Creation

From DBSJ. This installment continues consideration of the first of 9 Essentials of YEC: the literal hermeneutic, then takes up Essential 2 and Essenetial 3. Read the series.

By Matthew A. Postiff, from DBSJ. Read the series.

Non-Essentials of Young Earth Theology

Although various authors over the past decades have expressed strong beliefs in one or the other details of young earth theology, many such details are extraneous to the system, mainly because of limited biblical revelation. In this section, I briefly list a few such details that are not essential to young earth creationism.

For instance, it is not necessary to believe in an exact age of the earth, such as 6,000 years, or to adhere to Ussher’s Chronology. Dogmatism on the precise age is not necessary as long as the age is “young.”¹³ It is not required that one be dogmatic on an absolute absence of gaps or missing names in the Genesis genealogies.

From DBSJ. Read the series. Part 2 continues the Spectrum of Views on Creation begun in Part 1.

Scientific Creationism

Compared to biblical creation views, scientific creationist views expand the role of science in the understanding of creation. The views that fall under this heading are normally connected with a uniformitarian view of earth history that extends billions of years, punctuated by occasional catastrophic events.⁹ These are old-earth understandings of creation. The scientific views are different in another way from biblical creation: most do not posit a completed creation. The processes of creation (evolution) are ongoing today in most of the following views and therefore there is no “completion” or “cessation” of creation as there is in the biblical creation views.

The day-age view is an old-earth explanation that teaches that the six days of creation were not regular days but rather were a sequence of geological ages, giving time for the several-billion year age of the earth taught by secular science.

From DBSJ 21 (2016): 31–58. Republished with permission.

Matthew A. Postiff¹

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The widespread public acceptance of biological evolution in Darwin’s day was probably a product of the simultaneous faith in Progress. Darwin’s theory was accepted as readily as it was because it shared in the general belief that things were getting better. It’s not that the organisms themselves were being swept along, but that European and then American intellectuals believed that everything was improving. (256)

This is the way Tom Bethell ends his entertaining book attacking the reigning scientistic consensus of evolution. Darwin’s House of Cards is a fully up-to-date survey of the mechanics and effects of evolutionary theory — a theory which Karl Popper concluded was “not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program” (14).

As to the general optimism which provided the conditions for the enthusiastic acceptance of Darwinism in the middle of the nineteenth century, Bethell writes,

[A]s I hope to show in the following chapters, the science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts. I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy – the philosophy of materialism – and atheism along with it. (20)

“How did we get here?” This is one of the great questions of life, and its answer sets the direction for so many other answers to great questions. If we are descended from animals, then are we not justified in living as animals? If we are generated merely by chance, then is there any meaning to life, or do we simply make our own? If we are created by a non-involved creator, then are we accountable to that creator? If we are created by the Creator described in the Bible, then are we not accountable to Him, and should we not look to Him to guide in our understanding of existence in His universe?

How we answer the origin question in large part predetermines how we view and answer questions of our own personal meaning and responsibility. We really can’t know what we should do unless we know who we are. And we can’t know who we are unless we know from whence we came.