Answer for essay question 22
A complete answer includes all of these points.
A minimal answer has the key points but not all the details of the sub-points:
1. Historical Reasons
"Progressive creationism" is not a modern interpretation developed to bring the Genesis record into harmony with modern science, but a very ancient concept devised to impose a theistic connotation upon the almost universal pagan evolutionary philosophies of antiquity. The primeval existence of the cosmos, with matter in some form present from eternity, was a dogma common to all ancient religions and philosophies, seeking as they were to function without an omnipotent, holy, eternal, personal, Creator God. Compromising monotheists, both in ancient Israel and in the early Christian church, repeatedly resorted to various allegorical interpretations of Scripture, involving some form of protracted creation, seeking to amalgamate creationist/redemptionist theology with pagan humanistic philosophy. Almost inevitably, however, such compromises ended in complete apostasy on the part of the compromisers.
In more modern times, Charles Darwin himself is a classic case in point. Starting out as a Biblical creationist, his decline began with the acceptance of Lyellian uniformitarianism, the geological ages and progressive creationism. He then soon became a full-fledged theistic evolutionist and eventually an atheist. The same steps were traveled by many other scientists of that period. In fact, science itself was originally (in the days of Newton and the other founders of modern science) committed to the strict Biblical chronology, then drifted into progressive creationism (after Cuvier, Lyell and others), then into a Darwinian theistic evolutionism, finally into total evolutionary naturalism.
The creationist revival of the first quarter of the 20th century was short-lived because it again tried to compromise with the day-age theory. This was Bryan's fatal mistake at the Scopes trial. The various early creationist organizations also failed to take a firm position on recent creationism and soon either died out. Multitudes of churches, schools and other Christian organizations, have followed the same dead-end path of compromise during the past century.
If it were not for the continued apathetic and compromising attitude of Christian theologians and other intellectuals on this vital doctrine of recent creation, evolutionary humanism would long since have been exposed and defeated. The world will never take the Biblical doctrine of the divine control and imminent consummation of all things very seriously until we ourselves take the Biblical doctrine of the recent creation of all things seriously. Neither in space nor in time is our great God of creation and consummation very "far from every one of us" (Acts 17:27).
(This paragraph was at the end of the Impact article. If you refer to these points but did not place them under Historical, that is OK.)
2. Theological Reasons
Even if one does not accept the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, the concept of a personal, omnipotent, omniscient, loving God is fatally flawed by the old-earth dogma. The very reason for postulating an ancient cosmos is to escape from God‹to push Him as far away in space and as far back in time as possible, hoping thereby eventually to escape His control altogether, letting Nature become "god."
An omniscient God could devise a better process of creation than the wasteful, inefficient trial-and-error of the geological ages. A loving merciful God would never be guilty of a creative process that would involve the suffering and death of multitudes of innocent animals, in the process of arriving at man millions of years later.
The God of the Bible would create everything complete and good, right from the start. The waste and cruelty in the world (both in the present groaning creation and in the fossilized past) represent an intrusion into His creation, not a mechanism for its accomplishment. God would never do a thing like that, except in judgment of sin!
3. Biblical Reasons
There is not the slightest indication anywhere in Scripture that the earth endured long ages before the creation of Adam and Eve. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself said: "But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female" (Mark 10:6). The crystal-clear statement of the Lord in the Ten Commandments completely precludes the day-age interpretation of the six days of creation: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work,...: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it" (Exodus 20:8-11). If God's six workdays were not the same kind of days as the six days of man's work week, then God is not able to say what He means. The language could hardly be more clear and explicit. Note also its further confirmation later in the chapter: "(The sabbath) is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He rested, and was refreshed. And He gave unto Moses, when He had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God" (Exodus 31:17, 18). All Scripture is divinely inspired, but this portion was divinely inscribed!
Still further, the record of the six days of creation concludes with the statement by God that everything in His creation was "very good" at the end of the six days (Genesis 1:31). There is no way this could be harmonized with a worldwide fossil graveyard a mile deep all around the earth. The Bible makes it plain, in fact, that death never even entered the world until Adam sinned (Romans 5:12; I Corinthians 5:21) and brought God's curse on the ground. (Genesis 3:17; Romans 8:20-22).
4. Scientific Reasons
Geologists are abandoning uniformitarianism, realizing that catastrophism provides the only realistic explanation for the great geological structures of the earth. They recognize that the earth's various geological features were each formed rapidly, in intense catastrophes of one kind or another.
There are many more geological processes and systems that yield a young age for the earth than the handful of radiometric methods that can be forced (through an extreme application of uniformitarianism) to yield an old age. The continued insistence on an ancient earth is purely because of the philosophic necessity to justify evolution and the pantheistic religion of eternal matter. | |
