O r i o n C e n t e r
The Ozarks Not-For-Profit Organization
Story of Life
The concept of evolution runs contrary to our intuition and our ancestry. In an age of evolutionary thought, we are struck by how our common language bears the evidence of our ancestral beliefs. People might speak of death as “going to meet our maker” regardless of whether they personally believe in creation or an after-life. And we call living things “creatures”, a word derived from our innermost confidence that they are created things. Not evidence for creation, but evidence of our deepest beliefs about life on earth.
The Evolution Tale
According to the theory of evolution, life formed in the oceans perhaps four billion years ago from chemical reactions of molecules such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane. This origin of life was a one-time occurrence in the past that has never been observed in historical times. According to our present understanding, it happened in violation of the scientific law of biogenesis mentioned. It was a miracle, a supernatural event. Oops. My creationist bias just slipped in there.
Bible On Living Things
Genesis 1:21 “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
Genesis 1:26 “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Passages like these build a case for a Biblical model of biology.
Creation Theory of Life
Genesis describes God working on one environment at a time, a process that makes intuitive sense to anyone who has been a builder. He began with land plants because they could create their own food. Equally important is the role of plant life in oxygenating the planet’s atmosphere, a process on which animal life absolutely depends. Presumably the land plants colonized the oceans before the sea creatures are created on the fifth day so that the ocean water could be sufficiently oxygenated also. Genesis goes on to describe the creation of sea creatures and birds on the fifth day, and land animals and Man on the sixth day. Because the order of creation is so similar to what evolutionary scientists observe, it’s little wonder that they could be misled by the evidence to come up with a wrong story.
