Psalm 33:6 and 9 make a very clear statement about the origin of life for those of us who believe the Bible to be the Word of God: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. For he spoke, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.”
When I was pastoring Swan Creek Baptist Church, I borrowed one my teenager’s biology book just to see what they were being taught in our local public school. Her biology textbook clearly pitted evolution against God’s Word:
For thousands of years, most people believed that each separate species of organism had been specially created. This view was set forth in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. From time to time philosophers proposed that the living world changed over centuries, but by the mid-seventeenth century, most of the Western World took the word of Genesis literally and believed that animals and plants were created during the six days of the Creation. From about 1750 on, however, many people became convinced that species changed over the ages (Karen Arms Camp, Biology-A Journey into Life. Saunders College Publishing, 249). The biology textbook went on to discuss Charles Darwin, father of the modern theory of evolution, who studied theology and as a young man believed in special creation.
Years of observation and reading, however, presented Darwin with evidence that seemed incompatible with the notion of God as the Designer and Creator of living things, and a more logical explanation for the origin of species took shape. Darwin then was appointed naturalist on the Beagle, a British naval ship embarking on a five-year mapping and collecting expedition. In 1859, Darwin wrote The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In it, he marshaled an impressive array of evidence to support his theory. Not until the 20th Century, however, did most biologists fully accept the idea that evolution was by means of natural selection (Camp, 250, 251).
Did Charles Darwin believe each species was a special creation of God? Let’s hear him on the question: As many more individuals of each species are born that can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently reoccurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in a manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principles of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form (Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, n.d., page 457).
More and more 21st-century scientists and scholars, however, are rejecting evolution. Paul Le Moine, a French scholar clearly represents this growing group: “Evolution is a fairy tale for adults” (Lutzer, Erwin W. Twelve Myths Americans Believe Chicago: Moody Press, 1993, 31).
What are the tenets of evolution?
First, the evolutionist must believe in the Eternality of Matter. Evolutionists don’t know where matter came from for our planet to exist and for life to start as my teenager’s biology textbook declared:
If we could trace the ancestry of living organisms, we should find a long line of cells stretching back billions of years. Each cell came from division of a previously existing cell …. But where did the first cell come from? Some people say the first organisms came to earth in spaceships or meteorites, but this only moves the question of how life began to a more distant arena beyond our reach to study (Camp, 307).
Theologian Wayne Grudem cites an example of the above theory. Francis Crick called his theory “Directed Panspermia.” The theory is that life was brought to Earth from a faraway planet by a spaceship. About Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for helping to discover the structure of DNA molecules, Grudem observed:
It seems ironic that brilliant scientists could advocate so fantastic a theory without one shred of evidence in its favor, all the while rejecting the straightforward explanations given by the one book in the history of the world that has never been proven wrong, that has changed the lives of millions of people, that has been believed completely by many of the most intelligent scholars of every generation, and that has been a greater force for good than any other book in the history of the world (Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology Grand Rapids: Inter-Varsity Press, 286).
God’s Word declares that God created the universe out of nothing or to use the common Latin phrase, creatio ex nihilo. Creatio ex nihilo is implied but not clearly stated in Gen. 1:1 because the word bara means to create something new and great, such as the universe in 1:1 and man in 1:27. BDB (135) defines bara as to shape, fashion, create, always of divine activity but never as something out of nothing. Clearly, God used preexisting matter (2:7) to create man. However, John 1:3 does teach creation ex nihilo when it declares “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” There are other verses that use “all things” in relationship to creation: Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 11:3; and Revelation 4:11. Grudem reminds us of the significance of rejecting creation ex nihilo.
Were we to deny creation out of nothing, we would have to say that some matter has always existed and that it is eternal like God. This idea would challenge God’s independence, his sovereignty, and the fact that worship is due to him alone: if matter existed apart from God, then what inherent right would God have to rule over it and use it for his glory? And what confidence could we have that every aspect of the universe will ultimately fulfill God’s purposes if some parts of it were not created by him? …. The positive side of the fact that God created the universe out of nothing is that it has meaning and a purpose. God, in his wisdom, created it for something. We should try to understand that purpose and use creation in ways that fit that purpose, namely, to bring glory to God himself. Moreover, whenever the creation brings us joy (cf. 1 Tim. 6:17), we should give thanks to the God who made it all (Grudem, 264).
The first tenet of evolution that we discussed was the Eternality of Matter.
Next, we will discuss Spontaneous Generation which states that the first life, the first cell sprung from non-life. Darwin in 1871 wrote in a letter advancing the idea of spontaneous generation. “We could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat and electricity …. that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes” (Darwin, Francis. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, New York: Harper & Row, 1983, 101, 102). Erwin W. Lutzer has an insightful quote:
In 1954, experiments were conducted in the United States by Stan Miller, whose synthesis in a laboratory produced sizable quantities of amino acids and other organic molecules. Later, adenine, one of the components of DNA, was synthesized from a mixture of ammonia, methane, and water. Thus, the building blocks of life were brought about through human experimentation. But even with the synthesis of amino acids in a highly controlled laboratory, scientists agree that life cannot be sustained without protein, and proteins come only from life. In other words, life would already have to have been here before it began. As evolutionist Taylor admits, ‘The fundamental objection to all these theories is that they involve raising oneself by one’s own bootstraps. You cannot make proteins without DNA, but you cannot make DNA without enzymes which are proteins. It is a chicken and egg situation.’ Creationist A. E. Wilder-Smith uses this example: If a baby suddenly appeared without a mother, it would die. Hence, even if a cell were to begin random forces, it would immediately die because there would be no cradle for it” (Lutzer, Erwin. Twleve Myths Americans Believe, Chicago: Moody Press, 35).
In stark contrast to evolution’s naturalistic spontaneous generation, God’s Word in Genesis 2:7 declares that human life came from God as a special creation when He formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. As Ryrie notes, the creation of Eve presents a special problem for theistic evolutionists who believe Adam came from a long line of pre-Adamic creatures. God finally intervened in the evolutionary process and breathed into Adam the breath of life. But Eve is said by Scripture (Gen. 2:21) to have been created directly from Adam’s side while he slept not from a long line of ever increasing in complexity sub-human beings. Theistic evolutionists, Derek Kidner, must admit a special creation of Eve (Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, TOTC [London and Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1967], 28). If God specially created Eve, then why not Adam?
Other tenets of evolution are that a living cell reproduces itself with mutations that produce new species and through natural selection, or the survival of the fittest these new mutations and species survive. However, as Wayne Grudem brings out, after hundreds of years of experimental breeding of various kinds of animals there are no new species. Dogs that are selectively bred for generations are still dogs (Grudem, 280). God’s Word says God created “according to their kinds” (Gen 1:11, 24). There can be some differentiation among the species. Even among humans, there is much variety in size and appearance. “Kind” is used to describe species of animals that are different and the fixity of the species. Moses in Leviticus 11:14-22 speaks of the different species that God uniquely created.
“And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; every raven after his kind; and the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, and the stork, the heron after her kind, even these of them you may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after this kind.” From this list, we learn that God is a God of infinite variety. There is much diversification among these animals and the fixity of the species. There are several different kinds of owls listed but an owl never becomes a hawk.
Another tenet of evolution is time, that is, the necessity of millions of years for all of this to take place. From my teenager’s biology textbook, this view is expressed: “Given enough time, however, even improbable events are almost bound to occur at least once--- and once may have been enough for the origin of life on earth” (Arms, 308). This tenet runs against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which says everything is growing older and wearing out and running down. This tenet also violates the Law of Entropy which states that nature left to itself tends toward disorganization, not complexity. Wayne Grudem illustrates. Put all the parts of a new BMW in the cargo bay of a 747 fly to 6000 feet and dump all of the parts. Will they organize themselves before they hit? No! But the evolutionist says, “We need more time”. All right, fly to 20,000 feet and dump all of the parts. Will more time solve the situation? No! Genesis 1 and 2 say that God created the universe in six days.
In my next post, Origins of Life (Part Two) we will observe that evangelicals like Tim Keller, Derek Kidner, and Millard Erickson reject six twenty-four-hour day creation.