Book review: Creation and Change
Book by Douglas F. Kelly
by Carl Wieland
The blurb on the front cover, by Nigel M. de S. Cameron, drew my attention ‘highly
intelligent’ ’a model of exegetical theology’. Knowing De S. Cameron’s
book Evolution and the Authority of the Bible, I knew that this would be a book
by a theologian with the courage to ‘tell it like it is’ namely, that
the straightforward meaning of Genesis is the only one which an honest exegesis
allows.
Besides being a qualified theologian, Douglas Kelly also has a good grasp of philosophy
and a reasonable one of science, which all taken together makes this an important
work—though more care in some areas, including proof-reading, may have prevented
some significant annoyances. For example, the author appropriately cites the example
of the now-discredited phlogiston theory, but seems unaware that this historical
concept referred to oxidation, not light.
The opening chapters deal with some rather ‘heavy’, but nonetheless
important, philosophical issues. The author’s introduction recommends that
people using this book for group study could skip these. However, I feel that this
would be a pity, and in any case, if people could not plough through these successfully,
they would be likely to bog down on some of the rest, anyway. I liked the way each
chapter was followed by technical and bibliographical notes, even though these were
often like separate chapters in themselves.
The language of Genesis is so overwhelmingly clear and straight-forward, that I
confess I have at times wondered in less than charitable terms about how certain
theologians are able to face themselves in the mirror. I mean, of course, those
theologians who, professing to be evangelical, tell us with a seemingly straight
face that Genesis is meant to be telling us something other than an account of a
real 6-day creation, global Flood and the like. Kelly shows how evangelicals end
up in such a bind because their primary authority source is the conclusions of ‘science’.
Like the liberal theologians, they believe in an old world, millions of years of
death before sin, etc. Because they want to retain at least a semblance of Biblical
authority, evangelicals feel forced into all sorts of exegetical contortions to
‘re-interpret’ these early chapters somehow. Liberals, on the other
hand, have no such problem. In fact, they are eager to testify to the truth, namely,
that the Bible really does teach a literal, recent, six-ordinary-day creation. This
is because they can then point to ‘science’ to show that the Bible contains
overt myths and campfire stories, which allows them to claim precedent for overruling
its authority in any other areas they choose (ordaining practicing homosexual clergy,
for example).
Kelly rightly says:
‘To assume that the early chapters of Genesis are just “religious”
is to relegate the Bible and “religion” to the realm of the unimportant
and unreal, and eventually to empty the churches since they are no longer thought
to deal with actual truth.’
If it were true that Genesis does not mean what it so plainly says, and if the ‘long-ages’
view of creation is true, then God would have misled His people for centuries, deceiving
them into believing something which was virtually the exact opposite of the truth.
Death would not be the penalty for sin, but would be part of the normal ‘order’
of creation, for example. Among those so cruelly misled and mistaken would be the
Apostle Paul and Jesus Himself.
Kelly briefly rebuts the common fallacy that postulating supernatural creation is
somehow unscientific by definition. By the second chapter, he moves into his specialty
field, and shows how the language of Genesis simply will not allow the fanciful
‘re-interpretations’ so commonly applied.
First, Genesis 1–3 do not represent Hebrew poetry. He quotes an earlier authority
as saying:
‘The man who says “I believe that Genesis purports to be a historical
account, but I do not believe that account” is a far better interpreter of
the Bible than the man who says, “I believe that Genesis is profoundly true,
but it is poetry.”’
As Kelly rightly points out, the approach of the New Testament to Genesis is, or
should be, a matter of the highest consequence’ for professing evangelical
exegetes. He says:
‘One can disagree with the New Testament’s literal, historical usage
of Genesis 1–11, but one cannot honestly find in its pages anything less than
a straight-forward reading of these chapters as literal, relevant facts.’
Nineteenth century theologians, says Kelly, changed their views of Genesis because
of what they believed were the facts of science, not because of anything intrinsic
to the text. In their rush to ‘harmonize’ they arrived at mediating
positions which, though abandoning the meaning of the text, did not satisfy the
science they sought to appease. He quotes a prominent liberal of last century, Professor
Marcus Dods, as saying that these attempts to make Genesis say something other than
what it so plainly does are futile and mischievous’ that they
‘do violence to Scripture [and] foster
a style of interpretation by which the text is forced to say whatever the interpreter
desires’.
The same Dods is also subsequently quoted as saying (and I agree) that
‘if, for example, the word “day” in these chapters does not mean
a period of twenty-four hours, the interpretation of Scripture is hopeless.’
Kelly refers to these harmonization attempts by evangelicals as reflecting the ‘exegesis
of desperation’. The way forward, he says, is to let the Scriptures speak
for themselves, as an authoritative revelation from the Creator Himself, and to
look critically at the reigning scientific paradigm in the light of the Bible, an
approach we would wholeheartedly endorse. Unfortunately, although Kelly understandably
and strongly points out the biblical deficiencies of the ‘gap’ theory,
he makes an earlier statement on the grammar of Genesis 1 which some gappists could
twist to gain comfort.
His foray into the scientific arena, while generally good, falters in places. He
appears to be up with the works of ‘intelligent design movement’ theorists
like Behe and Johnson, but unfortunately seems to not have kept up with all the
latest information from those who, like himself, presuppose the truth and authority
of the Bible. He appears to rely significantly on the work of Scott Huse (he keeps
referring to him as ‘Hulse’). Huse is a well-meaning creationist writer
whose books we at Answers in Genesis ceased to stock years ago on account
of their being more than occasionally sloppy and out-of-date.
For example, Kelly relies on Huse to list a summary of the findings of the empirical
fossil evidence’. One item on the list is that ‘There are no transitional
forms between reptiles and mammals’. But what about the mammal-like
reptiles, which are surely reasonable candidates for an evolutionist to claim, being
both stratigraphically as well as morphologically intermediate? Now please don’t
misunderstand my point. I do not accept them as being true intermediates, and they
are one of the very few, if not the only, plausible candidate groups in a record
noted for its huge gaps (from an evolutionary viewpoint). Nevertheless, with the
heading to this list as quoted above, and considering there are no qualifying comments
(such as appear later in the list concerning ape-man intermediates), the reader
is entitled to conclude that there have been no discoveries of any
good candidates for an evolutionist to claim as truly intermediate between mammals
and reptiles. We do ourselves a disservice by allowing readers to form such misleading
impressions, even if this was not the author’s intent.
Recognizing that the main issue of controversy among evangelicals is the alleged
scientific evidence for an old world, Kelly’s seventh and eighth chapters
are devoted to this issue. Before dealing with radiometric dating and supplying
various evidences for a young world in chapter eight, the seventh chapter is on
‘The age of the world and the speed of light’. Like many of us, it seems
the author is still tantalized by the several lines of evidence which seemed to
independently confirm the Setterfield hypothesis, even though he lists some detailed
critical commentary on some of its unsolved problems. He is also aware of Humphreys’
relativistic cosmology, and gives it a reasonable hearing. His main point seems
to be to get readers to understand that there are a number of possible paradigm
shifts which could accommodate the evidence as well as being faithful to the plain
meaning of Scripture.
In his list of young-world evidences, he brings up the dust on the Moon issue, showing
that he is unlikely to have read the article Moon dust
and the age of the solar system by Snelling and Rush in the Creation Ex Nihilo
Technical Journal (7(1):2–42, 1993). However,
it has to be said that he does not appear to be relying only on the now-discredited
high influx rate of the evolutionist Pettersson. He quotes the astronomer Lyttleton
concerning the dust which he suggested would be created by the high-energy radiation
coming onto the Moon’s surface (unprotected by an atmosphere). Even though
only about ten-thousandth of an inch would form each year, after billions of years
this would presumably still add up to a very significant amount more than what was
found. However, Lyttleton wrote in 1956 before Pettersson, so Kelly has not kept
up to date. Besides, Lyttleton’s suggestion has not been taken seriously and
has not been supported by any lunar data collected by the Apollo missions.
I particularly appreciated the section on the fourth day, especially where he deals
with the claim by Hugh Ross and his disciples that the sun and stars and so on were
not really created on that day, but only ‘appeared’ from behind a previous
thick covering of cloud. The Rossists do this, of course, because their presuppositions
require them to remain at all times in step with the conclusions of cosmic evolutionary
teaching, particularly the big bang’ theory. In these cosmologies, the stars,
including the Sun, must have existed a long time before the Earth. Yet this is most
emphatically not what Genesis teaches—according to the Hebrew, the light-bearers
were created on the fourth day (as all Bible translators realize).
In summary, a worthwhile book, if somewhat meaty at times, by a trained and competent
theologian/exegete. It is particularly suitable for those who wish to either reassure
themselves that Genesis really does mean to tell us what commonsense has always
indicated, or to refute the specious arguments of theistic evolutionists or progressive
creationists who claim otherwise.
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