Those that work on electronics will be better equipped to understand what I am about to say. The wiring complexities of a radio, television, radar, and microwave are designed in a schematic. Around 1960 the transistor AM radio was invented. It was soon replaced with the transistor AM-FM radio; at the same time our homes had the large and improved 24-inch black and white television. The radio and the television had individual schematics; the small handheld radio could receive the AM-FM radio signals and broadcast them, but could not receive the TV signal. In the same way, the TV could not receive the radio signals.
Each of their schematics had them wired to receive certain radio wave signals. God created his Imago Dei with a schemata or a nerve wiring schematic that regulates the receivability of information, sound, sight, odor that our body can translate into useable information limited to time and space. For us, the number one source of information about God is His Word, the Bible.
The secular man can read the Bible as history, and his schematic receives a certain amount of information. But the truly born-again believer with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that enhances or updates his schematics can receive and understand so much more.
The reason, after decades of reading and studying the Bible, we see new things in old passages of the Bible today; the Holy Spirit is constantly enhancing our schematics. The example would be Acts eight, Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch that was returning home from a 2500 mile trip to worship. As commanded, Phillip had gone to the way to Gaza and found a man reading his private copy of Isaiah. Philip asked him if he understood what he was reading. The Ethiopian answered, “How can I unless some one explains it.” Philip began at that scripture (Isaiah 53) and taught him about Jesus.
The Bible makes it clear that we are surrounded by angels that the sight schematics of our eyes cannot see without The Holy Spirit adjustment, then like Elisha’s servant, “He saw the hillside was full of warrior angels.” Auditory science tells us that there are whistle sounds that a dog can hear that the ear schematics of us humans cannot hear. The truth is that God knows a whole lot more than he is able to reveal through the schematics of our mind. At times past he overrode the normal human schematics and revealed prophecy of things to come that was beyond our understanding. This is what happened in Daniel 9:20ff; here God sent angel Gabriel to explain.
With that in mind, I am setting out to seek to explain the unknowable that we must receive by faith. To help you envision that which we cannot see, but with faith we can get a glimpse of it. The chief question about God, we say He is eternal, but the schemata of our mind, that is wired to understand time and space, logically rejects timelessness. We have to accept that by faith, because God said so. It is important to know that if God were to give us His complete chronology, our minds could not understand it, it could not be fashioned in the time-space cortex of our thinking. Thus, by faith we believe God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have always been and will always be, because that is the revealed Word of God.
The same is true about God knowing everything about everything and everybody. Ever so often a braggadocious human claims to know everything about someone or something; it does not take long to figure out they are exaggerating. The truth is that we humans, the more we know on or about a subject, the more we realize how much we don’t know on that subject. Yet we constantly see in the Bible examples of Jesus and God knowing the slightest private detail, be it Nathan under the fig tree, the woman at the well and five husbands and now shacked up again. This knowledge, that God knows everything, must be received by faith.
Most of us that have spent more than a semester in state college or university have come across the sophomoric syllogism: “If God is the all-powerful creator, he could create a stone so heavy that as an all-powerful God he couldn’t lift it.” The first thing you need to know, that an eternal God is not limited by our syllogisms. However, let’s look at that challenge. Our Bible readers believe God created the whole cosmos. The rational secularists believe there is intelligence behind all creation. The secularists claim the cosmos extends 50 million light years; there are a million galaxies with a million stars, planets, and moons in each. This is a conservative number. There are star gasses that weigh trillions of tons to the ten-hundredths power. There are multitrillion to the umpteenth power of cubic feet of water that weighs 67 pounds per cubic feet. In the gigantic cosmos, all the planets of dirt, sand, rock weighs from 80 to 120 pounds per cubit feet. Thus, the weight of this cosmos is an inestimable tonnage. Yet, Hebrews one states God not only created it, but ‘Sustains it,” that is, He controls it, moves it about, lifts it constantly. I guess God can handle that syllogism; He is all-powerful.
With all that behind us, let’s get to the main question of the day: Is life on our planet self-created, or God created? Here for the Christian we have a clear Bible answer.
The obvious, no one was around videoing and recording the days of creation. Thus, we have no hard-filmed evidence. The Bible asks us to accept our teachings by faith. The secular scientist asks us to begin with aprioristic reasoning and judgments. That is asking me to believe the hypothesis because it is self-evident. Thus, both science and the Bible ask us to begin with faith in the hypothesis of our creation views. Thus, it is my tasks to look at the hard evidence for both. I am a long ways from all the answers, but I have a few. In my education I began in high school questioning creation and evolution. I became a Theistic evolutionist. In my studies in evolution at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology I tossed aside that metaphysical philosophy. At Ozark Christian College I studied biblical creation, and that was good, but left a lot of scientific questions unanswered. In studying Cultural Anthropology at Columbia Seminary I studied biblical geology (deluvian). This answered my faith and scientific questions. I am going to skip the creation philosophies; each and every culture has one or more. I am going to deal with the hard core evidence supplied by God in His Bible, and the side trips to contrary positions.
Number one, the Christian view is the oldest. We begin with God, and they are eternal. The evolutionary philosophy begins at least only 4.8 billion years ago. Genesis one gives us a pictorial and poetic view of six days of creation. The day of Genesis one is the Hebrew “Yom”, meaning a period of time with limits. “The evening and morning were the second day.” This is defined in Exodus 20. “The earth was created in six days and on the seventh day God rested.” The plural for day, “Yomin”, is always translated to mean a series of 24 hour days. You will find in this study that the question is not how could God get it all done in 24 hours, but what did Jesus do with his spare time?
I want to call as witnesses those that were present at the first part of that week one from Psalm 19.
1The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
3There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
David points out that everywhere on the earth, the stars and the Heavens proclaim the glory of God. God and His glory has a testimony everywhere on this Earth that the stars are seen. We understand there are three heavens above us. There is the first heaven, the starry host. The second heaven is where Satan reigns (Ephesians six). The Third Heaven is where God is with Jesus at His right hand (2 Corinthians 12). Paul in Romans one adds to this testimony:
20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Thus, worldwide. The eternal power and divine nature of God can be clearly seen and understood from observing the creation. The very fact this creation exists demands a creator that is greater than the creation.
We believe God at a point in timelessness created our cosmos ex nihilo, from nothing. This God can do, since he is the creator of atoms and molecules. The evolutionist asks us to believe that ex-nihilo created all from ex-nihilo. I am lost in this “self-evident hypothesis.” As many “Intelligent design” scientists say, “Evolution requires too much faith to be acceptable.” Let’s take a side bar to the evolutionist 4.6 to 4.8 billion years for the age of our cosmos. They have no dating data that stands alone; their dates are metaphysical, plainly stated, a guess based on “my hypothesis.” Let’s look at their hard evidence.
In our neighborhood, the moon is 1/400th the size of our sun, and 1/400th the distance from the sun. Ever so often the moon eclipses the sun and cast the earth in darkness. At that point we can measure the tongues of fire or rays emanating from the sun. Over a hundred years we have been able to estimate the fuel our sun is using per year. Now, based on that finding, scientists have concluded our sun will burn to a black hole and die in 25 million years. Not to lose sleep over, but let’s reverse the fuel usage 180 times and multiply our sun’s size (fuel capacity) and ask the question: “Since our earth is only viable in a + or – 1% distance from our sun at the present size what would our relation be if the sun were at least 180 times larger?”—crispy critter. They ask us to have “Faith” in their hypothesis, but their own findings defeat their own thinking.
Let’s go to the clear thinking of the New Testament and creation. I call to testify, Apostle Paul and Apostle John about Emmanuel/Jesus.
Colossians 1:15ff
15He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
John 1
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.
3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it…
14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth
Paul and John place Jesus as the divine creator of everything. Paul writes and speaks as a Greek-trained, bi-racial Roman-Hebrew that everything was created by Jesus. John writes as a Hebrew to the Roman world that Jesus is the logos (word), all-powerful “prima causa” –God who created everything then came and pitched his tent among us.
The scientific method of proving a hypothesis is to replicate the thing to be proved, and then compare with the original. Our belief is that Jesus spoke everything into being. That each creation took a mille-second, and millions were done in minutes.
John 2 gives us the replication of that hypothesis and the examination of the results. Jesus and family had gone to a wedding party in Cana of Galilee. Halfway through the days of the party they ran out of wine. Mother Mary was helping; she brought the servants to Jesus and turned the problem to Jesus. Jesus told mother, “It is not my time.” But Mary, a good Jewish mother, ignored him, told the servants to do whatever he said, turned and walked away. Jesus told the servants to fill a number of large water jars with water then told them to take a dipper full to the master of the wedding feast. He exclaimed, “Most hosts serve their good wine first, then when everyone is drunk, they serve the poor wine. However, you saved the best wine till last.” What happened?
Jesus is the designer and creator of the atoms and molecules; they obey his command, he spoke to the water and the molecules of H2O turned themselves to the molecules of excellent wine (OCH1CI 3). The headmaster testified; it was excellent wine.
Our hypothesis presented, tested and proved.
Additional proof, Satan, one of Jesus created angels when tempting
Jesus spoke to him in Matthew four: Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 2After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
Here Satan is not telling Jesus to make bread of the silicon dioxide and ferrous trioxide, but to command the molecules of stone to reform into warm fresh bread, perhaps with all the butter and honey that you desired. All the building blocks were there in the stone, no harder than turning water into excellent wine, but Jesus didn’t bite.
Thus, in an instant during his lifetime Jesus created food for 20,000. Created new flesh for lepers, eyes for the blind, calmed the storm, raised the dead, and so much more; exampling how he did it in the beginning and all time in between, spoke it into being.
To close, I want to deal with a couple touchy subjects in creation. It appears to me that during the days of creation, everything seemed to be created mature. The animals, fish, birds, fruit trees, nut trees, Adam and
Eve all created mature— ready to reproduce. If indeed the cosmos is 50 million light years across and we see the light of stars 100,000 light years away, doesn’t that prove ancient age of the earth? I contend, our God that created the stars could have created the light trails at the same time. So the stars and the light trails are the same age as the earth, less than a dozen millennia.
On the sixth day of creation God said, “Let us make man in our own image.” Emmanuel who had spoken all else into being, hand formed from the dust of the earth man, and then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Then with a piece of Adam’s bone he hand formed Eve, to be a helpmate. Both were mature and complete with full eyesight, perfect heart, and hearing— ready to reproduce. The evolutionary theory believes that man developed from a single cell, and each organ took thousands if not millions of years to develop to usefulness. For example, Gray’s Anatomy, their chief textbook, states the breast glands of the mammalian animal took twenty-three million years to develop. I just want to know how mama fed the next generation for that long, with SMA, Carnation or Eagle Brand?
God seems to be busy in continued creation today. Astrophysics tells us the cosmos is ever expanding, and growing. In Psalm 139 and Job 31 we are told that God is still hands-on in forming babies in the womb; so, biblical creation continues today.
Thus, our worldview is that we are hand made by Emmanuel, as were all our ancestors. Each complete and fully functional when first appeared.