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Let's begin this lesson with reading the first two verses in scripture:

"In the beginning God created." The scriptures address every question that has still yet to be answered by evolution in one simple statement. God has always been and will always be -- He is timeless. And so it was He who created the Universe and caused the miracle of creating something from nothing. He is the source of life. He is how life formed. Because evolution seeks to remove God from the equation, evolutionists are left with questions that theory can't answer that we discussed in our last lesson. Simply put, all the questions raised by evolution point to the fact that there must be a God, and intelligent designer and creator of the universe. It takes faith to believe that but as we have seen no less faith than any other theory of what happened at the beginning when no human being was present.

Here is a summary of the Days of Creation according to the Genesis account which details what God created on each day according to scripture:

Day 1 -- Genesis 1:3-5 -- God created light and divided from darkness. He formed the concept of "day and night" and the first morning and evening happened.

Day 2 -- Genesis 1:6-8 -- God created the sky and atmosphere of the earth (firmament in King James English) and divided the water that was below the sky from waters that were above the sky. We'll talk more about this "water above the sky" when we get to the Flood of Noah's day. God also named the sky "heaven."

The Jewish people taught that there were "three heavens" with the first heaven being the air and atmosphere around the earth that we live in and birds fly through, the second heaven being the universe, and the third heaven being the spiritual realm and the heaven that is the center of consciousness and dwelling place of God Almighty. There must be some truth to this because in scripture, Paul referred to it in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4.

Day 3 -- Genesis 1:9-13 -- God gathered the waters on the earth's surface together in one place to form "seas" and let "dry land" appear which would be called "earth." God also spoke plants into existence on the dry land and all vegetation came forth.

Day 4 -- Genesis 1:14-19 -- God created the universe with stars and such as well as our particular Sun and Moon. He placed the Sun and Moon to "rule over the day and night" by providing light in the day and night.

Day 5 -- Genesis 1:20-23 -- God created sea life from the smallest amoeba to the biggest whales in the seas and created birds and things that fly through the air.

Day 6 -- Genesis 1:24-31 -- God created all other animals that exist on land and "every creeping thing." That means insects as well as amphibians and dogs, cattle, etc... The various animals that we call dinosaurs were created under whichever day that fit their type. In other words, all sea animals and birds were created on Day Five. All "land creatures" which would include the animals on land that we refer to as dinosaurs were created on Day Six. God also created humanity on Day Six and "gave" authority over all creation to this prized creation.

Day 7 -- Genesis 2:1-3 -- God rested from His creation. He did this as an example to us that we need rest from physical labor every seven days, to establish the concept of the week, and to emphasize that He was through with creation. To quote the Bible:

Despite the simplicity of these verses, there are a myriad of beliefs today about the origins of the earth and life on earth. Virtually every possible belief of how the world was created can be categorized into four basic beliefs:

1. Literal Creationism

2. Creationistic Evolution

3. Evolution

4. Theory of Intelligent Design

Let's take them one by one and discuss what each believes and the problems facing each opinion in lieu of what we now know scientifically.

I am a literal creationist. I believe in God and I believe in the literalness of His Word. I am part of a ministerial organization that is largely literal creationists. Surprisingly, we are in the minority among "Christian" organizations. Most ministers today are confused in this area and will teach theories other than literal creationism.

Literal Creationism holds that God created time and the universe and the world and did it in six, twenty-four hour days, resting on the seventh. He spoke the worlds into existence and created something out of nothing by His omnipotent power. The universe is a product of an intelligent God who designed it instantly as He created. Literal Creationism is the only one of the four opinions to take the Bible as truth and interpret science in light of scripture. Everybody else assumes that science is correct and then tries to interpret the Bible in light of it. As we will see, this is why each of the theories contradict scripture in some way or fashion and therefore I believe are flawed. The problem with much of the literal creationism literature out there is that they don't know enough of the principles of scripture that I'm going to teach you to realize that they are arguing in areas that they have no need to argue.

Is believing in Literal Creationism vital for a Christian? Listen to what Jesus said:

Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible including the first chapter of Genesis. Jesus said that "if you don't believe Moses' writings, then how will you believe my words?" At the risk of sounding sardonic, I would say that Jesus was a Literal Creationist!

We've already discussed how that Evolution fails to account for the most basic questions of how the universe and life began in the first place (see God and Science -- Lesson #1 --How It All Began of this series). Even though they can't explain how life formed out of inanimate material in the first place, Evolution says that over billions of years, life slowly evolved becoming more and more complex from single celled life to multi-celled life, from simple sea creatures to more complex sea creatures. Eventually -- after hundreds of millions of years -- some of these creatures developed the ability to crawl out of the ocean and to survive on land. In time, some of these creatures developed the ability to fly and some became increasing complex, resulting -- in relatively modern times -- in the human being.

The first problem with evolution is that it directly contradicts the Genesis account of the Word of God something that Darwin, himself, realized and that haunted him for the rest of his life. We will deal with that in a moment. The second is that it assumes that the earth is billions of years old which we will also discuss at the end of this lesson. The third problem which we have already discussed is that it gives no answer for how life formed in the first place and merely assumes that it just happened on it's own. The fourth problem with evolution is that macroevolution -- the fancy name for a species evolving into another species, say a dog into a cat or a fish into a lizard -- has never been observed nor scientifically proven. Furthermore there is not one bit of proof that macroevolution has ever happened.

Microevolution -- the fancy name for how selective breeding can produce significant variations within a species -- is a scientific fact and can be proven. We understand that of the species of "dog" that all of the variations have been produced by selective breeding. We know that because we can demonstrate and observe it today. Microevolution is something that is truth and can be scientifically substantiated. When we talk about the problem with "Evolution" we are talking about the problem with "macroevolution." And it's a serious problem indeed for science to put something forth as fact that cannot be observed in a laboratory. What I'm getting at is that at best Evolution is a theory. And one that has not only spiritual and moral problems but that has scientific problems. It directly contradicts the first two laws of thermodynamics which are held by virtually every scientist breathing today as fact:

The First Law of Thermodynamics, to put it simply, states that nothing new is being created. Energy and matter can be converted from one state to another and from one to another but that there is no new matter being created. Evolution says that even though we cannot see it or prove it, new things are being created now. Of course, we know as Bible believing Christians that God "rested" after the six days of creation and the only time when something is created anew now is when God decides to do a miracle!

Evolution also contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that systems left to themselves go into a greater condition of disorder, probability, and randomness. We understand this law today. Tornados do not come through a town and hit lumber yards and build houses! Given a little time, your back yard does not become a neatly ordered garden. Everything is slowly falling apart including you and me as a result of Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden.

Furthermore, Evolution is not only a theory, but makes some surprisingly "exact" claims based upon guessing. And there is a great agenda to present their claims about such things as the natures of the dinosaurs as truth when really they are literal more than a stab-in-the-dark, guesswork. To show what I mean, I give the following example from Dr. Arlo Moehlenpah's excellent book "Creation versus Evolution." In addition to his doctorate degree in chemical engineering with an emphasis on physical science, Dr. Moehlenpah also happens to be a graduate of Apostolic Bible Institute, a licensed minister with the UPCI, and a pastor. He states:

Dr. Moehlanpah goes on to say in his book:

For all of these scientific reasons and many, many more that we don't have time to get into, since 1996, the state of Alabama has placed a disclaimer on evolution in the front of every biology textbook in the state's public high school systems. Here it is exactly:

Why did the major groups of animals suddenly appear in the fossil record (known as the "Cambrian Explosion")?

Even among modern scientists that are atheistic or agnostic, evolution faces some serious issues and criticism that question why a theory with so many problems and so many fallacies would be so often presented as a fact. Because of this, in recent years, we have seen the rise of the next group the:

This group and recent science movement that is gaining ground in America is not creationistic or evolutionistic in nature. They are called the "Intelligent Design" theorists or "Design" for short. They are not literal creationists as we are. Neither do all of them believe in an Almighty God who can be known. They are scientists with brilliant minds who have noticed that evolution has some serious scientific issues. And they are producing sophisticated evidence in many fields that states "creation must be the result of an intelligent design." To put their theory in short, there are just too many things that could not have evolved but would have had to been thought up in order to be formed because the individual parts serve no purpose out side of the finished product.

To put all of that in simpler terms, think of a mousetrap. It consists of unique parts none of which are useful for anything else on their own. Furthermore if even one of these little pieces were missing, then your mousetrap ceases to function. In organic chemistry, we can find many complex-celled creatures that are composed of things that are complex and multi-celled and yet could not evolve on their own because they served no function. Because this stuff can be observed and demonstrated in laboratories, the Design theorists are raising serious opposition to Macroevolution as Darwin's theories are called. The Design theorist say that this life's existent is proof of intelligent design, that somebody or something invented the idea for it and not just mere chance. God is just one of the possible "intelligent designers" that they cite could be the source of creation, but nevertheless their scientific observations and examples are presenting quite an argument and crisis for traditional evolutionists because it is expounding forth on the scientific flaws of evolution in a crucial manner. The theory of Intelligent Design has become a very prominent theory among some leading scientists in the last eight years.

The main scriptural flaw of the Intelligent Design theorist is that they continue to believe that the earth is billions of years old and that they do not all give the God of the Bible credit for being the intelligent designer of it all.

There is no more dubious and compromising belief than this, nevertheless there are many Christians who try to twist the Bible to accept scientific theory on evolution. Essentially a Creation Evolutionist believes that God created the heaven and the earth and yet used evolution to do it. For this to happen, they must twist scripture to not mean a literal six days of creation but make each day represent millions of years. The scripture that they like to twist is:

Peter's point in context was that time is nothing to God and He'll wait as long as He has to for the perfect timing of His return. Peter was exhorting the church to be patient with God and used a figure of speech. Virtually every conservative Bible Scholar agrees with that view. The problem with twisting this scripture to mean that each day of creation in Genesis equaled a thousand years is that a thousand years is not enough for evolution to take place even according to the evolutionistic theory. To believe that God created life through evolution means that each day of creation must be hundreds of millions of years. A simple reference back to Genesis 1 shows how absurd and utterly incomprehensible -- in other words dumb -- this idea is. Creationistic Evolution cannot be true because:

1. Evolution teaches that the progress of life resulted from the environment and heat and light resulting from the Sun and Stars. God created Light and Day and Night on the first day, and did not create the Sun, moon, and the stars until the Fourth day. Yet He created grass and fruit trees on the third day. If each of these days were hundreds of millions of years -- and for that matter thousands of years -- then how did the grass and trees (which require sunlight for nourishment) stay alive for the zillions of years before the Sun was created?

2. The first day, God divided the light from darkness and created Day and Night. Divided means that He divided them equally. If each day were a thousand years or greater, then each day would have consisted of 500 years of light, and 500 years of darkness. How would the vegetation and for that matter animals survive in 500 years of darkness?

3. Adam was 930 years old when He died. The oldest man recorded living was Methuselah who died in the Flood at the age of 969 years. Adam was created on the Sixth day, and the Seventh day of rest was between him and the rest of the events of his life. If each day were thousands of years, then Adam was thousands of years old before the end of the Seventh day, yet the Bible says that he died much sooner than that!

4. God created the fish and aquatic animals at the same time that He created the birds and flying things, on the FIFTH day. It wasn't until the SIXTH Day that God created the land creatures. This contradicts evolution's process of sea animals becoming land creatures who would eventually take to the air.

5. The Bible emphatically states over a hundred times that God "spoke" the world into being. Our text says:

It is clear that you cannot believe both evolution and Genesis chapter 1. Truth and Lies do not mix well!

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After having surveyed every serious possible opinion about the origins of life, let's address the key issue in Literal Creationism. The major question that you must answer is "how old is the earth?" If you take a literal view of Genesis chapter 1 and the rest of the Bible, and add up all the "so and so begat so and so" of the scripture and combine that with the safe assumption that Adam and Eve were in the garden of Eden for less than a year (the scriptures are clear that their first children were conceived after their expulsion after the garden, and we assume that God would have created their reproductive organs in good shape and yet they had no babies in the Garden. All of this points to a shorter duration between their creation and their sin.) you will find that the Bible claims that the earth and universe is a little over 7,000 years old. Scientists would immediately point out a couple of facts to contradict this:

1. We can accurately test through such things as "carbon dating" and "radioactive decay" how old rocks are and they say that the earth is hundreds of hundreds of millions of years old. To explain this simply, a radioactive rock emits energy very efficiently at a very exact rate called it's rate of decay. Scientists can measure this, and by figuring out how much radiation a rock has now and how swiftly it is decaying they can calculate backwards to see how old the rock is. This is a scientific fact and it says that the earth must be millions even billions years old.

2. The speed of light can be accurately measured. And although the speed is fast, over great distances, it becomes pronounced. For example, it takes light from the moon -- our nearest neighbor in space -- about seven seconds to reach earth. That means when we see the moon in the sky, we are actually seeing how the moon was seven seconds ago. And we never actually see the moon in the present. If there were to be someone stand on the moon and wave at you and if there were telescoped large enough to see someone standing on the moon (there is no such telescope) you would still see the person wave to you seven seconds after they actually made the gesture.

The stars are much further away from us. The North Star, one that is fairly close to us, is 680 light years away. That means when you look up at the North Star, you are seeing it as it was 680 years ago. It could be that the North Star blew up last week. If so, we'll never know because it will be almost 700 years before you can see it! When you look at the light from the stars you are actually looking into the past.

Polaris, the North Star, is very close. Some of the stars that we can see in telescopes are hundreds of millions of light years away. That would mean that the light that we see tonight had to leave the star millions of years ago to reach us, therefore the earth and universe must be billions of years old and therefore Genesis can't be literal. Right?

Wait a minute. There's a little more to it than that. Both of those points are fact. Scientist can determine the age of a rock by testing and a star by it's light and surrounding neighbors. But they are missing a key point, the third key point of this series of lessons, and a key point that most Christians today miss. And that is this:

That is, He created the Earth and Universe and everything in it mature and seasoned and developed. This principle is the key to understanding the relationship between God and Science. When God created Adam, He created him as a mature man. God did not create a baby. He did not create and infant. He created a man. And then a woman. Five seconds after Adam was created, he was a full-grown man, physically, mentally, and sexually mature. If we could have whisked him into a modern health clinic five seconds after his creation, Adam would have tested as having lived perhaps thirty years or so. His body would show the results of the process of growth. He would have had all of the characteristics of a mature man of about thirty but in reality he was still only five seconds old! In other words, because God created him completely mature, scientific tests would have proved without a shadow of a doubt that he was at least in his late twenties and probably around thirty years of age since that was the age that Jesus -- who is called the second Adam -- began His ministry and work. But despite what the scientific tests would say, Adam in reality was only five seconds old. He had just been created mature to show up as if he had been there from a little baby on.

When you look at the wording of day 3 in Genesis, it immediately becomes clear that God created plants and grass blades and full-sized trees, not seeds in the ground. It says the earth brought forth these things in one day! When you get to say day 6, it is obvious that God created the chicken before the egg. Science would have taken a look at all the trees and the chickens clucking in their shade and said they the chickens have to be at least a year old and that tree at least fifty. But in actuality they were only days old because God created a mature earth!

All of Genesis backs this up. God did not create a flat world with rivers of water just beginning to flow over it, but he created a world that looked as if it had been here for a long time. It seemed that it had taken thousands of years for the rivers to carve their canyons and for the mountain ranges to be pushed up, but in actuality they were only days old! What I'm trying to get you to see is that God created it in such a way that if you want to believe a lie and go with what man says, you can and have perfectly good reason to do so. But if you want to trust in His Word and have faith in what He says, then you can do so as well. When someone mentions that a rock tests to be 20 million years old, I can smile at them and say you're right, that's an absolute fact. But I don't believe the earth is that old, because I understand that God created a mature earth. He created that rock to appear that way so that those who choose not to trust in His Word would have something to believe in. But in actuality, He created that rock, with all of it's pertinent characteristics a little over 7,000 years ago by speaking it into existence!

God created a mature earth and universe! Grasp the importance of that concept. And not only that, but I believe that God created that universe in such a manner that if someone doesn't want to believe in Him, they can find alternate theories.

It is a scriptural principle that God will allow and even provide the lie for someone to believe if they refuse to believe truth!

We read about it in our text in 2 Thessalonians:

"God shall send them strong delusion!" Go read 1 Kings 22 sometime how that after years of preaching and attempts by God to reach him, King Ahab didn't want to worship Him in truth, that God sent a lying spirit into the false prophets of the king so that they would tell him what he wanted to hear. God sent the lying spirit. It was from God, but not of God. And so those false prophets felt a spiritual presence and inspiration and got a message from that spirit but it was a lie because Ahab didn't want to accept truth! God will allow and even provide the means for you to believe a lie if you reject truth. That was true in the Old Testament in Ahab's time. It was true in the New Testament during Paul's time and I submit to you that it was true in Creation. When God created the universe, He created it mature in such a way that if you wanted to believe a lie that contradicted the Word of God you could, and even find somewhat "proof" of it. But in actuality the truth of the matter would be believed by those who were simple enough and believing enough to take His Word as what it said. That He created it by speaking it into existence in just seven days a little over 7,000 years ago.

That's why when I go to the Grand Canyon and see a sign that it took "hundreds of thousands of years for the river to carve it's way through the rock," I smile. Because I realize God's sense of humor in all of this. He created it to appear that way, but in actuality it was a result of the Flood of Noah's day and Creation. Ditto with fossil finding. Evolution has some serious problems with what they haven't found in the fossil record, but it really doesn't matter one way or another. Let's say that they were to find the "missing link" in rock that indicated it was hundreds of millions of years old. It's not going to make the Bible obsolete, because it would just mean that God created an earth with fossils already in place. If you want to believe a lie, He'll let you. But in actuality, He created a mature earth.

For this to be true, then that means that the light from these stars that are millions of years away would have had to be created before the actual star themselves. That is the light between here and there would have had to been formed before the creation of the stars. A quick look back at Genesis indicates that that is exactly what God did. Light was created on the FIRST day. The stars themselves weren't created until the FOURTH day. God created a mature universe. He set the light shining in the heavens to appear as if it had left the star millions of years ago, but in fact it was created a little over 7,000 years before now. And so He created the light before the star itself. But just to complete the fun, I believe He created the star so it would appear that the light had been shining forth form it for a long, long time. God is smarter than us and so He created everything so that it would never get beyond the level of simple faith.

There are some who would argue that this principle can't be true because it oversimplifies things. I argue that it is true because of it's simplicity. Remember our text from last week when David was writing about the formation of the universe and said:

God is a God who responds to faith! And so He has set the universe up so that it will never get beyond faith in the unseen.

And so to the Evolutionist, I would say there are serious scientific flaws in your theory that even your own raise, but even if you ever were to find some "comprehensible proof" of your theory within the earth, I'll just smile and know that God placed it there to appear that way a little over 7,000 years ago and keep putting my trust in a God who cannot lie and whose Word always means exactly what it says!

To the Creationistic Evolutionist, I would say that not only does your theory contradict scripture AND science but by trying to play both sides you lose everyone. You are a compromiser who is choosing to believe a lie.

To the Intelligent Design Theorists, I would say keep on shooting holes in the Evolutionistic theory with your science and good luck with your agenda to get our public school systems to teach about evolution more, that is, to teach the serious scientific problems about it. You aren't far from the truth. But I'd like to tell you that you missed the fact that God created a mature earth and so that everything you see, no matter what it scientifically indicates, was created by a God much smarter than you a little over 7,000 years ago. I agree with you that there is an intelligent designer of the universe, but I would like to introduce you to Him by name: He's Jesus Christ, a God who not only created you but died for you!

And to the Literal Creationists, I would say keep having simple faith in the scriptures and remember that Jesus said:

I believe that He spoke and it was!