What About Origins? (CreationPoints)

by Dr A J Monty White

  Like every other verse in the Bible, the verse in 2 Peter must not be taken out of its context. In chapter 3 of that epistle, the apostle Peter is addressing those who will come in the last days and will scoff at the promise of the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are told in 2 Peter 3:4 that these scoffers believe that ‘all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation’—this is uniformitarianism, the philosophy of evolutionists. The apostle Peter teaches, however, that such people are ignorant; God did not use uniformitarian processes to bring about the universal cataclysmic Flood that caused the world that then existed to perish, and neither will he use those processes to bring about his Second Coming. What is taught in 2 Peter 3:8 is, therefore, the fact that God can accomplish in one day what it appears would need a thousand years to accomplish with uniformitarian processes.

  Having seen that the days in Genesis 1 are ordinary days, some ask: How is it possible to have twenty-four-hour periods on the first three creation days in view of the fact that the sun, moon and stars were not created until the fourth day? This is a legitimate question to ask, and it has been adequately answered by Dr John Whitcomb:

  The fact that the sun was not created until the fourth day does not make the first three days indefinite periods of time, for on the first day God created a fixed and localized light source in the heaven in reference to which the rotating earth passed through the same kind of day/night cycles as it has since the creation of the sun.12

  It also needs to be stressed that time is not dependant on the sun, moon and stars for its existence, even though these astronomical bodies were created ‘for … seasons, and for days and years’ (Gen. 1:14) and we use them to measure the passing of time. As soon as God created matter, time existed, for many of the properties of matter can only be explained in terms of time. For example, it takes a certain amount of time for an electron to move in its orbit around the nucleus of its atom, and it takes time for atoms and molecules to vibrate and move. A second is now defined using an atomic clock, so the measure of time is independent of the sun, moon and stars.

  There is one other theological objection to theistic evolution. Most theistic evolutionists tend to argue that the whole of the history of humankind, including the present, belongs to Day Seven. This does not accord with the teachings of Scripture, for in Genesis 2:1–2 we read, ‘Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.’ These verses are written as though the seventh day is in the past—which indeed it is. The theistic evolutionist, however, has to have it in the present. If the theistic evolutionist is correct, it would mean that God is resting and not working at present—something that is denied in the Scriptures:

  My help comes from the LORD,

  Who made heaven and earth.

  He will not allow your foot to be moved;

  He who keeps you will not slumber.

  Behold, He who keeps Israel

  Shall neither slumber nor sleep.

  (Ps. 121:2–4)

  These verses alone show that God is not resting—he neither slumbers nor sleeps, contrary to the implications of theistic evolution. Furthermore, during his earthly ministry, the Lord Jesus Christ explained that, not only was he working, but so too was God the Father, and that God had been at work until Jesus’s time—that is, since his day of rest at the end of his six-day creation: ‘But Jesus answered them, “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working”’ (John 5:17).

  By looking at what theistic evolutionists believe about origins, we have seen that their thinking is muddled, for they accept neither what the Bible teaches nor what the evolutionists teach. Their hybrid ideas do not make sense and, no matter how hard they try, they cannot come up with an account of origins that unites these two irreconcilable explanations. It is ironic that the same Christians who reject a literal view of the early chapters of Genesis, and refer to such a view as being rubbish or illogical, actually accept a view which is so confused and muddled that it makes no sense whatsoever.

  Who was Adam?

  Every Christian must be able to give a reasoned answer to the question, ‘Who was Adam?’ Theistic evolutionists do not believe in a literal Adam; they believe that Adam was a composite man. They believe that evolutionary processes eventually produced an animal species that was, to all intents and purposes, human. They think that, at this point, God came to a pair of these ‘people’ and breathed his spirit into them, thus making them religious animals with spirituality and a moral law. They teach that God remained close to this pair (that is, the Adam and Eve of the Bible) for a while, but that, as they failed to keep his commands, God withdrew his presence from them, sentencing them and the whole of humankind to spiritual death. Because of this, the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ was necessary in order to redeem men and women from this spiritual death imposed upon them. Christ’s death has no effect on our physical death, because physical death is the driving force of evolution.

  This type of reasoning has been made by the anthropologist E. K. Victor Pearce. He believes that Old Stone Age people were pre-Adamic, and that they were the people that God created in Genesis 1:27. He then argues that he ‘finds in the early chapters of Genesis a “cultural zone fossil” which exactly reflects what has long intrigued anthropologists—the “New Stone Age Revolution” in farming and horticulture. The sudden appearance of this new mode of life in the New Stone Age exactly fits the appearance of Adam with his divinely-imparted knowledge “to till the ground and keep it.”’ In other words, Dr Victor Pearce views Adam as a group of people—the New Stone Age people—rather than as a literal person.13

  There are, however, five major theological problems with accepting such a view of Adam and his wife Eve:

  If Adam and Eve were religious animals because God had breathed his spirit into them, when did their contemporaries become religious, having an awareness of God?

  The Bible emphatically teaches that Adam was the first human to exist. What, therefore, was the nature of the people (that is, the Homo sapiens) who existed before Adam or who were his contemporaries? Were these people soulless and so unable to be saved?

  The Bible teaches quite clearly that Adam was the first person to sin and that, as a result, we all inherit sin because we are all descended from him. What about Adam’s human ancestors and his contemporaries—how could they inherit sin, given that they were not descended from him and are in no way able to be described as ‘in Adam’ (1 Cor. 15:22)?

  The Bible teaches quite clearly that, because of Adam’s sin, we all die. We die because we are all descended from him—‘For as in Adam all die …’ (1 Cor. 15:22). What about Adam’s human ancestors and his contemporaries—were they immortal? Did Adam’s contemporaries only start dying when Adam sinned? Even so, this raises the problem that they were not descended from him and could therefore in no way be described as being ‘in Adam’.

  The final problem concerns the clear teaching that the Bible makes in Genesis 3:20 that all humans are descended from Eve. How does this affect those people who were descended from Eve’s contemporaries? Would this make them ‘not human’?

  The answers given by theistic evolutionists to these questions may be gleaned by considering the views of the evangelical Christian Professor R. J. Berry, a retired Professor of Genetics from University College, London. He accepts that the New Testament regards Adam as the first parent of the whole human race, but argues that ‘it would be incompetent exegesis to regard the Bible’s use of “whole human race” as necessarily synonymous with the biological species Homo sapiens’.14 He believes that ‘We are human because we have been created in God’s image, not because of our membership of a species defined on morphological grounds as Homo sapiens; we are qualitatively separable from other hominids not because of any genetical event but because of God’s inbreathing.’15 He then goes on to argue, ‘Humanness d
oes not spread from generation to generation in the same way as physically inherited traits; every individual is uniquely endowed with spiritual life by God. Consequently it is quite possible that, at some time after God had created Adam, he then conferred his image on all members of the same biological species at the time.’16

  We can see that the main thrust of the theistic evolutionist arguments is that there is a distinction between a member of the species Homo sapiens and a human being. The difference is that being human is the result of the act of God’s in-breathing as recorded in Genesis 2:7.

  But what does the Bible teach regarding Adam? This will clarify our views and will also show the errors of theistic evolutionist views about who Adam was. Genesis 1:26–27 records the creation of people on the sixth creation day. In Genesis 2 a more detailed account of the creation of the first man, Adam, is found: ‘And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being’ (Gen. 2:7). There is also an account of the creation of his wife, Eve: ‘And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made [lit. built] into a woman, and He brought her to the man’ (Gen. 2:21–22).

  The two pertinent questions we need to ask are the following: Is the biblical account of the creation of Adam and his wife, Eve, evolutionary in its teaching? Does the Bible teach that Adam and Eve were products of evolutionary processes operating over millions of years? Although the answer to both these questions is a resounding ‘No!’, theistic evolutionists still try to read evolution into the Scriptures, arguing that the ‘dust of the ground’ mentioned in Genesis 2:7 is the Bible’s way of referring to the evolutionary descent (or should it be ascent?) of humans via the various life forms (uni-cellular organisms ➜ multi-cellular organisms ➜ invertebrates ➜ fish ➜ amphibians ➜ reptiles ➜ mammals) from the first self-replicating molecule which, they maintain, first appeared on the shores of the earth’s primeval ocean. This argument, however, is made nonsensical by what God said to Adam in Genesis 3:19:

  In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread

  Till you return to the ground,

  For out if it you were taken;

  For dust you are,

  And to dust you shall return.

  The dust that is referred to here is literal dust and is the same dust mentioned in Genesis 2:7, otherwise the argument used by God would not make sense. It is totally illogical to give ‘dust of the ground’ one meaning in Genesis 2:7 and a different one in Genesis 3:19, just to fit theistic evolutionist ideas. Adam was the first man—created by God in his image and likeness literally out of the dust of the ground and not as the result of evolutionary processes. Adam was not an advanced hominid,17 nor was he New Stone Age Man. Such evolutionary views are not supported by the Scriptures.

  As we have already seen, the writers of the New Testament believed that Adam was the first man and that he was supernaturally created by God. The truth of his disobedience and fall into sin is vital to the New Testament doctrine of salvation. The apostle Paul argues in Romans 5:12 that not only did sin enter the world because of Adam’s sin, but that all men and women have sinned because of Adam’s sin. This thought is also expressed by Paul in Romans 3:23, where he states that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’. Now, sin and death are inextricably joined together—death is the result of sin: ‘… the wages of sin is death’, according to Romans 6:23. However, the second part of that verse is more positive, and also very thrilling: ‘… but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’. This is the gospel message, and it is a truth that is repeated in 1 Corinthians 15:22, where Paul contrasts the life which we can have in Christ with the death that we all inherit from Adam. Likewise, in Romans 5:19, Paul contrasts the fruit of Adam’s disobedience with that of Jesus Christ’s obedience.

  It is obvious, then, that a literal Adam is absolutely crucial to the plan of salvation, as the following logic shows:

  The argument of Paul in Romans 5 depends absolutely for its validity on the fact that, as Jesus was an historical Person, so Adam was an historical person. There cannot be a proper parallel between a mythical Adam and an historical Christ. Adam is as essential to the Christian system of theology as Jesus Christ is. Christ is indeed called ‘the second Adam’, or ‘the last Adam’.18

  That last point is crucial, for it is nonsense to refer to Christ as ‘the last Adam’, as the Bible does in 1 Corinthians 15:45, if there was not a ‘first Adam’. If the first Adam did not fall from his original perfect state, there is no sin; hence the last Adam died for nothing. It also follows that, if universal death through the first Adam’s sin is a myth, so too is the doctrine of the resurrection of the last Adam; our preaching and our faith are then in vain (see 1 Cor. 15:13–22).

  We see, therefore, that if the Genesis account is not reliable, the whole basis of the doctrine of the Fall and of salvation collapses. The atheist Dr Richard Dawkins is well aware of this and has actually mocked those Christians who do not believe in the historicity of the Genesis account of the Fall: ‘Oh, but of course, the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn’t it? Symbolic? Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual. Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than “barking mad!”’19 This is one of the few times when I can honestly say that I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments that Richard Dawkins is expressing. If the story of Adam and Eve was symbolic, Jesus Christ’s sufferings and sacrifice for our sins are a total nonsense. I often think that atheists’ understanding of the theology of original sin is greater than that of the average Christian.

  Another militant free-thinking atheist who appreciates the theological importance of the historicity of the early chapters of Genesis is Richard Bozarth. He actually argues for the eradication of the historicity of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve and original sin. Doing this, he suggests, will bring about the end of Christianity: ‘Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god [sic]. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer that died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.’20 If you read this quotation carefully, you will see that Richard Bozarth is maintaining that evolution means that Jesus is not the redeemer who died for our sins. This is because, if evolution has occurred, there could have been no Adam, no Eve, no original perfect world, and no Fall; Jesus Christ could not, therefore, be the redeemer, because we would have nothing to be redeemed from. No wonder atheists are evolutionists—it gives them an excuse to ignore their sin and live as they please. No wonder, too, that atheists are not content simply to be atheists but must be ‘evangelical’ in their opposition to Christianity. Dr Richard Dawkins is a prime example; he is not content merely to disbelieve in God, but must, at every opportunity, attack God (in whom he does not believe) and God’s Word (which he does not accept as being God’s Word). This would be ludicrous if God did not exist, but it is quite understandable in view of what is written in Psalm 2. There we read that God laughs at those who oppose and plot against him, and that he holds them in derision when he listens to their arguments about getting rid of him.

  We see, then, that the Bible teaches unambiguously that Adam was the first man created by Almighty God and that Eve was made by God from a piece of Adam’s side. They were made perfect.

  The evolutionary view of the history of the human species not only dominates non-Christian philosophy, it also affects Christian thinking to a certain extent. Ancient men and women are often thought to have been primitive—physically, intellectually, linguistically, culturally and technologically, as well as morally and spiritually. The story of mankind is thought to be that of a steady upward advance in these seven spheres. Genesis, however, tells a completely different story. It presents man, n
ot beginning as a half-ape/half-human creature and evolving into modern men and women, but as part of God’s perfect creation; a creature who was perfect physically, intellectually, linguistically, culturally, technologically, morally and spiritually. The Bible presents the human race, not evolving upwards, but sinning against God and morally, physically and spiritually destitute—alienated from God. The Bible teaches very clearly that the only way for fallen men and women to be reconciled to God is in and through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, who said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’ (John 14:6).

  The biblical view of origins

  Theistic evolutionists, with their evolutionary views about origins, have to rely on the ideas of evolutionists rather than on the biblical accounts for the answers to the questions of origins. Often these ideas are in direct contradiction to what the Bible teaches, in spite of the fact that many theistic evolutionists argue that they believe the Bible but simply reinterpret it in terms of evolution. But what we believe is a matter of authority. Who is right: God or the evolutionists? What do we believe: the Word of God or the words of evolutionists in their textbooks?