Christadelphians can be satisfied with that statement, and the following brief description of how the world was organised in a literal six days. To believe otherwise is impossible for anyone claiming to be christian, let alone Christadelphian. We believe it because the weight of evidence is on the side of the scriptures. This is not to say that we have all the answers, because we do not.
The facts, stories, and explanations we find in the Bible do, however, present a sensible, cohesive and comprehensive picture — it all hangs to together. Of course there are unanswered questions, but there are not the insoluble problems in the Biblical account that one finds in the various theories of evolutionists. If the debate were all that simple, there would be no real problems. We could concentrate on the facets of scripture that are important to us in our ecclesial and individual walk in the truth.
Unfortunately, we do not live in isolated communities which have no contact with those holding conflicting points of view. Since we and our children are under constant attack from those who would use the ‘Special Creation/Evolution’ debate as a platform from which to challenge our belief in the reliability of the Bible as the revealed word of God, we must be able to discuss the ideas and issues involved in that debate. If we are to prepare ourselves for that challenge to our children, ourselves, and the brotherhood, we must be able to understand and discuss the arguments for and against both creation and evolution in clear and simple terms. We must be able to ‘sift the wheat from the chaff; to separate the core arguments from the ‘fluff and feathers’.
Most importantly, we must have the ‘weapons’ with which to combat the scoffers and sceptics in this cynical and faithless world. These weapons must be simple enough for the children in school to master, but sophisticated enough to enable us to withstand some very involved challenges ourselves.
Let us begin with several words of caution:
Firstly, we must not fall into the trap of either branding the evolutionists or theistic evolutionists as silly — or of letting them brand us in the same way. While we have fundamental disagreements with them, we must recognise that, for the most part, they have reasons for believing the way they do. There are, in fact, many degrees of understanding and commitment among evolutionists. Our experience is that the further the evolutionist is from the original research, the more convinced he is that it explains all the secrets of the universe. In other words, while primary and high school teachers are usually convinced evolutionists, those who wrote their textbooks are not so sure, because they can see its many shortcomings.
Our children are being exposed to ignorant, but convinced authority figures who, because of their positions in the classroom, have great influence over them at a very impressionable time in their young lives. It would be a very bad mistake to dismiss these teachers outright without first having established a strong, logical basis for our own beliefs in our children’s minds. Otherwise, we are likely to be ‘caught out’ by the children coming home from school to challenge us with evolutionary ‘facts’ and interpretations we might not be able to explain away. Our resulting loss of credibility, which has nothing to do with the truth of the matter, can effectively make us and our beliefs look as silly as the evolutionists claim we are. To regain the children then is a very difficult job indeed.
Secondly, we must not repeat the mistake of the earlier ‘church’ leaders. It was common practice for the ‘official’ Church to make seekers after secular knowledge choose between the then current Church position on a particular scientific discipline and their sincere desire to understand the physical, observable world. These church leaders, failing to understand the Scriptures properly, compounded their error by extending their lack of understanding of the issues involved into fields not even mentioned in the Bible.
Their political and ecclesiastical conservatism led them into positions they could not, or would not, abandon under the pressure of honest inquiry from members of their congregations. The resulting conflict and hardening of positions gradually led to a widening gulf between the religious and scientific worlds.
The religious world’s appeal was to a blind acceptance of Church teaching, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The scientist’s appeal was to sight only. If it was not observable, it was not so. What had once been a commonly held belief, that science and a belief in God were not only compatible but natural, came to be a contest in which the newly-developing sciences felt it necessary to divorce themselves from the ‘blind faith’ of the religionists if their new disciplines were to have any credence at all. To have faith in God and the Bible came to be equated with blind superstition and black magic. It is now a contest in which the sides are speaking two separate languages.
The record, from Genesis 1:1 to the end of the Revelation, is concerned with the manifestation of God on the earth and the development of a special class of people being called out for His glory. Every Christadelphian is familiar with that and should recognise that the Bible is not a science textbook. Except for the early Genesis record and occasional references to the physical world later on, God, in the Bible, is talking about other things. He gives us only a general picture of the creation. We know what was done, not how.
We know how long it took. We know about the early years of man’s habitation of the earth. We know of the flood and the subsequent dispersal of both man and beast following the events at the tower of Babel. Beyond that quite explicit framework in which this world was constructed, we do not know very much. To claim otherwise is very dangerous. Having said that, let us not assume that just because the Bible is not a science text book it is not scientifically accurate, so far as it goes. Whatever God says is not only true, but accurate. If we are told that the world was made in six days, it was. If we are told that Noah built an ark, he did. If we are told that the earth was overcome by a universal flood, it was. Just because God, in the Bible, does not elaborate on these themes, it does not mean they are wrong. It just means that God did not think that our knowing the details was important for the manifestation of His glory on the earth or for our salvation.
What should have remained a friendly collaboration between religious and scientific interests has become a bitter contest. Instead of finding encouragement to gain a better understanding of God’s creation by deep study, scientists were driven into a position where it became necessary for them to establish either unreligious or anti-religious orientations. It is a tragedy of the worst kind, for we would be hard pressed to name many Christadelphians in the scientific community, or many scientists in the Christadelphian community.
What should have been a natural association has become almost mutually exclusive, as if one cannot have both faith in God and a scientific education. Because of the attacks by evolutionists in the schools, Christadelphians have developed an anti-intellectual orientation, with the result that the brotherhood lacks a good grasp of scientific principles and disciplines. Instead of seeing the pure sciences as additional ways to learn more about God’s creation, we see them as being opposed to the Truth.
We should be able to see Chemistry, Physics, and the Life Sciences as ways to better understand what God has given us in His magnificent creation. But we cannot, and we do not. And we are the poorer for it. Our lack of understanding has left us quite vulnerable to the evolutionist’s arguments because we don’t not have the information and background with which to fight back, and it is our own fault.
The problem between creation and evolution for us is not to disprove evolution, but to find some way to combine what we can see and touch with what we know by faith. The great mistake of the evolutionist is not in what he sees, but in the conclusions he draws from those observations. There is not much argument over what the trained observers are seeing.
The problem arises from their position, the preconceived ideas which dictate their interpretations of the data collected. Who would deny the existence of the things the scientists are finding? Certainly not the person who sees in them more examples of the fine hand of the Creator. It was not always so. It was not so long ago for example, that the Church said fossils were either naturally occurring, but unusual rocks were works of the Devil, put there to try men’s faith. I once told a leading Christadelphian that I had actually held the skull of a Homo Erectus (a supposedly early man/ape which has since been shown to be a type of early ape).
He did not exactly call me a liar, but he did say that no such creature had ever existed because the Bible did not mention it. He was not interested in the fact that I had actually held it in my hands. I was able to understand the frustration the scientists must have felt when faced with the same attitude from the ‘official’ church. This brought home our need to understand the physical, touchable world in a Biblical framework. We must make some sense of what we can see and touch, in context with what we know of God’s message in the Bible. We must be able to see the limits of each. We cannot expect all the pieces to fit together neatly.
There will be many things we will not be able to explain or understand, but instead of feeling bad about it, we should look forward to learning the answers to the problems and questions in the kingdom when we are able to talk to the Angels who put it all together. Let us share the scientist’s thrill at his new discoveries, for they are, after all, examples of God’s wonderful creation. The scientist may ‘discover’ some new thing, but our God made it all.
Another caution for us is that we must not be overwhelmed by apparently conclusive masses of proof which may be presented by the evolutionist. It is in the nature of science to try to make sense of naturally occurring phenomena by making painstaking observations, and trying to identify recurring patterns. They put this into a provisional model which is checked for accuracy, reliability, and repeatability. This is how a theory is constructed. Until it has been verified and repeated successfully, it remains just a theory.
This is not to say that the collected information is wrong if it remains a theory, it is just that it has not come together yet as a ‘fact’. A major problem is that the scientific community will begin to treat a theory as fact if it seems to offer a likely framework within which they can work. They teach it as ‘useful’ to others. These ‘others’, being less well-educated in the discipline, are less likely to be able to sort out the working hypothesis from proven fact.
Since the scientists do not consider the Bible record scientific, they do not consider it as being a possible explanation for what they have observed. This means that they must look elsewhere for their explanations. Just as we dismiss the Aboriginal Dream time stories as a true account of creation, evolutionists dismiss the record of the Bible. The difference is that the Biblical record does give us a clear, verifiable record of the sequence and outline of the actual creation period. While it does not pretend to lay out the details for us, the general record is accurate. So, the huge mass of information being pushed at us by the evolutionists is made up of accurate observations, but is not in itself ‘factual’. If we can make that distinction, we are not likely to be stampeded into granting the evolutionist his claims. The onus is on him to prove his points. It is not up to us to disprove them.
One final caution. This is a very serious debate. Those who, for their own reason, refused to recognise the God of Israel as the creator of the universe seem unable to leave us to our own beliefs. They seem determined to undermine faith founded on the Bible, the word of God. They are determined to woo our children from us, so the battle must be joined. We must “contend for the faith once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).
May the God of Heaven bless our efforts.
The Solution