Transcript The Problem with Evolution

The Problem with Evolution
Three impenetrable barriers
between evolution and the
Bible.
By B. D. Tate
Christians rightly think that if God had chosen to bring the
world into existence through evolution He could do it.
Since God is able to do abundantly beyond all we can
think, dream or ask, God could have used evolution to create all
that we know in the world today including bringing man
into existence through monkeys, etc.
• If the Bible contained language that told us that is how God did it
then there would be no problem; however, there is no such
language in the Bible to confirm evolution.
EVOLUTION
LANQUAGE
Keep in mind that the major thrust behind the theory of
evolution is to provide answers for the world’s existence without a God.
• For the Christian this is not a motivation but for just about everyone else
in the Western world it is the natural conclusion. Evolution has
become the tool to undermine authority in scripture.
• If science has proven, at least has convinced, the world that the
Bible is wrong about its beginnings then eventually the
whole gospel becomes foolishness.
• The Bible has become irrelevant in regards to history while
the scientific community tells the “real” history story.
Number One: The matter of Interpretation—the days of Genesis 1
• Some would say that is a matter of interpretation. Some would argue that
our understanding of the Bible’s teaching on the beginnings
could be wrong just like the church was wrong about the
world being flat.
• There may have been many in the church that believed
these things but lets not forget that whatever there was of science back then, many
of them believed these things too. But keeping with the truth, it was men who
read the Bible that discovered that the earth was not flat.
It was men who read the Bible…
– that discovered there were currents in the seas
and oceans.
– that discovered spontaneous generation could not be
true.
– that discovered that washing and cleansing hands, kept
disease from spreading long before
scientists and doctors would believe it, then
they discovered microorganisms and
bacteria.
– that discovered that the stars couldn’t be
counted, now astronomers confirm what
we’ve been told from scripture thousands of
years ahead of it’s time.
Note: It was Christopher Columbus
who read the Bible and trusting it
venture to travel west across the
huge ocean understanding the earth
is a sphere!
About the matter of interpretation:
• There are hermeneutical rules that keep us all on the same page
understanding the same things.
• It is true that language does change over time. It is true that words
change meanings. However, what is not true is that in a
time period under hermeneutical rules a word can mean something
other than what that generation understood it to mean.
• For example, the word gay today means homosexual. That
same word over fifty years ago meant happy, fun loving,
light hearted, and all of the literature of that time would
agree. It would be impossible and wrong to import the modern day meaning back
to the day when it meant happy.
• No honest effort with hermeneutical rules applying could make that
claim. The same is true of the Hebrew language and the
meaning of words in the Bible. In this case the meaning
of the word “day.”
SEALED FOREVER
• When it comes to the Biblical text all scholars understand
that history, the literature of the day it was written has sealed forever
the original meanings.
• What we can do is investigate to find out what the language
meant, the meanings that were applied, but what we can’t do
is import our definitions.
These important scholars
all agree words are sealed
in history…
When we therefore look at scripture we can’t say that it is a matter of
interpretation.
Fenced In!
• The interpretation is fenced in, it has limits, it
has guards, it has rules and you can see that
when honest scholarship is applied
there is unanimous consent that a word or
phrase when translated means the
same things even with different
versions of the Bible.
Guarded
When it comes to the Genesis account of creation there is great consensus that
the meaning and the words are consistent through
out.
• In other words, there is no scholar worth his/her salt that would
argue that the plain meaning, and the intent of the author
was anything other than to describe creation as six literal days.
6
Literal
DAYS!
Why did God take so
long?
Some background information...
• The definitions of a natural day/night in Hebrew meaning:
-The Natural Day was from sunrise to sunset.
-The Natural Night was from sunset to sunrise.
-The Civil Day was from sunset one evening to sunset the next;
for "the Evening and the Morning were the first day."
Stop and think about this...
• Where do we get day from? God called it
day in Genesis but its breath and
definition come from the rotation of the
earth in relationship to the sun today;
however, originally it would have been
a period of light and then a period of
night.
• Where do we get month from? We get it from
the rotation of the moon around the
earth.
• Where do we get a year from? We get it from
the rotation of the earth around the
sun.
• Where do we get the seasons from? We get it
from the rotation of the earth’s axis in
relationship to the sun.
God placed in the sky the sun, moon, and stars for what purpose?
Gen. 1:14 “Then God said, "Let there be lights in the
firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the
night; and let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years;
For signs, seasons, for days,
and years; and like clock work
the solar system along with our
galaxy operate precisely…
Week idea from Bible
• What is missing in our calendar of days, months, seasons and years? The Week...where
do we get the seven day week? The only place it is found is in
scripture beginning here in Genesis 1. The creation week is established
when God created in six days and rested on the seventh.. The seven
day week is ordained by God’s Will in His Word by the pattern set forth.
• The description of day is not used in a general sense so that we
could define day as an era, an indefinite time period, like the
“Day of salvation.” No the writer and author wanted us to know that evening and
morning, one cycle of an earth’s rotation, is what equaled or was meant by day one, two,
three, four, etc...
Day-Month-Year
• There is no other place in scripture where the word day is used, numbered, and given
this specific evening and morning application and means anything other than a 24
hour period of time.
NOTE: We can’t arbitrarily
place or import a new
definition of the meaning of
day into these passages. If
we define day as a
thousand years, a million,
or a billion years, the whole
meaning breaks down.
Jonah spent 3 days in
the belly of the great
fish…maybe it meant...
OUR WEEK COMES FROM THE CREATION WEEK!
This is where we get the six day working week with the seventh a day of
rest called the Sabbath. One of the Ten Commandments is “Keep the
Sabbath holy.” Listen to these scriptures and understand that the frame work of one
ordinary day was established from the beginning and maintained through
out scripture not migrating, changing, evolving...
• Ex 16:26 “Six days you shall gather it (manna), but on the seventh day,
which is the Sabbath, there will be none."
• Ex 31:15 ‘Work shall be done for six days, but the seventh is the Sabbath of
rest, holy to the LORD. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day, he
shall surely be put to death.
• Le 23:3 ‘Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of
solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work on it; it is the Sabbath
of the LORD in all your dwellings.
• (Duet. 5:12-14; Ex 20:9 & 11)
The interpretation of day (as a natural day) is consistent in all of these
translations...where is the freedom to deviate?
Compare these translations or interpretations:
NLT (New Living Translation)
1:5 God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.”
And evening passed and morning came, marking the first day.
YLT (Young’s Literal Translation)
1:5 and God calleth to the light ‘Day,’ and to the darkness He hath
called ‘Night;’ and there is an evening, and there is a morning—day
one.
NRSV (New Revised Standard Version)
1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And
there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
NIV (New International Version)
1:5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night". And
there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
NKJV (New King James Version)
1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the
evening and the morning were the first day.
THE CONCLUSION:
• What scholars do is acknowledge that “Yom” (the
Hebrew word for day), described in Genesis 1 is a
natural day, a 24 hour period; but then go onto say because of
science and millions of years, that it could mean indefinite periods of time.
• They do this because first it is assumed that science is right and
second they want to reconcile what the scripture
actually says with what is perceived to be reality. (In
other words, Evolution and it’s time periods do not agree with Genesis!)
It’s vital which key we are basing our interpretations
on!
Number 2: God’s laws and Evolution contradict.
1) The Law of Genesis is that everything reproduces after its own kind. Evolution
teaches that everything came from one kind of simplest
form of life. That life came from non living matter, all on
its own.
What is recorded in scripture...?
• Gen. 1:11 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that
yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose
seed is in itself, on the earth"; and it was so.
• Gen. 1:21 So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that
moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and
every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
• 22 And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the
waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."
• 24 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to
its kind: cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth, each according
to its kind"; and it was so.
What we can see and observe today agrees with the Bible
everything reproduces after its own
kind. We don’t see or observe
anything like evolution even in the fossil
record everything appears suddenly in
simple and complex forms much as we
see today.
Harvard paleontologist Stephen
Jay Gould:
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the
fossil record persists as the trade secret of
paleontology. The evolutionary trees that
adorn our text books have data only at the
tips...of their branches; the rest is inference, ...not the
evidence of fossils...in any local areas, a
species does not arise gradually by the steady
transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once
and ’fully’ formed.” (“Evolution’s Erratic Pace” Natural History
86, No. 5 May 1977:14.)
TWO LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS
There are two laws of thermodynamics that agree with this
account of Genesis. These two laws are proven,
tested, and experimented on both large
and small scale. There are no scientists that doubt the
veracity of these laws.
• The First Law is the law of conservation and states that
nothing is now being either “created” or
destroyed.
• It therefore teaches quite conclusively that the universe did not
create itself; there is nothing in the present
structure of natural law that could possibly
account for its own origin. (Henry M. Morris,
PH. D. Scientific Creationism, pp.25)
First Law of
Thermodynamics:
Energy can be
changed from one
form to another,
but it cannot be
created or
destroyed. The
total amount of
energy and matter
in the Universe
remains constant,
merely changing
from one form to
another.
Laws of Thermodynamics in a nut shell…
Question: What is a simple definition of the
laws of thermodynamics?
Answer: Thermodynamics is the study of the inter-relation
between heat, work and internal energy of a system.
The British scientist and author C.P. Snow had an excellent
way of remembering the these laws:
• You cannot win (that is, you cannot get something for nothing,
because matter and energy are conserved).
• You cannot break even (you cannot return to the same energy
state, because there is always an increase in disorder;
entropy always increases).
Since God rested on the seventh day nothing is being created...this
agrees with Law number 1!
• Gen. 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them,
were finished.
• 2 And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done,
and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had
done.
• 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it
He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
The Second Law is the law of energy decay and states that
every system left to its own devices
always tends to move from order to disorder, its
energy tending to be transformed into
lower levels of availability, finally reaching
the state of complete randomness and
unavailability for further work.
Since the fall of Adam and Eve everything
is in a state of dying or cursed. Everything is winding down
because the source of energy which is
God has been disconnected. Like a
spinning top will eventually to topple over
and stop.
•
•
Gen. 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man,
saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat;
17 “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you
shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall
surely die.“
(Gen. 3:17 ,18,19)
Entropy is a
measure of
disorder: cells
are NOT
disordered and
so have low
entropy. The flow
of energy
maintains order
and life. Entropy
wins when
organisms cease
to take in energy
and die.
Evolution crashes against both of these laws.
• First, scientists have been scurrying for decades trying to
find a source that creates anything. They need to find something that is the origin
of life, information, and complexity. They have been peering
relentlessly into the stars looking at all mysterious forms
claiming and reclaiming certain nebulas to be the origin
of life, origin of created things, where information is
growing, where things are coming to be on their own...in
a place far, far, away, in a time long, long, ago, as in Star
Wars...(no blind faith here...)
• The second (law) totally contradicts evolution’s premises that life
began from non living matter by chance, it mutated
and by natural selection increased in order, form, and
complexity. The second law says everything is heading in the
direction of being less complex, less ordered; everything is tending
toward randomness and chaos...the opposite direction for evolution.
Number three: The last impenetrable barrier is the origin of death, disease, the curse and
sin.
• This is the most damning to evolution and Biblical compromises. If one
wants to believe evolution and the Bible can be compatible
this is one barrier that cannot be passed.
• The process of evolution is mutation and natural selection,
with that is death, disease, dying, devouring and being
devoured by the law of “the survival of the fittest.”
• What we know today of life’s struggle, death, dying, disease,
etc. is all a part of evolutionary processes that have been
for millions if not billions of years.
• Death is a part of life and the passing on the genes to the next
generation is the method by which evolution increases in
complexity, survivability, and growing adaptability.
• Stop and realize that this totally contradicts what the Bible teaches
us about the beginning. This would mean that death, dying,
killing, and being killed have existed long before Adam and Eve.
• That when God supposedly created the Garden of Eden
in the midst of the evolutionary world, He called everything
good...actually He called it very good!
•
Gen. 1:31 “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was
very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
• So, everything on the earth was very good, INCLUDING the killing,
being killed, dying, death, sickness, weakness, disease, the survival of the fittest, etc? Does
anyone have a problem with this?
This would imply then…
• That God’s Kingdom will NOT remove the present curse in the earth.
There will still be death, dying, sickness, disease, struggle, pain,
sorrow, hardship…
• YET, Revelations 21:4 says, “And God shall wipe away all tears
from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither
sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the
former things are passed away.
• God is going to restore through redemption in Christ what had been marred
by sin. Sin and the curse are the DIRECT RESULT of the fall of Adam and
Eve.
Isa. 11:6 The wolf also shall dwell
with the lamb, and the leopard
shall lie down with the kid; and the
calf and the young lion and the
fatling together; and a little
child shall lead them.
The whole gospel and restoration, the need for a savior is based on the
fall. The Book of Romans clearly teaches us that through
Adam sin entered into the human race and it is the second Adam Christ by
which righteousness will enter.
– Ro 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those
who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam,
who is a type of Him who was to come.
– 1Co 15:22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.
• When Jesus Christ dies on the cross the scripture says that
he is redeeming us from the curse of the law. The curse entered at the fall
not millions or billions of years before...
– Ga 3:13 Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a
curse for us (for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree"), {#De
21:23}
The Fall into sin
& curse…
Redemption
Through Christ’s
atonement!
It is All Based on a Literal Adam!
• Rom. 5:17 For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the
one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the
gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.
• 18 Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all
men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s
righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of
life.
• 19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so
also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.
And a Literal Jesus!
• If evolution is correct then the Gospel is considerably weakened
because Jesus Christ didn’t come to deliver from the
curse or death. Both (the curse & death) are part of the processes of life
according to evolution. Further, devouring and being devoured are also good
things, things which evolution uses to strip away the
weak, ill, and unworthy...
• I believe you will see clearly and
hear correctly that there is no middle
ground between the testimony of scripture and the
teaching in evolutionary theory. They do not mix
nor can they...in truth evolution is
what was warned about by Paul
the Apostle when he wrote:
• 1Ti 4:1 Now the Spirit expressly
says that in latter times some will
depart from the faith, giving heed to
deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons,
Paul Warned Us about
Doctrines of demons that
appear right but are false!
TWO OPPOSING VIEWS OF HISTORY
• What we have are two opposing views of history between
evolution and the Genesis record. One claims authority
by scientific prowess, prestige, and arrogance...while the other
claims authority by being an eye witness, divine inspiration, validated by prophecy,
miracles, signs, and wonders, Jesus Christ the son of God, and consequently by the
laws of nature, and true scientific research. What is at odds is not the
evidence but the interpretation of the evidence...what
is at odds is the will behind the accounts, the motive, and
the story telling...is God’s Word authoritative or not? Will we believe
the changing, finite, willfully ignorant opinions of
sophisticated men?
What Authority do we believe?
Consider what Jesus said,
• “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.
But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”
John 5:46, 47
• We have to make a choice and fundamentally the Gospel’s message is
torn down if we believe evolution in any way...listen to the testimony of
Moses who wrote
• Genesis 2:4 “This is the history of the heavens and the earth when
they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the
heavens.”
• There is a great weakness in our faith when we realize that our
foundations have been crumbled by belief in evolutionary teaching.
Make the right choice, regain your spiritual senses and foundation, and
restore your trust in the Holy Word of God as the ultimate authority in
your life!
CONCLUSION
• These three impenetrable barriers (and there are many
more) between the Bible and Evolution should make the true
Christian stop and think. In a way, if we are not informed about
how true science in Geology, Paleontology, Archeology,
Biology, Astronomy, etc. genuinely line up with scripture it
may cause a crisis. A crisis of who are you going to believe? If
our exposure to these issues has only been secular and one sided in favor of evolution
it will be difficult to keep the Word of God in its rightful place in our lives. There
are many resources today from books, CDs, tapes, and
the internet (Answers in Genesis website) that will give
you the other side of the story. These are Christian men and
women with PhDs are reviewing the same evidence and
interpreting them according to a Biblical framework.
• When one approaches the controversy and examines
both sides creation science is straightforward, powerful, and convincing.
When we boil it down there are three witnesses in the
matter:
• 1) The Word of God in the Bible;
• 2) The testimony of Creation scientists interpreting the
evidence;
• 3) The testimony of humanist, secular scientists
interpreting the evidence in favor of evolution.
• We actually have two out of the three that agree with creationism so
why embrace the worldly view that is very fallible, limited,
ever changing, and quite simply wrong in its motives and
theories?
Recommended Reading
• 1) Scientific Creationism, by Henry M. Morris, Master
Books, Copyright 2001
• 2) In the Beginning was Information, by Werner Gitt,
Copyright 2001
• 3) Refuting Compromise, by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D.,
Master Books, Copyright 2004
• 4) Big Argument: Does God Exist? John Ashton &
Michael Westacott, 24 scholars Explore How Science,
Archaelogoy, and Philosophy Haven’t Disproved God.,
Master Books, Copyright 2006
• AnswersinGenesis.Com Website is an awesome
resource...