This is but one of the titles of the eight essays offered to the reader in the 4th Volume of “A SYMPOSIUM ON CREATION”. It is a fascinating and varied fare fully maintaining the standard of useful information established in the first three volumes.
For example, the first essay we have selected, written by Robert E. D. Clark, begins with the question, “Is God a Cosmic Magician?” A fair question —, think about it! The point the writer is making is this — do people who are convinced believers in a Creator God, as the author of all forms of life, dismiss true scientific study as useless, a waste of time, because God is the super magican whose incredible acts of creation “cannot be explained in terms of the concepts of science no matter what assumptions are made”.
Such an approach, it is argued, spells the dead end of human enquiry. “If events are due to God, what more is there to be said?” Is is Job’s encounter with God that prompts such thinking?
So the essayist addresses himself to the question of the wisdom of seeking to explain God’s creative acts through scientific enquiry. Science can explain much, but there is a danger that our approach can appear to imply that what cannot be explained by science must be explained as an act of God. “God then, becomes a ‘god of the gaps’ and someday may be squeezed out as science advances its frontiers further into the unknown.”
The writer makes it plain that this is an entirely unsatisfactory way of looking at the matter. It can imply that, in all the many facets of nature that science is able to unravel, the hand of God is not acknowledged as being in evidence. Let us never forget that God created everything, he is not simply needed to fill in “gaps”.
A very valid point that scientific “agnostics” of today overlook is that the great bulk of the early scientists, the men who discovered the fundamental laws or principles upon which nature operates, were themselves ardent believers in a miraculous creation by an omnipotent Creator. It was with a real sense of awe that these men studied the wonders of the natural world. It was because they were convinced that there was a designer, they searched for unseen things which they reasoned could lay behind the visible things. of His creation. Clark gives several examples — one is Faraday who “reckoned that it was dishonouring to God to suppose that He created the Universe out of atoms and nothingness, but chiefly of nothingness or space”. This led him to- the view that space must be a created “thing” and therefore one possessed of properties. It was the search for these properties that led to the prediction of and finally to the discovery of radio waves.
Another essay tackles the subject of “INSTINCT.” Darwin admitted in the “Origin of the Species” that “instinct is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered . . . The problem at first appeared to me as insuperable, and actually fatal to my theory”. Evan Shute, Medical Director of the. Shute Institute in Canada, reveals just how abundant is the evidence of utterly marvellous acts of instinct in nature. A thorough study of this completely undermines the evolutionary concept and the puerile reasoning that is put up to explain instinct from an evolutionist’s point of view. Shute says, “Darwin was honest and accurate when he spoke of the doubts that instinct raised in his mind. I feel that here lies the invisible challenge to his theory. Let anyone try to imagine the evo. lution of an instinct.” He provides some 28 pages of facts on instinct, for which the evolutionist has no worthwhile explanation:
Yet another essay deals with Botany, giving an up-to-date report of the thinking of botanists who accept the Creationist, viewpoint. Another analyses blood and the differences between the blood of different animals and the blood of man. Another writer examines the assumption that all the earliest men were nomadic hunters who gradually settled into villages and a more domestic existence which finally led to the establishment of cities. He demonstrates that there is simply no evidence for this assertion, and that, in view of more recent evidence, it has been necessary to admit this and come up with surprising admissions.
The foregoing should give you some idea of the usefulness of this book.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)