six literal 24-hour days that created Eden and Adam and Eve. Adam
and Eve were the direct ancestors of all human beings. All fossils,
including so-called pre-human fossils, were created about 3,000 BC
during Noah's Flood, which submerged the entire surface of the Earth
and destroyed all air-breathing life that was not in the Ark (with the
possible exception of air-breathing mammalian sea life). Dinosaurs,
which did exist but are probably badly misinterpreted by geologists,
are only slightly older than the human race and were co-existent
with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Actually, the Biblical
patriarchs were contemporaries with all the creatures in the fossil
record, including trilobites, pterosaurs, giant ferns, nine-foot sea
scorpions, dragonflies two feet across, tyrannosaurs, and so forth.
The world before the Deluge had a very rich ecology.
Modern flood geology creation-science is a stern and radical
school. Its advocates have not hesitated to carry the war to their
theological rivals. The best known creation-science text (among
hundreds) is probably *The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and
its Scientific Implications* by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M.
Morris (1961). Much of this book's argumentative energy is devoted
to demolishing gap theory, and especially, the more popular and
therefore more pernicious day-age theory.
Whitcomb and Morris point out with devastating logic that
plants, created on Day Three, could hardly have been expected to
survive for "eons" without any daylight from the Sun, created on Day
Four. Nor could plants pollinate without bees, moths and butterflies
-- winged creatures that were products of Day Five.
Whitcomb and Morris marshal a great deal of internal Biblical
testimony for the everyday, non-metaphorical, entirely real-life
existence of Adam, Eve, Eden, and Noah's Flood. Jesus Christ Himself
refers to the reality of the Flood in Luke 17, and to the reality of
Adam, Eve, and Eden in Matthew 19.
Creationists have pointed out that without Adam, there is no
Fall; with no Fall, there is no Atonement for original sin; without
Atonement, there can be no Savior. To lack faith in the historical
existence and the crucial role of Adam, therefore, is necessarily to
lack faith in the historical existence and the crucial role of Jesus.
Taken on its own terms, this is a difficult piece of reasoning to refute,
and is typical of Creation-Science analysis.
To these creation-scientists, the Bible is very much all of a
piece. To begin pridefully picking and choosing within God's Word
about what one may or may not choose to believe is to risk an utter
collapse of faith that can only result in apostasy -- "going to the
apes." These scholars are utterly and soberly determined to believe
every word of the Bible, and to use their considerable intelligence to
prove that it is the literal truth about our world and our history as a
species.
Cynics might wonder if this activity were some kind of
elaborate joke, or perhaps a wicked attempt by clever men to garner
money and fame at the expense of gullible fundamentalist
supporters. Any serious study of the lives of prominent Creationists
establishes that this is simply not so. Creation scientists are not
poseurs or hypocrites. Many have spent many patient decades in
quite humble circumstances, often enduring public ridicule, yet still
working selflessly and doggedly in the service of their beliefs.
When they state, for instance, that evolution is inspired by Satan and
leads to pornography, homosexuality, and abortion, they are entirely
in earnest. They are describing what they consider to be clear and
evident facts of life.
Creation-science is not standard, orthodox, respectable science.
There is, and always has been, a lot of debate about what qualities an
orthodox and respectable scientific effort should possess. It can be
stated though that science should have at least two basic
requirements: (A) the scientist should be willing to follow the data
where it leads, rather than bending the evidence to fit some
preconceived rationale, and (B) explanations of phenomena should
not depend on unique or nonmaterial factors. It also helps a lot if
one's theories are falsifiable, reproducible by other researchers,
openly published and openly testable, and free of obvious internal
contradictions.
Creation-science does not fit that description at all. Creation-
science considers it sheer boneheaded prejudice to eliminate
miraculous, unique explanations of world events. After all, God, a
living and omnipotent Supreme Being, is perfectly capable of
directing mere human affairs into any direction He might please. To
simply eliminate divine intervention as an explanation for
phenomena, merely in order to suit the intellectual convenience of
mortal human beings, is not only arrogant and arbitrary, but absurd.
Science has accomplished great triumphs through the use of
purely naturalistic explanations. Over many centuries, hundreds of
scientists have realized that some questions can be successfully
investigated using naturalistic techniques. Questions that cannot be
answered in this way are not science, but instead are philosophy, art,
or theology. Scientists assume as a given that we live in a natural
universe that obeys natural laws.
It's conceivable that this assumption might not be the case.
The entire cognitive structure of science hinges on this assumption of
natural law, but it might not actually be true. It's interesting to
imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,
public, irrefutable violation of natural law.
Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of
evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight
Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly
had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were
henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found
ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would
violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,
the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a
few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would
simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We
thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through
slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the
fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our
species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an
instant all at once, and that was that.
This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to
the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained
through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike
the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see
scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles --
despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at
hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish -- queer
"explanations" that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there
naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere
illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always
had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once
had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.