Creation and Evolution

By Jacques Van Heerden

The first few chapters of Genesis, which give the biblical account of Creation, may well be the most underrated text in existence! It has been misunderstood by many either read very naively as a simplistic description, or otherwise regarded as a bit of of the patchwork employed by a final redactor of the text. The vast majority of scientists regard it as infra dig.
Ancient Hebrew thought patterns were quite different from our own. They were less interested in the process than in the origin -- the Creator in the Creation stories and the result. Symbolism, exemplified in numbers and colors, were tremendously important. Central to all their thinking was the worship of the LORD God Almighty and the tabernacle, which was later replaced by the temple. All this has a bearing on our interpretation of Genesis.
The best translation of Gen 1:2 is as follows:
Gen 1:2 The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep water. The Spirit of God was hovering over the water. (Gods Word)
The two terms, formless and empty, are the first key to understand what follows, namely a giving shape to that which had no form, and then filling the forms. The whole description speaks of a dynamic system, not a rigid structure cast in concrete.
What transpires in the end is that there is no conflict between Creation and Evolution, except that the naturalists natural selection was actually divine selection, not a random process, but a directed development to reach a very specific goal. The Christian believer should take comfort in the fact that our Bible is in perfect harmony with the best up-to-date science. The scientist should take note that the biblical account had to be inspired by God to relate something of real meaning to us through an author who had no proper knowledge of the universe and no understanding of evolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491888728

Jacques Van Heerden

Jacques van Heerden (b. 1941 in Pretoria, South Africa) has a PhD in Zoology (based on a few Triassic dinosaurs from South Africa), ten years experience as a fulltime paleontologist and 33 years teaching experience at tertiary level. The latter included reviews of the evolution of plants, invertebrates and vertebrates and the specific adaptations of animals to their environment. For the last 15 years he has been doing research on pseudoscorpions, tiny (2-8 mm) relatives of spiders and scorpions. He is also a committed Christian. He lives with his wife, Elza, in Louis Trichardt (=Makhado) in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. They have three sons (one in Britian, one in the USA and one in Cape Town), of whom two are married, and four grandchildren.

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© 2014 Jacques Van Heerden. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 01/29/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8872-8 (e)

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR

DEDICATION

CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2. INTRODUCTION TO GENESIS

CHAPTER 3. BIBLICAL COSMOGONY

CHAPTER 4. THE THREE SPHERES

CHAPTER 5. THE CREATION OF MAN

CHAPTER 6. THE EVOLUTION OF THE COSMOS

CHAPTER 7. ORGANIC EVOLUTION

CHAPTER 8. THE SYMBOLISM IN GENESIS 1:1 – 2:3

CHAPTER 9. THE TWO ACCOUNTS COMPARED

CHAPTER 10. THE CREATION OF MAN

CHAPTER 11. THE FALL

CHAPTER 12. SYMBOLISM IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDIX A. THE SONS OF GOD

APPENDIX B: NOAH’S FLOOD

APPENDIX C. THE AGES OF THE ANCIENTS

APPENDIX D. BAPTISM

FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR

In his commentary on Genesis John E. Hartley wrote as follows: ‘Acknowledging the purposes and the limitations of both scientific knowledge and spiritual truth is necessary for insightful interchange between these two approaches. Ultimately there can be no major conflict between the two approaches, for the world studied by science is the one created by God’ (p. 57).

The only way we can understand the Scriptures is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit: he is the Author behind the author and he can explain the Word to us. The same applies to the world of Science. Our God is also the Creator! We can look at Nature with the human mind and we will see ‘blood, sweat and tears’, or ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’, a mindless, godless, futile evolution that is bound to end in entropy. Conversely, we can regard our world as a garden prepared for us by a loving God and Father – if we pray to the Spirit to open our eyes.

My heart’s desire is that this book will prove to be an instrument that will tear down the walls of prejudice, ignorance and pride that we have built around ourselves with reference to this Creation-Evolution issue, that Christians will come to appreciate the fact that Science represents no threat to biblical truth, and that hard-nosed scientists will realize they are not quite as clever as God. We have here but two sides of the same story: Science tells us about the greatness of our God while Scripture informs us on how to meet that God and get to know him as our personal Father.

A very special thanks to my beloved wife, Elza, who has been a God-given support over almost fifty years, and to my late mother – their prayers made a wonderful difference in my life.

The Author

Louis Trichardt

Limpopo, South Africa

DEDICATION

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead (Rom 1:20)

Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. (1 Tim 1:17)

CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Conflicting Ideologies

This is the Atomic Age. It is the age of radio, television, cell phones, computers, space probes and moon landings. It is difficult to imagine a world without electricity, motor cars, trains and telephones – but they have been with us for less than 200 years! It is even harder to conceive of a more primitive world, with very little understanding of the cosmos and the plants and animals with whom we share this world. But that was the background of the Bible authors and, for a very long time, also that of all who read the Bible.

Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD) was a very noted Jewish philosopher who wrote commentaries on a number of Old Testament books, including Genesis. According to Eusebius¹, ‘it is on record that in his enthusiasm for the systems of Plato and Pythagoras he surpassed all his contemporaries.’ Plato, in turn, subscribed to the notion of a geo-centric universe and advocated the concept of ‘ideal forms’. The latter is echoed in Philo’s exegesis² of Gen 1:11, in which he says:

But in the first creation of the universe, as I have said already, God produced the whole race of trees out of the earth in full perfection, having their fruit not incomplete but in a state of entire ripeness, to be ready for the immediate and undelayed use and enjoyment of the animals which were about immediately to be born. Accordingly he commanded the earth to produce these things. And the earth, as though it had for a long time been pregnant and travailing, produced every sort of seed, and every sort of tree, and also of fruit, in unspeakable abundance; and not only were these produced fruits to be food for living animals, but enough also to serve as a preparation for the continuous production of similar fruits hereafter; covering substances consisting of seed, in which are the principles of all plants undistinguishable and invisible, but destined hereafter to become manifest and visible in the periodical maturity of the fruit. For God thought fit to endue nature with a long duration, making the races that he was creating immortal, and giving them a participation in eternity. On which account he led on and hastened the beginning towards the end, and caused the end to turn backwards to the beginning: for from plants comes fruit, as the end might come from the beginning; and from the fruit comes the seed, which again contains the plant within itself, so that a fresh beginning may come from the end.

This interpretation leaves no room for the development (evolution) of organisms.

Early Christian exegetes of the Bible, such as Augustine, looked at the current concept of the world in trying to understand what Scripture was saying about Creation. In his The City of God3 he expresses admiration for Plato’s philosophy. Philo also enjoyed a very high reputation among the Christian Fathers (much less among Jewish scholars). One can detect the Platonic idea of ‘ideal forms’ and Philo’s application of it in the tenor of his description of God’s creative work. He said that ‘[God] saw that what He had made was good, when He saw that it was good to make it.’

In this way two concepts were incorporated in the corpus of Christian writing and they have been the main cause of the conflict between Scripture and Science since the Renaissance. The one was the concept of the earth as the center of our solar system and of the Universe, which was based on Ptolemaic astronomy of the early Christian era. The second was the concept of the fixity of species based on the Platonic idea of ‘ideal forms’.

During the first 300 years of its existence the Christian Church was an underground institution and believers were severely persecuted. When Emperor Constantine was converted to the Christian faith in 312 AD, this changed. By the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Soon afterwards the distinction between Church and State had disappeared and the Bishop of Rome appropriated more and more religious and political power. Gradually doctrines and customs were added to the Christian faith: celibacy (at least in name) became a sign of dedication to God. Priests were to be addressed as ‘father’, i.e. a revered personage (contrary to Matt 23:9) and given the power to forgive sin (contrary to Mark 2:7, 10). Mary, the mother of Jesus, was declared to be an ‘eternal virgin’, despite the fact that Jesus had several brothers (Matt 12:46; 13:55). She became an intermediary to Christ and prayers should now be offered to her or others who had been elevated to sainthood by the Church, and not to God or Jesus Christ. This was blatant idolatry. In the Middle Ages the rich could even buy indulgences from the Church: you could pay in advance for your licentious behavior and receive absolution, so repentance was no longer a requirement for forgiveness – in violence of 1 John 1:9. The whole object was to detract from the perfect, all-sufficient sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, the absolute Redeemer between God the Father and man. Purgatory was introduced to encourage people to enrich the Church so that their loved ones would be released from this ‘halfway station’ to their eternal destiny, and their contributions may even buy his ticket to heaven.

During all this time the only copies of the Bible were very costly handwritten ones. We should be grateful to the monasteries for preserving and copying the Scriptures. Perhaps because of its idolatrous additions to the Bible the Church was not keen for laymen to obtain copies. The Church claimed to be the only body which could interpret the Bible properly. Moreover, it was only available in the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and a Latin translation, the Vulgate, so even if they had a copy, most people would not be able to read it.

It was because of these practices that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses (objections) to Roman Catholic doctrine to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. From the start the guiding principle of the Reformation was Sola Scriptura – ‘Scripture only’, or ‘back to basics’. John Wycliffe had earlier (1382 to 1395) published a translation into Middle English of Bible portions. Now Luther translated the Bible into German to make it accessible to his countrymen. Movable print had been developed in the fifteenth century and Gutenberg issued the first Latin version in 1454/5, therefore the new translations could now be printed and although still expensive, more people could afford to have a Bible.

Although the Reformation had purged Christian doctrine of its Roman Catholic accretions, Augustine was still regarded as an inspired authority, so the earth was still flat, in the center of the universe, and species (‘kinds’) could not change.

Not all developments around the interpretation of Scripture was as constructive as the Reformers would have wished. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes concluded that several passages in the Pentateuch, e.g. Gen 12:6, Num 21:14 and Deut 34:6, could not have been written by Moses because they refer to events after his death. This view was shared by a number of other critics, including Benedict Spinoza (1632-77). A century later Jean Astruc identified two terms associated with different parts of the text; these terms were Elohim and YHWH (Yahweh), which were used as the names for God. He also recognized the appearance of doublets (supposed duplications), such as the two accounts of the creation in the first and second chapters of Genesis. It was also suggested that the two accounts of Sarah and a foreign king (Gen 12 and Gen 20) are actually a retelling of the same event. Julius Wellhausen published his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1876-77) and with this the so-called Documentary Hypothesis on the origin of the Pentateuch was established. He argued that the Pentateuch was compiled from four different sources long after the time of Moses. This gave birth to the Critical School of Hermeneutics which, in its more extreme forms, rejected the divine inspiration of the Bible.

The Hebrews were mainly agriculturists and their philosophers concerned themselves with reading, understanding and writing commentaries on the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. Their understanding of the cosmos was based on what they could glean from the Holy Book, therefore the only ‘science’ they developed was concerned with livestock and cultivation. The best known of the Jewish philosophers was Philo of Alexandria who was more widely read and influenced particularly by Plato. Although Philo was of the orthodox Jewish faith, he was more highly regarded by the early Church Fathers, such as Augustine, than among orthodox Jews.

Greek culture was totally different. It was polytheistic and lacked any central doctrine of Creation. Their ‘religious corpus’ consisted of man-made myths, while the philosophers concerned themselves to try and understand the world around them. They produced good mathematicians, such as Euclid and Pythagoras, and tried to interpret the movement of the stars and planets. The first one who proposed a heliocentric solar system was Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC, but this was not generally accepted – in the absence of telescopes, a geocentric system made more sense to layman and scientist alike, as that is what it appears to be like.

Much of Greek science was speculative and was gradually transposed into mysticism and magic. This was the world the early Christian Church inherited. The lack of any serious scientific endeavor plunged the Western world into the Dark Ages. A good example of the kind of irrational thinking which resulted was the belief in Spontaneous Generation: if one should leave old garments in a humid place, it would spontaneously generate mice.

In 1453, when Copernicus proposed a heliocentric (Sun-centered) solar system after careful mathematical analysis, he not only challenged the astronomers of his day, but also the Church and its authority. Understandably then it met with fierce opposition from ecclesiastical circles. However, the heliocentric theory gained impetus with Galileo and Newton: it gradually transpired that the so-called ‘pillars of the Earth’ were nothing but interacting gravitational forces which keep the Earth in orbit around the Sun. It was also suggested that the Earth was a sphere, not a disc. (When the first satellite pictures of the Earth became available, it proved the sphericity of the Earth, but until the 1950’s there was still a very vocal Flat Earth Society which came up with all kinds of rather contorted explanations in defense of their opinion.)

Medicine was the next field to be freed from mysticism. Until William Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood in 1628, it was believed that the heart pumped air into the arteries and that the liver continually produced blood – but no one could account for what happened to the blood after reaching the tissues!⁴ Gradually, however, it became clear that the body of an animal (and a human) is constructed like a very sophisticated machine, and this opened the door to an empirical analysis of the body to better understand the interrelationships of the different organs and systems. The very advanced medical care we have today is a direct result of these analyses.

On the Science front Geology and Biology had meanwhile come to the fore. The Portuguese explorations of the globe since the 15th century had brought ‘strange’ faunas and floras to the attention of people in Europe. The first reports of marsupials in Australia were met with incredulity by people who were more inclined to believe in the existence of the mythical unicorn!

Early microscopy is especially associated with the name of the Dutchman, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723). He was the first to observe Protista (algae and protozoans), blood flow in capillaries, sperm cells and muscle fibers. This opened another world to enquiring minds. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (Hamlet, Act 1).

During the 19th century there were two outstanding scientific contributions which have a bearing on our interpretation of the Bible. The first was the publication, in 1830-33, of the three volumes of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In this he advanced the concept of uniformitarianism, viz. that the same geological processes which we observe today (such as erosion and deposition of sediments by wind and water) were responsible for the geological formations we observe in nature. Because such sedimentation is slow, it implies a great age – even millions of years – for the geological strata to be formed.

To the orthodox Christians this presented a serious challenge: after all, Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656) had calculated the date of creation to have been 4004 BC!

The second major scientific contribution was in the field of Biology, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Instead of species being separately created by God as hitherto understood, it was now proposed that they evolved from one another in a long chain of being from the most primitive (simple) organisms to the most advanced. The idea that man was not separately created ‘in the image of God’ but descended from an ape-like ancestor was especially abhorrent!

The publication of The Origin of Species proved to be a watershed both in Science and in Philosophy. It was not the first time that someone had proposed a naturalistic origin for life forms, but it proved to be much more acceptable to both scientists and many laymen because of the intrinsic logic of the mechanism of evolution. Paleontology was beginning to uncover hidden worlds of past ages. The gap between fishes and amphibians was now bridged with the lobe-finned fishes, the Crossopterygii⁵; that between reptiles and birds by the discovery of Archaeopteryx and the cynodont reptiles demonstrated the transition to modern mammals. The living monotremes of Australia are egg-laying mammals; like them, the cynodonts probably also practiced post-natal care of the young.⁶ What previously appeared to be discrete major taxonomic groups were no longer so very distinct.

Scientists now set about discovering the details of inheritance and natural selection while philosophers investigated the teleological implications. The conclusion seems to be that, if all the different species of plants and animals⁷ evolved through natural processes, there is no need for a Creator. A normative God is therefore eliminated, ‘sin’ is a relative concept developed by sick minds, and hence no Savior is needed. A new Social Gospel replaced the traditional, biblical one; it was even declared that ‘God is dead’. The end result of this liberal theology is fatalism, even nihilism: if God does exist, he does not care about this world and our Bible is nothing more than wishful thinking. Man is left Fatherless in a rather hostile world!

Different Viewpoints

We can identify four basic viewpoints in the Creation-Evolution debate, namely Orthodox Creationism, Progressive Creationism, Theistic Evolution and (atheistic) Evolutionism. (There have been other divisions, but this one is as good, or better, than any alternative.) If Orthodox Creationism was generally accepted till the 19th century, it would appear that Atheism has now replaced it. Bernard Ramm (p. 20) commented:

‘The spirit of the times is such as to make evangelical headway difficult. It is the popular belief that the Bible and science are at odds, that intelligence is on the side of unbelief, and that only childish or sentimental or uneducated people still trust the contents of the Bible. No longer do people respond to Scripture because it is the voice of God, but armed with the belief that science has broken the credibility of Scripture they cynically ask how we know the Bible is God’s voice.’

We are all so easily beguiled! We are indoctrinated by the mass media to live and think in a particular way; advertisements determine what we will buy or who we will vote for. We like to point fingers at Eve for her naivety – but we are not doing any better! We keep spinning around in the whirlpool because we have missed the basic tenet of scientific thought, i.e. to set aside any preconceived ideas and review the facts each on its own merits. And as regards the interpretation of the Bible, we either subscribe to the complete naivety of the hyper-orthodox or otherwise we regard ourselves as too sophisticated to believe in the Bible, which is relegated to the same dustbin as fairies and Father Christmas.

By definition Evolutionism is atheistic (or at best agnostic); it opposes any supernatural influence and maintains that our highly