The Modern Creation Trilogy. Dr. Henry M. Morris
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for either theistic evolution or progressive creation, as distinct from non-theistic evolution. The same natural processes, the same fossil sequences, the same genetic comparisons apply in all of them. These compromise theories are philosophical whimsies, not scientific ideas. And certainly, as we have seen, the Bible gives us no indication, much less support, of either evolution or geological ages.
The truth is, however, that evolution is not a proved fact of science, and, therefore, God is necessary to account for this world. As shown persuasively in Volume 2 of this Trilogy, evolution is, if anything, a disproved “fact” of science! There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that evolution is occurring at present or that it ever occurred in the past, or ever could occur at all.
There is, therefore, no scientific need whatever for Christians to try to accommodate this false and harmful world view — or any part of it — into their biblical interpretations. The honest course is either to accept the Bible as it is, the inerrant Word of the living God, or else to follow Huxley and Asimov and Rachels and Gould, and reject it altogether! The middle of the road is a dangerous place to walk, and fence-straddling will sooner or later become very uncomfortable.
Once the literal historicity of the Genesis record is abandoned or made into a mere literary framework (or even worse, ignored), it is only a matter of time before the whole structure of the Christian belief system collapses. As Mattell has noted (with satisfaction, from his atheistic perspective):
Those liberal and neo-orthodox Christians who regard the creation stories as myths or allegories are undermining the rest of Scripture, for if there was no Adam, there was no fall; and if there was no fall, there was no hell; and if there was no hell, there was no need of Jesus as Second Adam and Incarnate Savior, crucified and risen. As a result, the whole biblical system of salvation collapses. . . . Evolution thus becomes the most potent weapon for destroying the Christian faith.16
Compromising God’s Character
However noble may be their intent when they compromise Genesis to try to win committed evolutionists to belief in the God of the Bible, the compromisers will fail. Once again, the main reason that they will certainly fail is because these evolutionists know enough about their theory to recognize that it simply cannot be squared with the biblical revelation of the character of God.
The Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University, Holmes Rolston III, expressed this irreconcilable conflict as follows:
Biologists believe in Genesis, but if a biologist begins reading Genesis, the opening story seems incredible. The trouble is not so much the six days of creation in chapters 1 and 2, though most of the controversy is usually thought to lie there, as in chapter 3, where, spoiling the Garden Earth, the first couple fall and Earth becomes cursed. . . . The real problem is with the Fall, when a once-paradisaical nature becomes recalcitrant as a punishment for human sin.17
Dr. Rolston indicates that he might be open to the idea that the six days of creation correspond to the geological ages, but he cannot believe that the age-long reign of suffering and death resulted from human sin:
That does not fit into the biological paradigm at all. Suffering in a harsh world did not enter chronologically after sin and on account of it.18
The Bible says that it did, however, and that’s the problem. Such doctrinaire evolutionists as Rolston and the others cited can read the Bible, and they also know that a God of love would never impose such a cruel regime on the animal world for any other reason.
But nature is also where the fittest survive, “red in tooth and claw,” fierce and indifferent, a scene of hunger, disease, death. And nature is what it is regardless of human moral failings, indeed regardless of humans at all.19
The accommodationist interpreters, whether they call themselves theistic evolutionists, progressive creationists, or even “gap theorists” — all of whom accept the geological ages with their billions of fossils of dead animals preserved in the sedimentary rocks — seem to have very little sensitivity to (or understanding of) God’s revealed purpose and ideal order in the animal kingdom. They may acknowledge that human suffering and death came into the world only when Adam sinned, but they cannot explain why God allowed multiplied billions of animals to suffer and die during the supposed billion years of life history before man was created.
Nor can they explain why, after Adam did sin and God pronounced the curse on Adam and “the whole creation” (Rom. 8:22) that God only then allowed the death of certain specified animals to represent an “atonement” (Lev. 17:11) for the sins of human beings. These same kinds of animals supposedly had already been living and dying for millions upon millions of years before any human sin.
As noted before in the discussion of “Creation and Ecology” (chapter 6), there is a beautiful picture given in the Bible of the divinely intended relationships in God’s animal kingdom:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isa. 11:6–9; see also Isa. 65:25; Ezek. 34:25; Hos. 2:18; etc.).
Whether this passage describes conditions on the earth in the coming kingdom age after Christ returns to earth or not, it undeniably describes the ideal conditions intended by God for His animal creation. Therefore, this must have been the way it was in the beginning, after God had completed His creation work and surveyed it with deep satisfaction. “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Therefore, “God ended his work which he had made; and . . . rested from all his work which God created and made” (Gen. 2:2–3).
God cared for the animals, placing them under man’s stewardship, even authorizing Adam to examine and name them (Gen. 2:19–20). Furthermore, there was an abundance of food for all of them (Gen. 1:30), and definitely no “struggle for existence.” The 19th century depiction of “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson) was diametrically opposite to the true picture of the primeval creation as revealed in God’s Word. At that time, all the animals were herbivorous and at peace with one another and with man.
That is not the way it is now, of course, for “sin entered into the world, and death by sin,” so that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Rom. 5:12; 8:22). God had to tell Adam: “Cursed is the ground [same as ‘earth’] for thy sake” (Gen. 3:17), and Adam’s whole “dominion” (Gen. 1:28) came tragically down with him.
Evolutionists, however, have long regarded this groaning and struggling in nature as the basic means of evolutionary progress. The conclusion of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species even seems to glory in this state of suffering and death:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life.20
Now, strange and sad to say, a number of leading evangelicals — those espousing either theistic evolution or progressive creation — in their wistful attempt to hang on to the vast geological “ages” of the evolutionists, seem to agree in general with “this view of life.” That is, they also explain suffering and death in the animal kingdom not as a result of God’s curse on the creation because of sin, but as a necessary component of the balance of nature. For example, physicist