a hard time justifying that, unless
they could prove that God made the Tree of Knowledge thoroughly irresistible, or
Himself encouraged them to disobey His command, and we have no indication that that
is the case. In fact, if ANYONE is guilty of entrapment in the story, it’s
the serpent!
Yours sincerely,
Jonathan Sarfati (with Tas Walker)
Related articles
Further reading
References and notes
- A.T. Robertson, A Harmony of the Gospels, Harper San Francisco,
1922. Return to text.
- Writer Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) coined the term
mimophant to describe Bobby Fischer (1943–2008), world chess champion 1972–1975,
hypersensitive at what he perceives as scorn against himself (i.e. as vulnerable
as a mimosa, which droops at the slightest touch), but blind to the scorn with which
he treats others (i.e. as thick-skinned as an elephant). Return to
text.
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