Dr. Charles Jackson
Some people in our churches today may feel a little embarrassed by our literal interpretation of the Bible. There is no reason for this, though unbelievers and even other Christians may try to make you feel this way. Some will say that Genesis is not an essential part of our faith.
But the central figure of the gospel is our Lord Jesus Christ. And he referred to the Old Testament as a true history; a history that he was sent to fulfill in the New Covenant with mankind signed in his own blood at the cross.
If Jesus believed Genesis was true, then why shouldn’t we?
Either we believe the whole Bible or we should not call ourselves Bible believers. That’s just obvious.
Meet the Creator
I wasn’t always a creationist. There was a time I wasn’t even sure there was a God. Growing up, my family didn’t go to church regularly. I respected friends at school who did believe in God. But I always felt uncomfortable talking with them about him, until the day that I met him myself.
People sometimes ask how I became a creationist. As with any faith matter, believing was seeing. Before my conversion, I had believed in evolution as a matter of scientific fact right up to my senior year in high school. That may not sound very old, but I had already begun my career as a total science geek in first grade!
The day I was born again was the day I believed the Bible. Suddenly I just knew it was all true.
My mind reeled with Bible stories that I’d heard before. It was a catastrophic realization! Everything I thought I knew that contradicted the Bible was now a lie! Miracles could happen. A virgin had a baby. Jesus walked on water. Moses parted the Red Sea. Adam and Eve were real people in history. This meant Darwinian evolution could not possibly be true.
I was devastated. The truth had set me free, but it had also ripped my world from its old foundation in a single day.
A Journey of Discovery
I started looking for scientific evidence that the Bible was true. It didn’t take long. I found there was a ton of evidence in all the areas of science — astronomy, biology, geology, paleontology, chemistry, and even in the very philosophy of science itself. Nobody ever talked about this evidence, because hardly anybody had put it all together in the past hundred years.
Interpretations, theories, facts, and opinions all flooded into my brain and my soul. I was astounded.
How could I have been so blind all my life? Why did I not see it in my telescope and my microscope? Breeding land snails and tropical fish, growing herbs and trees from their seeds, why did I not know there was a Creator of them all? I knew had to tell everyone. Most of all, I had to tell other Christians.
I found out most of them either had never thought of the conflict or they had just accepted it. When I met those Christians, at first I wondered if they might not be saved. After all, to me, getting saved had meant getting a download of the truth. I didn’t yet know about things like compromise, hypocrisy, friendship with the world, and weakness in the faith. I had to tell them that science was really on our side, on the Bible side. And it always has been!
Tools for Your Own Journey
What could help you settle this conflict in your mind between faith and science? Here are a few science facts that might be useful.
Astronomy. The Big Bang theory violates the First of the Law of Thermodynamics: “Matter and Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.” Bang theory says that in less than a second, all of the matter and energy of the universe was created from nothing, including all of space and time.
Some secular scientists are now trying to get around this by saying that the universe is eternal and so it didn’t need to be created. The Second Law is the Entropy Law. It says everything in the universe goes from order to disorder. Evolution says the universe (and all life) has gone from the disorder of an explosion to the order of galaxies and stars.
Lord Kelvin revolutionized the science of thermodynamics in the 19th century. The Kelvin temperature scale is named after him. We use his contributions to science every day. He opposed Darwin’s theory. The worldview of Darwinism can never be the biblical worldview. It can’t even be the scientific view!
Biology. The science of life is the worst nightmare for those committed to evolution. Because of that, it gives us the best support for the biblical mindset in science. All biochemical processes are incredibly well tuned in even the simplest forms of life.
Even the word “species” was coined by a Bible-believing Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus in the 17th century. He took the Hebrew word for “kind” from Genesis and translated it into the Latin “species” meaning groups of living things that can reproduce among themselves.
The DNA molecule is how all species on this planet have survived. DNA in cells is assembled by proteins called enzymes. But DNA itself contains the instructions on how to make these proteins! So, evolution has a chicken-and-the-egg problem with DNA and proteins.
This whole system had to be in place from the beginning, without any Darwin-style step-by-step process leading up to the first life form. After that miracle, evolution then says that DNA copying errors are the only thing that could lead to accidental new DNA that would change bacteria into worms, worms into fish, fish into lizards, lizards into monkeys, and monkeys into men.
If that was really true, then why would nature have equipped all living things with backup and repair systems, all designed to prevent and correct such errors? Everything we now know about biology fairly screams there is no evolution, and equally shouts that there is a Creator (see Romans 1:19-22).
Geology. Many people think it has been proven that the rocks of our planet are billions of years old. That’s just not true. This belief was necessary for the hope that the slow evolutionary process might have enough time to do its work.
It wasn’t until almost a hundred years after Darwin’s book that his followers finally proposed a method for telling the age of rocks that did not disagree with their “billions of years” beliefs. These include the famous radioactive decay methods like uranium-lead and potassium-argon to assign their ages to samples of rocks and fossils. Until then, all they had was the evolution calendar of events to tell how old a rock was by the types of fossils that were in it.
There are four unprovable assumptions in radiometric dating. But we never hear these brought up in television documentaries that tell us the radiometric ages of rocks and fossils.
- There is no way to prove that radioactive elements have always been decaying at the rate they do today.
- There is no way to know how much of the undecayed element was in the rock to begin with.
- There is no way to know how much of the decay product element was already in the rock to begin with.
- There is no way to know that some forces of nature may not have tampered with the sample, given the chance of many supposed millions or billions of years to do so.
These four assumptions should be enough to put radiometric dating into the category of “guesswork” and not that of real experimental science. As for the many sedimentary rock layers found worldwide in the crust of the earth, they could have easily been caused by the flood of Noah found in the historical account of the book of Genesis.
Paleontology. Most everyone is familiar with the term “missing link.” There is a reason for the word “missing.”
Despite what so many sources tell us, there is no respectable missing link fossil that has ever been discovered. And we’re not just talking about the link between monkeys and people. This is also true about all of the links between each of the steps in the evolution story, from bacteria to pterodactyls. Each famous link fossil that evolutionists claim to be their evidence has some fact about it that disqualifies it from being the actual link. This is usually brought up by the researchers who first discover a fossil when they tell the rest of the world about it.
Chemistry. Evolutionists have to explain how chemical reactions in the ocean can create the molecules necessary for life and then create life itself. This is their worst nightmare yet.
Water actually destroys non-living proteins, so life could never evolve in the ocean. This is why we dry out the proteins in preserved foods like beef jerky.
DNA building blocks would have to come together by luck in just the right order to make the chromosome strings that carry the instructions for life. Every cell in your body has six billion of these DNA subunits in the exact right order making up your 22,000 genes. If the order is accidentally changed in one of your genes, then it can’t make the protein it was supposed to make for you.
The laws of chemistry go against the accidental spontaneous generation of life. But every evolutionist has to believe that it happened at least once long, long ago anyway.
Philosophy of Science. There are many principles and laws of science that show that the evolution story just could not have ever happened. Even the very way that scientific thinking works goes against the way that evolutionary thinking works.
Everything in real science has to be testable, measurable, verifiable, and falsifiable. None of this can be done with the evolution story. It is therefore outside the realm of observable science, and can never be anything more than a story about how life and the universe got here. It can never be anything more than forensic science, because that is all we can do when we investigate events of the past.
This makes the creation story outside of science, also. But the evidence is still more on our side than on the side of the Darwin believers.
What to Say to Atheists and Evolutionists
So maybe now you’re pretty confident in what you believe and why you believe it. But what can you say to those who would try to get you to question your faith in God and in the Bible, using what they call science?
This article has given you some pretty good ammunition for that. And there are many good sources of much more such reliable information. But that’s not going to be enough.
Just being right and saying the right things isn’t going to get through to most people who want to argue with you.
To really discuss these things wisely, you’re going to have to follow the instructions of Jesus himself. In Luke 12:12, he tells us that when we are called upon to speak, we must depend on God’s Holy Spirit to help us to know what to say.
Too spiritual for you? Not really. I’ll bet you’ve shot up an emergency prayer when you’ve had a friend going through a tough time and you didn’t know what to say to them. And God answered you. Do this when you talk to the unbelievers around you, just like you would with a friend. It’s the only way to follow 1 Peter 3:15-17 and really get results.
God bless you in your efforts. Amen.
