NOTE: Last week’s lesson was on the Flood. There was little discussion in the lesson of how the Genesis Flood narrative conflicts with mainstream geology, so I am covering that topic here.
There is simply no way that long ages geology, or what I call “Lyellism” after its foremost expositor, Charles Lyell, can be made compatible with Bible Christianity. What follows, adapted from my book “Dinosaurs—An Adventist View”, is a discussion of how long ages geology conflicts with Bible Christianity, and how all attempts to fit the two systems together have been absolute failures.
I further discuss how long ages geology laid the foundations for Darwinism, the atheistic, evolutionary tale of the origins of life and of humanity. If one accepts the long ages geological interpretation of the fossiliferous strata, one has essentially accepted all the foundational elements of Darwinism.
“Don’t you and your husband fight all the time?” a fellow graduate student asked Patricia Kelley. Kelley was studying paleontology at Harvard under Stephen Jay Gould, while her husband Jonathan was in seminary preparing for the ministry. “The question surprised me,” writes Kelley, “for the thought that my research on evolution might be incompatible with my religious faith had never entered my mind.”
When she was growing up, evolution was not an issue at her United Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. At college, she attended the campus Presbyterian Church, along with other geology majors and faculty. Jonathan Kelley is now a Presbyterian minister, and Patricia, who teaches geology and paleontology at the University of North Carolina, also teaches Sunday School and sings in the choir at her husband’s church. Kelley’s minister father-in-law once quipped, “Tricia studies the ages of rocks, and Jonathan studies the Rock of Ages.”[1]
One hesitates to introduce discord into this picture of marital harmony, but is there really no conflict between the naturalistic view of earth’s history, as expressed in Lyellism and Darwinism, and Christianity? It seems someone has not done his homework.
A. The Implications of Lyellism[i] for Christianity
Laying aside Darwinism for the moment, Lyellism by itself drastically undermines the Bible and biblical Christianity. The Bible states that the earth, with its plants and animals, was created in six days. Gen. 1:1 - 2:3; Ex. 20:11; 31:17. If Lyell was correct, however, the plants and animals were created over the course of more than 550 million years. That is a big difference. Lyellian geological theory could not possibly be farther from the biblical teaching.
We tend to forget that God created the world in six days. God foresaw this tendency and told us to remember it. He hallowed the Sabbath as a memorial to His creation. “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating he had done.” Gen. 2:2, 3 (NIV).[2] After the Exodus from Egypt, when God was teaching the Israelites His laws, He used the manna to teach Sabbath observance. One day’s worth of manna was collected each morning, but it would not keep overnight. Ex. 16:15-20. On the sixth day, however, the Israelites were to collect two day’s worth, and it would keep overnight and throughout the Sabbath day. Thus, they did not need to collect manna on Sabbath morning, and those who went out to collect it found none. Ex. 16:5, 6, 22-30.
In the fourth of the Ten Commandments, God commands us to observe the Sabbath: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Ex. 20: 8-11 (NIV, emphasis added).
God states within the commandment itself that the Sabbath is a memorial to the creation week. This would have been a remarkably dishonest thing for God to do if the world had been made over the course of hundreds of millions of years, rather than in six days.
The uniqueness and importance of the Ten Commandments cannot be overemphasized. Accompanied by thunder and lightning, God descended to Mount Sinai and audibly spoke the Ten Commandments within the hearing of the entire congregation of Israel. Ex. 20:1-21; Deut. 4:10-13. God Himself inscribed the Ten Commandments in stone tablets. Deut. 4:13; Ex. 31:18. God did not take these extraordinary measures with any other of the laws and regulations He gave to the Israelites. Although Moses, in indignation at Israel’s idolatry, smashed the original stone tablets, God commanded him to chisel out two more tablets, upon which God re-inscribed the Ten Commandments, again with His own finger. Ex. 34:1, 28; Deut. 10:1-4.
The new tablets, called the tablets of the Testimony, were placed inside the Ark of the Testimony. Ex. 34:29; 40:20; Deut. 10:5. The ark of the Testimony, also called the Ark of the Covenant, was a wooden box overlain with gold, with a solid gold lid, called the mercy seat or atonement cover. Affixed to the lid on each side were golden sculptures of angels, or cherubim, with their wings overshadowing the middle. Ex. 25:10-22. The ark was the most sacred article of furniture in the sanctuary. Only the Levites were allowed to carry it, one man was struck dead for touching it without authority, and seventy men of Beth-Shemesh were slain for looking inside it. Deut. 10:8; 2 Sam. 6:6, 7; 1 Sam. 6:19.
The ark was placed in the most sacred compartment of the sanctuary, the Most Holy Place. Ex. 26:33, 34. The visible manifestation of God’s presence, the glory of God that some rabbis called the “Shekinah Glory,” was just above the ark, between the cherubim. Ex. 25:22; Lev. 16:2; 2 Sam. 6:2; Psalms 99:1; Ezek. 9:3. Only the high priest was allowed to look upon the ark, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Even on the Day of Atonement, the high priest could not enter without incense and the blood of a sacrifice. Lev. 16.
To summarize, the most sacred compartment of the sanctuary, the Most Holy Place, contained the most sacred article of furniture, the Ark of the Testimony. Above the Ark dwelt the visible glory of God, and within the Ark were the tablets of the Testimony. The tablets contained the Ten Commandments, in the middle of which is the Fourth Commandment. The Fourth Commandment contains God’s statement, written by His own finger, that He created the world and all its creatures in six days. But if Lyell was correct, God’s statement, at the very center of the Hebrew religion, is at best a practical joke.
The symbolism of the sanctuary services is clear. Sin, the broken law, has resulted in man’s alienation from God, with death as the inevitable result. 1 John 3:4; Rom. 4:15, 6:23. The blood of Christ is the only sacrifice that can secure mercy and atonement with God. 1 John 2:1, 2; Heb. 9:11-28. This is the very heart of Christianity, its core doctrine. The broken law creates the need for the atonement of Christ. Whatever denigrates the law also denigrates the need for the atonement. A Lyellian interpretation of the strata leads to the conclusion that the world was not created in six days. Therefore, the commandment to observe the Sabbath as a memorial to the six-day creation is void. This is how Lyellism nullifies part of the law and, to the same extent, nullifies the atonement.
Lyellism directly conflicts with the Bible regarding Noah’s Flood. Chapters six through nine of the book of Genesis contain a description of the events leading up to the Flood, the Flood itself, and its aftermath. All humanity, all the land animals, and all the birds, with the exception of those on Noah’s ark, were destroyed. Gen. 7:21-23. Jesus Christ attests to the historical reality of the Flood. Mat. 24:37-39; Luke 17: 26, 27 (“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the Flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the Flood came and took them all away.”) Peter attests to the reality of the Flood, as does the author of Hebrews. 2 Peter 2:5; 3:5, 7; Hebrews 11:7. After the Flood, God made a covenant with Noah and the animals that He would never again destroy the world with water. The rainbow is the symbol of this covenant. Gen. 9:8-17.
But Lyellism denies that a worldwide flood ever occurred. If Lyell was correct, the Flood story, Noah, his ark, and God’s covenant sealed and symbolized by the rainbow, were all invented out of whole cloth, and should not be understood as factual or historical.
Lyellism also seriously erodes the doctrine of the Fall. The Bible teaches that death entered the world because of Adam’s sin, with the resulting fall of the human race. Rom. 5:12. (“[S]in entered the world through one man, and death through sin”). The Bible teaches that death entered not only the human race, but also the entire creation, as a result of Adam’s sin. Rom. 8:18-22.[3] The sedimentary strata show man at the top, and the entombed remains of a large variety of animals far down into the crust of the earth. If interpreted according to Lyellian assumptions, the strata show that death reigned for hundreds of millions of years before man ever appeared on the scene. Thus, in the Lyellian system, death, as a general phenomenon, cannot have been caused by the fall of mankind.
This was noticed early in the Lyellian revolution. American geologist and clergyman Edward Hitchcock, writing in 1840, stated:
The general interpretation of the Bible has been, that until the fall of man, death did not exist in the world even among the inferior animals. For the Bible asserts that by man came death (1 Cor. 15:21) and by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin (Rom. 5:12). But geology [Lyellism] teaches us that myriads of animals lived and died before the creation of man.[4]
If death is not a result of the fall, then it must be part of God’s plan—part of the creation that God declared “very good.” (Gen. 1:31.)
The Bible also teaches that the animals were created to eat grass and other vegetation, not each other. “And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” Gen. 1:30 (NIV, emphasis added). In the earth made new, the animals will not prey on each other or on man. Isaiah 11:6-9. (“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb . . . the lion shall eat straw like an ox. . . . They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”) If all animals were created herbivores, and in Heaven will again be herbivores, the predatory nature of animals must be a result of the Fall.[5]
If Lyell was correct, however, nature was “red in tooth and claw”[6] long before Adam sinned. The dinosaurs provide many examples of meat-eating predators. Tyrannosaurus rex had powerful jaws packing sixty teeth, the exposed portions of which were six inches long, sharp, and serrated. In a single bite, T. rex could snap off a chunk of meat weighing five hundred pounds.[7] T. rex was one of a group of carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods (“beast foot”).
Another of the theropods was Velociraptor, discovered during one of Roy Chapman Andrews’ expeditions to Mongolia and made famous in the motion picture “Jurassic Park.” In 1971, a Velociraptor was found with its jaws clamped on the neck frill of a Protoceratops, and the deadly talon of its second toe ripping into the Protoceratops’ belly. The Protoceratops, meanwhile, seems to have pierced the Velociraptor’s chest with its beak. The animals were buried and fossilized in this position, preserving the evidence of their deadly encounter.[8] If the dinosaurs really lived some five dozen million years before man was created, however, Adam’s sin could not have caused these animals to become predatory carnivores. The Lyellian is forced to conclude—contrary to Scripture—that the violent, predatory nature of the animal kingdom was part of God’s original plan.
A disturbing picture of God emerges if one accepts Lyellism. God claims to have created the world in six days and destroyed it by a universal Flood, none of which is true. He placed the Sabbath, a memorial of the six-day creation, at the center of the Ten Commandments, despite knowing the world was not created in six days.
If one accepts Lyell, the Bible is also wrong in teaching that sin caused violence and death. These things existed for many millions of years before man was created. If the lion is indeed to lie down with the lamb in the Earth made new, it will be a marked departure from the order of God’s original creation. For the Lyellian, not as much was lost by the Fall as Christians had always believed, and therefore not as much has been redeemed by the atoning sacrifice of Christ. Lyellism severely damages the integrity of biblical Christianity.
B. Christian Reaction to Lyellism
There is no way to reconcile Lyellism with biblical truth. Unfortunately, many Christians have tried, offering several theories in an attempt to accommodate the Bible to Lyellian geology. These accommodationist theories have common characteristics. First, instead of interpreting the earth’s crust in the light of biblical history, they reinterpret the Bible to make it fit geological theories. Second, the accommodationist theories typically interpret most of the fossiliferous strata as the residue of long ages that passed before man was created, which has the effect of decoupling disease, predation, suffering, and death from Adam’s sin and the Fall of mankind. The terrible things that we find in the fossil record must therefore have been part of God’s original creation, which He called “good.”
1. The “Diluvium Theory”
One of the earliest accommodationist theories was William Buckland’s “diluvium” theory. He and several of his contemporaries taught that much of the Pleistocene layer, then often called the “diluvium” or the “drift,” was deposited during the Genesis Flood. But these men also taught that the lower strata were formed hundreds of thousands of years before Adam was created, which deviates from the biblical doctrine that God created the plants and animals in one week just a few thousand years ago.[9] After he was shown that the “diluvium” was primarily the work of glaciers, not floodwaters, Buckland abandoned his diluvium theory in favor of the “tranquil theory,” which held that Noah’s Flood left no residue.[10]
2. The gap theory
A more prominent accommodationist theory is the “gap theory,” also known as the “active gap,” “ruin and restoration,” “pre-Edenic ruin,” “ruin and reconstruction” and “interval” theory. It postulates that a very long interval of time elapsed between Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”) and Genesis 1:2 (“And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”). The gap theory is attributed to Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), a Scottish Presbyterian pastor. Although it has many variations and has changed over the centuries, its core is that, during the supposed “gap” between the first two verses of Genesis, there existed a previous creation on this Earth.
The earliest versions of the gap theory teach that Lucifer ruled this previous creation, which was peopled by a race of beings without souls. Desiring to become like God, Lucifer eventually rebelled (Ezekiel 28:11-19, Isaiah 14:12-20),[11] incurring God’s judgment in the form of a flood, called the “Lucifer flood.” The Lucifer flood is indicated in Scripture by the “waters” and the “deep” of Genesis 1:2. The rest of the first chapter of Genesis describes a re-creation or reforming of the earth from a chaotic state, not the initial creative effort. All the plant, animal, and human fossils in the rock strata date from the “Lucifer flood ” and are not genetically related to the plants and animals living today, which are a result of the re-creation described later in the chapter.
The gap theory was given widespread circulation in 1909 when Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield (1843-1921) included it in the annotations to his Scofield Reference Bible.[12] While the gap theory does explain the presence of violence and death in the lower fossiliferous strata, the explanation is extra-biblical. The Bible divulges nothing of this hidden history, although gap theorists interpret several verses—usually only the King James translation of those verses—in such a way as to give veiled clues about the time of the “gap.”
As an accommodation of geology, the gap theory was more successful when geological opinion was open to Cuvier’s multiple catastrophes. Some of the strata could then be attributed to the “Lucifer flood” and some to the Genesis Flood. In its modern incarnations, the gap theory is strictly a device to expand the biblical time frame in order to allow time for the strata to form over the hundreds of millions of years that Lyellian geology insists upon. Modern gap theorists do not include a “Lucifer flood,” and believe that the Genesis Flood left no geological traces.
But some modern gap theorists still make Lucifer the lord of the purported gap creation.[13] One cannot help but wonder, however, why for 130 million years Lucifer’s only earthly subjects were marine animals, or why it took more than 160 million additional years for Lucifer to get some dinosaurs to rule, or why poor Lucifer was allowed to rule over the men without souls for only the final 1/10,000th of his “gap” reign.[14]
3. The day/age theory
Another popular attempt to harmonize Lyellism and Scripture is the “day/age” theory, which holds that the days of the first chapter of Genesis are not literal twenty-four-hour periods but long epochs of millions of years. The Hebrew word for “day,” yôm, can refer to something other than a literal twenty-four-hour period. In Genesis one, however, each yôm of the creation week is modified by an ordinal number, as in “the first day,” “the second day” etc. When so modified, yôm always means a literal twenty-four hour day.[15]
Moreover, the phrase “there was evening and there was morning” is used to describe each of the days of the creation week. This obviously refers to the dark and light portions of a literal, twenty-four-hour day. Generally, the Hebrew text weighs heavily in favor of interpreting the days of Genesis 1 as literal days.[16] Attempts to interpret the days of creation as ages or eras rather than literal days have been driven not by textual considerations but rather by a perceived need to accommodate Scripture to Lyellism.[17]
One has to wonder why, if the days of creation were intended to indicate multi-million-year epochs, the writer of Genesis didn’t just say that? It isn’t as though ancient people could not conceive of an earth millions of years old. On the contrary, most ancients believed the earth to be much older than the Bible indicates. For example, Plato believed that the Flood had occurred two hundred million years ago. The Babylonian historian Berosus placed the creation two million years ago. Hindu traditions that were committed to writing 1,500 years ago teach that the earth’s history can be divided up into endlessly repeating cycles of 4.32 billion years, each of which can be further subdivided into 1,000 subcycles of 4.32 million years duration. The ancient Chinese adopted similar teachings of long cycles.[18] Obviously, the ancients were familiar with “old earth” histories and legends; it is the Bible’s “young earth” narrative that is unique.
Furthermore, the animals created during a given day of the creation week do not always correspond to the fossils found in the analogous “age.” For example, the Bible teaches that birds were created on the fifth day, and then the land animals on the sixth. Gen. 1:20-25. Obviously, birds come before land animals in the biblical narrative. By contrast, fossils of land animals are found in lower sedimentary strata than the fossils of birds, and therefore land animals are thought to have lived many millions of years before the birds ever appeared. Thus, the order in which creatures appear in the Genesis days does not correspond to the order in which they appear in the Lyellian ages.[19]
In the biblical creation account, God speaks the creation into being ex nihilo (out of nothing). There is no reason this should have taken hundreds of millions of years. The long ages are necessary to allow time for Lyellian geological “history” and Darwinian biological “history”—not because God needed more than an instant, much less more than a day, to speak the creation into being. Moreover, unless the day/age theory is coupled with a pre-creation creation and a pre-Fall Fall such as those of the gap theory, it presents violence, predation, and death as part of the creation that God declared “very good,” and not as results of Adam’s sin. It also leaves no geological work for the Genesis Flood to perform.
4. The tranquil theory
Swedish botanist Carl Linne (Latinized as Carolus Linnaeus) (1707-1778), who is famous for having developed the binomial naming system for species, and a classification scheme for the plant and animal kingdoms, suggested that Noah’s Flood was a calm, quiet event in which the waters slowly rose and slowly subsided, without leaving any mark on the earth’s crust. This theory became known as the “tranquil theory.” Both Lyell and Buckland seized upon the tranquil theory as a way to harmonize Scripture and uniformitarian geology. But unless coupled with the dubious pre-creation creation and pre-Fall Fall of the gap theory, the tranquil theory cannot explain death prior to the Fall of man. Moreover, the Bible describes an event of considerable violence: “all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” Gen. 7:11, 12 (NIV).
The tranquil theory makes no geological sense. Think of the destruction that local floods, tidal waves, and tsunamis cause today. Bridges, houses, automobiles, boulders and trees can be swept away and destroyed as if they were pebbles and matchsticks. Powerful ocean currents move massive amounts of water. The south equatorial current in the Atlantic Ocean moves six million tons of water a second northward across the equator.[20] These currents would have been even more powerful in the unbounded ocean of the Flood, and the amount of erosion and sedimentation taking place would have been immense. Even if the Flood had risen slowly and calmly, tidal action alone would have stirred up staggeringly vast amounts of sediment that would have left an indelible mark on the Earth. It quickly became obvious that the “tranquil theory” was untenable, and it has largely been abandoned.[21]
5. The local flood theory
The most popular accommodationist position is that the Genesis Flood was a local, Mesopotamian valley flood. Since the mid-seventeenth century, various writers have advanced this theory. It gained wide circulation after John Pye Smith promoted it in an 1839 book entitled, On the Relation Between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science. Smith argued that the Flood could have been “universal” in having wiped out all human beings then living without having affected the entire globe.
Over the years, various local floods have been put forward as having inspired the biblical flood story. British archeologist C. Leonard Woolley, while excavating the site of biblical Ur, discovered a thick layer of silt separating two layers of artifacts. But it was soon discovered that Woolley’s flood was too local to be the local flood.[22] A recent local flood theory, promoted by Bob Ballard, who located the wreck of Titanic, is that the story of Noah’s Flood refers to a catastrophic filling of the Black Sea some seven thousand years ago.[23]
There are a number of serious problems with the local flood theory. As with the other accommodationist theories, it leaves intact the Lyellian explanation of the worldwide sedimentary layers, meaning that predation and death reigned for millions of years before the creation of mankind and his Fall. Moreover, the local flood theory cannot be reconciled with a straightforward reading of Scripture. Genesis tells of a flood that covered “all the high mountains under the entire heavens.” Moses was at pains to describe, in the most categorical language he could muster, a universal flood with universal consequences.
The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the Ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than 20 feet.[24] Every living thing that moved on the earth perished —birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the Ark. Gen. 7:18-23 (NIV, emphasis added).
After examining the Hebrew syntax of this passage, Adventist theologian Gerhard Hasel concluded: “There is hardly any stronger way in Hebrew to emphasize total destruction of ‘all existence’ of human and animal life on earth than the way it has been expressed. The writer of the Genesis flood story employed terminology, formulae, and syntactical structures of the type that could not be more emphatic and explicit in expressing his concept of universal, worldwide flood.”[25]
If the Flood were merely local, it would have been absurd for Noah to spend 120 years[26] constructing a giant, 150-yard long barge to save him, his family, and the animals, and it would have been absurd for God to order him to do so. Noah and his family could simply have moved out of the way. In fact, anyone could have moved out of the way, defeating the purpose of the Flood.
Those who believe that a local flood could have wiped out all humanity assume that the human race dwelt only in Mesopotamia. If that long-lived race had been reproducing normally during the (at least) 1,650 years between the creation and the Flood, their numbers could easily have been in the hundreds of millions, even the billions. There is no reason to believe that their civilization was contained within the area that later came to be known as Mesopotamia. Moreover, the Bible explicitly states that all land animals and birds were destroyed in the Flood. Are we to believe that the wild animals and birds were also limited to Mesopotamia? The only interpretation that does not shred the fabric of the biblical narrative is that the Flood was worldwide, not local.
All of the accommodationist theories—including the “diluvium” theory, the gap theory, the day/age theory, the tranquil theory, and the local flood theory—are failures. They do not merely fail to protect the integrity of the Bible, they fold, spindle, and mutilate plain biblical teachings in a procrustean attempt to make them fit Lyellian conclusions. The whole enterprise reflects a belief that the speculations of geologists are more reliable than God’s word.
Young-earth creationists, who reject Lyellism, do not dispute a law of nature, or even a fact of geology. Creationists merely reject uniformity of rate, believing instead that rapid erosion and massive sedimentation occurred around the time of the Genesis Flood. The creationist assumption and the Lyellian assumption are on the same epistemological[27] footing: neither can be proven correct because they concern unobservable and unreproducible events of the very distant past. The Lyellian assumption is more scientific only if the term “science” is understood to include the philosophy of naturalism, which forbids any explanation, hypothesis or theory that appeals to the supernatural, or that is suggested by the Bible.[28]
The issue is stark: geologists have adopted an interpretive principle that is directly contrary to biblical revelation. To the uniformitarian, “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” But, as the apostle Peter warned us, “they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.” 2 Peter 3:4-6 (NIV). Lyellian geologists who insist that Earth’s crust must be interpreted in light of presently observable processes and rates “deliberately forget” the Flood, just as Peter said they would.
C. The Relationship Between Lyellism and Darwinism
Most of the geologists who agreed with Lyell were creationists. Many, such as Buckland, Sedgwick and Conybeare, were clergymen in the Church of England, trained in theology. They were creationists, and they were not in sympathy with Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Robert Chambers, and the other Pre-Darwinian proponents of the theory of evolution or, as it was then called, “transmutation.”[29]
In the final analysis, however, it is irrelevant that many of the early Lyellians were churchmen and creationists. Lyellism sounds the death knell for any straightforward reading of Scripture. “If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well,” lamented John Ruskin in 1851, “but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”[30]
Many conservative scholars and churchmen understood the destructiveness of Lyellism and devoted much time and effort to defending the literal Genesis narrative.[31] Even before Darwin published, “there were many, very many, who felt that irreparable damage to faith” would result from Lyellian geology. They felt that Lyell and the uniformitarians were undermining the authority of Scripture, starting down a road that eventually would lead to infidelity and atheism.[32]
And it turned out exactly as they feared. Lyellism paved the way for Darwinism by rendering the Scriptures a compendium of fables. If the Bible is wrong about a six-day creation week, wrong about the Flood, and wrong about death being a result of the Fall, it is probably wrong about all aspects of origins.
Second, Lyellism supplies the incredibly vast amount of time necessary to Darwinian evolution. By the time Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, the scientific community had for decades believed that the earth’s fossiliferous rocks were formed gradually, over the course of millions of years. The scientific community was thus primed to accept Darwin’s theory of how life had evolved by the slow and steady accumulation of small changes over the course of millions of years.
Third, not only did Lyell prepare the scientific world to accept Darwinism, Lyell prepared Charles Darwin to formulate his theory. Darwin took a copy of Principles of Geology with him on his voyage aboard the Beagle, studied it attentively, and reported that, “the book was of the highest service to me in many ways.”[33] “The very first place which I examined,” wrote Darwin, “showed me clearly the wonderful superiority of Lyell’s manner of treating geology, compared with that of any other author whose work I had with me or ever afterwards read.”
In Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged his debt to Lyell:
He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.[34]
Upon Lyell’s death in 1875, Darwin wrote, “I never forget that almost everything which I have done in science, I owe to the study of his great works.”[35] Gould has called Darwin “a disciple of Charles Lyell,” and Lyell “Darwin’s guru.”[36]
Fourth, Lyellism and Darwinism mutually support each other. Assuming the strata took hundreds of millions of years to form, the pattern of fossil distribution seems to confirm evolution. The Precambrian levels contain the fossils of single-celled microbes. The Paleozoic strata contain mostly the fossils of sea-dwelling creatures at lower levels, with amphibians and then reptiles appearing at higher levels. The Mesozoic strata contain the fossils of land-dwelling reptiles, such as the dinosaurs, and smaller mammals. The Cenozoic strata contain a fossil fauna dominated by larger mammals. At the very top of the geologic column, we find man.
This fossil pattern is predicted by Darwin’s theory: life originated in the seas; eventually a fish became an amphibian and crawled onto land, some amphibians evolved into reptiles, some reptiles evolved into mammals and birds, and ultimately some ape-like mammals evolved into humans.
Given a Lyellian interpretation of the rocks, something like Darwinian evolution seems very likely, even if we do not understand the mechanics of it. In the face of this broad pattern, to argue against evolution on the basis of the absence of transitional fossil forms and the lack of a plausible evolutionary mechanism seems like quibbling, like nitpicking. Thus, Lyellism strongly supports and reinforces Darwinism.
By the same token, if Darwin’s theory is correct, it indicates that the rocks formed very slowly and gradually, just as Lyell said they did. The evolution of the animals whose fossils are contained in the rocks must have been a very long, slow process. Evolution must have taken many millions of years to change the lowermost mammals in the fossil record, the tiny shrew-like mammals of the Triassic/Jurassic boundary, for example, into the great variety of mammals we see today. Accordingly, the rocks separating the early mammal fossils from today’s mammal specimens must have been formed over the course of many millions of years. Thus, Darwinism strongly supports and reinforces Lyellism.
It is sometimes asserted that Lyell only reluctantly accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution. But Darwin published in 1859 and by 1865, only six years later, Lyell had become an enthusiastic supporter of Darwin’s theory. In the 1865 edition of Principles, Lyell added his own original arguments in support of Darwin’s theory. In later editions of Origin of Species, Darwin proudly noted Lyell’s conversion to evolutionary views:
The several difficulties here discussed, namely [the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, the simultaneous and sudden appearance of several groups of species, the absence of fossils below the Cambrian], are all undoubtedly of the most serious nature. We see this in the fact that the most eminent palæontologists, namely Cuvier, Agassiz, Barrande, Pictet, Falconer, E. Forbes, &c., and all our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, &c., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species. But Sir Charles Lyell now gives the support of his high authority to the opposite side; and most geologists and palæontologists are much shaken in their former belief.[37]
To summarize, the view that evolution took place over the course of millions of years proves that the rocks are millions of years old, and the view that the rocks are millions of years old proves that life evolved slowly over the course of millions of years. It is thus pointless to reject either Darwinism or Lyellism without rejecting both. If one’s model of origins rejects both Lyellism and Darwinism simultaneously, however, astonishingly little evidence remains to support either view. Lyellism is based on an assumption about the past rate of geological processes. Darwinism is based on the belief that beneficial genetic mutations can accumulate to form complex new organs and bio-chemical systems, a belief that is not well supported by observation.[38]
Yet many Christian apologists do not want to pick a fight with Lyell. In recent years, many writers have criticized Darwinism but, with few exceptions, have not challenged uniformitarian geology.[39] Prominent among the recent critics of Darwinism are the leaders of the “Intelligent Design” movement, including Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski.[40] This movement does not criticize mainstream geology. Phillip Johnson said that his group wishes to criticize Darwinism on scientific grounds without becoming involved in a defense of “biblical literalism.” This seems a good strategy: attack the adversary’s model without exposing your own for him to shoot back at.
But no one on the other side is fooled. The concept of “Intelligent Design” implies that there was a Designer and, for most, that Designer is the God of the Bible. Phillip Johnson is a Christian, and his faith motivated him to become involved in the origins controversy. Most other prominent members of the intelligent design movement are also Christians.
Moreover, Darwinists label any criticism of evolution as creationism, regardless how scrupulously the critic keeps religion out of the argument. For example, Jonathan Wells, who holds Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Berkeley, wrote a book called “Icons of Evolution,” in which he argued that the Darwinian fairy tales told in science textbooks do not reflect current scientific knowledge as embodied in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Wells never mentioned his religious beliefs, yet his Darwinist detractors immediately attacked him because of his membership in the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.[41] If you criticize Darwinism, you will be called a creationist, so if you are motivated by a high regard for Scripture, why not be honest about it?
Those who would reject Darwin without also rejecting Lyell make a strange distinction that scientists do not make. Geological gradualism (Lyellism) came, logically and historically, before biological gradualism (Darwinism), but today they have merged into one unified system of assumptions that scientists use to theorize about the history of the earth and its flora and fauna. The philosophy behind this system is naturalism. Naturalism, or scientific materialism, is the basis of all of the historical sciences. Darwinism is the philosophy of naturalism applied to historical biology, and Lyellism is naturalism applied to historical geology. It is absurd for Christians to adopt supernaturalism with regard to historical biology, but be reconciled to naturalism in the realm of historical geology.
There are intermediate theories between “young earth” or biblical creationism on the one hand, and Darwinian evolution on the other. These include “theistic evolution, the idea that God “created” through the use of evolution, largely allowing evolution to take its course, but giving it a helping nudge every now and again. Theistic evolution is a bizarre attempt to marry two opposing philosophies, theism and atheism, supernaturalism and naturalism. For the term “theistic evolution,” substitute “theistic naturalism,” as suggested by Phillip Johnson, and it is obvious that theistic evolution is an oxymoron. Another of the intermediate theories is “progressive creationism,” the doctrine that God created by stages, each stage lasting—or separated from the next by—many millions of years.
The intermediate positions are illogical compromises that are faithful neither to the Bible nor to the philosophy of naturalism that guides modern science.[42] Scientists condemn both of these approaches as mere creationism. Bible-believers ought to condemn them as well; they contradict basic Bible doctrines such as the six-day creation and the worldwide Flood.
There are only two internally consistent models: 1) the biblical model—God created the world in six-days and later destroyed it in a global Flood that comprehensively reshaped the surface of the earth, forming most of the geologic column, and 2) the naturalistic model—life evolved by natural selection acting upon genetic mutations, unguided by God or Providence, over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Each of these models has integrity—meaning that it is internally consistent and faithful to its guiding principles—and is not the product of an illogical compromise or accommodation.
Those who subscribe to Lyellism already deny the reality of a literal creation week and a universal flood, two foundational biblical claims. Lyellians, if they are intellectually consistent, will be drawn toward the purely naturalistic model of origins, i.e., Darwinism.
[i] The term Lyellism is stylistically preferable to the ponderous Uniformitarianism. Neither Darwin nor Lyell invented the theories that made each famous. But what Darwin did for evolution, Lyell had previously done for uniformitarianism: he argued the doctrine in such a compelling way that all opposition in the scientific community was swept aside. Darwin would have been the first to acknowledge that if there is a “Darwinism,” there should also be a “Lyellism.”
[1] Patricia H. Kelley, “Studying Evolution and Keeping the Faith,” Geotimes, December 2000, at http://www.geotimes.org/dec00/faith_feature.html.
[2] A year is the time it takes the earth to circle the sun, a day the time it takes the earth to revolve on its own axis, and a month is the time it takes the moon to pass from a particular phase (e.g., full) back to the same phase, averaging 29.53 days. By contrast, the week has no natural reason for existence; it exists because God established it at the creation. Atheistic regimes have thus sought to displace the weekly cycle. For example, French revolutionaries invented a calendar in which the months were divided into three ten-day cycles, and all the days were renamed. See, Schama, Simon, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), pp. 771-774.
[3] “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” Although the phrase subjected to frustration seems vague, the phrase bondage/slavery to decay/corruption implies that the creation is subject to disease and death. The creation is not subjected to disease, death, and natural catastrophes as a result of its own choice but as a result of man’s sin. See John T. Baldwin, Creation, Catastrophe, & Calvary, (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2000), pp. 112, 113.
[4] Hitchcock, Edward, Elementary Geology, (Amherst, Mass: J.S. and C. Adams, 1840), p. 218, as quoted by John T. Baldwin, Creation, Catastrophe, & Calvary, (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2000), p. 111.
[5] “While they remained true to God, Adam and his companion were to bear rule over the earth. . . .The lion and the lamb sported peacefully around them or lay down together at their feet.” Ellen White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 50; “God gave our first parents the food He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden.” White, Spiritual Gifts, pp. 120, 121.
[6] Alfred Lord Tennyson In Memoriam (1850)
[7] Dowswell, Paul, John Malam, Paul Mason, and Steve Parker, The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs, (Bath, UK: Dempsey Parr, an imprint of Parragon, 2000), p. 31.
[8] Wilford, John Noble, The Riddle of the Dinosaur, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 241.
[9] Whitcomb, John C., and Henry Morris, The Genesis Flood, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1961), pp. 93, 94.
[10] Whitcomb, et al, at 97, citing William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, (Bridgewater Treatises, 1836), p. 94.
[11] It is unfortunate that many critics of the gap theory have denied that these passages refer prophetically to Lucifer, not just to the kings of Tyre and Babylon. Gap theorists are correct in holding that these verses describe the origin of sin within Lucifer, the covering cherub. This event took place in heaven, however, not on earth during the hypothetical time gap between Gen. 1:1 and Gen. 1:2. See, Rev. 12:7-9; Luke 10:18.
[12] In his book Genesis Vindicated, George McCready Price noted:
In the early part of the nineteenth century this theory was quite popular. With the rise of Lyell’s geology and the modern biological sciences, it went into eclipse for several decades; but it was revived a generation or so ago by C. I. Scofield and others . . . As it is the theory taught in the notes of the Scofield Bible, it is now very aggressively held by many who are emphatic in calling themselves fundamentalists, and who seem to regard the notes of Mr. Scofield as on a par with the Bible itself. . . . The early Reformers had some sad experiences with editions of the Bible with “explanatory” notes. They found that such notes tended to have an unfair and perverting influence on the readers; so they all finally abandoned them. Price, Genesis Vindicated, (Review and Herald, 1941), p. 291.
The Scofield notes also did much to popularize futurist views of prophecy, in which the Antichrist is described as a future bad individual who will desecrate a rebuilt Jewish temple in Jerusalem. See, e.g., Steve Wohlberg, The Antichrist Chronicles, (Ft. Worth: Texas Media Center, 2001), pp. 92-94.
[13] See Jack W. Provonsha, “The Creation/Evolution Debate in the Light of the Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan,” in Creation Reconsidered, James L. Hayward, ed. (Roseville, CA: Association of Adventist Forums, 2000), pp. 303-311.
[14] See, Weston W. Fields, Unformed and Unfilled: A Critique of the Gap Theory, (Burgener Enterprises, 1994, republished by Master Books, Green Forest, AK); Jack C. Scofield, The Gap Theory of Genesis Chapter One; Russell Grigg, “From the Beginning of Creation: Does Genesis have a Gap?” Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):35-38 March–May 1997, condensed version at the Answers in Genesis Ministry website, http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1132.asp; Younker, Randall W., God’s Creation, (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 1999), pp. 22, 23 (“the Active Gap Theory has not gained many supporters among Bible interpreters who have a good knowledge of Hebrew.”).
[15] Younker, Randall W., God’s Creation, (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 1999), p. 29.
[16] See, Hasel, Gerhard F., “The Days of Creation in Genesis Chapter 1: Literal Days or Figurative Periods/Epochs of Time?” Origins 21(1):5-38 (1994) (GRI website http://www.grisda.org/origins/21005.htm ) which is Chapter 2 of Baldwin, supra. See also Younker, at 28-36.
[17] See, e.g., Fritz Guy, “Negotiating the Creation-Evolution Wars,” Spectrum, vol. 20, No. 1 (October 1989) (“The problem with all of these interpretations is that they are not indicated, much less demanded, by the biblical text; they are simply ad hoc attempts to make Genesis agree with geology. . . . The gap theory ignores the structure of Genesis 1, and the function of the first sentence as the thesis of the whole chapter. The day-age theory ignores the impact of the refrain, ‘There was evening and there was morning’ [Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31, NIV]”).
[18] Coffin, Harold, Origin by Design, (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1983), p. 287.
[19] Some creation week events have no analog in naturalist origins theories. For example, on the second day God separated the “waters below” from the “waters above,” creating a “firmament.” Gen. 1:6-8. The meaning of this passage is not clear, but many creationists interpret it to mean that God created an atmosphere bounded from below by the ocean and from above by a water vapor canopy which separated the atmosphere from outer space. At the flood, the vapor canopy precipitated into part of the water that flooded the earth, and the canopy was never replaced. Evolutionists, of course, deny that the vapor canopy ever existed. The vapor canopy theory remains controversial even among creationists. See, e.g., Dillow, Joseph C., The Waters Above: Earth’s Pre-flood Vapor Canopy, (Chicago: Moody Press, 1981); Coffin, Harold, Origin by Design, (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1980), pp. 10, 11; Oard, Michael J., An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood, (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1990), pp. 26-28; Marsh, Frank Lewis, Life, Man, and Time, (Escondido, CA: Outdoor Pictures, 1967) pp. 59, 60; Whitcomb, John C., and Henry Morris, The Genesis Flood, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1961), pp. 215, 240-242, 253-258, 399-405.
[20] Whitcomb, et al, at 100, 101.
[21] Whitcomb, et al, at 97-106.
[22] Whitcomb, et al, at 110, 111, citing George A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible, (1937);G.E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957). Woolley dug five trenches at Ur, only two of which showed the flood strata. A logical inference is that the flood did not overwhelm even the entire city. There was no break in occupation of the site. Today most archaeologists and language specialists doubt that Woolley’s flood strata could be the source of the biblical Flood narrative.
[23] Ryan, William, and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
[24] 15 cubits. A cubit could be 18 inches or 21 inches. Even taking an 18 inch cubit, 15 cubits is “more than 20 feet.”
[25] Gerhard F. Hasel, “The Biblical View of the Extent of the Flood,” Origins 2(2): 77-95 (1975), p. 78, (See Geoscience Research Institute website, http://www.grisda.org/origins/02077.htm ) quoted by Richard M. Davidson in “Biblical Evidence for the Universality of the Genesis Flood,” which is chapter 4 of Baldwin, supra. See, also Younker at 76-86.
[26] The 120 years comes from Genesis 6:3: “Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’” This text, like the two it is sandwiched between, is difficult to interpret. It could be interpreted as a limitation on the human lifespan. Lifespans decreased rapidly after the flood, from 600 years (Noah’s son Shem, Gen. 11:10-11) to 148 years (Nahor, Gen. 11:24-25) in just eight generations. (Abraham, the tenth generation from Noah, lived to be 175 (Gen. 25:7)). There are some problems, however, with interpreting the text as a limitation on the human lifespan. First, 120 years is not an absolute limitation on the human lifespan. The Guinness Book of World Records notes that Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, died in 1997 at the age of 122. A woman in Brazil was believed to have lived even longer, but that case could not be documented. Second, while 120 years is not an absolute limitation, it is not a very good prediction, either. Very few people live past the age of 100. A much better prediction is found in Psalm 80:10: “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength . . .” Even with today’s advanced medical knowledge, seventy to eighty years is the average lifespan.
Another interpretation of the text is that God was setting a probationary period for the antediluvian race. He would allow 120 years for Noah to preach and to build and provision the Ark, before the antediluvian world would be destroyed. This is the interpretation endorsed by Ellen White: “Connection with God made [Noah] strong in the strength of infinite power, while for one hundred and twenty years his solemn voice fell upon the ears of that generation in regard to events, which, so far as human wisdom could judge, were impossible.” Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 96. The early interpreters Jerome and Augustine saw Genesis 6:3 as the length of time that God had allotted for the antediluvians to repent before He sent his judgment upon them. See, Jerome, Hebrew 6.3; Augustine, The City of God 15.24. One of the Gnostic texts discovered in Egypt in 1947 also teaches that this was a period of God’s grace toward the antediluvians: “And he (Noah) preached piety for one hundred and twenty years. And no one listened to him. And he made a wooden ark, and whom he had found entered it. And the flood took place.” From the Nag Hammadi Library, “The Concept of our Great Power,” translated by Frederik Wisse. See, http://www.webcom.com/gnosis/naghamm/cgp.html.
[27] Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge, i.e., the study of how we know what we think we know.
[28] Honest Darwinists admit that their concept of science includes an a priori philosophical commitment to naturalism. See Phillip Johnson, “The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism,” First Things, 77:22-25 (November, 1997).
[29] Ritland, Richard, “Historical Development of the Current Understanding of the Geologic Column: Part I” Origins, 8(2):59-76 (1981); Historical Development of the Current Understanding of the Geologic Column: Part II,” Origins, 9(1):28-50 (1982).
[30] John Ruskin, quoted in, “Those Dreadful Hammers: Lyell and the New Geology,” in The Faber Book of Science, John Carey, ed. (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 71.
[31] Noteworthy authors who remained thoroughgoing Flood geologists after the triumph of Lyellism include Thomas Rodd, Granville Penn, William Kirby, George Fairholme, and George Young. See Byron C. Nelson, The Deluge Story in Stone, (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany Fellowship, 1931, 1968), pp. 83-110. Dr. Terry Mortenson has written an excellent book on the scriptural geologists, covering Granville Penn (1761-1844), George Bugg (1769-1851), Andrew Ure (1778-1857), George Fairholme (1789-1846), John Murray (1786?-1851), George Young (1777-1848), and William Rhind (1797-1874). See, Mortenson, Terry, The Great Turning Point (Green Forest, AK: Master Books, 2004).
[32] Ritland, supra, (1982).
[33] Clark, Robert T. and James D. Bales, Why Scientists Accept Evolution, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1966), p. 33, citing Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. I, p. 60.
[34] Darwin, Charles, Origin of the Species, (Reprint: New York: Gramercy Books, 1979), p. 293 (Chapter IX, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record” par. 6). Later editions omit the word incomprehensibly.
[35] Clark and Bales, supra, p. 34, citing Life and Letters, Vol. II, p. 374.
[36] Gould, Stephen Jay, The Panda’s Thumb, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1980), p. 179.
[37] Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, The Harvard Classics, Vol. 11, (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-1914; web edition by Bartleby.com, 2001) Chapter 10, par. 6. http://www.bartleby.com/11/1006.html. Earlier editions have a slightly different list, which includes Sir Richard Owen, and shows Lyell only beginning to come around to Darwin’s way of thinking:
The several difficulties here discussed . . . are all undoubtedly of the most serious nature. We see this in the plainest manner by the fact that all the most eminent palæontologists, namely Cuvier, Owen, Agassiz, Barrande, Falconer, E. Forbes, &c., and all our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, &c., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species. But I have reason to believe that one great authority, Sir Charles Lyell, from further reflexion entertains grave doubts on this subject. Darwin, Charles, Origin of the Species, (Reprint: New York: Gramercy Books, 1979), pp. 315, 316.
“When the first edition of this work was published,” wrote Darwin, sarcastically, “I included Professor Owen with other paleontologists as being firmly convinced of the immutability of species; but it appears . . . that this was on my part a preposterous error.” Darwin, Charles, Origin of the Species, (Reprint: New York: Gramercy Books, 1979), p. 59. Further research would probably show that Sir Richard Owen, like modern creationists, did not hold to the immutability of species, but at the same time did not accept the larger molecules-to-man evolutionary story.
[38] See chapter 12, infra. See also Spetner, Lee, Not by Chance, (Brooklyn, NY: The Judaica Press, Inc., 1997), pp. 159, 160.
[39] See, e.g., Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box; Lee Spetner, Not by Chance; Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial; Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis; Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution; William Dembski, Intelligent Design.
[40] Phillip Johnson is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago School of Law. He clerked for Earl Warren, then chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, then taught law at Cal-Berkeley, where he is now a professor emeritus. His book Darwin on Trial (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991) and his subsequent work have helped to establish the “intelligent design” movement as an intellectual force to be reckoned with. Johnson’s very keen intellect and impeccable academic credentials have allowed him to take the critique of evolution into the academic mainstream, where others could not take it. He has been diligent about participating in debates and fostering friendships with scientists. His primary intellectual service to the critique of Darwinism has been to show that the real force of Darwinism is not in the scientific evidence, which is not convincing, but in the philosophy of naturalism, which has an unshakable hold on modern academia. “Naturalism is not something about which Darwinists can afford to be tentative,” he writes, “because their science is based upon it. As we have seen, the positive evidence that Darwinian evolution either can produce or has produced important biological innovations is nonexistent.” Darwin on Trial, p. 115.
But the philosophical basis of Darwinism is not news to creationists, certainly not to Adventists. In his 1929 book Back to Creationism, Harold Clark spent a chapter (entitled “A Revival of Paganism”) tracing evolutionary philosophy from Aristotle to Darwin. He wrote that “the pedigree of the evolution hypothesis ought to be sufficient to cause any cautious thinker to consider very carefully before he accepts it. Instead of being the science that it so vociferously calls itself, it is a pagan philosophy parading in the name of science; and it is for this reason that the Fundamentalists are waging such an active campaign against it. The acceptance of a bald naturalism in the place of supernatural religion is in its very nature an unthinkable act on the part of believers in Bible Christianity.” Harold W. Clark, Back to Creationism, (Angwin, CA: Pacific Union College Press, 1929), in Creationism in Twentieth-Century America, Vol. 8: The Early Writings of Harold W. Clark and Frank Lewis Marsh, ed. Ronald L. Numbers, (New York and London: Garland Pub. Inc., 1995), p. 122.
[41] See, e.g., Padian, Kevin, and Alan D. Gishlick, “The Talented Mr. Wells,” Quarterly Review of Biology, 77:1 (March, 2002).
[42] For a detailed critique of “progressive creationism”, specifically the views of astronomer Hugh Ross, see, Jonathan Sarfati, Refuting Compromise (Green Forest, AK: Master Books, 2004).