Notes from "Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design"

Edited by J.B. Stump

Next school year, with the 9th/10th graders, we are hoping to spend just a little bit of time considering the old question of Biblical creation account + modern science, how to fit these together? Frankly the question is of less interest to me than it used to be, in part because I think I’m just trying to fry bigger fish today. The problem of the misuse of science, mischaracterization of science, and the making of Science itself into a religion tends to be my target these days, and you can get many non-Christian allies to help you in that battle. But, Genesis and science is an interesting topic, still, and you end up bringing in both a lot of neat science, and a lot of philosophy + questions of Biblical interpretation when you discuss that topic.

But how do you cover that topic with students in a way that is serious, fair, and also short? (And yes, this already sounds like one of those, “you may pick two of the three” things.) But I came across the book in our title and read it, and decided this would be an aid in the effort.

Most importantly, you can’t accuse the publisher of bias, because they got four leading proponents of four viewpoints and let all those people make their case themselves.

Ken Ham: Answers in Genesis, young-Earth creationism
Hugh Ross: Reasons to Believe, old-Earth creationism, or day-age creationism, or progressive creationism
Deborah Haarsma: BioLogos Foundation, theistic evolution, or evolutionary creationism
Stephen Meyer: Discovery Institute, intelligent design

And yes, the last is different than the other three, because you can believe in it AND any of the other three. Ham and Ross certainly both also believe that evidences of intelligent design are detectable in nature, and probably Haarsma would affirm that for the physical parameters of the universe, but not for biological evolution. But because of that, and really just to make this post shorter, I do NOT have notes from Meyer’s section below. It’s a fine section of the book, he spends a lot of time making probability arguments - you say random processes produced the present world, OK, let’s calculate the likelihood that random chance could have produced this feature, oh, the chances are insanely small, must’ve been a designer then - it’s a fine section, but I just am not including those notes here.

The book has the format of long essay by each proponent, then three brief rebuttals by the other three, and then a final very brief rejoinder by the original.

This post is not a review of the book, or even a comprehensive summary, I just wanted to share some things I found interesting / did not know because you might find them interesting too. If you want elaboration on anything, or discussion of anything, or have a bone to pick with anyone, please leave a comment below! I would love to have such a discussion.

Ken Ham - Young-Earth Creationism

Ken Ham definitely takes the perspective that the Bible is our guide, and the Bible teaches young-Earth creationism. (Actually in the epilogue, probably out of a desire to explain why Ham’s essay is longer than anyone else’s, the editor mentions that he was unwilling to make it shorter and said he deserved to have the most space in the book, since he was the only one really making the case for Biblical authority.) In fact Ham very nearly says that sometimes science might seem to indicate an older universe, but it doesn’t matter, if science and scripture conflict you go with scripture.

Without the biblical revelation about the cosmos-impacting fall of man, the creation gives a confusing message about the Creator.

I would give Ham credit, too, for not leaning too much on genealogies to make his case, but rather leaning more on Biblical reports that probably hold wider theological meaning: the historicity of Adam, death before the Fall, and the need for a Flood that wipes out all of humanity and not just a local population.

And then, in somewhat scattered fashion, here are a few things I found interesting from his argument, in some cases with rebuttals from the other authors. These are brief notes just for your interest, I cannot repeat the book here, if you want the extended argument then buy the book. To avoid awkward writing I’m mostly going to refrain from writing “Ham says”… unless it says otherwise, it should be assumed that everything in this section is “Ham says”, etc.

So, Ham says:

Early Genesis

• The most natural reading of early Genesis is that God created the universe in six, 24-hour days, around 6000 years ago.

  • Hugh Ross replies that the sentence structure of Genesis 1:1-2 implies the passage of time between the “formless and void” primordial Earth and the first creation day.

  • Haarsma remarks that “natural reading” is not so universal. It depends on the culture and mindset a reader brings to the text. Genesis was originally written to people in a pre-scientific context, and God accommodated his message to their understanding.

  • Meyer comments that the Biblical authors often seem to be assuming much more time in their description of God’s creative acts than Ham’s interpretation allows [Ross will elaborate on this in his essay - Adam seems to have done a whole lot of stuff on day six, for example]. He also notes that, with the sun not yet in existence for the first three days, it is logical to conclude they were not necessarily 24-hour periods. Also Psalm 90, the only psalm attributed to Moses, comments that a thousand years in God’s sight are like a day to man.

• The Church held almost universally to this opinion before the 19th century.

  • Hugh Ross says that, more accurately, early Christian writings virtually never address the age of the Earth - only about two pages of the 2000 pages of ancient commentary on Genesis address creation’s timescale. Apparently it was not viewed as a major issue.

• Genesis 1-11 is written as history - not poetry, parable, or myth. Jesus and others in scripture treat it as history.

  • Haarsma comments that most OT scholars do not see Genesis 1 as requiring a literal six-day, 24-hour creation, and many Hebrew scholars recognize Genesis 1-11 feels like a different genre, somehow, than the rest of the book. They may refer to historical events, but not in the same way a modern book would.

    • Ham notes in his rejoinder that Haarsma apparently rejects the doctrine of inerrancy. [Her position is never really clarified in the book.]

• The Hebrew word for “day” (“yom”) should be read as, basically, a normal day. Refrains in Genesis like “and there was evening, and there was morning” mean they were normal days.

• The order of events in Genesis 1 contradicts evolutionary cosmology - the Earth was created before the sun, moon, and stars for example. [So you can’t believe in evolutionary cosmology and scripture, is his argument here.]

• God created supernaturally, and the stuff he made was immediately fully functioning. “The plants immediately had fruit on their branches and people were immediately ready to obey God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.” You don’t need to wait for time to pass.

• When Christians are considering which view of creationism to support, they often neglect the question of when death and suffering came into the world. Only young-earth creationism can give you no death before the Fall.

• The Fall of Adam and Eve resulted in a curse that applies to all of creation. The ground was cursed, animals were cursed - the natural world changed as well, in other words, not just humanity.

The Flood

• Many other passages in scripture refer back to the Flood as an historical event, and Noah as an historical person (he is in the genealogy in Luke for example).

• The purpose of the Flood was to destroy all sinful human beings, land animals, and birds - it had to be a global flood to accomplish that.

Science

• Ham drives a distinction between “experimental science” where predictions can be tested over and over again in a lab, and “historical science” that attempts to reconstruct past, unobservable, unrepeatable events. Much of the misapplication of science today involves mistaking very tentative historical science for much more certain experimental science.

  • Hugh Ross notes that because the speed of light is finite, we sometimes can actually witness past events. Astronomers can directly witness the preparatory work God did long before Adam and Eve were created.

• Attempts to reconstruct the past are heavily influenced by worldview assumptions scientists use to interpret evidence collected in the present.

• The idea of geological evolution predated, and influenced, the idea of biological evolution. Men like James Hutton simply posited that the past history of the globe must be explained assuming the same processes we see operating right now are the same processes that have always operated.

• Quoting Stephen Jay Gould, “…the catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem to require catastrophes… to circumvent this literal appearance, Lyell imposed his imagination upon the evidence.”

• Quoting Niles Eldredge, “the general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism is a metaphysical stance… it is not a high-order empirical observation”.

• There is no such thing as examining the Earth apart from ideological presuppositions.

• The observed absence of slow chemical and physical erosion at the boundaries between sedimentary layers indicates that they were laid down quickly, not over millions of years.

  • Haarsma says no, actually this erosion is visible at many places in the Grand Canyon. She also raises other objections - for example, billions of dead things are buried in rock, but they are not mixed together as would be expected from the violence of a global flood.

• All over the world, upright fossil trees cut through many layers of rock, showing that the layers were laid down before the tree could rot.

• Yes, radiometric dating sometimes gives very old dates, but there are examples of rocks that were known to form only decades or centuries ago giving dates of millions of years.

  • Hugh Ross comments that radiometric dating is generally reliable, and many young-earth creationists admit that, if radioisotope half-lives are invariant, then radiometric dating indicates old ages. They then deny that radioisotope half-lives are invariant. Ross believes the Bible itself testifies to the invariance of physical laws, and spectra from distant starts attests to past constancy. Ice cores and sediment cores that do not rely, or rely less, on radiometric dating also give us data back through millions of years at least.

• Creation scientists believe God created distinct “kinds” of animals roughly equivalent to “family” in the modern classification system. Speciation does happen, but only within kinds¹. [This paradigm will be well-known to anyone who has visited Answers in Genesis properties.]

• Evolutionists also have a light travel problem known as the “horizon problem” - even given 13.8 billion years, there has not been enough time for light to produce the uniform background radiation temperature we observe.

Final Comments

• The Bible calls death an enemy. It seems reasonable to assume that, when God clothed Adam and Eve with coats of skins, that was the first ever death of an animal.

  • Hugh Ross is certainly skeptical of this claim when applied to animals. Animal predation serves beneficial purposes. Other things we sometimes call “natural evils” (e.g. hurricanes) also serve useful purposes. Ross seems to think the new creation will not just be a return to the pre-Fall condition.

    • Ham in his rejoinder reiterates his belief that millions of years of animal death, disease, and violence is incompatible with the overall picture we get in scripture. [Ross would disagree, and say those things happened, actually, to prepare the world for humans and the Great Commission.]

• The age of creation is not immediately a salvation issue, but rejecting the Bible’s straightforward teaching on the matter teaches people that scripture is not infallible and leads to other issues further down the line.

Hugh Ross - Old-Earth Creationism

I had not read much by Hugh Ross before this - I was surprised by how convincing I found his argument. I think I have tended to view day-age creationism as the sort of compromise that makes nobody happy. Let’s take a hammer and whack at scripture, and let’s take a hammer and whack at science, and by the time we’re done neither of them really look like they’re supposed to but wow!, they “fit together” now.

Ross’ most intriguing suggestion was that God used long time periods so biology would have time to create bio-resources (like coal, oil) that humans would use to very quickly build a technological civilization once we arrived on the scene, SO THAT we could then use that technology to evangelize the world. And I think Ross would say… yeah, those bio-resources that fuel our civilization are also going to run out pretty rapidly after we discover them, but it won’t matter, because their purpose is to make it so we can evangelize the world, and they will fulfill that purpose before they run out. The whole universe, in Ross’ view, is built around making it so humans can rapidly fulfill the Great Commission. Although the universe is old, the Earth, especially, shows evidence of God miraculously intervening repeatedly through time to bring about the conditions humanity would need once God, again supernaturally, put humans on the scene.

I was also impressed by how theological his argument was, using scripture to make the case that the Biblical authors, in places, seem to imply an older Earth.

And now some notes from Hugh Ross:

Mostly introductory and Bible comments

• Scripture provides more details about the redemptive story, science provides more details about the creation story, but they speak together in perfect harmony.

• Old-earth creationists consider mass speciation events as divine intervention, God introducing new species appropriate for Earth’s changing conditions. Slow, usually negative, natural changes happen between those interventions.

• They therefore tend to reject the claim that Neanderthals and humans, or birds and dinosaurs, share a common ancestor.

  • Meyer spends a long time in his response affirming the weak case for “universal common descent”. After-the-fact attempts to reconstruct this past are inconclusive at best, other explanations for similarities in animal features would seem to work just as well. Genetic v. anatomical analyses sometimes put animals in very different places in the “tree of life”. Some of the evidence Darwin leaned on the most in formulating his theory has crumbled with better data.

• Jeremiah 33 compares God’s character to the changelessness of the laws governing the heavens and the earth. Astronomical measurements seem to verify that the physical laws are constant over time. This can be seen as the Bible making a prediction that science then verified.

• This includes the fact that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) was in effect even before the Fall. Things like starlight and metabolism as we understand them require entropy and were happening before the Fall. [Entropy has sometimes been named as a result of the Fall, Ross is responding to that.]

  • Ken Ham notes that he agrees that entropy did not start with the Fall.

• Ross thinks he adopts a moderate position. The Bible anticipates some of the findings of science, but not all. It seems reasonable to link biblical passages describing creation ex nihilo with some fundamental features of big bang cosmology, for example. But the Bible has basically nothing in detail to tell us about particle physics.

  • Haarsma seems to object that evolutionary creationism doesn’t see the Bible as making scientific predictions at all. It was first written to pre-scientific people who didn’t think in those terms.

• The day-age model means we should expect to find scientific evidence for God’s direct involvement in nature, unlike most evolutionary creationism models. [It is important to Ross that his model actually be testable. Whatever else you might say of evolutionary creationism, I think Ross would say that it doesn't make any testable predictions.]

• Even if you point out flaws with the usual theory of evolution, scientists will not abandon it unless you provide them will a viable alternative paradigm. Old earth creationism can be that paradigm.

• The Bible contains more content on the origin and history of the universe and life than any other ancient text.

Arguing for an old earth from scripture

• Genesis 2 describes events between God’s creation of man and woman [his implication being, the entirety of this stuff occurred on day six]. Adam’s expression when seeing Eve is “at last!”, which makes it sound like he’s been waiting for a while. The naming of the animals (surely done after some examination of them, right?), God’s instructions to Adam and Eve, altogether these things would seem to require much more time than a single 24-hour period.

  • Ken Ham replies that God’s work with Adam was supernatural and was accomplished very quickly.

• The first six days all have articulated a start and a finish, but no end is ever articulated for the seventh day. Perhaps this means the seventh day has not yet ended.

• Figures of speech used in the Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes all compare God’s ancientness to that of mountains and the Earth’s foundations. If these were only a few thousand years old, that seems somehow inappropriate compared to the alternative of billions of years.

• Similarly, Habakkuk calls the mountains “ancient” and the hills “age-old”. 2 Peter says the heavens existed “long ago”. Do we just mean by that just a few thousand years?

Mostly science comments

• Genesis gets the chronology right. The day-age view makes Genesis an elegant literary masterpiece that gives a correctly-in-order account of God’s miraculous acts in preparing the Earth for human life.

  • For a medley of reasons, Haarsma objects that this just isn’t true. For example, fossil evidence indicates that birds (day 5 of creation) appeared millions of years after land animals (day 6).

    • Ross argues that day 6 refers to the categories of land animals necessary for launching human civilization, not all animals. Ross distinguishes between most animals, and the “nephesh” - soulish animals, different from the other animals, that have features of intelligence and possess capacities for social interaction with humans.

• Day-age creationists expect that scientific experiments will find that naturalistic evolution just isn’t able to explain the record of pre-human life. Changes from natural processes usually lead to extinction, and where speciation does occur it is minor changes only.

• A long-running experiment on bacteria at Michigan State University has found that replaying the same evolutionary process rarely results in identical morphological outcomes. Yet we see identical morphology in species far away from each other on the evolutionary tree. This is more evidence of God’s direct involvement.

The Flood

• 2 Peter says the Flood affected “the world of the ungodly” and “the world of that time”. It was a flood to wipe out the entire human population and the “nephesh” - higher animals - associated with them. It was not a global flood.

• Genesis 8 says the floodwaters took 7-10 months to recede - a very long time, likely suggesting melting snow and ice. Perhaps the flood occurred during the last ice age.

• Genesis 2 mentions four rivers coming together in the garden of Eden, but those rivers don’t converge in the modern landscape. But they did converge during the last ice age, in what is now part of the Persian Gulf.

More other and science comments

• The physical death of animals yields benefits, most importantly for humanity a treasure chest of biodeposits (e.g. coal) from which to build a global civilization and so accomplish the Great Commission. The Biblical text does not require no animal death before the Fall.

• Old-earth creationists see humans as distinct from Neanderthals and other hominid species, specially created by God. Humans are descendants of Adam and Eve, two distinct persons.

  • Haarsma objects that genetic evidence strongly indicates Homo sapiens in common descent with other species.

• Young-earth creationists prefer the term “diversification” to evolution, but nonetheless they invokes rates of natural process genetic change far more rapid than even the most optimistic atheist Darwinist would propose.

  • Ken Ham objects to the claim that he believes in evolution - variation and speciation within a kind is not evolution.

• The Sun has gradually brightened over the last few billion years, but Earth’s surface temperature has remained optimal for life, because new life forms came along that were better at removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This is an active intervention from a supernatural creator.

• Adam and Eve came on the scene sometime during the last ice age, 12,000 to 135,000 years ago.

• God intended to redeem billions of humans within just a few thousand years. He therefore used time and biology to endow the Earth with the resources that would make this possible.

  • Haarsma takes issue with the idea that creation is ordered around man and the need to evangelize. Surely much of creation flows out of God’s abundance and for his own pleasure - it needn’t all be somehow connected to human life.

• Before life, Earth had 250 distinct mineral species. Thanks to life, we now have 4300.

• Sulfate-reducing bacteria, over long time periods, removed toxic elements from water and concentrated them, producing much of our iron, magnesium, zinc, and lead deposits today. [This is, again, Ross saying that the whole history of the Earth is preparation for the arrival of man.]

• 575 million years ago, atmospheric oxygen levels increased from 1-2% to 8%. Almost overnight, complex organisms that required those higher oxygen levels appeared (the “Avalon explosion”). So rapid a change shows divine intervention.

• Around 544 million years ago there was a mass extinction event, and shortly thereafter animals with hard body parts and bilateral symmetry appeared. 50-80% of the animal phyla known to exist appeared within just a few million years of each other. [He then goes on to cite a medley of other rapid explosions of life that were too rapid for natural evolutionary processes.]

• The main scientific challenges to the day-age model are imperfect designs in nature, and possible rates of biological evolution.

• But we should generally expect biological decay to be occurring since God’s last intervention with an organism.

Deborah Haarsma - Evolutionary Creationism

Ah… what do you say about the BioLogos people? I do think they are Christians, if there was any question about that. I saw Haarsma at a conference once actually (and Hugh Ross), I don’t doubt her sincerity or good intentions. But they are also Christians who REALLY REALLY BADLY want to be accepted into the Cool Kids Mainstream Scientists Club. And that leads to some really poor discernment sometimes. Francis Collins’ bad behavior during COVID is well-documented now, and the BioLogos crowd jumped into the masking and vaccination regime as uncritically as CNN. Recently I’ve even heard some “gender identity” comments that are very “come now, let’s not be so quick to say that the Bible doesn’t…” from that crowd. They want to be the cool kids, it’s dangerous for Christians to want to be the cool kids.

That doesn’t necessarily make them wrong about their science, of course. Perhaps the biggest objection that might be leveled against evolutionary creationism (EC) in this context is just that it doesn’t try to fit scripture and science together at all - in fact, basically the whole point is that they don’t. The Bible has nothing to say about science, at all. If the Bible and science ever seem to conflict on a science-esque claim… you should go with the science, because the Bible was written to pre-scientific people and accommodated to their understanding. That is basically her case. The “heart” of BioLogos is to say that you can be a Christian and not reject science… really not reject a single element of mainstream science at all.

And now, some notes from Haarsma:

Introductory comments

• EC believes that God created over billions of years, and that God governed the process of evolution to create the diversity of life on Earth.

  • Ham objects that Haarsma never defines evolution. To him, small changes within kinds are OK, but there is no “molecule to microbiologist evolution”.

  • Meyer notes that since random mutations overwhelmingly result in useless or harmful genetic information, even given billions of years, naturalistic evolution could not explain the life presently on the Earth. (He goes on with more details for a long time in his response.)

• The Bible was not originally written to us. Passages that refer to things like the earth being fixed on a foundation (Ps 93:1) reflect an ancient near east cosmology which is, frankly, mistaken.

  • Ross notes that we still haven’t learned where Haarsma stands on inerrancy.

  • Ross disagrees that scripture indicates that the Biblical authors shared this ancient near east cosmology. Some words can be translated other ways. The Hebrews clearly knew that rain came from clouds, for example, whereas that cosmology envisions water coming through holes in a brass dome.

• Christians should have a generally positive view of science. It is sort of the central concern of BioLogos to say “you can be a Christian and love science too!” Many of the best scientists of history were Christians.

• Chemist Robert Boyle described his science as studying the “book of creation”, and he regarded himself a “priest of nature”.

• Yes, our science looks just like the science of atheists - why would it be different? We are studying the same created world with the same divinely given minds.

  • Ross dislikes this disconnect, and notes that for many people, connecting science with scripture provides them with a reason to pick up a Bible.

  • Ross also notes that the Bible explicitly says that nature provides a clear and compelling testimony to God’s existence and divine attributes.

• It is true that, if God created the universe 6000 years ago but already looking old, science would have no way to detect that the universe was really only 6000 years old. [Sometimes you do hear young-earth creationists make this case.]

  • Somewhat curiously, Ham chimes in that scripture tells us that nature reveals God - his existence and some of his attributes. Scripture does not tell us that nature reveals how and when the universe came into existence. [So Ham perhaps again saying that science might be unreliable regarding origins.]

Some science comments

• Radiometric dating clearly indicates old rock ages. And it isn’t just one test - one rock in Greenland dated with several different isotopes gave a date of 3.6 billion years with each isotope, for example.

• The age of the universe itself can be determined from its rate of expansion. The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. [It could be correctly pointed out that this conclusion is inferred through the big bang paradigm.]

• Fine-tuning is a real thing, and shows God’s design. The fundamental parameters of the universe are set so that life could develop. If many of these were off even slightly, life would not be possible.

• The fossil record offers excellent support for evolutionary theories. Many “gaps” that once existed have been filled in with more recent finds.

  • Ross notes again that the fossil record shows several epochs of very rapid change, too rapid to be explained by naturalistic evolution. And each leap has a purpose - making biology that will prepare the world for humans to fulfill the Great Commission.

• Christians who believe in evolution believe in it because of the evidence and arguments, not because of peer pressure. [Whoa, I’m sure many do, but let’s not pretend peer pressure isn’t a real issue in science today.]

  • Ross notes that “evolution” is a very broad term. Defined generally, basically all creationists believe in evolution too.

• Yes, he could just snap his fingers, but both scripture and the natural world reveal that God delights in working through long processes to accomplish his will.

  • Meyer objects that Haarsma makes evolution an undirected process. She can say God governs it, but really she doesn’t have God doing a thing, so what does that government actually mean? There is a theological difficulty here. Francis Collins and others who have been asked to clarify just what they mean by saying God oversees the process have been reluctant to offer any greater clarity.

    • Haarsma replies that theologians have spent millennia thinking about such questions. Jesus said that God feeds the birds, but does that mean he is supernaturally involved with every dinner?

• Genetic evidence indicates that humans share a common ancestor with other great apes. Chimps have 24 chromosomes, humans have 23. This is because two of the chromosomes present in chimps have fused together into one, in humans. This one long chromosome in humans is almost identical to the two, laid end-to-end, from chimps. This is strong evidence for common ancestry.

  • Ham cites two AiG scientists whom, he says, have disproven the claim about the fused chromosome.

  • Ross notes that humans and chimps aren’t as similar as you might think. We have similar structural anatomy, but human brains are more like the brains of ravens. He thinks human chromosome 2 might appear as two fused chimp chromosomes. The science on that isn’t as clear as Haarsma makes it sound, and if it is true, it speaks to God’s intervention.

• The early Homo sapiens population was several thousand individuals, living about 200,000 years ago.

  • Ham makes some general comments again about the assumptions we bring to our work when we try to reconstruct the past based only on observations in the present.

  • Ross objects that we just aren’t good enough at genetics to know that. Field studies of other animals alive today regularly find greater genetic diversity than what our models would predict. You cannot rule out just two, more recent human ancestors.

• Science does not rule out the existence of Adam and Eve, but it does rule them out as our sole progenitors. And can’t the Biblical text be read as indicating other humans were also alive concurrently?

• The Church has not always held to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 - Augustine argued against it, for example.

Still some hard questions / concluding comments

• Sin is rebellion against God’s revealed will. Questions about Adam and Eve do become entangled with questions about original sin. Haarsma doesn’t seem to know exactly how to resolve that difficulty, offers various possibilities.

• No text of the Bible necessarily indicates animal death before the Fall. Even passages that speak of human death could be referring to spiritual death.

• Genesis 1-2 speaks of a good world, not necessarily a perfect one. Passages like Job 38-39 remind us that God delights in predators.

• It is objected that evolution is random - the randomness that is part of evolution does not mean meaninglessness. A videogame designer might put randomness into a game to make the game more fun. Perhaps this was God’s way to add variety to the world.

• But evolution does tend to produce the same features over and over again. God likely designed the process with the intent of producing these features.

  • Ross objects that modern-day experiments show that natural processes actually don’t converge on the same features over and over again.

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1. Hugh Ross brings this up, and Ken Ham hates it, it does seem to me that Answers in Genesis basically believes in evolution, but thinks it happens MUCH faster than is usually stated for standard Darwinistic evolution.