The Prehistoric Creation a Composite Theory to Explain It
As we have already seen, God spoke to Moses at the burning bush, revealing His Name to Him, and the eternal nature of His being. Moses made the next overture. He went into the tabernacle, and asked God to show him His glory Ex. 33:18. Now we know that God has two distinctive glories Creator and Redeemer. The tabernacle was a fitting place to make such a request, for it was the pattern of the universe God created, and also the seat of the sacrifices which looked ahead to the death of the Redeemer.
God granted Moses' request. He showed him His glory as Redeemer on the Mount of Transfiguration. Luke 9:31 tells us that Moses and Elijah appeared in glory, and spoke of the imminent death of Christ "which He should accomplish at Jerusalem." God also revealed His glory as Creator when He showed him "His back parts" (1) an allusion to what was behind Him His creatorial works of the past. Gen. 1 is an historical account of those Creatorial works, based on what God saw, not man. That is why we encounter the repeated phrase "and God saw etc.”
The Genesis record of creation was written to enlighten man in all ages both Jew and Gentile. Because the Jews were dispersed throughout the ancient world, God made their synagogues the conduit for instructing the Gentiles. After the Roman Empire fell, the voice of the creation record was heard by the simple people of the Middle Ages. Its witness continues on to our times, when knowledge has been increased. The essence of its testimony is the opening verse, which is a remarkably clear, succinct statement, attributing the creation of the universe to God. For most Christians this is probably enough. However, God wrote the record for our instruction. It is truly about "the deep things of God" and if we are interested enough to investigate them we will be richly rewarded.
From the second verse to the end of the chapter, the interpretation of Gen. 1 has been obscured in blinding controversy with no consensus. Commentators, unable to harmonize the creation record with their understanding of Scripture and science, term the various explanations of Gen. 1 theories, recognizing the debatable nature of the conclusions. Because this terminology has been adopted by convention in evangelical circles, it seemed prudent to employ it in this chapter. However, it probably reflects too pessimistic an attitude to the solution of the problems in the creation record. In spite of the areas of disagreement, much progress has been made in the understanding of the passage. Men of the world do not stop exploring God's creatorial works because they do not fully understand them, so why should believers become discouraged with the inspired account of them?
Our approach in this chapter is to explain the statement of creation first, and then the meaning of the days in Gen. 1 a barrier to an understanding of the whole. The various theories of Gen. 1 are only lightly touched on, because so much has been written on them. Instead we present our own theory, which is based on an analysis of the reasons for disagreement in the better theories, and careful weighing of Scripture to reconcile them. This synthesis is termed "a composite theory of creation." This chapter concludes with an account of the Tennessee Monkey Trial, as it is popularly called. This trial is recounted here because it demonstrates how a faulty understanding of Gen. 1 has discredited Christianity in public opinion.
The Creation of the Universe
The first shaft of light which bursts on us is the opening statement "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Clearly this is a space time consideration. "In the beginning" speaks of time "the heavens and the earth" of space. Life, the great prerogative of God, is not mentioned. So in a sense we are in the realm of physics. We are confronted with a statement of ultimate’s. Before God there was nothing. It is the word God which ties together "in the beginning" the point of origin of God's choosing and "the heavens and the earth" which He created. Without attributing the origin of things to God, the scientific community still recognizes a point of origin. The current theory to describe this event is called "the big bang theory.”
.. In the beginning: What wisdom there is in this expression. How could you state the age of the universe in solar years, for example, before the sun had been given its appointed place in the heavens to regulate time? What good would light years be before light was? The meaning of the phrase "in the beginning" is that God is commencing a work to execute His counsels. Indeed we learn from Rev. 3:13 that the beginning is one of the Lord's Names "these things saith the Amen,... the beginning of the creation of God."(2)
There are four beginnings in Scripture John 1:1, Gen. 1:1, 1 John 1:1, Mark 1:1. Each of these beginnings is the beginning of a book of the Bible, and they are tied together by a divine plan. The first beginning is "in the beginning was the Word." This tells us that God wanted to make Himself known, for we communicate by words. The setting of this statement is before creation, in a past eternity. The second beginning i.e. "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is also in a past eternity. But in this beginning God took His first step in making Himself known He created. So "the heavens declare the glory of God" Psa. 19:1 i.e. they make known His wisdom and power. The third beginning is in time. It is the beginning of Christ's life on earth "that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at, and our hands have touched, of the Word of life." This teaches us that the world was created as a stage on which the Word of Life should be made known. The fourth beginning is also in time "the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" Mark 1:1. Thus the two beginnings of time are linked to the two beginnings of eternity to complete the full revelation of God in the Person of His Son, and to make us worshippers of the Father who sent Him.
.. God Created: The words create and make are not synonymous in Gen. 1. (3) The opening statement of the Bible has nothing to say as to when the creation was completed, except that God rested on the seventh day. His work was complete, yet there is an ongoing activity in creation. We merely note this here. The heavens are full of exploding stars, black holes, and other phenomena which have no apparent meaning. When we turn to the earth it is clear that God was making it ready for human habitation over long geological eras. Mountain ranges rose and fell, seas advanced and retreated, forests turned into coal beds, earthquakes and volcanoes exposed mineral deposits, and so on.
So the general impression that creation is always instantaneous is false. It can be as in the creation of man but the days of creation are vast ages. Also they overlap one another in some cases. We shall look at both these features later.
.. The heavens and the earth: This is the Scriptural term for the cosmos. The heavens here are the material heavens, although there are others. Consider Deut. 10:14 for example "the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord's." Then Solomon says "the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee" 1 Kings 8:27. In the New Testament Paul is caught up to the third heaven, which he also calls Paradise where the crucified malefactor was told he should be with the Lord Luke 23:45. This unknown and presently unknowable sphere of things is excluded from the opening statement. We know very little about it. What we do know is that there are no uncreated heavens or anything else "for by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth" Col. 1:16. The teaching of Scripture is that heaven is the seat of rule of the earth because God dwells there Rev. 22:1. So now we change course, so to speak, to consider the earth.
The earth is no more than a speck in the universe. Actually it is only one out of a great many planets in the heavens. Why then did God choose it as the stage on which He would make Himself known rather than a greater and more imposing planet like Jupiter? Jesus' words in Matt. 11:29 tell us why "I am meek and lowly in heart." Its size was suited to the God who humbled Himself to become Man. Earth was the place where God manifested Himself. That fact accounts for its prominence in Scripture. As far as we know it is unique in the universe in its life forms and Christ is the Author of life and so glorifies God in creation. And on the earth the Son of God died glorifying God in redemption.
Literal Six Days of Creation Theories Made Untenable by the Vast Age of Both the Universe and the Prehistoric World
How old is this universe God created? Very old indeed. While our first verse does not tell us, other Scriptures do. From Isa. 57:15 we learn that God is the inhabiter of eternity. What did He do in the vastness of that past eternity? We know He created angels and they would require dwelling places. What else? The mind speculates but finds no answers. We know from Prov. 8 that God's eternal Son dwelt under the name of Wisdom in the bosom of His Father "the Lord possessed Me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old." This is a fairly good indication of the antiquity of the universe because God does not exaggerate when He uses language. It intimates an age indeterminable by man perhaps, but very, very old "of old hast Thou laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands" Psa. 102:25.
Man has made considerable progress in verifying the antiquity of the universe, and of that part of it which interests us most the earth on which we live. However we must concede that estimates of the age of the universe vary considerably even those made in the same year (4) because of advances in technology, new discoveries in space, and other factors. Even so an educated guess of 10 billion years might give us a rough bearing. The earth's age, and that of the formation of the solar system, is estimated at 4.6 billion years.
The antiquity of the earth became evident to man in many ways other than the presumed time of its origin. Even if some of them are flawed, others are sound. In "The Christian view of science and Scripture" Bernard Ramm takes up the question of the earth's age. He tells us that Agassiz calculated that the coral reefs of Florida took 200,000 years to form. He then gives his readers two observations of his own. The first is in Yellowstone Park, where there are 2,000 feet of exposed strata containing 18 successive forests, each wiped out by lava. Without attempting to put numbers to this exhibit, he points out how great the time for it all to happen must have been "the individual forests had to mature, and then be covered with lava. Before another forest could appear the lava would have to be weathered to form soil for trees to grow in." His second observation is the formation of the gypsum deposits in West Texas and New Mexico, which he calculated had been formed from the evaporation of 5,000,000 ft. of water evaporating over 500,000 years. He also refers the reader to F.E. Zeumer's work "Dating the past an introduction to Geochronology." This book lists seven dating methods tree ring analysis, good up to 3,000 years—varved clay analysis to 15,000 years radio carbon dating to 30,000 years a form of radium dating called "per cent of equilibrium method," good to 300,000 years solar radiation to 1,000,000 years typical geological methods such as sedimentation, denudation, erosion, weathering, and chemical change applicable to all periods uranium and radioactive methods giving results up to 3 billion years.(5)
The first four billion years of earth's history is called "the Precambrian." Because so little is known about it, it is excluded from the geological calendar. This calendar is broken down into three great eras, each of which is subdivided into periods. The Paleozoic era the age of ancient life is the first great division. It begins with the Cambrian period, which is rich in the fossilized remains of distant life. Next is the age of middle life, known as the Mesozoic era, and last the age of recent life or Genozoic era. The geological calendar compiled by Tarbuck and Lutgens shows approximate ages for these eras in millions of years, based on radioactivity findings.(6)
So we see what God means when He says His works were "of old." Some creation theories have denied this, insisting on a literal six days of creation, and even the construction of the earth's geology around Noah's flood. The truth is that a day in Scripture is generally a time when God's purposes are being worked out or have been realized. The Lord said "your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day." The future eternity is the day of God, because in that He rests, as on the seventh day long ago. God rests when His purposes have been realized, the darkness banished. Even when a day has a time connotation it can be different from what we expect "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years etc." As long ago as the days of the early Church, Augustine said that the days in Gen. 1 were God divided days, not sun divided days. That interpretation is supported by each day having the stamp of the Alpha and the Omega on it a beginning and an end. Based on these considerations a literal six day creation can be ruled out, and the theories which rest on it. No theory of Gen. 1 can be constructed on any other principle than that of a very ancient universe. Gen. 1 is a divine history of God's works of old.(7)
Theories Built Around the Antiquity of the Universe and the Earth
Many problems in the text of Gen. 1 demand solution. The meaning of the days, which we have just considered, is only one. However it is an important one, for if the days of creation are not literal, then what are they? What are the alternatives?
.. The Day Age theory: The great exponent of this school of thought was the geologist Dawson. According to this theory the days are vast aeons. They are synchronized to the geology of the earth. The Genesis record is viewed as an ongoing account, so the chaotic period of Gen. 1:2 is interpreted as the early world not a world which later became chaotic.
.. The Gap Theory: This theory ignores the geological eras, placing them in the gap between Verses 1 and 2. Verse 2 is interpreted as the chaotic state into which the world fell after the original creation. The subsequent account is how God refashioned the earth for human habitation in six literal days. Dawson challenged the Gap Theory on the ground that geology could find no trace of the work of the six literal days of reconstruction. (8) Other critics claimed that it was invented to accommodate modern geological discoveries. However the antiquity of the Gap Theory silences this objection.(9)
.. Problem areas in the Day Age and Gap theories: Both theories have a common area of agreement the great age of the creation. The prime area of disagreement is the interpretation of Verse 2 "and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep." It is a unique verse seemingly impossible to fathom. Is it a parenthesis or not? Why is this the only verse in which God is not mentioned? It can't be called a day for it ends in darkness. Many questions suggest themselves but few answers.
Could it be that there is no answer to a scientific understanding of Gen. 1? Hardly. It seems more probable that it was written in such a way that it satisfies the needs of simple souls on one hand, and of the probing mind on the other. However this means that the student of science in one age will look at it in a different light from the student in another as knowledge is retarded or advanced. For example since Dawson lived before Einstein he could not understand the implications of "let there be light." But we are living in the time of the end, when Daniel was told that knowledge should be increased. For that reason the author believes that his Composite Theory of Creation, which reflects some of that increased knowledge, is timely.
.. The Composite Theory of Creation Because this is a theory, like those which have preceded it, parts of it are conjectural. It not only modifies the Day Age and Gap theories in the light of scientific advances since Dawson's time,(10) but it also effectively reconciles the two theories by sourcing the chaotic period to the fourth day. Previously this key to the chaotic period has either been misunderstood or ignored. With this key, supplemented by other Old Testament scriptures referring to the chaotic period, we can determine the intended chronological, rather than moral location, of Gen. 1:2.
At the beginning of Hebrews Paul informs us that God made the worlds by His Son and then he tells us that God's Son is the upholder or sustainer of the worlds He created. Well, Moses' first statement "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" agrees with Paul's first statement that God made the worlds by His Son. But we are puzzled by the apparent disagreement of the second statements of Moses and Paul. Moses' second statement "and the earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep" does not appear to harmonize with Paul's second statement that God's Son upholds all things by the word of His power. We wonder why God's hand did not uphold His creation, but in His permissive will allowed it to drift into the chaotic condition of Gen. 1:2. Could it be that God wanted to demonstrate that without His sustaining hand everything would dissolve? Or was it a reflection of a deep moral discord in the universe the fall of Satan as some think. It is not necessary to take a position for our purposes here. It is more important to establish a principle that Gen. 1:2 is not located in chronological order. The account of creation which follows Gen. 1:2 is dual. It contains both the history of the prehistoric creation and of the remedial work which followed Gen. 1:2. It was the remedial work which confirmed God's role as the sustainer of His creation. The entire composite work consumed long gone eternal ages called days in the Genesis record.
The ages in Gen. 1 are so drawn out, so vast, that Dawson posed the question "Why are God's days so long? He is not like us, a being of yesterday.... even in human history a day is with Him as a thousand years; and we who live in these later days of the world know full well how slow the march of His plan has been even in human history. We shall know in the endless ages of a future eternity that even to us these long creative days may at last become but as watches in the night."(11) The long God divided days of Gen. 1 belong to a past eternity. They are better understood if divided into two periods the first three days and the last three days. Of the six days of creation the first three are basic, for the work of the last three days complements the work of the first three days.
The First Three Days
The great subject of the first three days is the creation of the universe, followed by God's sovereign choice of the earth an apparently inconsequential part of that universe as the planet where He would continue and expand His creative work in other ways. So He endows the earth with an atmosphere, seas, and continents. At the end of the three day period vegetation emerged on land.
.. Day One Divine light: Before the creation all was darkness. That is implied by God's intervention. He who Himself is light says "let there be light." God saw the light that it was good, and divided it from the darkness. So the original darkness was not banished. Instead there was light which was good and the darkness of which God says nothing. So we too will ignore it, and enquire about the light. What is light then, and why did God begin creation by willing it into being, untold billions of years ago?
We know today that light includes both the visible and the invisible range of the electromagnetic spectrum what we see, and what we do not see like radio waves, x-rays and so on. We know that light is energy, and that energy can be converted into matter. So it becomes clear why the appearance of light was God's first fiat in creation. None of these things were known until comparatively recent times, so in a sense we are privileged today over other generations. We know that when God said "let there be light" He was virtually saying "let energy be.”
.. Day Two: This day is the point of origin of the physical universe. God brought it into being by creating an expanse in the heavens. However He doesn't even tell us this in the account of day two. We learn about it indirectly in 1:14, where it is called "the expanse of the heavens" and viewed as a "fait accompli.”
Clearly He turned light, which is energy, into matter. No one had any idea that this was possible until Albert Einstein's discoveries of the relationship between energy and matter. (12) This brings us to the "big bang" theory of the origin of the universe. In layman's language the matter originally created underwent infinite compression into a microcosm. This reached intolerable limits and the compressed matter exploded. The colossal energy of the explosion hurled the matter outward in all directions into the darkness and nothingness. Thus space and the universe were born.
Observation of the farthest galaxies by telescope reveals that they are rushing away apparently from us, but actually from the primeval big bang at great speeds. Clearly we live in an expanding universe, which is only man's term for "the expanse of the heavens." Energy from the big bang propels the stars on and on, for in space there is no friction to retard the initial thrust. Even today, after these many billions of years, black body radiation now at 3°K still bathes the universe. This fact has made man concede the concept of a universe with a point of origin which is what Scripture teaches. There is no such thing as eternal matter or eternal energy. There is an eternal God. And this God is a directing God. He does not permit the expanse to rush outward in blind fashion, but orders it as it pleases Him. The Psalmist acknowledges that "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse shows the work of His hands" Psa. 19:1. Job is more specific "who makes the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the chambers of the south" Job 9:9. So during the second day the heavens would be divided into galaxies, star systems, planets, satellites and so on. The earth would be positioned in its appointed place in the solar system of our galaxy. As Job said "He stretches out the North over empty space, He hangs the earth on nothing" Job 26:7. But at this remote period our planet would only be a molten globe in space without an atmosphere. It would be ablaze with color from the light of the big bang, which would floodlight it in all directions so there would be no night. This ends the organization of the expanse in the heavens.
Our next consideration is the organization of an expanse for our planet, so that a common principle an expanse links heaven and earth. On day two then, God divides the heavens and the earth in the written account. He directs our attention away from the heavens to the earth. The transitional second day sees a primitive atmosphere now introduced on earth. This atmosphere has been simulated in scientific experiments. For much of the second day this atmosphere would bear little resemblance to the one we know. The seas were likely precipitated from it, covering the surface of the planet. But they would be boiling from the internal heat of the world, the radiation of the big bang, and the radiation of the sun. This explains why the geological calendar is blank during these early ages of the earth's history. The planet had to cool down before life could appear. By that time there was an atmospheric air ocean in place above the earth.
.. Day three: Not until day three does it become evident that God is working from the simple to the complex. In doing this He is demonstrating the principle of dependency. His work on a given day depends on His work on the preceding day. Tracing this to its origin in Day one, we see that everything depends on God. Light, which comes from God, must precede life so too must an atmosphere. Vegetation on land must precede the herbivorous animals who require it for food. This is only one indication that the days overlap and run into one another. We know that the light of day one persisted for days one, two, and three, overpowering the light of sun, moon, and stars, which is not even mentioned in the day two account, for that reason. The same thing applies to God laying the foundations of the earth. We know that the angels rejoiced when God did this, but we cannot date it. We can only surmise that the third day saw God capping this work by placing the earth's crust on the foundations He had already laid. However it is clear from geological studies that the work of the third day carried on into the later days, just as the light of the first day did. These matters require careful consideration.
Scripture speaks of the earth's foundations, a term most people would consider to be poetic language. Yet the term is apt, even though its meaning was veiled until recent times. Today we know that the earth really has foundations, and that they are layered, a state which is probably related to the intensity of the extreme heat of the interior. They consist of an inner core, the hottest, an outer core which is extremely hot, and a mantle, still very hot.
The earth's crust both continents and oceans rests on the mantle. The crust is insignificant in thickness compared to the three major interior "foundations." Sometimes we get a glimpse of the extreme pressure and heat of even the upper mantle rock when volcanoes erupt. Huge molten rocks are hurled upward like pebbles, and fiery lava devours everything in its path. But what do we really know about the mantle, the ultimate support of the earth's crust, or the crust itself? Well, we know that the upper mantle consists of two parts the Asthenosphere, which is made up of fluid rock, and the Lithosphere, which is segmented into a number of solid rocky plates. These plates float on the Asthenosphere, and support the crust of the earth. So far 29 of them have been identified. They vary greatly in size. One small plate underlines Turkey. Of the large plates, one is under the Pacific Ocean the rest support both continents and oceans. So we live in a world of moving land and ocean. This can be illustrated in a modern tale of two cities on different plates. The two cities on the same plate do not move, but they move in relation to the two cities on another plate. Our mobile world contributes to volcanoes, faults, earthquakes, mountain building, and other evidences of tectonic activity.
Most of this knowledge was acquired in the 20th century. Before then the geology of the earth was sketchy. But now that we know these things it is timely to recount the history of their discovery. This will help us relate our present knowledge to what Moses wrote. We will start with F.B. Taylor, an American geologist who published a paper on continental drift in 1910. It was ignored because it was unsupported by a theory of causation. Then in 1912 Alfred Wegener, a German scientist, gave a lecture on continental drift. By 1915 he expanded the theory he proposed in this lecture and published it in The Origins of Continents and Oceans. In 1924 an English edition of this book appeared. Wegener was ridiculed because his theories of the cause of drifting continents seemed implausible. Among other things he proposed that the continents moved through the ocean floor. However his observations were acute, and his evidence strong. Wegener visualized an original super continent, which he called Pangaea i.e. "all land" rising out of a primeval sea. He believed this supercontinent broke up into smaller continents, which drifted to where they are now. To support his theory he demonstrated how the present South American and African continents approximately fitted together. It was not until the early 1960. that his deductions were verified by Sir Edward Bullard. This scientist aligned these two continents with the help of computers. He began their shore lines at a depth of some 900 meters on their continental shelves. He produced a map which fitted the two continents together like a jig saw puzzle. Wegener also found evidence of the same life forms on both of the separated continents of South America and Africa. One example was the swimming reptile Mesosaurus, which lived in the Mezozoic era. But the continental drift theory was formulated before the ocean floor was explored, and sea floor spreading understood. By 1968 the theories of sea floor spreading and continental drift were combined into the prevailing plate tectonic theory.
The Mosaic account, lined up with other Scriptures speaking of God laying the foundations of the earth, now becomes clear.
On day three God caused the original submerged land to rise from the water. This act was only the initiating division. It would give us what Wegener visualized in Pangaea, an all land continent washed by a universal sea. God clothed this continent with vegetation to feed the herbivorous animals of day six, who in turn would become food for the carnivores, establishing a life cycle. At some point of time unknown to us God divided the original land mass into separated continents just as He divided the heavens into galaxies. This explains why the continents are called the islands of the sea in Scripture.(13)
The Last Three Days
These are so arranged that they complement the first three days. Days one and four go together their common subject is light. Days two and five go together their common subject is the atmosphere and the seas and the life which should fill these two habitats. Days three and six go together the land and the animal life which should roam over it. Day six ends the work of the creation, which in this chapter excludes man, who will be considered separately in the next chapter.
.. Day Four: On day four we leave the earth behind. The earth was the subject of God's work in the first three days, beginning with the divine edict "let there be light." Now we are taken to the heavens to trace God's work there. Remarkably the subject is the same light only this time light in heavenly orbs. To be specific, Moses is writing about the solar system. We know this because on day four "God made two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night." The concluding statement that He made the stars also refers to the planets of the solar system, for the stars of outer space were created in 1:1. Although the moon has a minor but important function we will by pass it. Our primary emphasis here will be on the sun. We know that when the solar system was formed some 4.6 billion years ago, the sun was between 25 and 30 per cent dimmer than it is today. (14) We also know that its light would hardly be seen in the primitive earth for a long time because it would be insignificant compared to the incandescent light of the big bang. However big bang light decreased over the ages until the point was reached when it could sustain the vegetative life of day three. As this was going on solar light increased as we have mentioned.
Day four is that extended period in a past eternity when solar light gradually took over from big bang light. This gave the earth a regulated, dependable, and constant flow of light a precondition for the mobile life shortly to be introduced. In combination with the moon, the earth was lit day and night. Another feature of the work of the fourth day would be the establishment of the earth sun ratio. If the earth were too close to the sun the oceans would boil if too far away they would freeze. The distance between the sun and the earth had to be just right to maintain the sea, bird, and animal life on the earth.(15)
The fourth day concludes the opening statement of the Bible “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" i.e. the creation of the physical universe excluding life. It is noteworthy that the beginning of this creation was marked by light on earth 1:3 and the end of it by light in the heavens 1:14. Truly our God is light, and it is fitting to review His works now the creation of the universe in a very concise way. By the fourth day we see that God had brought the heavens into being. Out of the heavens He chose the earth for His own ends. He gave it an atmosphere, land and seas, and caused vegetation to grow on it. Out of the heavens too He selected our solar system to give the earth an ordered source of light, and to serve man, His ultimate work in creation, as a chronometer. The pre conditions of life had been established.
It is remarkable, too, that much of the earth's landmass was at or near the equator in the beginning. When this broke up near the beginning of the Cambrian period large new regions of coastline were opened up for the life to come. The climate was warm and equable.
.. Day Five: The subject of day five is the introduction of mobile life on earth. God had brought stationary life to the dry land on day three vegetation in various forms. Early fossils show moss and lichen later ones tell a story of lush growth and tropical plants. The details are less important than the underlying principle "whose seed was in itself, after its kind." Seeds are wafted by sea and air currents, spreading plants worldwide. But the vegetation itself is rooted in the land. The subject of day five is the filling up of the two spheres of Day two water and sky with mobile life.
So the history of day five opens with these words "and God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and birds which may fly above the earth in the open expanse of heaven." The seas or oceans are not mentioned because they came later. They originated with the breaking up of the great land mass into continents. Although that occurred on day six, it was the termination of the work of day three. So the waters referred to here are the primeval waters surrounding the great super continental land mass which emerged on day three.
After God has spoken a brief statement follows, summarizing a new work of creation which He performed on the fifth day "and God created the great sea monsters, and every living soul that moves with which the waters swarm, after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." This is not a chronological statement of events, but an account of what God created in the order in which He was pleased to narrate it. Being sovereign He placed His own weightings on the different elements of creation comprising day five. He mentioned the great sea monsters first because they were the summit of His creative work in the waters, although in point of time they were last. Everything else is unclassified "every living soul that moves with which the waters swarm" an all inclusive but non descriptive umbrella covering every other kind of marine life. Man is free to investigate the life in the oceans and fill in the missing details.
Ancient marine life began with simple forms like corals which formed reefs. Then a primary food source was added jellyfish and trilobites. Trilobites were given that name because their bodies were sectioned into three parts. They had bony skeletons, and ranged in size from very tiny forms to 2ft. 4in. They multiplied greatly and became the prime food source for sea scorpions and fish. Great monstrous fish completed the cycle of small life being eaten by larger life, with the great sea monsters at the top of the feeding cycle. One of the greatest of these sea monsters was Dinichthys known as the terrible fish which had massive jaws, an armored head, and was 33 ft. long. Then there was the Plesiosaur 39 ft. long, and Kronosaurus, 55 ft. long. The period when these monsters lived is called the age of fishes. The great sea monsters created on day five were the rulers of the seas by day six, just as the dinosaurs of that day ruled the land.
Bird life was abundant and far ranging on the fifth day. Their over flights of land would spread seed everywhere, so that the world would become forested. Birds fed on the abundant fish in the waters. A gigantic Pteranodon was discovered in Texas with a wing span of 50 ft. Many fine fossil specimens of another bird called Archeopteryx have been found, which even show its feathers. When the climate grew colder with the approach of the ice age, new huge flightless birds appeared. Two of the greatest were Diatryma, which was 6 ft. 6 in. tall, and Phororhacus, about 10 ft. tall. Both birds could outrun most of their prey, and kill them with their terrible beaks and sharp talons. The emergence of these birds and the dying out of the earlier types tells us that God did not end His day five creative activities on that day. His work was ongoing in character, with successive waves of creation spread out over long periods of time. The Christian acknowledges God the Son as the Author of life, or the Originator of life, as variously translated Acts 3:15. John tells us that "all things received being through Him, and without Him not one thing received being which has received being" John 1:3.
Most paleontologists hold different views, claiming that life evolved from one form to another due to various factors. Some of their claims seem little more than the product of over active imaginations. Others have some substance to them, for God built into the creature the ability to adapt to a changing environment. However when change or adaptation takes place in nature, it is not mindless or by chance, but according to the preprogramming of the creature by God. When radical new life forms emerge in the fossil record which cannot be explained by permitted change or adaptation, God must have initiated a new wave of creative activity. He initiated the creation of marine and bird life on day five, but this does not mean that He ceased to create such life when day five ended. He continued to create on day six, replacing older life forms with others of different designs.
As the history of the fifth day unfolds, the word created occurs again. It should alert us to a new development, for it was last seen when God created the heavens and the earth. It tells us that a new sphere of creation is opening up mobile life. We are moving from physics to the life sciences with this change. So day five may be summarized as the filling up of the waters and sky of day two with the characteristic life suited to each sphere. The waters are to teem with marine life the sky with bird life. The birds link heaven and earth. They soar in the heavens but return to the earth to nest and reproduce as God commanded them...
Day Six Prehistoric Life on land: On the sixth day God brings all His works to a climax, before entering into His rest. An indication of this is the expansion in the number of words used to recount His works on the sixth day. These are equal to or greater than the number of words for the other five days, depending on what verses are included or excluded from a tabulation. In spite of this God dismisses His prehistoric creation on land with a few words a creation which spanned hundreds of millions of years. He says simply "let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth according to its kind.”
Early life on land began on the super continent God brought out of the waters on day three, and clothed with vegetation. The story of life began about 600 million years ago, as the Cambrian Period dawned and the supercontinent began breaking up. The broad character of day six animal life on earth is based on everything now being in place to recycle life, just as in the seas. The earth was lush in the vegetative growth of day three which harnessed the energy of the fourth day sun through photo synthesis. The herbivorous animals Moses calls them cattle fed on this vegetation. Next in the life cycle are the predators the carnivores whom Moses labels the beast of the earth. Finally there are the decomposers, who remove dead flesh from the earth. This would be a broad class, but most likely insects are intended. At this time the ancient forests swarmed with insect life, cockroaches being a prime example. However we know that dinosaurs had T.B., so bacteria and probably viruses are included. But in the Mosaic record only that which meets the eye is directly mentioned as Solomon put it, what is seen under the sun.
The history of this ancient life has been preserved in fossils. The fossil record, fragmentary at first, has grown to enormous proportions as new discoveries continually expand it. The undiscovered fossils still buried in the earth are thought to be very great. This wealth of specimens is not due to the great numbers of flora and fauna which became fossilized, but to small numbers which built up into countless specimens over geological ages. Extinct life forms became fossilized in so many different ways that it is only practical to convey the general idea to the reader who has not read the literature on the subject. Plants left behind spores and pollen, and their leaves can be clearly seen in coal. Extinct animals have left behind evidence that they were once alive in fossilized specimens of their footprints, droppings, and eggs. X-rays of dinosaur eggs have even revealed details of the embryo. When prehistoric animals died, some of their skeletons were preserved in various ways such as violent burial, or more often by being washed into a body of water. Eventually their bones were silted over, and the covering turned into sedimentary rock, encasing their skeletons into something analogous to a plaster cast. Sometimes water with a high mineral content seeped into the bones, petrifying them. Fossils are cut out of the rock which entombed their remains, and sent to museums for restoration. Using special acids, technologists dissolve the rock in which the fossils are buried, freeing them for study and mounting.
It is surprising that nothing is known of fossil discoveries in the ancient world. It was not until 1770 that the jaws of a huge fossil Mosasaurus were uncovered in a chalk quarry in Holland. Then in the early part of the nineteenth century an explosion of discoveries occurred in England, making household names of the more prominent finders the Rev. William Buckland, Dr. Gideon Mantel' a physician, Richard Owen a comparative anatomist, the Rev. Robert Plot of Oxford University, and Baron Georges Cuvier "the father of Paleontology." A publicity stunt helped fuel public support. Owen hired a sculptor to carve life size figures of prehistoric animals. These were mounted later in the grounds of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, which was attracting worldwide public attention at the time. As a promotion, Owen and his sculptor threw a dinner party for 20 people inside the body of an Iguanodon. Then in 1878 a massive discovery of 40 Iguanodon skeletons was made by miners in Belgium. In the previous year a dinosaur graveyard was found in Colorado. Dinosaur hunting then became the rage in the United States, with two powerful men Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh competing for public acclaim. They became rivals because of a personality clash, but their rivalry filled the museums of their choice with many specimens. As the pioneers faded away they were replaced by institutional expeditions. Sometimes their professionals were alerted by amateurs Who sighted huge bones jutting out of rocks. That was how one of the most famous dinosaur discoveries was made in 1907 in what is now Tanzania. German scientists unearthed the skeleton of Brachiosaurus, which is about 39 ft. tall. It is the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world. It is exhibited today on a platform in the Humboldt Museum in East Berlin. The end result of this plethora of discoveries is that dinosaurs are scattered in museums all over the world. Unless you are a world traveler, the best way to get to know the dinosaurs is to buy one of the many books about them, or better still one about the dinosaurs and the life which preceded and followed them. Then at one glance you can live in the world of Dimetrodon, a 13 ft. long animal who lived in the Permian Period. He had a big semi circular sail on his back, which some scientists think was his air conditioning system. Then there are the mammals, who took over after the dinosaurs died out without any explanation, 64 million years ago. There are many beautiful specimens of these, many of them recovered from the Rancho La Brea tar pit in Los Angeles. Animals were attracted to it by water on its surface. Stepping in for a deeper drink, they began to sink. Their cries of fright attracted predators like the saber toothed tigers, who jumped onto them but feasted too long and were engulfed in the tar. Nature can be cruel, but the final test looming ahead for the prehistoric world was the worst of all.
The Ice Age the End of the Prehistoric Creation
The coming of the ice age which might better be called the ice ages was gradual. It overtook the world in the Pleistocene Epoch, about two million years ago. The sixth day had ended and the world was about to become waste and empty or without form and void ending with darkness on the face of the deep. The desolation began as the world got colder. It snowed continually. We know this because the thick ice masses we call glaciers are formed from the accumulation, compaction, and re-crystallization of snow on land. So it took a great deal of time for the glaciers to form. Because of this the ice age was prolonged. Also it saw considerable fluctuations in climate which caused alternating glacial and interglacial periods. Some animals like the Mastodon survived the rigors of the ice age by migrating south or north with each successive advance and retreat of the glaciers. Most animals however could not cope with these conditions and died out. The glaciers overran the earth although isolated spots like the western part of the Yukon escaped them. These great ice sheets crushed whole forests in their paths. As they overran the continents they carved their way through valleys and river beds, or gouged out new channels. The fiords of Norway and Alaska are good examples of this activity. They transformed the shape of mountains for example the Matterhorn. Everywhere they changed the face of the earth. As they melted, the crust of the earth compressed by their weight slowly began to rise a process which is still continuing. Water levels were affected and flooding took place. As they melted they deposited the rocks and gravel they had picked up, enabling geologists to retrace their paths.
If we look at the world today we will find a whole continent, Antarctica, covered with ice. This is not what is left of the ice age, however. It greatly preceded the ice age, being about ten million years old. Long ago the continent of Antarctica was carried away on its plate from its original semi tropical setting to its present inhospitable location. Ruling Antarctica out then, what caused the Ice Age? This is much debated by scientists but there is only a modicum of consensus.
a. What caused the Ice Age? Gen. 1:2 is a two part statement.
The first part reads "and the earth (was or became) waste and empty" a description of the desolation of the earth as the great ice sheets advanced over the continents. The second part reads "and darkness was on the face of the deep." This is the aftermath of the Ice Age the meltdown of the glaciers and the environmental conditions of the time. This does not concern us at this point. We wish to focus on the earth becoming waste and empty. The translation quoted here was by William Kelly, who, although he held the gap theory, was honest enough to give alternative renderings. To this day Hebraists disagree among themselves as to the preferred translation. The author likes the translation of a family friend, Louise Greig, that the earth "became trackless waste and emptiness.”
In isolation Gen. 1:2 does not tell us very much. We must turn to scientific findings and creation passages in other Scriptures for help.
.. Scientific theories on the cause of the Ice Age: Milutim Milankovitch contributed greatly to our understanding of the problem when he postulated variations in the earth's orbit as a prime cause. Milankovitch believed that variations in incoming solar radiation are a principal factor in controlling the world's climate. He supported his hypothesis with a mathematical model. Acceptance of his views advanced and retreated like the glaciers themselves. They now occupy a prominent place in scientific thought because of a paper published by Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton in the December 1976 issue of Science. These scientists state "our geological data comprise measurements of three climatically sensitive parameters in two deep sea sediment cores." These cores were screened and selected with great care. The analysis involves abstruse mathematics. However under Discussion they state "we regard the results of the time domain test as strong evidence of orbital control of major Pleistocene climatic changes" following which they give their reasons for this statement. Item six of their Summary states "it is concluded that changes in the earth's orbital geometry are the fundamental cause of Quaternary ice ages.”
.. Light from Scripture as to the cause of the ice age: Long before these scientific discoveries, the author had come to similar conclusions in principle at least. The mechanics i.e. some alteration of the earth sun ratio, variation of the earth's orbit, or whatever the cause may be is properly the domain of science. However the principle is spelled out in the Genesis record that an unspecified disorder in the solar system caused the Ice age on earth. This is the meaning of God's remedial work within the solar system on the fourth day which will be explained later under the caption The Adam Creation.
The Ice age and its aftermath followed the long drawn out work of the prehistoric creation, the account of which ended in Gen. 1:25. Therefore Gen. 1:2 must be transposed to follow Gen. 1:25 if the text is to have any meaning chronologically. Gen. 1:2 was divinely located out of chronological order to stress its underlying spiritual meaning, and so encourage us to investigate it. God uses precisely this technique on several occasions in the Book of Revelation. But in order that the chronological order should not be lost, God has given us other Scriptures to help us determine it, and transpose it to its chronological setting. When we position Gen. 1:2 after Gen 1:25, the conflict between the Bible and science ends, and the two main theories of creation are reconciled. This is the key tenet of my Composite Theory of Creation. We will now test it in terms of Scripture.
The account of the Ice age in Gen. 1:2 is condensed into these cryptic words "and the earth became waste and empty." It does not tell us how this transition took place, but two prophets shed light on it, and in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established. Jeremiah writes about this time -beheld the earth and lo it was waste and empty". Jer. 4:23. Isaiah goes a step further, telling us that it was God who wasted the earth "and He shall stretch out upon it the line of waste and the plummets of emptiness" Isa. 34:11. Then later in his book Isaiah writes "for thus saith the Lord who created the heavens, God Himself who formed the earth and made it, He who established it not as waste did He create it He formed it to be inhabited." This last verse is double proof of the correctness of the author's Composite Theory of Creation. First it rules out the Day Age view that Gen. 1:2 is a description of the embryonic world. Dawson was generous enough to concede "the words employed are generally used to denote the ruin of places formerly inhabited'.(16)Secondly the words "He formed it to be inhabited" agree exactly with the life God created in the prehistoric world. This largely perished in the Ice Age Gen. 1:2. It was renewed in modified form after that in six days more of indeterminable length, though nothing like the protracted six days of the prehistoric creation. In rejecting the literal six day restoration of the gap theory which has no scientific support the contention between Buckland and Dawson ends. There can be no conflict with the geological record because what the Composite Theory of Creation advances is the geological record. The chronological positioning of Gen. 1:2 after Gen 1:25 is therefore a closed case.
b. Controversy as to why God should desolate His work speculation as to the reason, and inferences Some Christians are unhappy with the thought that Gen. 1:2 should be interpreted as God undoing His own works. A comparison of Gen. 1:2 with other Scriptures does not sustain this objection. Three other instances may be cited of God destroying His creation in part or in whole Noah's flood, the coming judgments of the great tribulation, and the time Peter writes about when "the heavens shall pass away...the earth also...shall be burned up" 2 Peter 2:10. Moreover the objection vanishes when we see why God does it to make way for something better. So it was at the beginning in Genesis and so it will be at the end when the first heavens and the first earth shall pass away, only to be succeeded by new heavens and a new earth.
Other Christians those who hold the Gap Theory especially are more interested in speculating on why God destroyed the work of the first creation. They attribute the ferocity of the prehistoric world and the desolation of the Ice age which followed it, to the fall of Satan. Jennings interjects a thought along these lines while commenting on Tophet, whose pile is set on fire by the breath of the Lord "this Tophet had been prepared long ago a word that is strongly suggestive of what had taken place before the day of man altogether. Before man had come upon the scene, before he fell in disobedience and so came under the penalty of the first death, Tophet had been prepared. But that inevitably suggests that there had been a prior fall a prior sin in a pre—Adamite era and this the Word of our Lord distinctly confirms "then shall He say to those on the left hand, Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels" Matt. 25:41. (17) It is probable, though not certain, that the fall of Satan may have been the underlying cause of much that is unexplained in the remote past.
God is the God of Measure, and His acts are measured, not mindless. So it is not surprising that we find the four basic arithmetical functions in the Genesis record each with a moral teaching. The first is division. This is prominent in the work of the first four days. God divides the things which displease Him from those which He sees as good. Addition comes on days five and six, in which God adds mobile life to His remedial work of days two and three. The life God added proceeded from where God was and because He is a blessing God, that life was ordered to be fruitful and multiply. In summary God divided the good from the bad, added life to the good and told it to multiply but in the end He subtracted from all His work by desolating the world according to Gen. 1:2. Why? Because Gen. 1:2 omits all reference to God. Did Job have an insight into Satan's rebellion against God and its consequences when he said—(18)
“The Wise in heart and Mighty in strength,
Who has defied Him, and remained unhurt?
Who displaces mountains, and they know not
That He has overturned them in His wrath;
Who makes the earth to tremble out of her place,
So that her pillars rock to and fro;
Who commands the sun, and it rises not;
And seals up the stars.”
The Adam Creation
Paul tells us that God is not the God of disorder. So He begins a remedial work, which for the sake of convenience we will call The Adam Creation. A chart outlining what God said and did, and bearing this caption, accompanies this chapter. In view of what has already been written it need hardly be emphasized that the account of creation in this chart is not restricted to the Adam creation, but includes the prehistoric creation as well.
In the strictest sense the term The Adam Creation is a misnomer. The only creation is the prehistoric creation. Man followed as the next and last creation. However the term is factual if we understand it to mean God's work of refashioning the earth after the Ice age, restocking it with life, creating man, and making everything in the world subordinate to him. God began this work at some unknown point late in the Pleistocene Epoch, which ranged from 2.5 million years ago until Adam was created. The time cannot be established, but in a general way the ice sheets had probably retreated, leaving a desolated world behind them and inducing flooding conditions.
If the reader has followed what has been written so far, he will see clearly that the correct interpretation of Gen. 1:2 is the key to the riddle of the only two theories worthy of consideration the Day Age and Gap theories. The Day Age theory is largely true, but its starting point is fallacious that God created the world a ruin which Scripture states is not the case. The gap theory does not provide for the dual content of the days in Gen. 1 i.e. the ages of the prehistoric creation and the shortened times of the Adam creation both of which are covered in the same account. Furthermore there is no scientific evidence that God refashioned the earth in six literal days a tenet of the gap theory. When Dawson challenged Buckland to provide geological evidence of this so called six literal days work he was unable to reply. Some think that a reconciliation of these conflicting theories is unlikely. R.A. Torrey tried it in 1907 in his Difficulties in the Bible but was handicapped by the science of his day. Bernard Ramm comments on this point in The Christian View of Science and Scripture (19)— "you cannot appeal to both the gap of Gen. 1:2 and the age day interpretation of the days without throwing the whole process of reconciliation of Genesis and Geology into confusion. Who could ever tell which belonged to the ages of the gap, and the ages of the six age days?" Keeping this objection in mind we will now move on to a consideration of the six days work of the Adam creation.
a. Day One: The first question we are faced with here is the meaning of a day in the Adam creation. It arises because Gen. 1:5 says "and the evening and the morning were the first day" a statement repeated on each succeeding day, varied only by marking out the day in question. Gap theorists tend to hold these days as literal. However they are more likely to be periods shorter than the prehistoric days but extensive just the same. The clause "the evening and the morning were the— day" is a device to separate the days, ending each day with the morning. Its meaning is primarily moral to teach us that God's work begins with light and ends with the morning.
Gen. 1:2, if interpreted literally, would mean that the entire world was flooded and in darkness, following the melting of the great ice sheets. This is too sweeping a conclusion, especially in the light of the geological record. Rather it suggests darkness and deep waters at a given point where God intervenes, and which is largely representative of the whole. There God retraces His work in the beginning by once more saying "let there be light." The geological record is not involved in this initial intervention. Rather God "described a circle on the face of the deep" {vi 16630-16632}Prov. 8:27-29. Because the circle is the symbol of the eternal God, its inclusion here tells us that just as the creation began with God, so it must end with God. And it does, for man was created in the image of God.
Day Two: We know that the atmospheric heavens and the waters on the earth the subject of day two were still in place. If this were not so, the cold of outer space would have frozen the deep over which darkness prevailed before God began His remedial work. Nevertheless they were malfunctioning. God's work on day two was establishing the ratio between water in the seas and water vapor in the clouds as it existed previously or as He chose to modify it— "when He established the clouds above, when He strengthened the fountains of the deep" {vi 16605-16632}Prov. 8:2-29. What is not told us, but what we know today, is that all life on earth lives at the bottom of an air ocean, one of whose functions is to shelter it from the deadly radiation of outer space.
Because the source of the disorder in the solar system remains uncorrected in day two, the divine light of day one is the candle of the earth. The geological record is not affected by what happened on day two.
Day Three: Two edicts go forth on this day. In the first "let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear" we see God retracing His original work in another way. In the prehistoric creation this fiat was executed when the supercontinent arose from the primeval sea. Here it is realized by the removal of the ice sheets from the land, so that once more it can appear. The record assumes we know, as any school child does, that water vapor, snow, and ice, are all water in different forms. The second fiat ordering the earth to bring forth vegetation follows logically from the removal of the glaciers which destroyed forests and other forms of vegetation on the earth. So God returns to His original thought of a world filled with fruitfulness.
Once again we observe that the source of the disorder in the solar system is still not corrected on day three. So on that day the divine light of day one is still the only candle of the earth. The geological record is not affected by these doings, because what has taken place is the geological record, not a confrontation with it.
Day Four: On day four God's work is not on earth but in the heavens or to be more specific in that part of the heavens we call the solar system. The reason why the work of the fourth day has not been generally interpreted as the restoration of the solar system's usefulness to life on earth is the reference in the text to the stars. Most people mistakenly think these must be the stars of outer space. Not so. They are mentioned in the record to give us a composite picture of the solar system, thus identifying the subject under discussion. So we have the sun, the moon, and the other planets of the solar system which are called stars here. Scripture would seem to support this interpretation, for it calls Venus, one of these so called stars, the bright and morning star. As for the stars of outer space, they were part of the original creation of the heavens, and have nothing to do with the remedial work or making of the fourth day. The stars of the fourth day are really the other planets of the solar system. They were made, not created, on the fourth day. There is a distinction between make and create in Hebrew, as Kennion points out. How they were made is not told us, but a ratio adjustment in their orbits might be how it was done.
So God made the two great lights the sun and the moon. In the simplest possible terms He corrected whatever malfunctioning took place in the earth sun ratio, the orbit of the earth, or other causation factors of the Ice age on earth. Once this was done the divine light of days one, two, and three was withdrawn. That temporary arrangement was replaced with the definitive light of sun and moon. A constant, regulated source of light for the earth was a precondition for the life of days five and six ahead.
e. Days Five and Six: The last two days have a common theme restocking the world with mobile life in the three spheres of creation heaven, earth, and sea. Several questions arise because of this work.
.. Prehistoric life what was its meaning? Of the various forms of prehistoric life, the dinosaurs, rather than the life which preceded or followed them, seem most to have caught the imagination of the public, especially children. So we shall consider them as representative of prehistoric life as a whole. This is not true scientifically, but it is a practical way of looking at this subject, for most people think that way. A contemporary scientist, Dr. David Norman acknowledged this phenomenon in these words "the nature of their appeal...may be simply their immense size, or the grotesque appearance of their skeletons or...a violent or blood thirsty life style...dinosaurs are very big...even awe inspiring, and are all extinct...they are also the very personification of 'dragons' or other mythical beasts that are associated with folk lore traditions dating back long before dinosaurs were first described. This common factor of a human obsession with dragons, mythical beasts, or dinosaurs, may be a key feature relating to the very essence of the human condition the imaginative and creative aspects of the human intellect.(20)”
Dr. Norman's analysis of the popularity of dinosaurs is a penetrating one. It may even have some support in Scripture. In Revelation, for example, Satan is called a dragon thirteen times. He is called the great dragon, suggesting a beast of huge size and ferocity as the dinosaurs were. He is called a great red dragon, implying a predator red with blood. His tail draws the third part of the stars of heaven and casts them to the earth. Out of his head comes the roar of the dragon calling the world together to make war with the Lamb.
In principle it is true that whatever happens in heaven affects the earth, so the fall of Satan should not have left the earth unscathed. A number of writers mostly gap theorists have linked the fall of Satan to the carnage of the prehistoric world. This may be. Certainly the evidence of fierce struggle is there, not only in the ferocious teeth and claws of the predators, but in the way their prey were equipped to battle them. The herbivorous creatures were encased with formidable armor, spikes projecting out from their backs, huge horns, and tails at the end armed with spikes or battering rams of bone to flail their enemies. Still there is nothing in Scripture to indicate headship over the beasts before Adam, so all must be conjecture and inference as to the meaning of all this. If Satan's fall was the root cause of the carnage, when did this take place? The fossil record is a history of violent death from the earliest beginnings of life on earth. Furthermore the immense size of the dinosaurs might be simply sourced to the extreme fertility of their semi tropical habitat, which was luxuriant with vegetation. The 80 ton Brontosaurus and other huge herbivorous creatures would act as giant lawn mowers to control the growth of vegetation. This in turn called for king size predators to maintain a balance in nature. An alternative speculation is attributing the Ice age to the fall of Satan.
Perhaps the best approach to these theological speculations is to by pass them. There is no point in taking a position on matters which may have some merit but are debatable. It is more realistic to look at the prehistoric world as a prelude to what was to follow the world as a home for man. One feature of prehistoric life should be mentioned in passing that is that the fossil record reveals waves of unexplained disappearances of animals followed by similarly unexplained waves of new life.(21) To a believer this is evidence of a Creator. The story of the Adam creation which follows is virtually a parallel of this phenomenon.
.. Life in the Adam Creation: We need not assume that the Ice age exterminated all life. A number of animals like the wooly mammoth and the mastodon coped with the extremely cold climate. But regardless of what life spilled over into man's world, it was greatly depleted. So "God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, and cattle according to their kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind." That tells us that God restocked the earth with another wave of originations to replace the disappearances, just as He did many times before in prehistoric ages. This time, however, the lower animals were attuned to human needs. Man could not cope with the savage life of the Triassic, for example.
The creeping thing is a broad term for insect life, bacteria and viruses all of which are involved in the life and death cycle of human existence. However the Genesis record does not go into details. It is written from the viewpoint of what can be seen under the sun.
The cattle are the herbivorous animals, many of whom man has domesticated. With the ox he tilled the ground until recent times. The horse gave us basic transportation in peace it was the prime beast of burden on the farm in war it formed the cavalry. The cow gave milk, the sheep wool for clothing. All of them put meat on the table.
The beasts of the earth today are not different in principle from those in the prehistoric world. However, some of them were scaled down and others were modified so they were less ferocious. God did this to help us cope with them and subdue them. Consider, for example, the crocodile. Although dreaded, it cannot be compared to huge monsters like Allosaurus. The tiger of today is ferocious, but not nearly as much so as the saber toothed tiger of the Pleistocene. God takes pride in this fierce creation, which displays His power and might. This can be seen in what He says to Job. He rehearses His creatorial works from laying the foundations of the earth to giving life to the predators {vi 113795;113836}Job 38, 39. In this discourse He reminds Job of the lion who hunts his prey on land, the crocodile who makes the deep boil like a pot, and the eagle whose young suck up blood.
Animals of all kinds are also used to illustrate truths throughout the Bible. In Revelation, for example, the Lord is symbolically portrayed as a lamb and a lion the one being a herbivorous animal and the other a carnivorous one. In Rev. 13 His enemy is depicted as a beast. This beast is like a leopard. He is assisted by another beast a hybrid who has two horns like a lamb but speaks like a dragon. Daniel too dreamed of "four great beasts coming up from the sea, different one from another" Dan. 7:3.
The Relevance of the Composite Theory of Creation to Our Times
In a broad sense two creations are spoken of in Scripture the heavenly, which is assumed but of which we are told very little, and the earthly, which is the subject of this chapter. The heavenly sphere is deathless it is the home of life of the holy angels. We are given glimpses of the city whose builder and maker is God at the end of the Bible, but that is all. The earth is just the opposite it has been a scene of death from the beginning. Every living thing is born to die. Even the command "be ye fruitful and multiply" implies the death of the parent stock. Unlike the holy angels who are sexless because their population is static, man was created male and female, and the race must be constantly renewed to replace the ravages of death. Indeed the inevitability of death, and man's accountability to God for his life on earth, is the teaching of the Bible from its opening pages. It is a compelling reason why God gave us a revelation of creation in writing, because man's secret thoughts are to forget about God as much as possible, and make this world his home.
While the interrelationship between heaven and earth is stressed in the Genesis record, its primary thrust is the earth. It seems highly probable that God's great purpose in creating the universe was simply to form the earth out of it. This statement would evoke ridicule from those who know not God, because they cannot see the earth for what it is a moral center for the display of God's ways and the resolution of the sin question. If the creation of the universe displays God as the God of physics, the creation of the earth displays Him as the God of life. Life in two spheres as well natural life and eternal life. First we see God as the Creator of marine, bird, and animal life, with man the crown of that creation. Then we see God the Son become Man, and communicating His own life to man which life is called eternal life in Scripture. The Man Christ Jesus reveals God as the Ruler of the moral universe. The earth is the only world in which God has been revealed to man in these two ways, which explains its importance. Satan understands this only too well. The seed of the serpent said "this is the heir come let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours" Mark 12:7. The inheritance is the final rule of this world for one thousand years not other worlds, no matter how great they may be. Satan will contest this with Christ at Armageddon, but will be overcome.
So it is evident that the natural man looks at God's revealed thoughts as foolishness. Having rejected God's offer of eternal life the unregenerate scoff at Christ being the Author of natural life. They prefer to attribute the origin of all things to blind chance. Much of this can be traced to the theory of evolution a subject which would require too great a weighting in this book if reviewed in depth. It is preferable to trace evolutionary thought to its roots in the ancient world. By evolutionary thought we do not mean the attempts of the ancient Greeks, for example, to theorize about evolution. Rather we think of evolution as part of a larger package whose end purpose is subverting the doctrine and practice of God's creation. This we will examine in the way Scripture tells us how to simplify and understand apparently complex problems "by their fruits ye shall know them." We will first look at the roots of the subversion in the ancient world then the flowering and fruiting of the bitter fruit being reaped today.
a. Satan's attempts to subvert the creation in the ancient world: The accepted teaching of science today is that everything not just life arose by pure chance. One statement, culled from the October 1960 edition of M.D. of Canada, should expose the folly of this position "mathematicians have calculated that if a molecule of ribonucleic acid had to be created by the chance encounter of atoms, it would require infinitely more time than the presumed age of the entire universe." However, such calculations have not dispersed unbelief among scientists. Consider this statement, for example, by Dr. David Norman, a contemporary scientist "in the Triassic Period the various continental blocks had, by pure chance, all bumped together to form the so called supercontinent of Pangaea." By pure chance? Hardly. That supercontinent was to fragment into continents, forming islands in the sea much as original matter was to fragment into the islands in space we call planets, and so forth. A directing mind is behind all things, and an overall plan we find difficult to discern.
This is not helped when an opposing mind is at work in the universe, blinding men's minds to the truth and keeping their understandings darkened.
World history is the record of how the evil mind of Satan has deliberately attempted to pervert God's creation. Satan was irritated because God made the lower creation subordinate to man. He saw in this a delegation of authority he wanted vested in himself. He also wanted man to transgress the framework in which God had set him. He would wean man from the earth the home which God had provided for him and divert his thoughts to the heavens and the higher creatures who inhabit them. He accomplished these various objectives by getting man to worship both animal gods and the fallen angels under the guise of gods. At the same time he implanted the germ of space travel in man.
These were the central themes of paganism from earliest times. The ancient Egyptians left behind them abundant evidence of their characteristic idolatry in temples, idols, and paintings on the walls of their tombs. Satan's priests taught man to worship animals as gods. This was a subversion of the divine order which made the lower creation subject to man. Not content with this, they invented hybrid gods whose bodies were part human and part animal. This implied physical union between man and beast. If such a thing were possible it would destroy the distinct kinds God established and introduce confusion into the creation. God knew how the nations lusted after such evil. So in Lev. 18:23 He prohibited His people from engaging in such defilement. These aberrations or attempted aberrations for it is difficult to determine how far they went were either practiced throughout the pagan world or the subject of their fantasies. This is evident because of their prominence in the mythology of the Graeco Roman world. If Mt. Vesuvius had not erupted in A.D. 79, burying the twin cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, we would not have known as much as we do about life in those days. The entombment of these pagan cities, which spared them from the pillage of the barbarians later on, gives us a remarkable insight into the life of that far away world. In Pompeii the rich had artists paint murals on the wet plaster walls of their houses, so they became a permanent part of the decor. The principal subjects perpetuated the ancient Egyptian theme of human animal confusion, adapted to their own mythology. The ancient murals depict hybrid creatures with, for example, the body of a horse and the head of a man or the body of a horse and the head of a woman. These creations of their imagination are pictured soaring through space in pitch darkness. This helps us understand what Paul meant in Rom. 1:25 when he wrote about those who served created things rather than the Creator. These hybrid creatures are representative of recurring themes in the murals. They reveal the longing of the human heart, prompted by Satan, to commit two opposite transgressions to bring confusion and chaos into the creation by procreating with the lower animals, and in association with higher beings i.e. the fallen angels, to leave man's home on the earth for the heavens. The latter theme had many variations in Pompeii. A popular motif was the attempted union of Zeus the king of the gods i.e. Satan, with Leda, the wife of the king of Sparta. An occasional mural will show a woman travelling through space in inky darkness, with no evident means of propulsion. At other times gods and demons are illustrated in human form with outstretched wings. Gods in human form with wings attached are featured at the nuptials of Zeus and Hera, and the crowning of Zeus winged demons in human bodies at the Villa of the Mysteries. This particular corruption has filtered down to present times in illustrations of angels with wings something that is unheard of in Scripture.
These vile perversions of the ancient world seemed to have passed away when men yielded feigned obedience to Christ in what was once called Christendom. Actually they remained dormant, until evolutionary dogma enabled them to blossom in another form, more suited to a technological age.
b. The Post Napoleonic professing Christian world impact of evolutionary thought : The battle of Waterloo brought peace to a world drenched with the bloodshed of the Napoleonic wars. It introduced what was, for man, a century free from major European wars. (22) It was a century of unprecedented gospel blessing, enlightenment in the Scriptures, expansion of scientific knowledge, and the arts of peace. Satan wanted a different gospel preached a social gospel to anchor man to this world, and blind him to the truth that he is lost and needs a Savior. His "yea, hath God said?" this time was to cast doubt on the credibility of the creation record. He waited for the opportune time to launch his counter attack shortly after the mid century mark. His scheme to deceive the nations was helped by the lack of consensus among believers as to just how the Genesis record of creation should be interpreted. This was the setting in which Charles Darwin and his associates dazzled men’s minds with the theory of evolution of animal populations.
As a young man Darwin was undecided about his career. He first attended Edinburgh University to study medicine, but dropped out because of a sensitivity to surgical operations. He then went to Cambridge University to study for the Anglican ministry, but changed course again and became a scientist. In this field he succeeded brilliantly. He became noted for his studies of earthworms and the formation of coral reefs. His further researches led to the publication of two works on evolution The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Evolution became virtually a religion in the Western world. Its apostle could not have made more converts had he completed his theological training and been ordained as the Rev. Charles Darwin.
Like all religions, evolution has its characteristic appeal. First the time was right man had heard the gospel and wanted no more of it. This is anticipated in the Lord's parable in Luke 14 the rejection of the invitation to the Great Supper because of the more appealing attractions of this life. Secondly, like all religions, evolution contains a certain amount of truth to make it plausible and acceptable on top of which is superimposed a mountain of error. Faith in man's wisdom surmounts the difficulties, making evolution the preferred alternative to belief in divine creation.
The element of truth in evolution is that animal populations change and adapt to the dynamic and restless environment of the earth. If they lacked this capability they would soon become extinct. Darwin saw the mechanism as natural selection, but left the door open for other agencies also. Later Mendel's discoveries in genetics helped us understand how God has built change and adaptation into His creatures. Scripture does not rule this out it merely ignores the detail of how God creates, while insisting that He did create. As William Kelly remarked "there is nothing in Scripture to exclude a succession of creatures rising to higher organization from lower (23)." Furthermore we need not look to the prehistoric world to observe this. Man is able to breed animals for specific needs work horses and racehorses, hunting dogs, guard dogs, and gentle pets. The lesson we may distill from all this is that God preprogrammed His creatures to change and adapt within kinds, through various regulating mechanisms of His choice such as natural selection, genetic mutations, and so on.
Evolutionary dogma teaches that all the way from molecule to man everything arose by blind chance alone, without a Divine, directing mind.(24) The extension of this thinking is that there are no limits to the mechanisms of change, since God is not recognized as the Author of them. These errors lead on to exaggerations and untenable conclusions. In the early beginnings of life fish were supposed to have migrated to land and evolved into animals. Now while the Genesis record does not define kind, it is reasonable to assume that a very broad classification was in the mind of God. 1 Cor. 15:39 may capture the thought, although kind there is inferred in the Greek "there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The Genesis record makes it clear that marine life preceded life on land but that was because of divine fiat. How do the evolutionists explain this fact? They do so by inventing what Scripture calls "cunningly devised fables." The fish crawled out of the water and began to breathe on land, they claim. Nobody is certain why they did this but some have suggested that the predatory fish were giving them a hard time. The amphibian fish were even more resourceful, and in time evolved into reptiles. And some reptiles evolved into dinosaurs. What happened when the dinosaurs died out then? Why the mammals took over. But what were the mammals doing before then? It is suggested that they were hiding away from the dinosaurs. It is as unlikely that a saber toothed tiger would hide away from anything as that some fish was the remote ancestor of a dinosaur.
As the 19th century waned, Darwin's teachings were transplanted to the political arena, admittedly in distorted form. Nevertheless they evolved, shall we say, into the militaristic doc trine that might is right. Then came the horrors of battlefields like Verdun in the First World War W.W.2 followed like one horseman of the Apocalypse coming after another. German cities were fire bombed Japanese cities A bombed. Millions of lives were taken in the gas chambers. With W.W.3 looming ahead, the nations of the world are spending one trillion dollars a year in armaments. No wonder Dean Rusk said "only one third of the people of the world are asleep at any given moment. The other two thirds are awake and probably stirring up mischief somewhere.(25)”
What was it that Darwin wrote about man's evolving goodness in The Descent of Man "The moral structure of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of reasoning powers, and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection. It is not improbable that, after long practice, virtuous tendencies may be inherited'.(26)”
Darwin's teachings on the moral structure of man are a denial of the fall, the entrance of sin into the world, and man's need of a Savior. The evolutionary doctrine that everything can be attributed to chance has to be a refutation of the truth that the Son of God was sent into this world not by chance but to execute divine counsels. Its ultimate blasphemy is only unveiled when we take its teachings to their logical conclusion i.e. that since God's Son became a Man His true genealogy can be traced to an animal. So little has changed since the Lord was on earth and said "ye do dishonor Me" John 8:49. In this sense Darwin's teachings paved the way for the Post Christian world.
c. The development of evolutionary thought in the Post Christian world: The Post Christian world is a turning away from God to Satan. It arose from the public repudiation of the principles of Christian morality in the way the belligerent powers fought the two world wars. It is not surprising, therefore, that W.W.2 Saw the air, the seat of Satan's power, in the ascendancy. Radar, radio, and T.V. were subtle manifestations of this sphere of influence. More visible were aircraft and missiles. In W.W.2 air power replaced sea power, as was evident in the Pacific theatre and the surrender of Japan. On land the German army was crippled from lack of fuel caused by the air bombing of the synthetic fuel plants which supplied it. Missiles threatened England. It was not apparent until sometime after the war that a fundamental change was taking place. The missile and the computer the principal fallout from the war were ushering in the Space Age.
The time was right for man to burst the chains which bound him to this planet. I recall the elation in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto when the astronauts landed on the moon. "Moon girls" walked around the square handing out "moon juice" to people watching the moon walk of the astronauts on out size T.V. screens mounted everywhere. Other people celebrated a "howl in" under the light of the moon in High Park. To the public this seemed to be the climax of the space race with Russia which President Kennedy launched, and which the United States had won.
Darwin's theory is the principal motivation for space exploration(27) and indirectly for the modern drift back to paganism. Even the rockets which were probing planets named after the gods were themselves named after the gods.(28) Few people understand that the driving force behind space exploration is worldwide scientific lobbying for government funding of space exploration programs. Why? Because scientists want confirmation of evolutionary doctrine that life originated by chance on earth by finding it on other worlds. Given the number of worlds the chances should favor the probing. So the world at the time of the moon landings was in a ferment. Scientific congresses were held at which the top flight scientists of the world debated the likelihood of life in other worlds and how space probes should be directed to find it. Project Ozma was launched. Its director had a huge radio telescope to search for signals from space transmitted by "intelligent beings from other worlds." There were of course other motives for space exploration military and national prestige considerations being among them. However the overriding consideration was that the world's scientists wanted confirmation that life had evolved by chance in other worlds as they claimed it had on earth. We are living in a pagan, non Christian world.
Subtle confirmation of this scientific motivation surfaced when the astronauts returned from the moon. They were quarantined on landing to make sure they hadn't picked up low forms of life on the moon. Even their clothing was examined for moon germs. The findings were negative. But there was a positive finding the teaching of Genesis was confirmed from a study of the moon rocks. The moon was found to be low in chemicals that might indicate the presence of life but high in content of many pieces of spherical glass colored dark brown, yellow, and yellowish brown. That confirms the function God assigned the moon to reflect the sun's light "the small light to rule the night" Gen. 1:16.
Another part of the same package denying or distorting the Genesis account of the origin and destiny of life and of man in particular is the heinous doctrine of reincarnation. This means the rebirth of a soul in a new body. It is a denial of man's accountability to God for his life in the body. It seeks to avert the judgment Scripture warns about "it is appointed to man once to die, and after this the judgment" Heb. 9:27. This doctrine, widely held in the East, found roots in the West after it had largely abandoned its Christian traditions. Nature abhors a vacuum, and into the vacuum of Western indifference to the truth this error rushed.
In summary Satan has had a strategic plan in place over the ages to demote man from the exalted position in which God placed him and to dethrone God as the Creator. His tactics have varied. In his attacks on man he has implanted the idea of union with the lower creation, the offspring of which were to be worshipped as gods or goddesses. Latterly he has suggested to man the desirability of making contact with "intelligent beings from outer space." But this is simply a revival of man's age old dream of leaving this earth for the heavens in consort with the fallen angels the gods of the pagan world. Man can rationalize this behavior because he thinks he is his own god. Doesn't evolutionary teaching attribute everything to blind chance? If life arose in this world by blind chance why not in other worlds too? Why not search out this life? In the quest man is accountable to no one. Being his own blind chance god he can do as he likes.
Such is the thinking of the age. We will now move on to the triumph of one phase of Satan's tactics as an illustration of the whole. This took place in the public arena, in the United States. Regrettably it exposes the failure of an effective opposition due to a faulty understanding of Gen. 1.
The Tennessee Monkey Trial
The public profession of Christianity regardless of whether it is true or feigned has historically been a strengthening force in Western civilization. That profession is fading fast. Scripture teaches us that it will be given up entirely some day, as men will openly apostatize from the faith. Why did this happen? It was a gradual process, but we might learn something about it from what is virtually a case history in its development. This is the Tennessee "monkey trial" of 1925.
The battle over the teaching of evolution in the school system: Although Darwin's Origin of Species was published in England in 1859, there was little reaction to it in the United States at first because of the Civil War. Eventually though, militant fundamentalist groups lobbied against the spread of evolutionary doctrine. They succeeded in getting Oklahoma to outlaw evolutionary textbooks. In Tennessee in March 1925 the Butler Act became law. It prohibited the teaching of evolution in educational institutions. The next month the press notified the public of a coming challenge to the act by the American Civil Liberties Union. To bring the matter before the courts George W Rappleya, an engineer who believed in evolution, persuaded the A.C.L.U. to target J. T. Scopes, a biology teacher who was openly teaching evolution in Dayton, Tenn. Rappleya swore out a warrant against Scopes. Then the opposing sides mustered their forces for the midsummer trial.
The Conflict moves to the courts amid a comic setting: The defense marshaled twelve professors and scientists led by Prof. Kirtley Mather of Harvard, and a number of prominent lawyers. The principal lawyer for the defense was Clarence Darrow, an agnostic for the prosecution William Jennings Bryan, a fundamentalist lay preacher. They appeared in court in shirt sleeves and suspenders because of the heat. People fanned themselves. Both the town and the scene of the trial soon began to look like a circus. Showmen offered to rent chimpanzees to the litigants to make the "monkey trial" more realistic. Outside the courtroom a man calling himself John the Baptist the third showed up. He wandered in and out of hot dog and watermelon stands and swarms of cranks. A tailor whose name was Darwin put a sign in his store window "Darwin is right inside." H.L. Mencken was nearly driven out of town for calling the townspeople yokels. In this carnival atmosphere the trial opened on July 10. It was a sweltering day. Because of the heat and the overcrowding of the building the trial was adjourned. Then it was re opened outside, under the maples. More than 2,000 spectators listened in from car tops or anything else they could find. While 165,000 words were spoken daily by both sides, they were largely meaningless.
c. The Trial Darrow began with a psychological softening up of the prosecution: He tried to discredit the fundamentalist cause and its champion with smear tactics. Then he called Bryan to the witness stand. "We are calling him as an expert on the Bible" Darrow said "his reputation as an authority on Scripture is recognized throughout the world." Instead of rejecting this bait Bryan fell for it. Then Darrow sprang the trap. He read Gen. 1:5 "and the evening and the morning were the first day." He asked Bryan if he believed that the sun was created on the fourth day. Bryan answered affirmatively. "Then" Darrow said "how could there have been a morning and evening without any sun?" Bryan was unable to answer. The world authority on Scripture mopped his brow. Darrow went on to discredit the miracles in the Bible. He made them look so ridiculous that the spectators broke into laughter. Bryan turned livid. His voice rose in anger. Unable to refute Darrow effectively he indulged in emotional rhetoric instead. Judge Raulston saw through the emptiness of his rebuttal and rightly ruled that his testimony be removed from the record.
The state won the trial, but only because Scopes had clearly broken the law. It was a Pyrhhic victory. The Butler Act remained on the books until 1967 when it was repealed. Poor Bryan died in his sleep a few days after the verdict. He was a better man than his performance at the trial suggested. His failure was due to his misunderstanding of the days of Gen. 1. d. An overview of the trial and its fallout We believe that the Composite Theory of Creation outlined in this chapter would have answered Darrow's arguments. God did not create the sun on the fourth day it shone for millions of years before the Ice age of Gen. 1:2. He simply did an unspecified remedial work within the solar system on day four. There was evening and morning without the sun because the divine light of Gen. 1:3 illuminated the world for the first three days. But nobody understood this at the trial. Darrow himself scorned the Bible. He continued his harangue, ridiculing the Scriptures in general and miracles in particular. He sold the court a bill of goods ignorance of the Scriptures and denial of God's works in them miracles being only a case in point. The Lord's words to His adversaries covered both areas "you err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God" Matt. 22:29. The sad fruits of this ignorance were foreseen long ago by the prophet Hosea "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge 3''" Hos. 4:6.
A Summary of the Composite Theory of Creation
The Composite Theory of Creation is at variance with both the early earth literal six days of creation theory and the flood geology school. The first of these two theories fails to interpret the days of Gen. 1 as extended eons of geological time, and the second makes the earth's geology revolve around God's judgment on His creation that is Noah's flood rather than on the creation record itself which is in Gen. 1. Furthermore neither of these two theories has serious scientific support. The Composite Theory of Creation is a synthesis of the best features of the Age Day and Gap theories, which acknowledge the antiquity of the earth yet fail to reconcile scientific findings with the Genesis account.
The core tenet of the Composite Theory of Creation is that God intentionally located Gen. 1:2 The record of the ice age out of chronological sequence, and that the ice age itself can be attributed to a malfunctioning of the solar system, corrected by the remedial work of the fourth "day." Once this is understood, and Gen. 1:2 transposed to the end of the creation account, the Old Testament Scriptures which refer to the ice age are aligned with it, rather than left standing in isolation. In total this means that our interpretation is at harmony with the geological record. It is also in agreement with Scripture which is the best proof of its correctness. But this is the subject of Chapter 2.4