Four Views on Creation

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Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design By Patricia A. Young J. B. Stump the editor of ‘Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design’ brings to life the viewpoints of Ken Ham, Hugh Ross, Deborah B. Haarsma, and Steven Meyer. Each author is considered an expert by their following. In this r eview the contributors put forth arguments for Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth (Progressive) Creationism, Evolutionary Creationism, and Intelligent Design. Young Earth C reationists believe that God created the entire universe in six d ays, that He cursed the creation, destroyed the world with a flood, and then judged m ankind at the Tower of Babel. K en Ham believes Genesis 1-11 is history – not poetry, parable, prophetic vision, or mythology. He claims this was the universal belief of the church until the beginning of the 19th century. For Ham, the days of the creation week in Genesis 1:1-2:3 are literal . Since the order of creation events in Genesis 1 contradict the order of events in the evolutionary story of the universe and of life, evolutionary theory must be rejected. Ham also believes the Genesis genealogies are strict chronologies and should be used to calculate the age of the earth. In Ham’s reading, the earth is about 6,000 years old because Abraham was born a little before 2000BC and Adam was created about 2000 years before Abraham. Since Adam was born on the sixth literal day of history, the earth is very young. Ham is opposed to evolution. Concerning the flood, Ham believes it was global and catastrophic. The evidence of “billions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth” (29) among other geological findings, confirms a literal reading of Genesis 6.

Old-Earth C reationists accept the conclusions found by the larger S cientific C ommunity regarding the age of the earth, but do not believe that all creation evolved through common ancestors (13). Hugh Ross takes the Bible to be the book that i nforms us of redemption, and creations as the book that gives us detail on God’s creation (7). Ross defends the day-age interpretation . The day-age view considers the Genesis creation days as as six sequential, non-overlapping, long time periods. Ross believes Romans 5:12 means that when Adam sinned, he inaugurated sin among humans, but that other types of death did not occur among plants, bugs, and animals. A major question in this debate is when and how humans originated. Ross finds a biblical clue for humanity’s origin date in Genesis 2. The text mentions four known rivers that originally converged in Eden , the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates. By tracking ancient riverbeds, one could conclude that the first humans, Adam and Eve, came on the scene sometime during (12,000-135,000 years ago). Evolutionary Creationists accept the claim that the universe is several billion years old and that all life evolved through common ancestors. They believe these claims to be congruent with biblical text (13). Deborah B. Haarsma believes the Bible is true and evolution is real. She sees evolutionary creation as a faithful option for Christians and a reasonable option for scientists. E volutionary creationism is the view that God created the universe, earth, and life over billions of years, and that the gradual process of evolution was crafted and governed by God to create the diversity of all life on earth. Evolutionary creationists search for natural mechanisms in the physical world, and celebrate the God of the Bible as the creator and designer of those mechanisms a scientific explanation does not eliminate God (132) . God is understood as a “composer writing a symphony” (137) and a God who “delights in working

through systems” (138). Regarding the human origin question, Haarsma points to archaeological studies of indigenous human cultures showing that the first homo sapiens left Africa around 100,000 years ago and had spread all over the world by 10,000 years ago (144). Intelligent Design states that all creation was created by a designer , the God of the Bible (13). Stephen C. Meyer is one of the architects of the theory of Intelligent D esign and is a director of a research center that supports scientists who develop this theory. It was first proposed in the early 1980s by a group of scientists who were trying to account for the mystery in modern biology: the origin of the digital information encoded along the spine of the DNA molecule. Intelligent Design is not based on the Bible. Instead, the theory is based on recent scientific discoveries regarding patterns of evidence in the natural world that indicate intelligent causes. Meyer points to the presence of functionally specific, information-bearing sequences in DNA represents a striking appearance of design, among other proofs. Meyer’s argument was that explaining the origin of genetic information poses an acute difficulty for scientists attempting to explain the origin of life (193). In his studies he found that the specified information in cells point to intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of biological evolution. Thus, “intelligence, or what philosophers call, ‘agent causation’ now stands as the only known cause to be capable of generating large amounts of specified information” (202). Summary A strength of this book is how each contributor is allowed to not only present the case of his or her view, but also to critique and respond to the critiques of the

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other contributors. This allowed me as the reader an opportunity to compare each contributors beliefs in an open forum setting to see where they overlap and where they differ. Second, the format of the book is convenient and accommodating. For me personally, I agree with Ham, that as a Christian we must build all of our thinking in every area on the Bible. We must start with God ’ s Word, not the word of finite, fallible man. We must judge what people say on the basis of what God’s W ord says, not the other way around.

Four Views on Creation

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