Steve Schramm
[Originally published as part of 3 Reasons I Believe Jesus was a Young Age Creationist and continued from Part 1]
The doctrine of marriage is certainly a central teaching of the Bible and something God is very concerned with. Above, we noted that Jesus’ most explicit teaching on the doctrine of marriage comes from Mark 10:6:
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
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And its parallel passage, Matthew 19:4:
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female.
It’s important to note that Jesus is taking this teaching directly from statements made in Genesis chapters one and two — chapters that establish our understanding of the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of man, amongst other things. Now, we’ve discussed the textual reasons to think that Jesus means to say that male and female were created “in” the beginning — not 14 billion years after the initial creation event, but six literal days.
If Evolution is True, Jesus is Wrong About Mankind
The next logical “building block” in our cumulative case regarding marriage relates to the doctrine of mankind in general. We find Jesus’ affirmation of the doctrine of man in the same passages cited above, which suggests that Jesus derived it by taking Genesis 1–3 as a fully historical account. We’ll now look to declarations from Genesis about the doctrine of man that must be factually incorrect if evolutionary interpretations are true:
- Genesis 1:29 teaches with utter clarity that mankind was to be herbivorous. In fact, this is a restriction that we do not find lifted until post-deluge when God declared his covenant with Noah (see Genesis 9:3). Yet, the oldest humans in the fossil record show evidence of omnivory — the eating of both plant and animal life.
- Genesis records that the first humans were capable of long life — some (including Adam) living to be nearly 1,000 years old! But the earliest human fossils (on conventional dating) we’ve discovered lived an average of c. 30 years. Finding an older person (~70 years) is an extreme rarity.
- The Bible offers two important genealogies (found in Genesis 5 and 11) that suggest a hard constraint on the timeframe when the first humans must have lived. The fossil record, however, provides a plethora of evidence — on conventional, old age chronology — for the existence of the aforementioned omnivory and human age constraints, as well the distribution of humans (both male and female) worldwide, stone tools, the first agriculture, religion, and the first cities well before the time of Babel, Noah, Adam, etc.
- The biblical account found in Genesis 2 suggests that mankind was placed in a physical geographic location known as the Garden of Eden. The Bible claims that a river exits this garden which flows into four separate rivers — the Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and the Euphrates — which, in turn, water four separate geographic locations. However, there is no place on the earth’s present configuration which matches this description.
This suggests that either the account is incorrect (which would be problematic since Jesus affirmed the truthfulness of events regarding mankind in Genesis 2), or something must have happened which would reconfigure the earth so drastically that it would erase all evidence of such a place.
A global flood as described in Genesis 6-9 would accomplish this nicely, but this solution must be false on old age chronology due to geological considerations,¹ rendering a massive contradiction (or inconsistency, if we’re very generous) between such chronology and the teachings of Jesus. - In the biblical account, we see Eve is made from the side of Adam; yet, we see plenty of evidence of males and females existing before Adam in old age chronology!
- In the evolutionary account, a living soul became man through many years of undirected processes. But the biblical data suggests that God created man and then man “became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).
This draws an insurmountable distinction between the ontological status of humans gleaned from the biblical data vs. evolution theory. This distinction is even further strengthened when we consider that the Bible teaches mankind and some animals share a similar form of “life” — Nephesh Chayyah. This suggests that man is a separate creation even though his “soulish” properties are shared by some animals — rendering the concept that one is derived from the other to be totally contradictory to the biblical data found in Genesis 1-2. - Genesis 3:20 states quite clearly that Eve is so named precisely because she was the “Mother of All Living.” (We could, of course, correctly infer the word “humans” after that). But on old age chronology, humans appear way before Adam and Eve and are already quite advanced, relatively speaking.
Footnote
- One could certainly posit an extent for a “local” flood that would accomplish this reconfiguration, but such a supposition would have to be arbitrary since the Bible gives no clear understanding of the geographical extent of this deluge, if not global.
