Creation at the cutting edge
Editorial
Creation magazine is about to enter its 40th year. There’s been nothing quite like it in terms of presenting the fact of biblical creation and showing the falsity of long ages and evolution. With subscribers in over 110 countries, we’re taking back ground that much of the church had conceded to uniformitarian geology and evolutionary biology in the last two centuries.
Indeed, this true history in Genesis is the only one that makes sense of both the good and the evil in the world; of its beauty as well as its ugliness. We have a perfect Creator who made everything “very good” (Genesis 1:31). But the universal human ancestor, “the first man, Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), committed a real sin, and was punished with real death (Genesis 3). As God gave humans dominion over creation (Genesis 1:26–28), when they fell, everything else was cursed by Him (Romans 8:19–23). But He provided the remedy: Jesus, “the last Adam”, came to take the penalty of death on our behalf, and then conquer it by rising from the dead (1 Corinthians 15).
This indeed is the “good news” or Gospel—but this makes sense only with the true biblical history of the world. Conversely, denial of this history has proven a big stumbling block against people considering the Gospel’s claims.
Of course, the church held this view of history before the 19th century—because it is what the biblical text teaches! This issue interviews a Hebrew/Old Testament scholar to explain this in more detail, and why it matters (p. 38). And a New Testament specialist explains how the Apostle Paul used creation teaching to refute the religion/superstition of the leading philosophers in Athens, and point them to the Gospel (p. 17).
Likewise, we try to use the most up-to-date information in a number of areas of knowledge to show how the Bible makes the most sense of it. A fascinating area concerns the elaborate designs in living creatures. This issue includes the literally cool light of bioluminescence, in contrast to incandescent bulbs that waste most energy as heat (p. 20), and lizards that ‘walk (run) on water’ (p. 45). Indeed, walking in general is very complex, as engineers are learning when they try to program robots to do it (p. 56).
Another important function of Creation over the decades has been clearing up misconceptions. A major one is that natural selection is proof of evolution. Actually, as we often stress, natural selection explains survival of the fittest, but not arrival of the fittest, because it’s a culling force, not a creative force. This issue shows how this works with poison resistance in fish (p. 12) and antibiotic resistance in bacteria (p. 46).
Another important topic we regularly cover is the global Flood of Noah’s time. Once this is understood, there is no need to postulate millions of years of slow-and-gradual rock formation, because such a cataclysm would do lots of geological work in a very short time. Conversely, the whole idea of millions of years arose by an a priori denial of the Flood in the decades around 1800. But the Flood best explains why we have ‘snap-frozen’ and even opalized fossils (p. 52). And the runoff as the Flood abated explains the continental margins (p. 41).
Our regular Ph.D. scientist interview this time features a Slovakian geophysicist, who reminds us how one’s interpretive framework for world history depends greatly on the starting assumptions (p. 24).
An important feature for a family magazine is a dedicated children’s section (p. 34). We trust that this helps parents train their children from a young age that the Bible is real history—and how to defend this.
This information is too good to keep to yourself—please pass on after reading!
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