Viewpoint

The evolution of Creation

Major Bryan Snell says the subject of Creation is not a side issue

GENERAL Frederick Coutts wrote in the 1941 International Company Orders, ‘The Hebrew hymn of Creation reaches back to the dawn of time – “in the beginning”. When that was, no one knows. Various calculations have been made as to the age of the universe, but most of them consist of so many noughts that the mind is simply bewildered … Good people have nothing to fear from scientific research into the origin of the universe in which we live.’ Far be it from me to suggest that I have a better understanding of these matters than the esteemed General, who was one of the Army’s greatest theologians, but the evolution of modern creationism was in its early stages in 1941 and we now have amazing resources at our fingertips that were not available at that time.

In the late 1980s, as corps officer at St Albans City, I was privileged to have more than 40 active and retired officers as soldiers. One of them was Colonel Fred Kiff, who still retained his lovely sense of humour in his nineties. I learnt that my grandfather and the colonel had been good friends in the Clapton training garrison. Asking the colonel for the name of the session, he hesitated, then said, ‘I know – we were the Unbelievers!’ After a moment’s thought, he added, ‘No, that’s not right. That’s what we named ourselves. We were the Believers.’

I am not sure when I first became an unbeliever in evolution. It could have been in primary school when my teacher told me about stalactites. We were informed that these take thousands if not millions of years to form, one grain of sand at a time. ‘Please sir. Why are they to be found under the railway bridge?’ I asked. ‘I have often wondered that myself,’ he said. I might have become an unbeliever when visiting the Grand Canyon. It seemed to me just as easy for it to be formed by a lot of water in a short period of time as by a little water over aeons of time.

A former student, returning to college after many years, examined the science questions now being asked and found them to be almost the same as they were all those years ago. He was told, ‘Yes, the questions are the same, but the answers are different.’ There are those that would try and accommodate Scripture to fit science, only to discover that science has moved on and that many scientists no longer believe in the Big Bang.

Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist, says: ‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism … materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.’ We all have bias one way or the other. We must certainly involve exegesis, or the reading out of Scripture the message the writer intended, not reading things into the Bible.

In 1984 Oxford Hebrew scholar James Barr wrote: ‘Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: a. Creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience b. the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story c. Noah’s flood was understood to be worldwide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark.’

Why are these matters so important? It is because the gospel is based upon sin entering the world by one man, and death by sin. If death did not come this way, then the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross would not have been necessary. Also, every single biblical doctrine in theology directly or indirectly has its basis in Genesis.

Jesus clearly considered Adam and Eve’s creation, as well as the flood in Noah’s time, as true history. The rest of the Old Testament takes Genesis as history. The New Testament takes Genesis 1–11 as history.

It is my belief that we should seriously consider the subject of beginnings and not treat it as just a side issue.