ForFortress of Faith Radio by Tom Wallace discuss world views on creation vs evolution.
Listen to the program HERE ( OR DOWLOAD THE MP3 HERE) and below are the “show notes” from this program, so their are typos, etc.
I am calling the month of January the Christian Apologetic month. We will be looking at how Christians ought to defend their faith against false teachings. The first area we will address is the false teaching of evolution. God told us how we got here. He created us, the world, and everything in it, in six literal days. The world tells us that we got here by evolution, and it took millions and millions of years. There are two different world views, and we, as Christians need to have an answer for what we believe.
On our broadcast today we had a special guest. His name is Skip Tilton. He is the founder of From Day One Ministries. He travels, teaching on the issues of evolution. I have known Skip for a number of years, in fact, we were students in Bible College in another age.
Since this article is based upon our Saturday radio broadcast, and since this is an interview, I think you will get a better feel and understanding if you listen to the broadcast for yourself. You can do so on our website by clicking here. I will give you an overview of the broadcast, and not an exact transcript.
We need to start by teaching people about the authority of Scripture, and start at the beginning from day one. The Bible starts with creation, and I believe this is the best starting place in a culture that doesn’t believe the Christian Scriptures. This is the best way to form a biblical world view.
It seems that we are losing the battle in the creation/evolution debate, not because we don’t have the facts on our side, but because we don’t know how to present them. We have to start by realizing that many who call themselves Christians, especially among our youth, don’t understand the biblical view. Many of them believe that God created everything, but that He used evolution to do so. This is called Theistic Evolution, and doesn’t square with what the Bible says on the issue.
This problem is a cultural problem. In church, people are being taught creation, and in our schools, they are being taught evolution. Those in authority are teaching two different things, so they married the two together. This has been going on for so long that we find many in our churches who think this way.
The problem is knowing where to start. Everything boils down to the authority of the Word of God. Either the Word of God is true, or man determines truth for himself away from the Word of God. When man determines truth for himself, he can go in any direction, and that is what has happened. Secular humanism has become the way of life, rather than yielding to the authority of Scripture.
When a person is saved, he becomes a new creature, and the change is dramatic. There is a transformation that begins at salvation, and it starts by the renewing of the mind.
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:2)
Discipleship is an essential component to the growth of a Christian. If there is not a plan to grow Christians in Bible doctrine, they will believe just about anything. This is how theistic evolution has crept into the minds of so many Christians. They haven’t spent the time to study things out.
As Christians, we are not to just take someone else’s word, we are to study things out for ourselves.
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15)
We can’t just accept something because it is said to be “scientific.”
O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: (1 Timothy 6:20)
We need to learn to think from a biblical point of view. This is how we get a proper understanding of what we call science. It is interesting how the evolutionist and the creationist can look at the same facts and come to such different conclusions. It is because of how things are looked at, it depends upon our world view.
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We must start with our world view. A world view is the overall perspective through which you interpret the world you live in. Most of those who grow up in America without a strong Christian influence will have a secular humanist world view. If we think the world is billions of years old we will have one perspective, and when we start thinking from a biblical point of view, we will have quite another.
If we are going to be successful in reaching those with a different world view, we will have to start in the right place. We need to start with the Bible, and what it says. The evolutionist presents one possible history of the world. The Bible teaches the real history of the world. Secular humanism says the world is very old, while the Bible teaches that it is very young. The Bible teaches that God created things after their own kind, and He designed them to perform certain functions. Secular humanism tells us that over time, things gradually evolved into what we see today.
There are seven major events in the history of the world, if we start with them, we will develop a biblical world view.
- Creation
- Corruption
- Catastrophe
- Confusion
- Christ
- The Cross
- A future consummation
Six of these are real events that have happened in the world. One of them is still future, and it is the consummation.
We need to understand that you can’t be saved apart from the real history of the world. If we can’t believe the truth about worldly things, how will we believe the truth about heavenly things?
If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? (John 3:12)
If a person doesn’t believe in creation, corruption (sin coming into the world), catastrophe (the flood), and confusion (the Tower of Babel), they will have a hard time understanding Christ, the cross, and the consummation of things. These things are necessary to understand why Christ came, what He did, and why we can have hope.
How do we communicate this to those who don’t believe the Bible. We need to assure that we have the right view of things ourselves. There used to be a popular bumper sticker that said, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” This is totally wrong. The fact that God said it settles it, whether or not I believe it. We have to learn that we can trust God. When He says that He created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh, I need to trust this to be true.
When I look at the world, what I see is what God said. When I look at biology, I find that everything is created after its kind. Biology is an information science. It helps us understand how things work and why they exist. When we look at DNA, it becomes obvious that what we see could not have happened by chance. It is absolutely impossible. Real science has proven this to be true.
Once we understand this, and we look at secular humanism that says all of this evolved over millions of years, we must ask, Is there alternative world view? The answer is, yes there is, the biblical world view.
Secular humanism blames society for the evil in the world, but we see both good and bad people in the same society. The Bible says that because of the fall, all men are sinners, and when we look at the world we live in, we see the truth of this.
God says that He caused a worldwide flood. When we look at our world today, do we see any evidence of this worldwide flood? The secularists tell us that the Grand Canyon was formed by a little bit of water, and a long, long time. A better alternative is that it was formed by a lot of water, and a little bit of time. The water enters the canyon at 2,700 feet above sea level. It exits the canyon 1,600 feet above sea level. The canyon is at 7,000 feet above sea level. For it to have been formed by the Colorado River, the water would have had to run up hill from 2,700 ft. to 7,000 ft, and then eroded it down to 1,600 ft. That is not possible.
There are many things that support the Genesis account of things, and that disprove the evolutionist account of things. It is easy to see which is true if we will simply look at the facts.
When God created things, He created them with age. When He created Adam and Eve, He didn’t create them as babies, He created them as adults. It is also probable that when he created other things, like trees, He created them also as mature adults.
We need to remember that facts don’t speak for themselves. All facts are interpreted by a presupposition in the mind. Creationists and evolutionists have the same facts, we have the same microscopes, testing procedures, etc. The question is, how do we end up with different interpretations of a fact? It is because of the presuppositions in the mind.
With a humanist world view, it is believed that it takes millions of years to make a canyon. With a biblical world view, we realize that a canyon can be created in a very short time, it just takes the right conditions. Understanding history means we must understand the conditions that made that history possible. When we do that, we find that what we find in the world agrees with the history of the Word of God. What we see in the evolutionary history, molecules to man, does not agree with what we see in our world.
Everything comes down to how we think. For Christians, the Bible should be our sole authority. We should rest our beliefs upon its truths, even though we don’t understand everything it says. We may not be able to explain everything, but if God said it, that settles it.
The evolutionist is filled with rebellion. He is in darkness. He is, like all of us, born with a sin nature. In Romans Chapter 1, the Bible tells us that the creation clearly shows us that God exists, and that we are subject to Him.
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: (Romans 1:19-20)
The truth of the matter is that the humanist has a rebellious heart. He does not want to submit to God. Listen to what Peter had to say about this:
For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: (2 Peter 3:5)
This shows that those who reject what the Bible says about creation are ignorant by their own choice.
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Dr. Richard Lewontin, Professor of Genetics and Harvard, said, and I can’t give an exact quote, but here is the essence of it:
We take the side of evolutionary science, in spite of its absurdity in some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of it extravagant promises of health and life, because we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.
This statement shows that this isn’t an issue about facts, it is an issue about belief. If man came from evolution, then man decides truth. If God is Creator, then God will hold man accountable for how he lives in creation. It is an issue of accountability.
We are losing the argument and many of our children are losing their faith. What can we do about this?
We have two world views, one that accepts the authority of the Word of God, and the other that does not. The battle is really for the mind.
Earlier I mentioned the creation of the Grand Canyon. When someone says that it takes millions of years to create something like this, we can take them to Mt. St. Helen. After the eruption took place, the terrain had changed. There is one canyon there, called Engineer’s Canyon, that didn’t exist prior to the eruption of Mt. St. Helen. It is 90 ft. deep and 150 to 180 ft. wide. The engineers started pumping the water out of Spirit Lake, and the canyon was formed in about 29 months. There is another canyon that is called the Little Grand Canyon. It is about 1/40th the size of the Grand Canyon. The bottom of this canyon is Basalt rock, some of the hardest rock known to man. More than 30 ft. was carve in less than three hours in one day. It doesn’t take millions of years to carve out a canyon, it just takes the right conditions.
The evolutionist, as we have seen, wants to remove God, so they can’t consider the fact that canyons can be carved out in a short time if the conditions are right. This is why, with so much evidence supporting it, they can’t accept a worldwide flood. We have only looked at the example of Mt. St. Helen, but there are many examples of this throughout the world.
There are solid answers to the evolutionist’s arguments. An examination of the layers of strata show micro layers with crystals going in different directions, and we know that the layer was laid down all at once. At one of Skip’s meeting, some PHD students testified that they had just taken their test for their PHD, and to pass the test, they had to answer that it took 1,000 years to lay down one millimeter of strata, and that Skip had just shown in his presentation that this was not true.
Just looking at what is going on in the real world can give you a better idea of the truth that listening to the theories of the PHDs. Having a degree doesn’t make you smart, it simply means you went to school. This, by the way, is true of all of the sciences.
An airplane landed on the attic ice in Greenland in the 1940s. It was abandoned and many years later, after all of the snows that had fallen on it, it was found and dug up. By this time it was some 150 ft down in the ice. The layers of ice, according to the “scientific” theories, indicated that the plane had been there for hundreds of years. The truth is, there can be even dozens of these layers formed in just one year. This is just one of many facts that disprove the dating methods used to get the old dates of things so that it proves their old earth theory.
Those who use the layer method for dating things never stop to think about how long it takes to lay down a layer. They assume that every layer takes the same amount of time to form. Their presuppositions lead them in a direction totally void of the truth. Wrong assumptions lead to wrong conclusions.
As Christians, we need to learn how to investigate these things. There is a fantastic website called Creation.com, that has over 12.000 articles you can download for free. They have done over 45 years of research on all of these fields. Just about anything you want to find is there.
Here is a simple example of how to handle someone who thinks the world is millions of years old. Take them outside in the evening, and have them look at the moon. Tell them to put their arm out and set the moon on their index finger. Did you know that NASA shows us that the moon gets about an inch and a half further from the earth every year. If the moon was millions of years old, it would have been long gone years ago, and we wouldn’t be here because it would have destroyed everything.
Looking at in reverse, if the moon is at its present distance now, where would it have been millions of years ago? There is what is called the Rosch limit, which determines the closest the moon could be to the earth. When we use this limit, and see where the moon is today, we see that the moon would be where it is in less than 10,000 years.
In Texas, at the Red River, there is a man’s footprint inside of a dinosaur footprint. They took some scientist to the area, and they refused to even look at it. They actually turned their backs to it. This is what it means to be willingly ignorant.
We are going to continue on this subject next week. I want to look at things like intelligent design and other things we can sink our teeth into. The Bible says we are to be able to give an answer for the hope that is in us.
We have proof for what we believe, and true science agrees with what the Bible says. It is our responsibility to study things out and be able to defend our beliefs.
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