Post by Les Brewer on Jul 18, 2017 16:04:58 GMT
Creation: Believe It or Not, Part 1 -Genesis 1:1
(For audio and original location of message please follow this link www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/90-208 )
I'm going to begin a new series that I've been sort of working on for a long time, a series on origins. And I don't know how long this series is going to run exactly. I do know that I'm going to spend a little time on an introduction and then we're going to launch right into Genesis 1:1 and take the whole account of creation verse by verse, phrase by phrase and let the Lord unfold its significance to us.
Now I want to begin with a few sort of disclaimers, if I can, a few things that maybe you need to keep in mind. First of all, I'm not a scientist. I don't claim to be a scientist. Any teacher in my past whoever taught me science could stand up and testify to that fact. I am a theologian, I am a Bible teacher, I am a part-time philosopher; but I am not a scientist. And so, when it comes to those matters which are scientific, I have to basically move to somebody else and trust them as an authority where I am not an authority. This will not largely be a scientific study; in fact that's not our intent at all. But it will be a study of the Scripture, a study of theology with a little bit of rationality thrown into it.
Secondly, I will not answer every question tonight. I know that what I don't say tonight is going to create questions. I will get to those questions as we move through the text of Scripture. I will deal with things like theistic evolution. I will deal with things like day-age theory, deal with viewpoints like progressive creationism as we go along, but we'll not be able to deal with all of that tonight. And I really do believe that you're going to find the answer to your questions about origins primarily from the text of Scripture. The issues such as progressive creationism, theistic evolution are really answered by the text itself. And so we're going to find our way through the text of Genesis, chapter 1 into chapter 2, and therein we're going to secure the great answers to the questions that arise about origins.
But to begin with tonight I, I want to address the concept, I want to sort of set the picture in your mind as to the debate. This is critical for, for all of us, and it is most critical for those who are students. If you are a junior high student, if you are a high school student, if you are a college or university student in any other than a distinctively Christian school, you are going to be given this indoctrination about evolution as if it were fact and you're going to find that what I'm going to be saying to you is contrary to just about everything you hear. We'll set the stage for that contrast tonight, and then we'll get into the text of Scripture and see how Scripture itself addresses popular evolutionary theory.
It is also important to all of us because understanding origins in the book of Genesis is foundational to the rest of the Bible. If Genesis, chapter 1 and chapter 2 don't tell us the truth, then why should we believe anything else in the Bible? If it says in the New Testament that the Creator is our Redeemer, but
God is not the Creator, then maybe He's not the Redeemer either. If it tells us in 2 Peter that God Himself will bring about an instantaneous dissolution of the entire universe as we know it, that God in a moment will uncreate everything, then that has tremendous bearing upon His power to create. The same One who with a word can uncreate the universe is capable of creating it as quickly as He desires.
So what we believe about creation, what we believe about Genesis has implications all the way to the end of Scripture, implications with regard to the veracity and truthfulness of Scripture, implications as to the gospel, and implications as to the end of human history, all wrapped up in how we understand origins in the book of Genesis. The matter of origins then is absolutely critical to all human thinking. It becomes critical to how we conduct our lives as human beings. Without an understanding of origins, without a right understanding of origins, there is no way to comprehend ourselves. There is no way to understand humanity, as to the purpose of our existence, and as to our destiny. If we cannot believe what Genesis says about origins, we are lost as to our purpose and our destiny. Whether this world and its life as we know it evolved by chance, without a cause, or was created by God, has immense comprehensive implications for all of human life.
Now there basically are only two options. You can either believe what Genesis says or not. And that is no over simplification. Frankly, believing in a supernatural, creative God who made everything is the only possible rational explanation for the universe, for life, for purpose and for destiny. Now the divine equation given in the Bible, in contrast to nobody times nothing equals everything, the divine equation is found in Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." I don't know how it could be said any more simply or more straightforwardly than that. Either you believe God did create the heavens and the earth or you believe He did not. Really those are the only two valid options you have. And if you believe that God did create the heavens and the earth, then you are left with the only record of that creation, and that's Genesis 1, and you are bound to accept the text of Genesis 1 as the only appropriate and accurate description of that creative act.
So again, I say you're left really with two choices. You either believe Genesis or you don't. You either believe the Genesis account that God created the heavens and the earth, or you believe they somehow evolved out of random chance. Looking at the account of Genesis 1:1 for just a brief moment; the words in that first verse are quite remarkable. They are indicative of the incredible mind of God. God says in that first verse everything that could have been said about creation and He says it in such few terms. The statement is precise and concise almost beyond human composition.
A well-known scientist, a very decorated scientist named Herbert Spencer, died in 1903. In his scientific career he had become noted for one great discovery; it was a categorical contribution that he made. He discovered that all reality, all reality, all that exists in the universe can be contained in five categories: time, force, action, space and matter. Herbert Spencer said everything that exists, exists in one of those categories: time, force, action, space and matter. Nothing exists outside of those categories. That was a very astute discovery and didn't come until the nineteenth century. Now think about that. Spencer even listed them in that order: time, force, action, space and matter. That is a logical sequence. And then with that in your mind, listen to Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning," that's time. "God," that's force. "Created," that's action. "The heavens," that's space. "And the earth," that's matter. In the first verse of the Bible God said plainly what man didn't catalog until the nineteenth century. Everything that could be said about everything that exists is said in that first verse. Now either you believe that or you don't. You either believe that that verse is accurate and God is the force or you believe that God is not the force that created everything. And then you're left with chance or randomness or coincidence.
This is more than just a secondary issue. Someone wrote a letter to the president of the Promise Keepers, and I'm not particularly singling them out except that the illustration is so clear because of the response they wrote, asking them about their stand on the creation issue. The assistant to the president responded with this statement, quote: "You need to know that the ministry of Promise Keepers takes no stand on issues like this. In fact we specifically try to avoid such debates. Our efforts are designed to bring men together based on the historically essential doctrines of orthodox Christianity as represented by our Statement of Faith, or to focus on things that unite the Body of Christ, instead of those which tend to divide it. Since different churches and individual Christians hold varying views about creation, it is one of those things we believe falls under the category of secondary doctrines, secondary doctrines such as spiritual gifts, eternal security and the rapture, etc. In short, when it comes to subjects like creation, we believe Christians need to extend grace to each other as summed up in the statement, ‘In essentials unity and non-essentials liberty and all things charity,’" end quote.
Now that's a pretty aggressive statement about the secondary nature of a belief in the Genesis account, isn't it? It doesn't address the issue that if you don't believe the book of Genesis, you're not believing the Bible. I'm not trying to throw aspersions on that organization but simply to say that this is what is generally the view of the majority of Christian people. Whether the world was created by God or evolved by chance without cause has been debated a long time. It's been debated since Darwin. But the debate comes down to this, either you believe the Bible or you don't. Either you believe the book of Genesis or you don't. And if you don't believe the book of Genesis, then what do you believe? Well in most cases you believe in naturalistic evolution. There would be some who would be theistic evolutionists who would say well God sort of launched it all, but then evolution took over and they would deny that the Genesis account is accurate in saying that God created in six, twenty-four-hour days. Progressive creationists would essentially say the same thing, that creation is not, did not occur as Genesis says, but rather it was over long ages and God sort of progressively injecting Himself into the process did some creative work alongside the evolutionary process.
Those views, theistic evolution, progressive creationism, also deny the straightforward text of the book of Genesis. So I say again, you either believe Genesis or you don't. If you don't, you have some options. You can be a theistic evolutionist or you can be a naturalistic evolutionist. Among Christians there are some who are theistic evolutionists but among those who make up the unbelieving world they are naturalistic evolutionists. And so they are left with the incredible notion that nobody times nothing equals everything.
Douglas Kelly, who has written on this subject with great insight says, "There is no doubt that the biblical vision of man as God's creature whom He made in His own image has had the most powerful effect on human dignity, on liberty, on the expansion of the rights of the individual, on political systems, on the development of medicine, on every other area of culture. How different,” he writes, “from the humanistic viewpoint of man as merely an evolved creature, not made in God's image because there is no God. Such a premise has enabled the Marxist totalitarian states conveniently to liquidate millions of their citizens because of the assumption that there is no transcendent person in whose image those citizens are created, no being to give those citizens a dignity and a right to exist beyond what the state determines," end quote.
This point has been explored at length by Baron Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn of Austria, who may be the century's greatest scholar on questions of liberty and totalitarianism. He has written a very important book called Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, which deals with those issues. And in it he shows that apart from the belief that mankind is created in the image of a transcendent God, the divinely derived dignity and liberty of human beings completely disappears. He says, "For the genuine materialists there is no fundamental, only a gradual evolutionary difference between a man and a pest, a noxious insect," end quote. And his conclusion is: The issue is between man created in the image of God and the termite in human form. He's right. We have two options. Either we evolved out of the slime and can be explained only in a materialistic sense, meaning that we are made of nothing but the material, or we have been created by God and made in His image in a heavenly pattern. And the debate is not just biological, that's what I'm trying to say, it's not just biological, it's moral and it's spiritual. The debate gets to questions about man's dignity, about man's nature in the image of the heavenly pattern, the image of God. It asks questions about the issue of control, who is sovereign in the universe, who is in control. It asks: Is there a universal judge? Is there a universal moral law? Is there a lawgiver? Are people to live according to God's standard? Will there be a final assessment of how men and women live? Is there a final judgment?
You see, these are the questions that evolution was invented to avoid. Evolution was invented to kill the God of the Bible, not because evolutionists and materialists and naturalists didn't like God as creator, but because they didn't want God as judge. Evolution was invented in order to kill the God of the Bible, to eliminate the lawgiver, to eliminate the inviolability of His law, the binding standard for human thought and conduct. Evolution was invented to do away from universal morality and universal guilt and universal accountability. Evolution was invented to eliminate the judge and leave people free to do whatever they want without guilt and without consequences.
I mean, if we just kind of summed up these two alternatives, the materialistic view would say: Ultimate reality is impersonal matter. No God exists.
The Christian view says: Ultimate reality is an infinite, personal, loving God.
The materialistic view says: The universe is created by chance, without any ultimate purpose.
The Christian view says: The universe was lovingly created by God for a specific purpose.
The materialistic view says: Man is the product of impersonal time, plus chance, plus matter. As a result, no man has eternal value or dignity or any meaning other than that which is subjectively derived.
The Christian view says: Man was created by God in His image and is loved by God. Because of this all men are endowed with eternal value and dignity. Their value is not derived ultimately from themselves, but from the source transcending themselves; God Himself.
The materialistic view of morality says: Morality is defined by every individual according to his own views and interests. Morality is ultimately relative because every person is the final authority for his own views.
The Christian view says: Morality is defined by God and immutable because it is based on God's unchanging, holy character.
The materialistic view says about the afterlife: The afterlife brings eternal annihilation, or personal extinction, for everyone.
The Christian view says: The afterlife involves either eternal life with God or eternal separation from Him; either the glories of heaven, or the terrors of hell.
Now, folks, let me tell you something. Which of those views you take is not a secondary issue; it is a primary issue, not only for science but for theology. How in the world can Christianity view those as secondary issues? This is the foundation of all truth. Francis Schaeffer, the apologist, said if he had an hour to spend with a person on an airplane, a person who didn't know the Lord, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes talking about man being created in the image of God, and the last five minutes on the presentation of the gospel of salvation that could restore man to that original intended image. Christianity does not begin with accepting Jesus Christ as Savior. Christianity begins in Genesis 1:1. God created the heavens and the earth for a purpose and destiny which He Himself had determined. Understanding and believing the doctrine of creation in the book of Genesis is foundational in accepting, listen carefully, that the Holy Bible is to be taken seriously when it speaks to the real world.
People say, "Well, the book of Genesis is myth and legend and fantasy and allegory and tradition, doesn't really speak about real facts to the real world." Yes it does. The Word of God is to be taken seriously when it speaks to the real world on any and every subject. If we avoid dealing with what the Bible says about the creation of the material universe, then there is a tendency for our religion to be disconnected from the real world. There's a tendency to put Scripture into some mystical category, to put Christianity into some stained glass closet, as Douglas Kelly puts it, that doesn't impact the space-time world.
You start out with the book of Genesis, tampering with the literal nature of that text and you have created a mystical approach to Scripture at the very launch point. The Scottish theologian James Denney made this point in the late 1890s. I quote, "The separation of the religious and the scientific means, in the end, the separation of the religious and the true, and this means religion dies among true men." You can't pick up the book of Genesis, take chapter 1 and say this is a fairy story, this is not real history, this is not reality, this does not reflect a real understanding of the real world in real space and real time, without severe implications to the rest of the message of Scripture. The doctrine of creation as identified in the book of Genesis is foundational. It is where God starts His story. And you can't change the beginning without impacting the rest of the story and the ending. In the Bible, God speaks, and He speaks in Genesis 1:1 and says He created the heavens and the earth. He is the one who spoke in Genesis 1:1 and who speaks right through Scripture till its very end.
When you tamper with Genesis 1 you are tampering with the Word of the living God and you are taking the divine account of real creation in real space and real time and you're saying, it is not accurate, it is not legitimate, it is not the truth. That is a serious assault. And it loosens up the Scripture from reality and divorces religion, the true religion, from reality. That is severe. So evolution would love to do that. It would love to ungod God, it would love to strip Scripture of its veracity. It wants to reject God as lawgiver, judge, Savior. It wants to destroy the dignity of man as created in the image of God. And it gets pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? According to evolution man is quantitatively better than the animals. That is, he has some features that animals don't have, but qualitatively he's not better. He has a bigger brain quantitatively but qualitatively he was not created in God's image. Therefore it is ethically wrong to violate the rights of other animals who are our literal brothers, evolutionarily speaking.
And we hear all that today, don't we, all the time? That infamous organization called PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, their national director, Ingrid Newkirk, made this famous statement, "A rat is a pig is a boy,” “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." No difference. All higher forms of life (a rat being a higher form of life in her view) are to be considered equal. We have a funny organization called The Church of Euthanasia, believes that animal rights are superior to human rights. A representative from that organization, he told a TV audience, a national audience, and I quote: "If we're going to kill off species, let's kill humanity first because humans are only a minor species with a minor role to play in the overall diversity of nature," end quote.
And you've read it all. I've read animal rights groups that maintain eating meat is murder. Man is the tyrant species. Killing cows is murder. And there was one who said that killing chickens is equal to the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews. This kind of idiocy comes because these people really do believe that man is simply the end of an evolutionary series of chance occurrences that has no purpose and has no destiny and is not made in the image of God. He is not bearing any dignity beyond any other along the line in that evolutionary process.
And you know what? If evolution is true, you can't argue with them. We're just animals. We have just evolved. And their argument may be pretty valid. All of these animal rights advocates, writes Marvin Lubenow, who have expressed themselves publicly on the subject, are evolutionists. According to evolution it's merely the luck of the draw that man has evolved the big brain. Had certain mutations not happened in our ancestors and instead happened in the ancestors of the chimpanzees we might be where they are, in the zoo, and they might be where we are. Hence, he writes, "I have no ethical right to use my superiority, achieved purely by chance, to violate the rights of other animals, who through no fault of their own didn't evolve the same abilities." If man, as he said, is only an animal, an accident of nature, a collection of chance mutations, then where is his meaning? Where is his dignity? Where is his absolute value? What is his purpose? Obviously he has none.
Now what evolution basically says is that over time, by chance, matter evolved into the entire universe. Jacques Monod won the, this is unthinkable, the Nobel Prize and in his book Chance and Necessity he says this, "Man is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged by chance." That's the Nobel-winning biologist. Chance alone is the source of every innovation. Chance alone is the source of all creation in the biosphere. He writes, "Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution." So Monod says it's just chance.
Noted evolutionist J.W. Burrow writes in his introduction to The Origin of Species, "Nature, according to Darwin, was the product of blind chance and a blind struggle and man, a lonely intelligent mutation, scrambling with the brutes for his sustenance. To some the sense of loss was irrevocable. It was as if an umbilical cord had been cut and men found themselves part of a cold, passionless universe. Unlike nature as conceived by the Greeks, the enlightenment, and the rationalist Christian tradition, Darwinian nature held no clues for human conduct and no answers to human moral dilemmas," end quote. I mean, man was just cut loose from any meaning whatsoever. He is a lonely, intelligent mutation, produced out of chance. He is protoplasm waiting to become manure. Now, that is a far cry from being created in the image of God. This evolutionary idea not only strips man of his dignity and his meaning; this is more than just stupid, it is more than irrational, it is more than depressing, it is more than humiliating, it is more even than immoral. This evolutionary idea is deadly. And in our history, our recent history in western civilization, no one demonstrated the deadly character of this evolutionary idea better than Adolf Hitler and he was followed up by Joseph Stalin and all of those who massacred masses of people, millions of people, and committed genocide. At the bottom, at the base of their belief system and philosophy, was evolution.
For example, Hitler saw in evolutionary theory the scientific justification for his personal view just the same as social Darwinists of the nineteenth century did for their terrible abuses. There's no question that evolution was behind all Nazi thought from beginning to the end. And yet few people were aware of that, and Hitler even sucked up a quasi-Christian commitment from the church of the state of his day. Erich Fromm wrote, "The religion of social Darwinism belongs to the most dangerous elements within the thoughts of the last century. It aids the propagation of ruthless national and racial egoism by establishing it as a moral norm. If Hitler believed in anything at all, then it was in the laws of evolution, which justified and sanctified his actions and especially his cruelties." How does that work? Evolution is the survival of—what?—the fittest. Hitler was just playing out the evolutionary role. He was the fittest and so he massacred everybody else, under the evolutionary thesis that he was perpetuating the strongest and he was aiding in the development of the super race. That was all borne out of evolutionary theory. In the biological theory of Darwin, Hitler found his most powerful weapon against traditional, against religious and Christian values. He singled out the idea of biological evolution as the greatest weapon he had against traditional religion, and he repeatedly condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution. He hated Christianity. In fact he said, and I quote Hitler, "I regard Christianity as the most fatal, seductive lie that ever existed." And Mein Kampf, My Struggle, was basically Hitler's evolutionary theory working its way out politically, and was the justification for the destruction of the masses who threatened the continued evolution of the super race. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, "He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature. Nature likes bastards only a little." And finally he said, "All that is not of pure race in this world is trash." And so he destroyed the Jews, he destroyed the blacks, he destroyed the Gypsies and he was aiding natural selection and fulfilling the evolutionary biological dream. The head of the Nazi Labor Front said that Hitler's massacres expressed, and I quote, "The highest and best in manhood." Julian Huxley, a biologist and evolutionist, wrote Essays of a Humanist in 1964, said, "Evolution is the most powerful, most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth." And you know what? He's right. It is the single, greatest, satanic lie the world has ever known because it eliminates the need for a creator. People can avoid God altogether, particularly the biblical God.
Darwin didn't care if you wanted to worship another god. I don't think Hitler cared if you wanted to worship another god, just not the God of the Bible, just not the God who created. When Darwin first published his Origin of Species it was largely rejected by the scientific world of his day because they universally held to a belief in divine creation. There was no other rational explanation: You have effect; you have to have a cause. When he wrote Origin of Species, of course it had critical reviews from the very outset. The scientific world was almost wholly against it. In later years, Thomas Huxley, speaking of the year 1860, described the situation by saying, and I quote, "The supporters of Mr. Darwin's views were numerically extremely insignificant. There is not the slightest doubt that if a general council of the church scientific had been held at that time, we should have been condemned by an overwhelming majority."
It was a hard sell. Even Darwin had a hard time with it. If you read anything of Darwin's you find he's continually filling all his writings with tremendous doubts. For example, he says in the sixth chapter of his Origin of Species, "Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered." In his chapter on instinct he conceded, “Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.” And to think, he said, that the eye could evolve “by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." In his chapter on imperfections in the geological record he complained that the complete lack of fossil intermediates in all geological records was perhaps, quote, "the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." In other words, he was at least honest enough to admit that the thing didn't make any sense.
Darwin wrote that he was deeply conscious of his own ignorance. In his personal letters he wrote about having awful misgivings of having “deluded myself and devoted myself to a fantasy.” But Darwin was determined to escape from a personal God at all costs. He said that, "I am determined to escape from design and a personal God at all costs." To the end of his life he was in that war, trying as he would to escape from God, he never really could. And finally his emotional life atrophied under the strain of the battle, religious feelings disappeared and with it everything else; the world became cold and dead. And in the end Darwin apparently received a taste of his own medicine. He had deprived the universe of God and all meaning and so he had deprived himself of all meaning.
James Moore wrote a biography of Darwin called The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. In some of his letters Darwin referred to his theory, quote, as “the devil's gospel." And even after he had sort of won the day because he did liberate men from the God of the Bible, he did free people to enjoy their sin without the thought of a judge, he had begun to win the battle, but his psychological suffering was so profound, his physical symptoms continued. He was literally not only killing God for himself but killing God for everybody else. One writer says, "His life was one long attempt to escape from the church and to escape from God. It is this that explains so much that would otherwise be incongruous in his life and character."
No, let's just get the record straight here. This is all about getting rid of God, the God of the Bible, the authority of Scripture with its moral implications. And even Christian people who want to go to Genesis, I don't believe have the liberty to tell us that Genesis 1 doesn't mean what it says. Why would we want to join forces with those whose effort is directly against the authority of the God of Scripture? Just, I just need to put that in perspective.
Now, for a few minutes I want to get a little philosophical. I think you'll enjoy this. In the end the evolutionist, the naturalistic evolutionist says, and even the theistic evolutionist says, that things happen by chance, chance. We get rid of the God of the Bible, we get rid of the God of Genesis, we get rid of the Creator and then we've got chance. Now this is a pretty interesting thing to think about. I have read this word chance over and over and over again in reading the writings of these people. And the myth that drives the whole evolutionary process, this entire unbiblical, irrational, immoral idea of evolution, the myth that drives it is the myth of chance, chance. Chance is the cause. In contemporary science, chance takes on new meaning. They don't want God to be the cause, but something has to be the cause so the cause is chance.
Now when I say the word chance we take it back to its etymology; it once was largely restricted to describing mathematical probability. Where we could say, "Well, if I go over there there's a chance I might see her because she may be coming this way." Or, "If I put this money in this account there's a chance this might happen and I'll make this amount of money." "If I, if I move into that community and begin to meet some people there's a chance there that I might develop some interest in my business." There's a mathematical probability. That's what chance basically used to mean. And then it kind of got broadened a little bit and it took on broader application to include any unpredictable event, any sort of probability no matter how remote or any coincidence no matter how seemingly impossible. But let me tell you about chance. Chance doesn't exist. It’s nothing, it's nothing. Chance is a word used to explain something else. But chance isn't anything. It's not a force. Chance doesn't make anything happen. Chance doesn't exist. It's only a way to explain something else. Chance didn't make you meet that person; you were going there when she was going there, that's why you met her. Chance didn't have anything to do with it because chance doesn't exist. It's nothing. But in modern evolution, it’s been transformed into a force of causal power. It's been elevated from being nothing to being everything. Chance makes things happen. Chance is the myth that serves to undergird the chaos view of reality.
I mean, this is so fraught with problems from a rational or philosophical viewpoint you hardly know where to begin. How do you get the initial matter upon which chance operates? Where does that come? You would have to say, "Well, chance made it appear." You know what? This sounds so ridiculous and yet this is the undergirding philosophy behind evolution. It is completely incoherent and irrational. But the new evolutionary paradigm is chance. And it's the opposite of logic. You see, when you abandon logic and logic says, "Oh, there's a universe. Hmm. Somebody made it." What else would logic say? "There's a building, somebody made it. There's a piano, somebody made it. There's a universe, more complex than a building, infinitely more complex than a piano, somebody, somebody who is very, very powerful and very, very intelligent made it." You say, "No, no, chance made it." Listen folks, that's rational suicide, that's not logical. Logic abandoned leaves you with myth.
And the enemies of mythology, the enemies of mythology are empirical data and God-given reason. So in order to be an evolutionist and believe that chance makes things happen, you have to do two things: reject the empirical data, and be irrational. But if you love your sin enough, you'll do it. You see, if you can just eliminate the empirical data, the evidence, and get rid of God-given logic, and those two things are the essence of pure science, if you can get rid of those things then mythology runs wild. And as one writer said, "Chance is the new soft pillow for science to lie down on." Arthur Koestler said, "As long as chance rules, God is an anachronism." If chance rules, God can't rule. Chance deposes God. The very existence of chance rips God from His sovereign throne. If chance as a force exists even in the frailest form, God is ungoded...if there's such a word. The two are mutually exclusive. Either there is a God who created the universe, who sovereignly rules and sovereignly controls, or there's not. If chance exists, it destroys God's sovereignty. If God is not sovereign, then He's not God. If He's not God, then there is no God and chance rules. That's frightening.
But chance is not a force. Chance can't make anything happen. Chance isn't anything, it doesn't exist. It has no power to do anything because it isn't anything. It’s impotent because it's nothing. It has no power because it doesn't exist. Are you getting it? Since chance doesn't exist, it can't produce anything. It can't be the cause of any effect. Yet modern evolutionists talk about chance all the time. It's just nothing but hocus-pocus. It's the oldest and most inviolable law of science, logic and reason. Any of you who ever took debate or studied any of the rational philosophers remember the statement: Ex nihilo, nihil fit; out of nothing, nothing comes. And chance is nothing. This is rational suicide.
So when scientists attribute instrumental power to chance, listen carefully, they have left the domain of reason, they have left the domain of science. They have turned to pulling rabbits out of hats. They have turned to fantasy. And then all scientific investigation becomes chaotic and absurd because it can't really yield what it should yield because they won't allow it to. Today the absurdity of evolution goes largely unchallenged and all these universities and colleges, they keep pounding on this stuff. Every time I pick up a Newsweek or a Time magazine, I get another one of these wild kind of evolutionary articles, particularly because I read National Geographic I'm exposed to that as well, and they keep trying to make us believe that chance exists as a force. That everything by chance spontaneously generated. Nobel laureate George Wald, brilliant man, I quote him, "One has only to wait, time itself performs the miracles. Given so much time the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable actually certain," end quote. What in the world is that? That is just double talk. That is absolutely meaningless. Self-creation is absurd no matter how much time because chance does not exist. It doesn't exist.
There's no explanation of the universe without God. I'll give you one little scientific illustration. Have you ever heard of quantum theory? Well, you've heard about a quantum leap. People say, "Somebody made a quantum leap." Let me tell you where that comes from. Quantum theory goes back to a scientist, Max Planck, who in 1900 presented the theory that energy comes in discreet units called quanta. I'm not going to take you too deep here because I can't go too deep myself. But energy can be broken down into units and he said these units, these units, identifiable units, are called quanta. In 1927 Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, found that when a photon strikes an atom it boosts an electron into a higher orbit. And when that occurs, the electron moves from the lower to the upper orbit, listen to this, simultaneously, without having traversed the intervening space. That's a quantum leap. Let me say that again. When a photon hits an atom it boosts an electron to a higher orbit from the lower orbit simultaneously, but it never traverses the space in between. What happens is the electron ceases to exist at one point and simultaneously comes into existence at the other point. This is the famous quantum leap. It goes out of existence and comes into existence simultaneously. All the time, all the time, in all the atoms, all the time, through all of created history it keeps doing that. By chance? To say it's a quantum leap doesn't explain it. There's only one thing that explains it and that is the ongoing creative power of God. He sustains the universe and its creation by keeping up all the necessary creative acts, even down to the level of an electron in an atom. He upholds all things, Hebrews 1, by the Word of His power.
I'm going to give you one more closing thought here. Well, I'll tell you what, I'll save it till next time. I'll save it till next time because I don't want to get into it and then leave you somewhere between the lower and the upper. Now, I mean, I realize that some of this stuff is stretching your brain, and that's good, that's okay. We're going to do this one more time next Sunday night and then I'm going to explain how this has implications in the gospel and then we'll get into the actual text of the book of Genesis. Join me in prayer.
Father, as we contemplate these thoughts, as we endeavor to use the minds that You've given us, which are evidence of the image of God in which we were made, we, we just pray that You would guide us so that we might understand just exactly how we are to think, by using the Scripture and the reason that You've given to us. Protect us from any thought or any belief that would equivocate with Scripture, that would deny its straightforward statements. Protect us from any absurdity, any irrationality, any failure to use the minds that You've given us. And by Your Holy Spirit, prompt us so that we might think as we ought to think. We grieve, O God, that man has sought to destroy you, sought to eliminate You as the Creator. Such a dishonor to You is tragic, such a disgrace; to those who do it is tragic and has eternal consequences and we grieve over the lostness of those who believe in evolution. We grieve over the meaninglessness, the emptiness of life that belongs to those who want to live any way they would like to live without guilt, without responsibility, without having to answer to a judge, without having a standard established for them. We grieve, Lord, because the consequence of such life, the consequence of such sin is eternal damnation. We would have no part with those who deny the Word, we would have no part with those who equivocate on Scripture. But we want to take Your Word as You have given it to us, believing that what You said is exactly what You meant to say. And so, lead us, Father, as we contemplate these things, to have a strong and a firm foundation in Your Word, to know You as our great Creator as well as our Redeemer. We'll thank You for the opportunity to know You better as our Creator and thus worship You as You should be worshiped. And we pray in Christ's name. Amen.
(For audio and original location of message please follow this link www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/90-208 )
I'm going to begin a new series that I've been sort of working on for a long time, a series on origins. And I don't know how long this series is going to run exactly. I do know that I'm going to spend a little time on an introduction and then we're going to launch right into Genesis 1:1 and take the whole account of creation verse by verse, phrase by phrase and let the Lord unfold its significance to us.
Now I want to begin with a few sort of disclaimers, if I can, a few things that maybe you need to keep in mind. First of all, I'm not a scientist. I don't claim to be a scientist. Any teacher in my past whoever taught me science could stand up and testify to that fact. I am a theologian, I am a Bible teacher, I am a part-time philosopher; but I am not a scientist. And so, when it comes to those matters which are scientific, I have to basically move to somebody else and trust them as an authority where I am not an authority. This will not largely be a scientific study; in fact that's not our intent at all. But it will be a study of the Scripture, a study of theology with a little bit of rationality thrown into it.
Secondly, I will not answer every question tonight. I know that what I don't say tonight is going to create questions. I will get to those questions as we move through the text of Scripture. I will deal with things like theistic evolution. I will deal with things like day-age theory, deal with viewpoints like progressive creationism as we go along, but we'll not be able to deal with all of that tonight. And I really do believe that you're going to find the answer to your questions about origins primarily from the text of Scripture. The issues such as progressive creationism, theistic evolution are really answered by the text itself. And so we're going to find our way through the text of Genesis, chapter 1 into chapter 2, and therein we're going to secure the great answers to the questions that arise about origins.
But to begin with tonight I, I want to address the concept, I want to sort of set the picture in your mind as to the debate. This is critical for, for all of us, and it is most critical for those who are students. If you are a junior high student, if you are a high school student, if you are a college or university student in any other than a distinctively Christian school, you are going to be given this indoctrination about evolution as if it were fact and you're going to find that what I'm going to be saying to you is contrary to just about everything you hear. We'll set the stage for that contrast tonight, and then we'll get into the text of Scripture and see how Scripture itself addresses popular evolutionary theory.
It is also important to all of us because understanding origins in the book of Genesis is foundational to the rest of the Bible. If Genesis, chapter 1 and chapter 2 don't tell us the truth, then why should we believe anything else in the Bible? If it says in the New Testament that the Creator is our Redeemer, but
God is not the Creator, then maybe He's not the Redeemer either. If it tells us in 2 Peter that God Himself will bring about an instantaneous dissolution of the entire universe as we know it, that God in a moment will uncreate everything, then that has tremendous bearing upon His power to create. The same One who with a word can uncreate the universe is capable of creating it as quickly as He desires.
So what we believe about creation, what we believe about Genesis has implications all the way to the end of Scripture, implications with regard to the veracity and truthfulness of Scripture, implications as to the gospel, and implications as to the end of human history, all wrapped up in how we understand origins in the book of Genesis. The matter of origins then is absolutely critical to all human thinking. It becomes critical to how we conduct our lives as human beings. Without an understanding of origins, without a right understanding of origins, there is no way to comprehend ourselves. There is no way to understand humanity, as to the purpose of our existence, and as to our destiny. If we cannot believe what Genesis says about origins, we are lost as to our purpose and our destiny. Whether this world and its life as we know it evolved by chance, without a cause, or was created by God, has immense comprehensive implications for all of human life.
Now there basically are only two options. You can either believe what Genesis says or not. And that is no over simplification. Frankly, believing in a supernatural, creative God who made everything is the only possible rational explanation for the universe, for life, for purpose and for destiny. Now the divine equation given in the Bible, in contrast to nobody times nothing equals everything, the divine equation is found in Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." I don't know how it could be said any more simply or more straightforwardly than that. Either you believe God did create the heavens and the earth or you believe He did not. Really those are the only two valid options you have. And if you believe that God did create the heavens and the earth, then you are left with the only record of that creation, and that's Genesis 1, and you are bound to accept the text of Genesis 1 as the only appropriate and accurate description of that creative act.
So again, I say you're left really with two choices. You either believe Genesis or you don't. You either believe the Genesis account that God created the heavens and the earth, or you believe they somehow evolved out of random chance. Looking at the account of Genesis 1:1 for just a brief moment; the words in that first verse are quite remarkable. They are indicative of the incredible mind of God. God says in that first verse everything that could have been said about creation and He says it in such few terms. The statement is precise and concise almost beyond human composition.
A well-known scientist, a very decorated scientist named Herbert Spencer, died in 1903. In his scientific career he had become noted for one great discovery; it was a categorical contribution that he made. He discovered that all reality, all reality, all that exists in the universe can be contained in five categories: time, force, action, space and matter. Herbert Spencer said everything that exists, exists in one of those categories: time, force, action, space and matter. Nothing exists outside of those categories. That was a very astute discovery and didn't come until the nineteenth century. Now think about that. Spencer even listed them in that order: time, force, action, space and matter. That is a logical sequence. And then with that in your mind, listen to Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning," that's time. "God," that's force. "Created," that's action. "The heavens," that's space. "And the earth," that's matter. In the first verse of the Bible God said plainly what man didn't catalog until the nineteenth century. Everything that could be said about everything that exists is said in that first verse. Now either you believe that or you don't. You either believe that that verse is accurate and God is the force or you believe that God is not the force that created everything. And then you're left with chance or randomness or coincidence.
This is more than just a secondary issue. Someone wrote a letter to the president of the Promise Keepers, and I'm not particularly singling them out except that the illustration is so clear because of the response they wrote, asking them about their stand on the creation issue. The assistant to the president responded with this statement, quote: "You need to know that the ministry of Promise Keepers takes no stand on issues like this. In fact we specifically try to avoid such debates. Our efforts are designed to bring men together based on the historically essential doctrines of orthodox Christianity as represented by our Statement of Faith, or to focus on things that unite the Body of Christ, instead of those which tend to divide it. Since different churches and individual Christians hold varying views about creation, it is one of those things we believe falls under the category of secondary doctrines, secondary doctrines such as spiritual gifts, eternal security and the rapture, etc. In short, when it comes to subjects like creation, we believe Christians need to extend grace to each other as summed up in the statement, ‘In essentials unity and non-essentials liberty and all things charity,’" end quote.
Now that's a pretty aggressive statement about the secondary nature of a belief in the Genesis account, isn't it? It doesn't address the issue that if you don't believe the book of Genesis, you're not believing the Bible. I'm not trying to throw aspersions on that organization but simply to say that this is what is generally the view of the majority of Christian people. Whether the world was created by God or evolved by chance without cause has been debated a long time. It's been debated since Darwin. But the debate comes down to this, either you believe the Bible or you don't. Either you believe the book of Genesis or you don't. And if you don't believe the book of Genesis, then what do you believe? Well in most cases you believe in naturalistic evolution. There would be some who would be theistic evolutionists who would say well God sort of launched it all, but then evolution took over and they would deny that the Genesis account is accurate in saying that God created in six, twenty-four-hour days. Progressive creationists would essentially say the same thing, that creation is not, did not occur as Genesis says, but rather it was over long ages and God sort of progressively injecting Himself into the process did some creative work alongside the evolutionary process.
Those views, theistic evolution, progressive creationism, also deny the straightforward text of the book of Genesis. So I say again, you either believe Genesis or you don't. If you don't, you have some options. You can be a theistic evolutionist or you can be a naturalistic evolutionist. Among Christians there are some who are theistic evolutionists but among those who make up the unbelieving world they are naturalistic evolutionists. And so they are left with the incredible notion that nobody times nothing equals everything.
Douglas Kelly, who has written on this subject with great insight says, "There is no doubt that the biblical vision of man as God's creature whom He made in His own image has had the most powerful effect on human dignity, on liberty, on the expansion of the rights of the individual, on political systems, on the development of medicine, on every other area of culture. How different,” he writes, “from the humanistic viewpoint of man as merely an evolved creature, not made in God's image because there is no God. Such a premise has enabled the Marxist totalitarian states conveniently to liquidate millions of their citizens because of the assumption that there is no transcendent person in whose image those citizens are created, no being to give those citizens a dignity and a right to exist beyond what the state determines," end quote.
This point has been explored at length by Baron Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn of Austria, who may be the century's greatest scholar on questions of liberty and totalitarianism. He has written a very important book called Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, which deals with those issues. And in it he shows that apart from the belief that mankind is created in the image of a transcendent God, the divinely derived dignity and liberty of human beings completely disappears. He says, "For the genuine materialists there is no fundamental, only a gradual evolutionary difference between a man and a pest, a noxious insect," end quote. And his conclusion is: The issue is between man created in the image of God and the termite in human form. He's right. We have two options. Either we evolved out of the slime and can be explained only in a materialistic sense, meaning that we are made of nothing but the material, or we have been created by God and made in His image in a heavenly pattern. And the debate is not just biological, that's what I'm trying to say, it's not just biological, it's moral and it's spiritual. The debate gets to questions about man's dignity, about man's nature in the image of the heavenly pattern, the image of God. It asks questions about the issue of control, who is sovereign in the universe, who is in control. It asks: Is there a universal judge? Is there a universal moral law? Is there a lawgiver? Are people to live according to God's standard? Will there be a final assessment of how men and women live? Is there a final judgment?
You see, these are the questions that evolution was invented to avoid. Evolution was invented to kill the God of the Bible, not because evolutionists and materialists and naturalists didn't like God as creator, but because they didn't want God as judge. Evolution was invented in order to kill the God of the Bible, to eliminate the lawgiver, to eliminate the inviolability of His law, the binding standard for human thought and conduct. Evolution was invented to do away from universal morality and universal guilt and universal accountability. Evolution was invented to eliminate the judge and leave people free to do whatever they want without guilt and without consequences.
I mean, if we just kind of summed up these two alternatives, the materialistic view would say: Ultimate reality is impersonal matter. No God exists.
The Christian view says: Ultimate reality is an infinite, personal, loving God.
The materialistic view says: The universe is created by chance, without any ultimate purpose.
The Christian view says: The universe was lovingly created by God for a specific purpose.
The materialistic view says: Man is the product of impersonal time, plus chance, plus matter. As a result, no man has eternal value or dignity or any meaning other than that which is subjectively derived.
The Christian view says: Man was created by God in His image and is loved by God. Because of this all men are endowed with eternal value and dignity. Their value is not derived ultimately from themselves, but from the source transcending themselves; God Himself.
The materialistic view of morality says: Morality is defined by every individual according to his own views and interests. Morality is ultimately relative because every person is the final authority for his own views.
The Christian view says: Morality is defined by God and immutable because it is based on God's unchanging, holy character.
The materialistic view says about the afterlife: The afterlife brings eternal annihilation, or personal extinction, for everyone.
The Christian view says: The afterlife involves either eternal life with God or eternal separation from Him; either the glories of heaven, or the terrors of hell.
Now, folks, let me tell you something. Which of those views you take is not a secondary issue; it is a primary issue, not only for science but for theology. How in the world can Christianity view those as secondary issues? This is the foundation of all truth. Francis Schaeffer, the apologist, said if he had an hour to spend with a person on an airplane, a person who didn't know the Lord, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes talking about man being created in the image of God, and the last five minutes on the presentation of the gospel of salvation that could restore man to that original intended image. Christianity does not begin with accepting Jesus Christ as Savior. Christianity begins in Genesis 1:1. God created the heavens and the earth for a purpose and destiny which He Himself had determined. Understanding and believing the doctrine of creation in the book of Genesis is foundational in accepting, listen carefully, that the Holy Bible is to be taken seriously when it speaks to the real world.
People say, "Well, the book of Genesis is myth and legend and fantasy and allegory and tradition, doesn't really speak about real facts to the real world." Yes it does. The Word of God is to be taken seriously when it speaks to the real world on any and every subject. If we avoid dealing with what the Bible says about the creation of the material universe, then there is a tendency for our religion to be disconnected from the real world. There's a tendency to put Scripture into some mystical category, to put Christianity into some stained glass closet, as Douglas Kelly puts it, that doesn't impact the space-time world.
You start out with the book of Genesis, tampering with the literal nature of that text and you have created a mystical approach to Scripture at the very launch point. The Scottish theologian James Denney made this point in the late 1890s. I quote, "The separation of the religious and the scientific means, in the end, the separation of the religious and the true, and this means religion dies among true men." You can't pick up the book of Genesis, take chapter 1 and say this is a fairy story, this is not real history, this is not reality, this does not reflect a real understanding of the real world in real space and real time, without severe implications to the rest of the message of Scripture. The doctrine of creation as identified in the book of Genesis is foundational. It is where God starts His story. And you can't change the beginning without impacting the rest of the story and the ending. In the Bible, God speaks, and He speaks in Genesis 1:1 and says He created the heavens and the earth. He is the one who spoke in Genesis 1:1 and who speaks right through Scripture till its very end.
When you tamper with Genesis 1 you are tampering with the Word of the living God and you are taking the divine account of real creation in real space and real time and you're saying, it is not accurate, it is not legitimate, it is not the truth. That is a serious assault. And it loosens up the Scripture from reality and divorces religion, the true religion, from reality. That is severe. So evolution would love to do that. It would love to ungod God, it would love to strip Scripture of its veracity. It wants to reject God as lawgiver, judge, Savior. It wants to destroy the dignity of man as created in the image of God. And it gets pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? According to evolution man is quantitatively better than the animals. That is, he has some features that animals don't have, but qualitatively he's not better. He has a bigger brain quantitatively but qualitatively he was not created in God's image. Therefore it is ethically wrong to violate the rights of other animals who are our literal brothers, evolutionarily speaking.
And we hear all that today, don't we, all the time? That infamous organization called PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, their national director, Ingrid Newkirk, made this famous statement, "A rat is a pig is a boy,” “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." No difference. All higher forms of life (a rat being a higher form of life in her view) are to be considered equal. We have a funny organization called The Church of Euthanasia, believes that animal rights are superior to human rights. A representative from that organization, he told a TV audience, a national audience, and I quote: "If we're going to kill off species, let's kill humanity first because humans are only a minor species with a minor role to play in the overall diversity of nature," end quote.
And you've read it all. I've read animal rights groups that maintain eating meat is murder. Man is the tyrant species. Killing cows is murder. And there was one who said that killing chickens is equal to the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews. This kind of idiocy comes because these people really do believe that man is simply the end of an evolutionary series of chance occurrences that has no purpose and has no destiny and is not made in the image of God. He is not bearing any dignity beyond any other along the line in that evolutionary process.
And you know what? If evolution is true, you can't argue with them. We're just animals. We have just evolved. And their argument may be pretty valid. All of these animal rights advocates, writes Marvin Lubenow, who have expressed themselves publicly on the subject, are evolutionists. According to evolution it's merely the luck of the draw that man has evolved the big brain. Had certain mutations not happened in our ancestors and instead happened in the ancestors of the chimpanzees we might be where they are, in the zoo, and they might be where we are. Hence, he writes, "I have no ethical right to use my superiority, achieved purely by chance, to violate the rights of other animals, who through no fault of their own didn't evolve the same abilities." If man, as he said, is only an animal, an accident of nature, a collection of chance mutations, then where is his meaning? Where is his dignity? Where is his absolute value? What is his purpose? Obviously he has none.
Now what evolution basically says is that over time, by chance, matter evolved into the entire universe. Jacques Monod won the, this is unthinkable, the Nobel Prize and in his book Chance and Necessity he says this, "Man is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged by chance." That's the Nobel-winning biologist. Chance alone is the source of every innovation. Chance alone is the source of all creation in the biosphere. He writes, "Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution." So Monod says it's just chance.
Noted evolutionist J.W. Burrow writes in his introduction to The Origin of Species, "Nature, according to Darwin, was the product of blind chance and a blind struggle and man, a lonely intelligent mutation, scrambling with the brutes for his sustenance. To some the sense of loss was irrevocable. It was as if an umbilical cord had been cut and men found themselves part of a cold, passionless universe. Unlike nature as conceived by the Greeks, the enlightenment, and the rationalist Christian tradition, Darwinian nature held no clues for human conduct and no answers to human moral dilemmas," end quote. I mean, man was just cut loose from any meaning whatsoever. He is a lonely, intelligent mutation, produced out of chance. He is protoplasm waiting to become manure. Now, that is a far cry from being created in the image of God. This evolutionary idea not only strips man of his dignity and his meaning; this is more than just stupid, it is more than irrational, it is more than depressing, it is more than humiliating, it is more even than immoral. This evolutionary idea is deadly. And in our history, our recent history in western civilization, no one demonstrated the deadly character of this evolutionary idea better than Adolf Hitler and he was followed up by Joseph Stalin and all of those who massacred masses of people, millions of people, and committed genocide. At the bottom, at the base of their belief system and philosophy, was evolution.
For example, Hitler saw in evolutionary theory the scientific justification for his personal view just the same as social Darwinists of the nineteenth century did for their terrible abuses. There's no question that evolution was behind all Nazi thought from beginning to the end. And yet few people were aware of that, and Hitler even sucked up a quasi-Christian commitment from the church of the state of his day. Erich Fromm wrote, "The religion of social Darwinism belongs to the most dangerous elements within the thoughts of the last century. It aids the propagation of ruthless national and racial egoism by establishing it as a moral norm. If Hitler believed in anything at all, then it was in the laws of evolution, which justified and sanctified his actions and especially his cruelties." How does that work? Evolution is the survival of—what?—the fittest. Hitler was just playing out the evolutionary role. He was the fittest and so he massacred everybody else, under the evolutionary thesis that he was perpetuating the strongest and he was aiding in the development of the super race. That was all borne out of evolutionary theory. In the biological theory of Darwin, Hitler found his most powerful weapon against traditional, against religious and Christian values. He singled out the idea of biological evolution as the greatest weapon he had against traditional religion, and he repeatedly condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution. He hated Christianity. In fact he said, and I quote Hitler, "I regard Christianity as the most fatal, seductive lie that ever existed." And Mein Kampf, My Struggle, was basically Hitler's evolutionary theory working its way out politically, and was the justification for the destruction of the masses who threatened the continued evolution of the super race. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, "He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature. Nature likes bastards only a little." And finally he said, "All that is not of pure race in this world is trash." And so he destroyed the Jews, he destroyed the blacks, he destroyed the Gypsies and he was aiding natural selection and fulfilling the evolutionary biological dream. The head of the Nazi Labor Front said that Hitler's massacres expressed, and I quote, "The highest and best in manhood." Julian Huxley, a biologist and evolutionist, wrote Essays of a Humanist in 1964, said, "Evolution is the most powerful, most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth." And you know what? He's right. It is the single, greatest, satanic lie the world has ever known because it eliminates the need for a creator. People can avoid God altogether, particularly the biblical God.
Darwin didn't care if you wanted to worship another god. I don't think Hitler cared if you wanted to worship another god, just not the God of the Bible, just not the God who created. When Darwin first published his Origin of Species it was largely rejected by the scientific world of his day because they universally held to a belief in divine creation. There was no other rational explanation: You have effect; you have to have a cause. When he wrote Origin of Species, of course it had critical reviews from the very outset. The scientific world was almost wholly against it. In later years, Thomas Huxley, speaking of the year 1860, described the situation by saying, and I quote, "The supporters of Mr. Darwin's views were numerically extremely insignificant. There is not the slightest doubt that if a general council of the church scientific had been held at that time, we should have been condemned by an overwhelming majority."
It was a hard sell. Even Darwin had a hard time with it. If you read anything of Darwin's you find he's continually filling all his writings with tremendous doubts. For example, he says in the sixth chapter of his Origin of Species, "Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered." In his chapter on instinct he conceded, “Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.” And to think, he said, that the eye could evolve “by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." In his chapter on imperfections in the geological record he complained that the complete lack of fossil intermediates in all geological records was perhaps, quote, "the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." In other words, he was at least honest enough to admit that the thing didn't make any sense.
Darwin wrote that he was deeply conscious of his own ignorance. In his personal letters he wrote about having awful misgivings of having “deluded myself and devoted myself to a fantasy.” But Darwin was determined to escape from a personal God at all costs. He said that, "I am determined to escape from design and a personal God at all costs." To the end of his life he was in that war, trying as he would to escape from God, he never really could. And finally his emotional life atrophied under the strain of the battle, religious feelings disappeared and with it everything else; the world became cold and dead. And in the end Darwin apparently received a taste of his own medicine. He had deprived the universe of God and all meaning and so he had deprived himself of all meaning.
James Moore wrote a biography of Darwin called The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. In some of his letters Darwin referred to his theory, quote, as “the devil's gospel." And even after he had sort of won the day because he did liberate men from the God of the Bible, he did free people to enjoy their sin without the thought of a judge, he had begun to win the battle, but his psychological suffering was so profound, his physical symptoms continued. He was literally not only killing God for himself but killing God for everybody else. One writer says, "His life was one long attempt to escape from the church and to escape from God. It is this that explains so much that would otherwise be incongruous in his life and character."
No, let's just get the record straight here. This is all about getting rid of God, the God of the Bible, the authority of Scripture with its moral implications. And even Christian people who want to go to Genesis, I don't believe have the liberty to tell us that Genesis 1 doesn't mean what it says. Why would we want to join forces with those whose effort is directly against the authority of the God of Scripture? Just, I just need to put that in perspective.
Now, for a few minutes I want to get a little philosophical. I think you'll enjoy this. In the end the evolutionist, the naturalistic evolutionist says, and even the theistic evolutionist says, that things happen by chance, chance. We get rid of the God of the Bible, we get rid of the God of Genesis, we get rid of the Creator and then we've got chance. Now this is a pretty interesting thing to think about. I have read this word chance over and over and over again in reading the writings of these people. And the myth that drives the whole evolutionary process, this entire unbiblical, irrational, immoral idea of evolution, the myth that drives it is the myth of chance, chance. Chance is the cause. In contemporary science, chance takes on new meaning. They don't want God to be the cause, but something has to be the cause so the cause is chance.
Now when I say the word chance we take it back to its etymology; it once was largely restricted to describing mathematical probability. Where we could say, "Well, if I go over there there's a chance I might see her because she may be coming this way." Or, "If I put this money in this account there's a chance this might happen and I'll make this amount of money." "If I, if I move into that community and begin to meet some people there's a chance there that I might develop some interest in my business." There's a mathematical probability. That's what chance basically used to mean. And then it kind of got broadened a little bit and it took on broader application to include any unpredictable event, any sort of probability no matter how remote or any coincidence no matter how seemingly impossible. But let me tell you about chance. Chance doesn't exist. It’s nothing, it's nothing. Chance is a word used to explain something else. But chance isn't anything. It's not a force. Chance doesn't make anything happen. Chance doesn't exist. It's only a way to explain something else. Chance didn't make you meet that person; you were going there when she was going there, that's why you met her. Chance didn't have anything to do with it because chance doesn't exist. It's nothing. But in modern evolution, it’s been transformed into a force of causal power. It's been elevated from being nothing to being everything. Chance makes things happen. Chance is the myth that serves to undergird the chaos view of reality.
I mean, this is so fraught with problems from a rational or philosophical viewpoint you hardly know where to begin. How do you get the initial matter upon which chance operates? Where does that come? You would have to say, "Well, chance made it appear." You know what? This sounds so ridiculous and yet this is the undergirding philosophy behind evolution. It is completely incoherent and irrational. But the new evolutionary paradigm is chance. And it's the opposite of logic. You see, when you abandon logic and logic says, "Oh, there's a universe. Hmm. Somebody made it." What else would logic say? "There's a building, somebody made it. There's a piano, somebody made it. There's a universe, more complex than a building, infinitely more complex than a piano, somebody, somebody who is very, very powerful and very, very intelligent made it." You say, "No, no, chance made it." Listen folks, that's rational suicide, that's not logical. Logic abandoned leaves you with myth.
And the enemies of mythology, the enemies of mythology are empirical data and God-given reason. So in order to be an evolutionist and believe that chance makes things happen, you have to do two things: reject the empirical data, and be irrational. But if you love your sin enough, you'll do it. You see, if you can just eliminate the empirical data, the evidence, and get rid of God-given logic, and those two things are the essence of pure science, if you can get rid of those things then mythology runs wild. And as one writer said, "Chance is the new soft pillow for science to lie down on." Arthur Koestler said, "As long as chance rules, God is an anachronism." If chance rules, God can't rule. Chance deposes God. The very existence of chance rips God from His sovereign throne. If chance as a force exists even in the frailest form, God is ungoded...if there's such a word. The two are mutually exclusive. Either there is a God who created the universe, who sovereignly rules and sovereignly controls, or there's not. If chance exists, it destroys God's sovereignty. If God is not sovereign, then He's not God. If He's not God, then there is no God and chance rules. That's frightening.
But chance is not a force. Chance can't make anything happen. Chance isn't anything, it doesn't exist. It has no power to do anything because it isn't anything. It’s impotent because it's nothing. It has no power because it doesn't exist. Are you getting it? Since chance doesn't exist, it can't produce anything. It can't be the cause of any effect. Yet modern evolutionists talk about chance all the time. It's just nothing but hocus-pocus. It's the oldest and most inviolable law of science, logic and reason. Any of you who ever took debate or studied any of the rational philosophers remember the statement: Ex nihilo, nihil fit; out of nothing, nothing comes. And chance is nothing. This is rational suicide.
So when scientists attribute instrumental power to chance, listen carefully, they have left the domain of reason, they have left the domain of science. They have turned to pulling rabbits out of hats. They have turned to fantasy. And then all scientific investigation becomes chaotic and absurd because it can't really yield what it should yield because they won't allow it to. Today the absurdity of evolution goes largely unchallenged and all these universities and colleges, they keep pounding on this stuff. Every time I pick up a Newsweek or a Time magazine, I get another one of these wild kind of evolutionary articles, particularly because I read National Geographic I'm exposed to that as well, and they keep trying to make us believe that chance exists as a force. That everything by chance spontaneously generated. Nobel laureate George Wald, brilliant man, I quote him, "One has only to wait, time itself performs the miracles. Given so much time the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable actually certain," end quote. What in the world is that? That is just double talk. That is absolutely meaningless. Self-creation is absurd no matter how much time because chance does not exist. It doesn't exist.
There's no explanation of the universe without God. I'll give you one little scientific illustration. Have you ever heard of quantum theory? Well, you've heard about a quantum leap. People say, "Somebody made a quantum leap." Let me tell you where that comes from. Quantum theory goes back to a scientist, Max Planck, who in 1900 presented the theory that energy comes in discreet units called quanta. I'm not going to take you too deep here because I can't go too deep myself. But energy can be broken down into units and he said these units, these units, identifiable units, are called quanta. In 1927 Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, found that when a photon strikes an atom it boosts an electron into a higher orbit. And when that occurs, the electron moves from the lower to the upper orbit, listen to this, simultaneously, without having traversed the intervening space. That's a quantum leap. Let me say that again. When a photon hits an atom it boosts an electron to a higher orbit from the lower orbit simultaneously, but it never traverses the space in between. What happens is the electron ceases to exist at one point and simultaneously comes into existence at the other point. This is the famous quantum leap. It goes out of existence and comes into existence simultaneously. All the time, all the time, in all the atoms, all the time, through all of created history it keeps doing that. By chance? To say it's a quantum leap doesn't explain it. There's only one thing that explains it and that is the ongoing creative power of God. He sustains the universe and its creation by keeping up all the necessary creative acts, even down to the level of an electron in an atom. He upholds all things, Hebrews 1, by the Word of His power.
I'm going to give you one more closing thought here. Well, I'll tell you what, I'll save it till next time. I'll save it till next time because I don't want to get into it and then leave you somewhere between the lower and the upper. Now, I mean, I realize that some of this stuff is stretching your brain, and that's good, that's okay. We're going to do this one more time next Sunday night and then I'm going to explain how this has implications in the gospel and then we'll get into the actual text of the book of Genesis. Join me in prayer.
Father, as we contemplate these thoughts, as we endeavor to use the minds that You've given us, which are evidence of the image of God in which we were made, we, we just pray that You would guide us so that we might understand just exactly how we are to think, by using the Scripture and the reason that You've given to us. Protect us from any thought or any belief that would equivocate with Scripture, that would deny its straightforward statements. Protect us from any absurdity, any irrationality, any failure to use the minds that You've given us. And by Your Holy Spirit, prompt us so that we might think as we ought to think. We grieve, O God, that man has sought to destroy you, sought to eliminate You as the Creator. Such a dishonor to You is tragic, such a disgrace; to those who do it is tragic and has eternal consequences and we grieve over the lostness of those who believe in evolution. We grieve over the meaninglessness, the emptiness of life that belongs to those who want to live any way they would like to live without guilt, without responsibility, without having to answer to a judge, without having a standard established for them. We grieve, Lord, because the consequence of such life, the consequence of such sin is eternal damnation. We would have no part with those who deny the Word, we would have no part with those who equivocate on Scripture. But we want to take Your Word as You have given it to us, believing that what You said is exactly what You meant to say. And so, lead us, Father, as we contemplate these things, to have a strong and a firm foundation in Your Word, to know You as our great Creator as well as our Redeemer. We'll thank You for the opportunity to know You better as our Creator and thus worship You as You should be worshiped. And we pray in Christ's name. Amen.
