The Modern Creation Trilogy. Dr. Henry M. Morris
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in entropy elsewhere. God’s description of the entire creation as “very good” must tell us that at the time He said it, there was no disorder, no deterioration, no groaning and travailing, no suffering, and, above all, no death in the whole universe, “The heavens and the earth . . . and all the host of them” (Gen. 2:1).
The entire world was designed for man, and he was appointed by God to exercise dominion over it, as God’s steward. It was a perfect environment, and man was perfectly equipped to manage it. He should, certainly, have been content and supremely happy, responding in loving thanksgiving to His Creator who had thus endowed him.
God, however, did not create man as a mere machine. God’s love was voluntary, and for there to be real fellowship, man’s love also must be voluntary; in fact, an “involuntary love” is a contradiction in terms. Man was endowed with freedom to love or not love, to obey or not obey, as well as with the responsibility to choose. The history of over six thousand years of strife and suffering, crime and war, decay and death, is proof enough that he chose wrongly.
Sin came into the world when man first doubted, then rejected, the word of God, in the garden of Eden. And death came into the world when sin came into the world. God was forced to tell Adam, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake . . . for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:17, 19). The basic physical elements (“dust” of the “ground”) were thus placed under the curse, and all flesh constructed from those elements was also cursed. The classic passage of the New Testament on this subject is Romans 8:20–22:
For the creation was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. Because the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption [or, more literally, “decay”] into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
This universal “bondage of decay” can be nothing less than the universal principle that scientists have finally formalized as the second law of thermodynamics. By the same token, God’s “rest” at the end of His work of creating and making all things (Gen. 2:1–3), together with the providential sustenance of His creation ever since (Neh. 9:6), must constitute the universal principle now known as the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of mass/energy.
Scientists have demonstrated the universality of the two laws, but they are unable to discover why they work. The answer to the question — Why should energy always be conserved and entropy always increase? — can be found only in these biblical records. There are many other biblical allusions to the first law (Col. 1:16–17; Heb. 1:2–3; 2 Pet. 3:5, 7; Ps. 148:5–6; Isa. 40:26; Eccles. 1:9–10; 3:14–15, etc.), and to the second law (Ps. 102:25–27; Isa. 51:6; 1 Pet. 1:24–25; Heb. 12:27; Rom. 7:21–25; Rev. 21:4; 22:3, etc.). It is significant that these two universal (and all-important) principles, discovered and formally recognized little more than a century ago, have been implicit in the biblical revelation for thousands of years.
The imposition of the principle of decay and death on the original creation was the result of man’s sin. God had to bring the curse upon both man and his dominion because of man’s rebellion against his Creator. “Cursed is the ground,” God told Adam (Gen. 3:17). The very ground out of which Adam’s body had been constructed, the dust of the earth, the basic elements of the creation, were thus brought into the “bondage of decay” (Rom. 8:21). “Yea, all of them shall wax old, as a garment” (Ps. 102:26).
The curse is not permanent and irrevocable, however, but only remedial and disciplinary. “The creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of decay into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). “There shall be no more curse” (Rev. 22:3). “We, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Pet. 3:13).
At the same time that God pronounced the curse, He also promised the coming Redeemer, the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), who would someday provide salvation, both for individual persons and for the whole creation.1
The Genesis Flood
One of the most remarkable phenomena associated with the earth’s crust is the abundance of fossil remains of animals buried and preserved therein. Since these fossilized animals obviously were once living and are now dead, they must have died only after death entered the world when Adam sinned (Rom. 5:12). Although the Bible never mentions fossils as such, it does speak of a time when “all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died” (Gen. 7:21–22). This, of course, was at the time of the worldwide flood that God sent on the earth in the days of Noah.
Most creationists are convinced that the key to the real understanding of the fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks is nothing less than the great flood of the days of Noah. The fossils speak, not of the gradual evolution of life on earth over vast ages, but rather of the sudden extinction of life, all over the world, in one age.
There was never such an opportunity for production of fossils as in the great Flood. Neither was there ever, before or since, such an opportunity for the formation of vast beds of sediment and for their rapid conversion into sedimentary rock, as in the great Flood. “And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark” (Gen. 7:23).
The curse and the Flood constitute a permanent witness to us concerning God’s hatred of sin and His desire to call men to repentance. Every process that we experience in our daily lives should continually remind us of the judgment of the curse, and every feature that we see as we look at the world around us should remind us of the judgment of the Flood. All that we see and all that we experience are constantly telling us that we are out of fellowship with our Creator and urgently need the Savior.
But all fallen men are perverse, and their imaginations are evil. Instead of responding to the remedial purposes of the curse, early men and women tried to circumvent it and soon became so irretrievably evil that God had to destroy the world with the Flood. Then, instead of gratitude for deliverance from the antediluvian morass of wickedness by the Flood, the descendants of the survivors soon manifested their own perversity by a new rebellion at Babel.
Man has now somehow, in his warped thinking, converted the universal decay principle into an imagined universal evolutionary process, and the worldwide testimony in stone concerning the Flood into a contrived record of the history of evolution. The Flood itself is explained away altogether, either as a local flood or a tranquil flood or an allegorical flood (these theories will all be evaluated in chapter 4, and eliminated as possible options).
Accordingly, God ceased to concern himself directly with mankind as a whole, after routing the conspirators at Babel, choosing rather to work through an elect nation, Israel, and then through an elect assemblage, the Church, to accomplish His redemptive work in the world. Not again would He impose another remedial curse of some kind on the ground, nor would He again send another world-purging cataclysm as long as He continued to offer salvation and redemption to man.
“While the earth remaineth,” He said, “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). That is, the earth’s axial rotation and orbital revolution, which processes largely control all other terrestrial processes in the present economy, would remain unchanged, and so would all other processes until man’s temporal probation and God’s reconciliation were accomplished.
Origin of the Nations
Another great event in the ancient world has also had worldwide repercussions to this very day. That was the post-Flood rebellion led by Nimrod at the Tower of Babel, resulting in God’s miraculous confusion of languages of the various families gathered there. This, in turn, led to their dispersion from Babel and their eventual development into the many tribes and nations around the