Reading: Theories of Creation (David Feddes)

Suppose a little child asked you, “Where do babies come from?” You might not give the child the kind of answer you would give a biology professor testing you on the processes of conception and fetal development. You might tell the child that babies come from the love of Mommy and Daddy, and you might give simplified descriptions of body parts and use a few figures of speech. The explanation you give a child might leave out some details and technical terms that you would include on the biology test. You’re not trying to give the child an exact scientific explanation. Does that mean it’s a poorer explanation? Not necessarily. In fact, it might be richer in some ways. When telling a child of the love between Daddy and Mommy, you would be saying something deeper than any technical details on a biology exam. Of course, in giving a child a simplified description with some figures of speech, you should still tell the basic truth, even if you’re not trying to impress a biology professor. Mommy and Daddy are real, not just figurative. If you give the child basic information about body parts, the information should be true, not false, even if you use everyday language and maybe a few figures of speech. You would not help a curious child at all if you said, “The stork brings babies.” That’s just a tall tale.

When we ask, “Where did the world and living things and people come from,” the early chapters of Genesis do not offer detailed scientific descriptions, but neither do they offer a stork-like tall tale. They offer simplified history for people of all ages. When we dig into details, we might not always know for sure whether this or that detail of the story is literal or figurative, but the main facts are clear: God created the universe; the first humans fell into sin after being tempted by an evil power; and this has affected all of humanity and everything on earth. Genesis does not offer all the answers that a scientist seeks to learn, but it’s not just a tall tale. It is a true story that has communicated the greatest, deepest truths about creation to countless cultures throughout the ages. Here are five key facts:

1. The Genesis story is true, though not a textbook about scientific details.
2. God’s powerful Word created and rules all.
3. The world is purposefully designed.
4. Heaven and earth are God’s temple.
5. Humans image and represent God.

Evaluating Evolution

But what about evolution? Believing that God created all things doesn’t rule out every form of evolution, especially if by evolution we simply mean changes within a group of living things over time. For example, the average size of finch beaks on a particular island varies from year to year as the environment changes. Nobody denies that this kind of adaptive change takes place. Nobody denies that animal breeders can develop different breeds of cattle and dogs by selecting for certain traits. Nobody denies that the different races of humanity trace back to the same ancestry and developed some different characteristics over time, such as different skin color and facial features. If that were all evolution meant, there would be no argument.

But often evolution is used, not just as a word for changes within a particular population but as a word for a grand scheme which explains the origin of every form of life apart from God. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga points out five main claims of this grand evolutionary scheme:

1. The universe is very ancient.
2. Simple life forms produced complex.
3. All life forms have common ancestry.
4. A chance process produced all things.
5. Life emerged from dead matter by physics and chemistry without God
   

First, the universe is very ancient, perhaps even billions of years old. Second, over time life has progressed from relatively simple forms of life to relatively complex forms of life, and eventually there were fish, then reptiles, then birds, then mammals, and finally, human beings. Third, all of these life forms have common ancestry; life originated at only one place on earth, and all living things today are descended from those original life forms. Fourth, this development over the generations is due to entirely natural processes, such as random genetic mutation and survival of the fittest. Fifth, life itself originally developed from non-living matter just by virtue of the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry, without any special creative activity of God. All five claims, taken together, form the grand evolutionary picture.

These are different claims. They don’t necessarily go together. There are people who accept all of these claims, and there are people who reject all of them; but there are also people who believe some of these claims but not others. For example, some folks think the universe is billions of years old and may even think that all living things share common ancestry, but they don’t believe this happened randomly or apart from God’s creative activity. The different claims can be distinguished from one another. Consider the last two claims, that the development of life from one form to another happened by chance, and that the original forms of life emerged from non-living matter by chance, apart from any divine design or action. These are the claims that are most obviously in conflict with biblical teaching about creation—and these are also claims for which there is not a shred of scientific evidence.

All Christians agree that creation is not just a tall tale and that God is the Creator of all things, but they don’t all agree on the details. Some Christians are convinced that the earth is billions of years old and don’t think creation occurred in six 24-hour days. They don’t think science supports this view, and they don’t think the Bible teaches it. Other Christians believe the Bible teaches creation in six ordinary days, and they are not persuaded by scientific claims about billions of years. All Christians agree that God is the Creator, but they differ on the best way to unite a sound understanding of the Bible with sound science, and they hold different theories. Let's look at five theories of creation held by various Christians: evolutionary creation, functional creation, progressive creation, the gap theory, and six-day creation.

Evolutionary Creation (Theistic Evolution)

First, evolutionary creation, also known as theistic evolution. According to this theory, the Bible is right when it speaks of God as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, but mainstream science is right when it speaks of the origin and development of the universe over billions of years and the evolution of all forms of life (including humans) from common ancestry. Evolution is God's method of creating. Creation is not sudden or miraculous but is a seamless, continuous process which happens in accordance with observable laws of nature.

Evolutionary creation tries to keep science and Scripture separate. Each has its own proper place and boundary and should not interfere with the other. To learn about physical processes and the formative history of things, we should listen to science. To know the deepest truths about ultimate origins and governance and purposes, we should listen to Scripture. We will get confused if we expect science to answer questions about the spiritual realm. We will also get confused if we expect Genesis to answer questions about the physical realm.

According to evolutionary creation, the six-day sequence in Genesis 1 is a literary framework, not a literal chronology. It's a majestic, poetic portrait of God as the almighty Creator of all things. There's no value in consulting the Bible about the age of the earth or asking how there could be light on the first day but no sun or stars till the fourth day. Such questions are a symptom of taking the story too literally. God's creation of different things on each of the six days is a vivid poetic device to drive home the profound point that God made it all. However, according to evolutionary creation, the Genesis poetry has no bearing on the actual sequence or timing. For that kind of information, we must rely on science, not Scripture.

Here's how evolutionary creation evaluates the five claims of evolutionism:

1. The universe is very ancient.
2. Simple life forms produced complex.
3. All life forms have common ancestry.
4. Chance process produced all things.
5. Life emerged from dead matter by physics and chemistry without God.
   

Some godly, sincere believers take this approach. One attraction of evolutionary creation is that it avoids much conflict between Scripture and science. It makes it easier for some people to believe in creation if it doesn't clash with scientific teachings of an ancient earth and common ancestry of all living things. However, there may also be difficulties with evolutionary creation (theistic evolution). It might be too quick to accept unproven, anti-supernatural evolutionary dogma and too slow to recognize the factual content of the early chapters of the Bible. Genesis 1 is not poetry; it is prose. It is history, not just a mythic tale to make a spiritual point. The problems multiply in cases where evolutionary creationists don't believe that Adam and Eve were two real individuals created in God's image. They don't believe Adam and Eve's fall into sin was a real event that corrupted all humanity. This undermines what the New Testament says about Jesus as the last Adam whose perfection brings life where the first Adam's disobedience brought death (Romans 5:12-19, 1 Corinthians 15:45-50). Not all evolutionary creationists deny the reality of Adam and Eve, but some do—and the overall tendency of theistic evolution may be to separate science from Scripture, or to favor science over Scripture when the two seem to be in tension. While it’s true that the Bible is not a scientific textbook, Scripture does make factual claims that cannot be dismissed just because they are expressed in non-technical language.

Functional Creation

Functional creation holds that the Genesis creation story is mainly about God assigning various things their order and function, not about the origins of physical objects or the processes by which they came into existence. John Walton, a longtime professor of Old Testament at Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, is an influential teacher of this view. According to functional creation, the Hebrew word בָּרָ֣א, translated as “created,” means God assigned functions to already existing material. Functional creationists affirm that all material things and processes originated with God, but they say that this is not the focus of Genesis. Rather, the Genesis story is about the six days in which God readied the earth to be humanity’s home and God’s temple, his dwelling place. In this view, Genesis 1-2 does not teach or deny any biological or material processes. Scientific investigation might provide insight into biological and material processes, but Genesis has no interest in such matters.

Functional creation works very hard to understand the text of Genesis in its historical context of ancient Near Eastern literature, rather than trying to read modern science back into the text. At the same time, it leaves room for Christian scientific researchers to study biological origins without worrying that their findings or theorizing might contradict God's Word in Genesis. This obviously appeals to many scholars in both biblical studies and scientific research. Functional creation professes to focus on the religious and functional purpose of Genesis, without making any claims for or against any scientific theory.

Here's how functional creation evaluates the five claims of evolutionism:

1. The universe is very ancient??
2. Simple life forms produced complex??
3. All life forms have common ancestry??
4. Chance process produced all things.
5. Life emerged from dead matter by physics and chemistry without God.

A strength of functional creation is that it offers valuable insight into God's purposes in creating. We benefit from knowing that God intended the world to be his temple and our home, assigning us responsibility to care for his creation. A difficulty with functional creation is that it depends heavily on new theories in recent scholarship and offers some ideas about Genesis that have not been part of the church's understanding of Genesis throughout history. Another difficulty is that this view may too easily dismiss statements in Genesis that are relevant for the origins of physical objects and processes. Genesis might not be exclusively focused on functions.

Progressive Creation (Day-Age Theory)

Now let's consider progressive creation, sometimes known as the day-age theory. Unlike theistic evolutionists, progressive creationists don't see the six-day story of Genesis as just a literary device; they see it as a historical overview of six real periods of time, presented in accurate sequence. At the same time, they believe that the six days of creation lasted far longer than 24 hours each. They cite biblical statements that for God a thousand years are like a day or a few hours (Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8) and say that God measures time differently than we do. So, they reason, the six creation days may actually refer to long periods, each one lasting millions or even billions of years.

Progressive creationists accept a very old universe but deny that a seamless process produced all forms of life. Contrary to theistic evolution, they don't believe lifeless material somehow produced primitive cells leading to plant life and then to other life forms. They believe that during the third day-age of creation, God created the main kinds of plant life; that during the fifth day-age, God created the main kinds of fish and birds; and that during the sixth day-age God created the main kinds of land animals. They believe that each new day marked a new period of creation in which God made something new which couldn't have developed from what was there previously. They believe this fits the biblical story and also explains the progression of radically new life forms appearing in the fossil record with little indication of transitional forms.

Progressive creationists also believe that although God created the earth billions of years ago, he created humanity much more recently. Dr. Hugh Ross, a leading advocate of progressive creation, explicitly affirms "belief in our direct descent from Adam and Eve, specially created by God several thousand years ago and unique among all God's creatures on Earth in possessing spiritual capacities." Any primates or hominids who may have lived and died before Adam and Eve were not spirit-creatures and were not ancestors of humanity. According to progressive creation, God made Adam and Eve in his image, without evolutionary ancestors.

Here's how progressive creation evaluates the five claims of evolutionism:

1. The universe is very ancient.
2. Simple life forms produced complex.
3. All life forms have common ancestry.
4. Chance process produced all things.
5. Life emerged from dead matter by physics and chemistry without God.

Progressive creation has much to be said for it. It affirms basic biblical truths. It recognizes that Genesis 1 teaches historical facts, not just poetry. It affirms miraculous acts of God corresponding to each of the six days. It affirms the special creation of Adam and Eve. It accepts what Scripture says and tries to deal responsibly with scientific information. Many excellent Christians hold this view. But progressive creation has at least two difficulties that aren’t easily dismissed.

First, interpreting the six creation days as long periods of time feels like a forced meaning which doesn't fit the words of Genesis. It's true that for the eternal God, extremely long periods of time may seem no longer than a day. It's also true that the Hebrew word for day, yom, can occasionally mean an indefinite period of time. But that does not seem to fit the context of Genesis 1. There the Bible numbers each day and marks it with evening and morning: "And there was evening and there was morning—the first day... And there was evening and there was morning—the second day..." and so forth, through the sixth day. Elsewhere in the Bible, whenever yom, the Hebrew word for day, is used with a number, it always means an ordinary, 24-hour day. Also, whenever yom is used in connection with evening and morning, it always means an ordinary 24-hour day. So when Genesis gives each creation day a number and marks each day with evening and morning, it seems to be indicating days of ordinary length. It seems like a stretch, then, to say that yom in Genesis 1 means a long age.

A second problem for progressive creation is that in theorizing long periods of time, it also theorizes that animals ate each other long before Adam sinned. Genesis 1:30, however, says that God directed the animals to eat plants, not each other. It is hard to square eons of animals devouring each other with the statement that God made everything very good and that all animals and people were originally vegetarian.

The Gap Theory (Ruin-Reconstruction)

Still another theory of creation is the gap theory, also known as "the ruin-reconstruction theory." This theory takes Genesis pretty much as it's written, except that it places a huge time gap between the first and second verses of Genesis 1. Verse 1 says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and verse 2 says, "Now the earth was formless and empty." Suppose verse 1 describes the creation of a good world, which eventually fell into disorder, perhaps due to the rebellion of Satan and other angels who went bad. After millions, or perhaps billions, of years, nothing remained of the earth but a formless, empty ruin. Then, says the gap theory, God chose to reconstruct the world. He created something new on the ruins of the old, and he did this during the six creation days described in Genesis 1. Most fossils of prehistoric creatures would be remains from the ruined world that existed earlier, not from the recently created world. Earth itself is ancient, but the six creation days were six 24-hour days which occurred ten thousand years ago or less.

Here's how the gap theory evaluates the five claims of evolutionism:

1. The universe is very ancient.
2. Simple life forms produced complex.
3. All life forms have common ancestry.
4. Chance process produced all things.
5. Life emerged from dead matter by physics and chemistry without God.

The gap theory has considerable appeal because it holds firmly to the key truths of Scripture and at the same time seems to harmonize Scripture with some widely held scientific ideas. The main difficulty is that it might be inventing or imposing something that has no basis in the biblical story. In Genesis 1, verse 2 follows immediately after verse 1 in a smooth transition, without any mention of a time gap. To most ordinary readers, it sounds like Genesis 1 is describing the first six days of a world that was just beginning to exist, not a world that was being re-created after first existing for long ages and then falling into ruin. The gap theory inserts a huge period of time between two verses when there's not a word about it in the text.

Young-Earth Creation

Many Christians throughout history, and many still today, believe that God created the world in six days of ordinary length. Genesis 1 speaks of six days with a morning and an evening. Scripture later declares, "In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them" (Exodus 20:11). That sounds pretty plain to six-day creationists.

Here's how young-earth creation evaluates the five claims of evolutionism:

1. The universe is very ancient.
2. Simple life forms produced complex.
3. All life forms have common ancestry.
4. Chance process produced all things.
5. Life emerged from dead matter by physics and chemistry without God.

The main difficulty with six-day creation is that many scientifically educated people think that there is strong scientific evidence for a very old earth, and they find six-day creation hard to believe. If the Bible is speaking figuratively and doesn’t actually mean to teach six-day creation, then it would be best not to make it harder for people to believe the Bible by making claims that the Bible doesn’t intend to make.

This is an important concern, but our interpretation of the Bible’s meaning should not be determined by what contemporary people find believable. The Bible reveals many things that don’t fit current thinking. We must seek to understand and accept the original meaning of the biblical text, even when it doesn’t fit our assumptions and theories.

Centuries ago, some Christians had trouble believing that God created in six 24-hour days, not because it was too short, but too long. Their assumptions made them think God must have done it all in an instant, and the six days were just a teaching device. John Calvin responded that such an idea ignored the most straightforward reading of Scripture. "Let us rather conclude," wrote Calvin, "that God himself took the space of six days."

Martin Luther said the same thing: "The Days of Creation were ordinary days in length." A number of great Christians in earlier centuries thought otherwise, said Luther, and we must respect them as our elders in the faith. "Nevertheless, we do not depart from the authority of Scripture for their sake," said Luther. "If you cannot understand how this could have been done in six days, then grant the Holy Spirit the honor of being more learned than you are."

Dealing With Differences

For myself, if I must err in studying the creation account in Genesis, I prefer to err on the side of taking it too literally. In describing theories of creation held by various Christians and pointing out potential problems, I don't want to slam fellow Christians or overlook what we have in common: belief in our Creator. In pointing out difficulties with various theories, I'm not judging individual Christians who love Jesus but have a different theory of creation than I do. I know many who are great and godly people. Old-earth creationists should not regard young-earth creationists as scientifically illiterate, and young-earth creationists should not regard old-earth creationists as spiritually bankrupt. As I’ve said, if I must err in studying the Genesis creation account, I'll err on the side of taking it too literally. But if I must err in dealing with Christians who have a different theory of creation, I want to err on the side of treating them too kindly.

Let’s be honest. The Bible isn’t always easy to understand; scientific data isn’t always easy to understand; and how best to harmonize biblical interpretation and scientific theory isn’t always easy to understand. So let’s humbly keep exploring possibilities; let’s keep listening to others who are trying to understand truth more clearly and fully; and above all let’s pray for wisdom from God’s Spirit to understand his Word and his world.

As we keep thinking and exploring, let’s remember that what Christians agree about is much bigger than what we disagree about. Even if Christians differ on what theory of creation is best, they should form a united front in affirming the reality of the Creator and in resisting efforts in science and education to deny God or to suppress evidence of divine design. Amid uncertainties and disagreements about details, we can be quite sure of the big picture. Even if you're not sure exactly how to square science with the Bible, even if you're not sure what theory of creation is right, don't let uncertainty about lesser things keep you from knowing with great certainty the central, most obvious thing: God created everything that exists.

Whatever differences exist in Christians' theories of creation, never lose sight of five major facts about the creation story that all Christians should affirm: