The Evolution of a
Creationist

The
Lord

By wisdom hath
founded the earth;

By understanding hath He
established the heavens.

By His knowledge the
depths are broken up,

And the clouds drop down the dew

(Proverbs 3:19,20).

1 THE EVOLUTION OF A
CREATIONIST

Frustration was not an adequate word to describe my
feelings! Which was true—evolution and billions of years, or creation in
six 24-hour days? Two of my students at Baylor College of Dentistry had
challenged me to investigate the possibility that the God of the Bible
had created everything in six 24-hour days, as described in the first
chapter of Genesis. My first reaction was, “Only an ignorant fool would
believe in those ancient myths of the Book of Genesis.”

I was an evolutionist. My years as a biology major at
Bucknell University and a dental major at the University of Pittsburgh
had convinced me that we are here because of evolutionary processes—all
very logical and explainable through the Scientific Method. This was
A.D. 1971! We were living in the days of modern, hi-tech-science which
had “proven” evolution to be true. And yet, these two dental students
were brilliant young men. They held advanced degrees in the sciences.
Surely, there must be a simple way to prove that their six-day view of
creation was wrong. One of the questions those two dental students asked
me was this: “Doctor Martin, have you ever heard of the concept of God
creating things with the appearance of age?” At that point in my
pilgrimage, I certainly had not, but it sparked a desire to learn more.
And thus the frustration began.

FLASHBACK

The seed of my frustration was planted in September of
1966. I was attending USAF Basic Medical Training at Wichita Falls,
Texas. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and I had been given orders
to report in at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., upon
completion of Basic Training. I was to be one of five dentists to serve
the pilots and crews of President Johnson's presidential fleet—the 89th
Military Airlift Wing.

The seed was a brief prayer. As I sat at the Officer's
Club that September night, I decided to clear things up with the God of
the Bible (if He was really there). If He could part the Red Sea, turn
water into wine, and raise the dead, He could answer a simple prayer.
This was my prayer: “God, if you are up there, you have two choices.
Either you can show me the girl I am going to marry, or you will see the
wildest Air Force officer you have ever seen.” I instantly thought,
“Whew, nobody heard that prayer, I'm going out and live it
up!”

Except God did hear that prayer. I met my wife-to-be that
very day! We had a date the next night, and I told Jenna Dee that I was
going to marry her. I knew I would. The God of the Bible had answered my
specific prayer on the day that I uttered it to Him.

Upon my arrival to Washington, D.C., I decided to go to
church and learn more about God. As I left church that first Sunday, the
pastor shook my hand and asked if there was anything he could do to help
me spiritually. I told him that anything he could do would help me
spiritually, because at that point I was a big zero. Pastor Charlie
Warford asked me to get up on Monday mornings at 6:00 a.m. and read the
Bible with him. I used to like to argue with people about the Bible, but
I'd never really read it. So we read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and we
were in John, chapter 3, verse 16, when God got my attention. This verse
said, “For God so loved the
world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in
him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” It was the first
phrase that got my attention. I was part of the world, had a heavy
commitment to the world, and I knew it. That verse said to my heart that
God loved me! I got on my knees with Pastor Warford and committed my
life to the Lord Jesus Christ. The seed had been planted and was
beginning to sprout.

At the point in time I came to faith in
Jesus Christ as my Savior, my sins were all forgiven, and I was given
everlasting life. But something else happened which I was only later to
realize. I had gone from being an “agnostic evolutionist” to being a
“theistic evolutionist.” That meant that now I believed in God
and that He used evolution over billions of years to create the
universe and everything in it. I honestly believed that evolution was
the only scientifically accurate option for how we got here. It was the
“Big Bang,” plus time, plus chance. Or, in other words, “nothing plus no
one equals everything.”

EVERYONE BELIEVES BY FAITH

My university science professors had not
told me that I was making some significant assumptions by believing in
the Big Bang model. The “Big Bang” is the belief that the universe and
all it contains is the result of matter, so dense that the matter was
invisible, suddenly exploding in a mega-explosion labelled by
evolutionary scientists as the “Big Bang.”[1] Many
scientists believe that this explosion occurred between eight and twenty
billion years ago. To accept the Big Bang, one must assume the existence
of matter and energy to be eternal. The Big Bang model only attempts to
explain the ordering of matter and energy, not their origin. Matter had
to be eternally present before the Big Bang or there would have been
nothing there to go BOOM! We
discover here that everyone on earth believes in something
eternal by faith. It is either faith in eternal matter and energy
or faith in eternal God.

Why is this belief by faith? Because it is
beyond the reach of science to test. There are no experiments that can
test who or what was here when the universe began. Consequently, when we
speak of origins, neither the creation model nor the evolution model can
be tested or verified by reproducible scientific experiments. This takes
both models of origins out of the realm of science and into the arena of
faith.

God in His
infinite genius has designed His creation so that, no matter which view
of origins you believe, you are face to face with God. If matter and
energy were eternal, they would be—by the time of the Big Bang—in a
state of equilibrium. That means everything would be equal and
non-reactive. A car is like that. The car sits there in neutral and
doesn't do anything until it is turned on. Starting the engine explodes
the gasoline which gives the power to move the car. Science tells us
that when matter is somewhere for a long enough time (eternity past), it
will eventually stop doing anything and just sit there in neutral like a
car. This is a part of the second law of Thermodynamics
and is called Zeroeth Entropy. Before the Big Bang, all matter and
energy, if eternal, would be in neutral. It's like the car when it is
turned off and in park on a flat driveway. It will not move until
someone starts it up.

So, if everything was in neutral before the Big Bang, what
made the Big Bang go BOOM? If
you believe in the Big Bang and eternal matter and energy, you believe
by faith that an outside “force” acted on this matter-in-neutral to
supply the energy necessary to explode it into action. In reality, you
are face to face with God. “In
the beginning, God!” The question becomes either, “Do I believe by
faith in eternal matter and energy?” (This gives me the problem of how
did the Big Bang go BOOM?) or
“Do I believe by faith in eternal God?” Everyone believes by faith in
something eternal.

Philip E. Johnson, a First Amendment
attorney who teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley,
believes that the media all too often presents creationists as if they
do not use or understand science. Johnson writes:

In
fact, there is a great deal more to the creation/evolution controversy
than meets the eye, or rather than meets the carefully cultivated media
stereotype of “creationists” as Bible-quoting know-nothings who refuse
to face up to the scientific evidence. The creationists may be wrong
about many things, but they have at least one very important point to
argue, a point that has been thoroughly obscured by all the attention
paid to Noah's flood and other side issues. What science educators
propose to teach as “evolution,” and label as fact, is based not upon
any incontrovertible empirical evidence (scientifically proven facts,
ed.), but upon a highly controversial philosophical presupposition.
The controversy over evolution is therefore not going to go away as
people become better educated on the subject. On the contrary, the more
people learn about the philosophical content of what scientists are
calling the “fact of evolution,” the less they are going to like
it.[2]

Like many of us, Johnson is concerned that public school
science teachers and university professors have moved out of the realm
of “science” and into the sphere of religious teaching (faith) when they
address the evolution of molecules to man as if it were scientific fact.
In my years as a science major at Bucknell University and the University
of Pittsburgh, I was taught that science and fossils prove evolution to
be true—that the important transitional steps in the evolution of one
creature into another “occurred within its gaps.” I now agree with
Johnson when he questions current evolutionary theory and its adherents.
The evolutionary model's “...mechanism accomplishes wonders of
creativity not because the wonders can be demonstrated, but because they
(evolutionists) cannot think of a more plausible explanation for the
existence of wonders that does not involve an unacceptable
creator, i.e., a being or force outside the world of Nature.” [3] The
political correctness of the day in which we live also dictates the
abhorrence of any credibility or reality to a literal God who is, in
fact, greater than science, because He is the Creator of all.

GOD, THE
CREATOR

Though the idea of Creator God outside the
world of nature is unacceptable to the majority of evolutionists, the
Bible teaches that eternal God created the universe and He did so by and through and for His only eternal Son, the
Lord Jesus Christ. The eternal Son was there in the beginning of
creation as can be seen in the plural pronouns of Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” That He, the Son,
was instrumental in the creation of all things is taught in the Gospel
of John:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was
with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that
was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men (John
1:1-4).

These verses of John verify that Jesus is the Creator, and
that all things were made by Him. The book of Hebrews is another
testimony that Jesus is the Creator of the world: “God..., Hath in these last days
spoken to us by his Son, whom
he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the
worlds;...” (Hebrews 1:1-2). The letter to the Colossians also
refers to the Lord Jesus as the Creator of all things, and it goes on to
name Him as the One Who “holds
all things together” (Colossians 1:15-17).

Scientists say, “We have a problem. There
are not enough stars and moons and asteroids to hold the universe
together.” This is called the “Missing Mass” problem. Everything should
be flying apart, but it is staying together. A creationist can say, “I
know what holds the universe together in spite of the ‘Missing Mass’
problem—the Lord Jesus, the Creator holds it all together by His great
power (Hebrews 1 and Colossians 1).” When the Bible refers to science,
it may not be exhaustive, but it is accurate. We can trust
it.

The Scriptures tell us that the world came
into being, not as a result of cosmic chance, but as a special creation
with a unique purpose. God desired someone who would bring glory to
Himself and with whom He could have fellowship. Ultimately, the Creator
would step into time and His creation to become the Savior. But more
about that later.

In the ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament a word is
repeated to emphasize it. For example, Isaiah 6:3 uses repetition to
tell us that God is infinitely holy: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the
whole earth is full of His glory.” You cannot get any holier than
God. The Hebrew language uses the same word three times to show the
total absolute holiness of God. In a similar way, Genesis emphasizes the
fact of creation. Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
writes:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. In
the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called
their name Adam, in the day when they were created (Genesis
5:1-2 emphasis added).

MAN, THE CREATED

Man was created, created, created! You cannot get any more
emphatic than that.  The
Bible does not say man evolved, evolved, evolved. If God wanted to
indicate that man had come about through ages of evolutionary changes,
He surely could have. But His Word is Truth and the Truth says man was
created.

Not only was man created by the Lord Jesus, but he was
created in God's own image. Did God, who “spoke the creation into
existence,” have to use millions of years of evolutionary mistakes to
finally achieve His own image in man? Of course not!

If people really did evolve from monkey-like
creatures, then the question arises, “What about the Virgin Mary? Was
Mary, the human mother of the Lord Jesus, composed of made-over monkey
genes?” If Mary was a highly evolved, distant relative of monkeys, then
is our Lord also genetically related to the primates? Mary was
created in the image of God, not in the lineage of
monkeys.

The Bible tells us that God
created man in His own image as an instant creation (Genesis 1:27).
Jesus, the Creator, verifies this in Mark 10:6. He states: “But from the beginning of the
creation, God made them male and female.” The context of Mark 10:6
is divorce. We all know that cockroaches, rabbits and rats do not get
divorces. The creator is talking about people. People get divorces. The
Creator of one-man/one-woman-'til-death-do-us-part marriage tells us
that divorce is not His solution to problems of pride and
selfishness in marriage. (If you would like to read some of what
the Bible says about this please refer to Malachi 2:13-16; Deuteronomy
24:1-5; Matthew 5:31,32; Matthew 19:3-12; Mark 10:1-12; Luke 16:18; I
Corinthians 7:10-16). People, created instantly in God's image, were
there in the beginning.[4]

If we believe what the Bible says (and this book will
argue that there is no “scientific” proof not to), Mark 10:6 alone
destroys all evolutionary teaching. There were male and female people on
earth from the beginning. The Creator says so. That leaves no room at
all for billions of years of transitional animal forms (missing links)
gradually evolving from a single cell through monkey-like creatures to
man.

MAN CREATED FULLY MATURE

If it is true that there were people here
as male and female people from the very beginning, then God created them
as instant adults. He created Adam, a full-grown (totally mature) adult
who was only one second old. From Adam's rib (taken during the first
general anesthetic!), God created instantly the first woman, Eve,
complete and mature. Adam woke up and did not see a baby girl. He was
introduced to Eve, his fully grown wife.

If Adam
had asked, “Eve, how old are you?” she would have answered, “One minute
old, Adam.” She was created with the appearance of age. She looked
perhaps 25 years old, but she had to wait a whole year to celebrate her
first birthday. If Eve said, “Adam, I'm hungry,” he could have reached
out and picked a ripe peach, though its tree was only three days old.
God also created fully mature trees. They looked old, and bore ripe
fruit, but they were only three days old. These three-day-old trees were
growing in soil that was created fully developed. In this soil, ferns
were thriving and flowers blooming. Huge, minutes to hours-old dinosaurs
were walking the earth with Adam and Eve. (Fortunately, they ate plants
and not people at this point. See Genesis 1:30.) Even the light beams
from the stars could have been created at the instant God created the
stars. It might appear to scientists that light from the farthest stars
took millions of years to get to earth, but if God created fully mature
systems then that light beam may only be as old as the star itself. (For
further discussion of this subject, see Chapter 10, Light From The
Farthest Stars.)

When I am addressing the issue of creation
with maturity (or the appearance of age) with a class of college
students, invariably a hand will go up at that point of the discussion.
The student will say, “Then God is a liar. He created something that is
not what it appears to be if He created Adam, Eve, and dinosaurs full
grown. They looked old, but were not old.” No, God is not a liar. He
told us exactly what He did in Genesis l and 2. Our problem is that we
do not think we can believe it. Instead of believing the Bible, we have
accepted the speculative theories of evolution.

Remember that in Hebrews 1, Colossians 1 and John 1, God
tells us that Jesus is the Creator. Is it outside of the ability of God
to create with the appearance of age? The Creator stepped into
space-time-history as the Savior. He performed His first miracle during
the wedding feast at Cana as recorded in John 2.

JESUS CREATED AGED WINE

Decades before Jesus and the Apostle John
walked the streets of Cana, the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into
Greek. This translation is called the LXX or the Septuagint. As John wrote the
first two chapters of his gospel, he seemingly had in mind the first two
chapters of the Septuagint
(Old Testament in Greek). Not only is the use of the Greek language
similar, but John 1 and Genesis 1 talk about the beginning of the world
and John 2 and Genesis 2 deal with a man and a woman moving into
marriage.

As
recorded in John 2 the marriage party at Cana had run out of wine. There
were six stone waterpots full of water, which Jesus turned into wine.
The servants took some of this new wine to the headwaiter. After tasting
it he said, “Every man at the
beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then
that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now”
(John 2:10).

How is good wine produced? It must be aged.
How old was this wine? Only a minute or two. The Creator steps into time
and performs His first miracle to “manifest forth His glory”
(John 2:11). He wants
His disciples to make no mistake as to who He is. In doing so, He
creates something (wine) with the appearance of age. The seconds-old
wine tasted like aged wine. How many water pots does the Biblical
account of John record? Six! How many days did God work in the creation
week? Six! As John writes his Gospel he could be thinking about Genesis
1 and 2. In Genesis, God created the universe with the appearance
of age in six days. In John 2, God created wine with the
appearance of age in six water pots.

Scripture has one interpretation; however, it can have
many applications. One of the applications of John 2 is that the Creator
does not need time. He can create whatever He wants to create and make
it appear to "have some years" on it. Creations that are new can appear
to have gone through a process that required time—but there was no time.
Jesus manifested His glory as He performed His earthly miracles, without
the use of time, just as He had created each aspect of the universe,
instantly complete and fully functional.

PETER AIMS TO KILL

When Judas Iscariot came with a mob to
betray Jesus, Peter grabbed a sword and aimed it at the head of one of
them. The person ducked, and Peter succeeded in cutting off only the
mobster's ear. Did Jesus pick up the ear, get out His suture kit, sew
the ear back on and say, “Come back in two weeks and we'll take out your
stitches?” Of course not! He put the ear back on the person—no stitches,
no healing process, no time involved. You see, the God of the
Bible does not need time. There is no way to reattach an ear without the
process of days of healing…unless you are God. Our Creator does not need
time to do what we humans (limited and finite) would dogmatically say
requires time!

GOD CREATED TIME

God created
time. He is not subject to it, since He is eternal and time is
temporary. That is the message of II Peter 3:8, “But, beloved, be not ignorant of
this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a
thousand years as one day.” II Peter 3:8 does not teach that each
day of the creation week was 1,000 years or a longer period of time or
vice versa (1,000 years as a day), but rather it shows that God is above
time. The context of II Peter 3:8,9 is that time means nothing to God as
He waits for us to come to repentance!

All of the miracles of our Creator, with the exception,
perhaps, of walking on water, appear to have needed time! Our Lord did
not need time for His miracles, and He did not need time to create the
universe. For us to believe that God created the universe in a literal
six-day, 24-hour/day week (as recorded in Genesis), we must assume that
He can and will create things with the appearance of age. His
miracles tell us that this is consistent with His power and His
character. We can believe the Bible in the normal historical and
grammatical sense of its meaning. As we will see in the chapters ahead,
there is no scientific reason not to believe the Holy Scriptures as they
are written. Of course, I did not know these things back in 1971, and
twenty-three years later I am still learning. As I talked with those
Baylor students, I began to realize that evolutionary theory and the
Biblical creation account cannot be merged. Even the belief that
God used evolutionary processes over extended periods of time to change
primitive molecules into you and me (Theistic Evolution) is inadequate.
It portrays a vicious, stupid God who needed millions of years (of
ferocious animals eating animals or “survival of the fittest”), to
produce something He considered perfect enough to announce that man was
finally in His own image. Evolution destroys God, His infinite power and
His image. Furthermore, evolution enslaves God to the restrictive
boundaries of time.

Could it be that molecules-to-man evolution
is not based on true science, but upon many unprovable assumptions? We
will consider this in Chapter Two but one more thought first. The first
verse of the Bible (Genesis 1:1) says: “In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew word for “God” is a plural word,
and the same word is sometimes translated “gods.” The verb
created, is third person singular, “He Created” in the Hebrew.
Did God make a grammatical mistake in the very first verse of the Bible
by putting a plural noun with a singular verb? Not at all! God is
telling us, in His first written words to us, that He is a plurality and
at the same time a singularity. He is the one true God in three persons:
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He is the Almighty Trinitarian
God of the Bible, the three-in-one!

God’s universe speaks of His attributes. The universe is
composed of three elements: space, time and matter (which includes
energy). “In the beginning”—time, “God created the heavens”—space, “and
the earth”—matter. The universe is a trinity. Space is a trinity
composed of width, depth and height. Time is a trinity of past, present
and future. Matter is a trinity of solid, liquid and gas! In one short
verse (Genesis 1:1), the God of the Bible describes His universe.

[1] “The universe began as a
particle that was infinitely dense and occupied no space.” Robert Augros
and George Stanciu, The New Story
of Science (Lake Bluff, Illinois: Regnrey Gateway Pubs., 1984), pp.
54-64 (condensation and paraphrase).

[2] Philip E. Johnson, Evolution as Dogma: The
Establishment of Naturalism (Dallas, TX: Haughton Publishing
Company, 1990), pp. 1,2.

[3] Ibid., p.
7

[4] I heard
this argument first on a tape dealing with the evolution/creation
controversy by Floyd Jones Ministries, 8222 Glencliffe Lane, Houston, Tx
77070.

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