fifth verse. This suggests that there may have been an immense
span of time, perhaps eons, between the creation of matter and life,
and the beginning of the day-night cycle. Perhaps there were
multiple creations and cataclysms during this period, accounting for
the presence of oddities such as trilobites and dinosaurs, before a
standard six-day Edenic “restoration” around 4,000 BC.
“Gap theory” was favored by Biblical scholar Charles Scofield,
prominent ’30s barnstorming evangelist Harry Rimmer, and well-known modern televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, among others.
The second method of reconciliation is “day-age theory.” In
this interpretation, the individual “days” of the Bible are considered
not modern twenty-four hour days, but enormous spans of time.
Day-age theorists point out that the sun was not created until Day 4,
more than halfway through the process. It’s difficult to understand
how or why the Earth would have a contemporary 24-hour “day”
without a Sun. The Beginning, therefore, likely took place eons ago,
with matter created on the first “day,” life emerging on the third
“day,” the fossil record forming during the eons of “days” four five
and six. Humanity, however, was created directly by divine fiat and
did not “evolve” from lesser animals.
Perhaps the best-known “day-age” theorist was William
Jennings Bryan, three-times US presidential candidate and a
prominent figure in the Scopes evolution trial in 1925.
In modern creation-science, however, both gap theory and
day-age theory are in eclipse, supplanted and dominated by “flood
geology.” The most vigorous and influential creation-scientists
today are flood geologists, and their views (though not the only
views in creationist doctrine), have become synonymous with the
terms “creation science” and “scientific creationism.”
“Flood geology” suggests that this planet is somewhere between
6,000 and 15,000 years old. The Earth was entirely lifeless until the
six literal 24-hour days that created Eden and Adam and Eve. Adam
and Eve were the direct ancestors of all human beings. All fossils,
including so-called pre-human fossils, were created about 3,000 BC
during Noah’s Flood, which submerged the entire surface of the Earth
and destroyed all air-breathing life that was not in the Ark (with the
possible exception of air-breathing mammalian sea life). Dinosaurs,
which did exist but are probably badly misinterpreted by geologists,
are only slightly older than the human race and were co-existent
with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Actually, the Biblical
patriarchs were contemporaries with all the creatures in the fossil
record, including trilobites, pterosaurs, giant ferns, nine-foot sea
scorpions, dragonflies two feet across, tyrannosaurs, and so forth.
The world before the Deluge had a very rich ecology.
Modern flood geology creation-science is a stern and radical
school. Its advocates have not hesitated to carry the war to their
theological rivals. The best known creation-science text (among
hundreds) is probably *The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and
its Scientific Implications* by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M.
Morris (1961). Much of this book’s argumentative energy is devoted
to demolishing gap theory, and especially, the more popular and
therefore more pernicious day-age theory.
Whitcomb and Morris point out with devastating logic that
plants, created on Day Three, could hardly have been expected to
survive for “eons” without any daylight from the Sun, created on Day
Four. Nor could plants pollinate without bees, moths and butterflies
— winged creatures that were products of Day Five.
Whitcomb and Morris marshal a great deal of internal Biblical
testimony for the everyday, non-metaphorical, entirely real-life
existence of Adam, Eve, Eden, and Noah’s Flood. Jesus Christ Himself
refers to the reality of the Flood in Luke 17, and to the reality of
Adam, Eve, and Eden in Matthew 19.
Creationists have pointed out that without Adam, there is no
Fall; with no Fall, there is no Atonement for original sin; without
Atonement, there can be no Savior. To lack faith in the historical
existence and the crucial role of Adam, therefore, is necessarily to
lack faith in the historical existence and the crucial role of Jesus.
Taken on its own terms, this is a difficult piece of reasoning to refute,
and is typical of Creation-Science analysis.
To these creation-scientists, the Bible is very much all of a
piece. To begin pridefully picking and choosing within God’s Word
about what one may or may not choose to believe is to risk an utter
collapse of faith that can only result in apostasy — “going to the
apes.” These scholars are utterly and soberly determined to believe
every word of the Bible, and to use their considerable intelligence to
prove that it is the literal truth about our world and our history as a
species.
Cynics might wonder if this activity were some kind of
elaborate joke, or perhaps a wicked attempt by clever men to garner
money and fame at the expense of gullible fundamentalist
supporters. Any serious study of the lives of prominent Creationists
establishes that this is simply not so. Creation scientists are not
poseurs or hypocrites. Many have spent many patient decades in
quite humble circumstances, often enduring public ridicule, yet still
working selflessly and doggedly in the service of their beliefs.
When they state, for instance, that evolution is inspired by Satan and
leads to pornography, homosexuality, and abortion, they are entirely
in earnest. They are describing what they consider to be clear and
evident facts of life.
Creation-science is not standard, orthodox, respectable science.
There is, and always has been, a lot of debate about what qualities an
orthodox and respectable scientific effort should possess. It can be
stated though that science should have at least two basic
requirements: (A) the scientist should be willing to follow the data
where it leads, rather than bending the evidence to fit some
preconceived rationale, and (B) explanations of phenomena should
not depend on unique or nonmaterial factors. It also helps a lot if
one’s theories are falsifiable, reproducible by other researchers,
openly published and openly testable, and free of obvious internal
contradictions.
Creation-science does not fit that description at all. Creation-science considers it sheer boneheaded prejudice to eliminate
miraculous, unique explanations of world events. After all, God, a
living and omnipotent Supreme Being, is perfectly capable of
directing mere human affairs into any direction He might please. To
simply eliminate divine intervention as an explanation for
phenomena, merely in order to suit the intellectual convenience of
mortal human beings, is not only arrogant and arbitrary, but absurd.
Science has accomplished great triumphs through the use of
purely naturalist
ic explanations. Over many centuries, hundreds of
scientists have realized that some questions can be successfully
investigated using naturalistic techniques. Questions that cannot be
answered in this way are not science, but instead are philosophy, art,
or theology. Scientists assume as a given that we live in a natural
universe that obeys natural laws.
It’s conceivable that this assumption might not be the case.
The entire cognitive structure of science hinges on this assumption of
natural law, but it might not actually be true. It’s interesting to
imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,
public, irrefutable violation of natural law.
Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of
evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight
Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly
had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were
henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found
ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would
violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,
the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a
few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would
simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We
thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through
slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the
fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our
species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an
instant all at once, and that was that.
This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to
the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained
through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike
the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see
scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles —
despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at
hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish — queer
“explanations” that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there
naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere
illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always
had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once
had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.
The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a
parochial notion of “reality” had been conclusively toppled, thereby
robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.
This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that
Whitcomb and Morris’s Genesis Flood can talk quite soberly about
Noah storing dinosaurs in the Ark. They would have had to be
young dinosaurs, of course…. If we assume that one Biblical cubit
equals 17.5 inches, a standard measure, then the Ark had a volume
of 1,396,000 cubic feet, a carrying capacity equal to that of 522
standard railroad stock cars. Plenty of room!
Many other possible objections to the Ark story are met head-on, in similar meticulous detail. Noah did not have to search the
earth for wombats, pangolins, polar bears and so on; all animals,
including the exotic and distant ones, were brought through divine
instinct to the site of the Ark for Noah’s convenience. It seems
plausible that this divine intervention was, in fact, the beginning of
the migratory instinct in the animal kingdom. Similarly, hibernation
may have been created by God at this time, to keep the thousands of
animals quiet inside the Ark and also reduce the need for gigantic
animal larders that would have overtaxed Noah’s crew of eight.
Evidence in the Biblical geneologies shows that pre-Deluge
patriarchs lived far longer than those after the Deluge, suggesting a
radical change in climate, and not for the better. Whitcomb and
Morris make the extent of that change clear by establishing that
before the Deluge it never rained. There had been no rainbows
before the Flood — Genesis states clearly that the rainbow came into
existence as a sign of God’s covenant with Noah. If we assume that
normal diffraction of sunlight by water droplets was still working in
pre-Deluge time (as seems reasonable), then this can only mean that
rainfall did not exist before Noah. Instead, the dry earth was
replenished with a kind of ground-hugging mist (Genesis 2:6).
The waters of the Flood came from two sources: the “fountains
of the great deep” and “the windows of heaven.” Flood geologists
interpret this to mean that the Flood waters were subterranean and
also present high in the atmosphere. Before they fell to Earth by
divine fiat, the Flood’s waters once surrounded the entire planet in a
“vapor canopy.” When the time came to destroy his Creation, God
caused the vapor canopy to fall from outer space until the entire
planet was submerged. That water is still here today; the Earth in
Noah’s time was not nearly so watery as it is today, and Noah’s seas
were probably much shallower than ours. The vapor canopy may
have shielded the Biblical patriarchs from harmful cosmic radiation
that has since reduced human lifespan well below Methuselah’s 969
years.
The laws of physics were far different in Eden. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics likely began with Adam’s Fall. The Second
has been in decline since Adam’s sin. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics may well end with the return of Jesus Christ.
Noah was a markedly heterozygous individual whose genes had
the entire complement of modern racial characteristics. It is a
fallacy to say that human embryos recapitulate our evolution as a
species. The bumps on human embryos are not actually relic gills,
nor is the “tail” on an embryo an actual tail — it only resembles one.
Creatures cannot evolve to become more complex because this would
violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In our corrupt world,
creatures can only degenerate. The sedimentary rock record was
deposited by the Flood and it is all essentially the same age. The
reason the fossil record appears to show a course of evolution is
because the simpler and cruder organisms drowned first, and were
the first to sift out in the layers of rubble and mud.
Related so baldly and directly, flood geology may seem
laughable, but The Genesis Flood is not a silly or comic work. It is
five hundred pages long, and is every bit as sober, straightforward
and serious as, say, a college text on mechanical engineering.
The Genesis Flood has sold over 200,000 copies and gone
through 29 printings. It is famous all over the world. Today Henry
M. Morris, its co-author, is the head of the world’s most influential
creationist body, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee,
California.
It is the business of the I.C.R. to carry out scientific research on
the physical evidence for creation. Members of the I.C.R. are
accredited scientists, with degrees from reputable mainstream
institutions. Dr. Morris himself has a Ph.D. in engineering and has
written a mainstream textbook on hydraulics. The I.C.R.‘s monthly
newsletter, Acts and Facts, is distributed to over 100,000 people.
The Institute is supported by private donations and by income from
its frequent seminars and numerous well-received publications.
In February 1993, I called the Institute by telephone and had
an interesting chat with its public relations officer, Mr. Bill Hoesch.
Mr. Hoesch told me about two recent I.C.R. efforts in field research.
The first involves an attempt to demonstrate that lava flows at the
top and the bottom of Arizona’s Grand Canyon yield incongruent
ages. If this were proved factual, it would strongly imply that the
thousands of layers of sedimentary rock in this world-famous mile—
deep canyon were in fact all deposited at the same time and that
conventional radiometric methods are, to say the least, gravely
flawed. A second I.C.R. effort should demonstrate that certain ice—
cores from Greenland, which purport to show 160 thousand years of
undisturbed annual snow layers, are in fact only two thousand years
old and have been misinterpreted by mainstream scientists.
Mr. Hoesch expressed some amazement that his Institute’s
efforts are poorly and privately funded, while mainstream geologists
and biologists often receive comparatively enormous federal funding.
In his opinion, if the Institute for Creation Research were to receive
equivalent funding with their rivals in uniformitarian and
evolutionary so-called science, then creation-scientists would soon be
making valuable contributions to the nation’s research effort.
Other creation scientists have held that the search for oil, gas,
and mineral deposits has been confounded for years by mistaken
scientific orthodoxies. They have suggested that successful flood—
geology study would revolutionize our search for mineral resources
of all kinds.
Orthodox scientists are blinded by their naturalistic prejudices.
Carl Sagan, whom Mr. Hoesch described as a “great hypocrite,” is a
case in point. Carl Sagan is helping to carry out a well-funded
search for extraterrestrial life in outer space, despite the fact that