Clarifying Creationism

As a professor at The Master’s University, youth pastor at Santa Clarita Baptist Church, and Christian paleontologist who gets to speak at churches, schools, and conferences, I get a lot of opportunities to talk to people about creationism. When I talk with Christians on this topic, I regularly encounter misconceptions about Creation, the Flood, and other topics. Below are my responses to 10 of the most common misconceptions that many Christians have about creationism.

1. Creationism is just a defense of a six-day creation week.

I meet a lot of people who think that creationism only concerns the creation week, but that is only the first part of it. To really understand humanity and the natural world, we have to also include the Fall and Curse in Genesis 3, Noah’s Flood in Genesis 6-9, and the Tower of Babel narrative in Genesis 11.

Genesis 3 shows us why there is pain, suffering, death, disease, predation, and parasitism in the world around us. Genesis 6-9 shows us that the world was essentially destroyed and then recreated (2 Pet. 3:5-6), helping us make sense of geology, paleontology, and biogeography. Genesis 11 directs our thinking in understanding the various past and present people groups and languages. If you leave out these portions in your view of creationism, then you won’t be able to make sense of the world around you.

2. Creationists believe in a young earth because of how they read the word for “day” in Genesis 1.

This is one of the most common misunderstandings I find among young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists, and theistic evolutionists. Many people think that the debate on the age of the universe is just an argument over what the Hebrew word for day (yom) in the creation account means.
Granted, this is an important discussion that is worth having, but it really ends up being more of a red herring. Besides other passages that clearly teach a young creation (e.g., Ex. 20:11; Matt. 19:4), the big issues come down to chronology and theology.

Concerning chronology, lengthening the days of Genesis 1 does nothing to make the order of events match what we see in the geologic or fossil record. For instance, God made plants on day three and the sun on day four. However, conventional geology posits that the sun existed before the earth (and plants). Additionally, how would it help things make “scientific sense” to have plants exist for millions of years before the sun?

Theologically, the problem of allowing millions of years for God to create the universe is that death and suffering are obvious in the fossil record. When God made the original creation, He declared it very good (Gen. 1:31) and decreed that people and animals were to eat plants (Gen. 1:29-30).

It was Adam’s sin that brought sin and death to humans (Gen. 3:19; Rom. 5:12) and a curse upon the rest of creation (Gen. 3:17-18; Rom. 8:19-22). But if you’re allowing millions of years of earth history in the creation week, then you also have to account for death and suffering during that time and accept that God would call those things very good. That doesn’t make sense, especially since 1 Corinthians 15:26 declares physical death to be Christ’s enemy.

3. The Bible says God created every species in the creation week.

This is an old (and understandable) misconception. For most of world history, people have believed in what is called “species fixity” — the idea that species don’t evolve or change. However, we have good evidence that species have changed in the fossil record, and we watch creatures change today. Just look at how many breeds of dogs we have today that didn’t exist even a few hundred years ago, in addition to wild dogs like wolves!

Darwin used these kinds of observations to conclude that all species evolved from a single common ancestor. That is clearly anti-biblical, but how should creationists think about this topic in light of Scripture?

Scripture never talks about species. Genesis 1 says that God made different “kinds” of animals and plants. Noah was told to preserve “kinds” of animals on the ark. There’s no reason to assume that “kind” is equivalent to our modern, scientific definition of species, especially since no one can agree on a standard definition of species. (There are over 30 different species definitions out there!)

Additionally, the Bible never tells us whether these kinds are capable of changing or not. In our eagerness to combat evolution, creationists have been guilty of swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. God made His creatures to change (as seen with dogs and many other animals), but creationist scientists believe there are limits to how much change is possible. The scientific study of what creatures belong to what created kind is called baraminology, and this work has been applied to everything from chickens to turtles to dinosaurs.

4. Things look old in nature because God made them mature.

“Did Adam have a belly button?” is one of those “angels dancing on the head of a pin” questions that we just can’t answer. Similarly, if you had cut open a tree in the Garden of Eden, would you have found tree rings? Many Christians have argued that God created with an appearance of age, where things looked old even though they were only days old. This has to be true on one level (Adam was created as an adult, trees were bearing fruit by day six, etc.), but can it explain everything that looks old in nature? No, it cannot.

For instance, there are layers stacked upon layers of rock with fossils in them found all around the world. Fossils are the remains of once-living organisms. So, if someone claimed that God created rocks that were already bearing fossils, that would seem like evidence of suffering, disease, and death in the original creation, which doesn’t match with God declaring it “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Otherwise, they’d have to say those rocks were holding the remains of creatures that never actually existed. Neither option is reasonable.

Furthermore, if you assume all of the rocks and fossils were made during the Creation Week, then you introduce a new problem. This perspective means that the Flood left no physical evidence, which would be really weird. Instead, we recognize that there is abundant evidence in the world’s rocks and fossils consistent with a global, cataclysmic flood. Although God did create some rocks during the Creation Week, there are many rocks — including fossil-bearing rocks — that have formed since that time, so the appearance of age argument doesn’t apply to them.

5. Dinosaurs were just overgrown lizards.

As a paleontologist, I get to talk to people about dinosaurs a lot, which is fantastic. These amazing creatures are some of God’s most magnificent designs. However, there’s a lot of confusion about them to be found in the church.

One of the most common arguments I run into when speaking at churches is that dinosaurs are just overgrown lizards. “Reptiles,” the argument goes, “never stop growing. Given the perfect conditions of the world before the Flood and long lifespans, dinosaurs are just reptiles that got really big because they lived a long time.” But this argument is completely wrong.

First of all, although it is true that some reptiles lack determinate growth, it’s not as though they just keep growing by the same amounts until they die. You’ve heard about how there are turtles that are over 100 years old. They’re not significantly bigger than members of their own species that are, say, 50 years old. Those reptiles that keep on growing reach a mature size and then grow by tiny amounts afterward.

Secondly, dinosaurs are not lizards. They’re constructed completely differently. Dinosaurs hold their legs directly beneath their bodies (like us!), unlike modern reptiles, which have sprawling postures. Evidence from skeletons and footprints shows us that dinosaurs were very active animals, unlike most modern reptiles.

Additionally, if you scaled a lizard up to the size of a large dinosaur, it would die. That’s because bones and other structures have to be engineered appropriately based on size to combat the effects of gravity. A lizard’s body wouldn’t work at 60 tons, but a Brachiosaurus’ body will.

At TMU, I get the privilege to address this misconception and many others in a class I teach on dinosaurs from a biblical perspective called “Biology of Dinosaurs.” I also engage with the topic of dinosaurs in a video series on the Center for Thinking Biblically’s website, thinkbiblically.org.

6. The Bible says it didn’t rain before the Flood.

A common belief I hear passed around in churches is that it never rained before the Flood. However, you won’t find that verse in the Bible. Yes, in Genesis 2:5-6 you read, “for Yahweh God had not caused it to rain upon the earth… But a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.”

However, when you include the context, you see that this was when “there was no man to cultivate the ground” (v. 5). The text tells us nothing about the weather between Adam’s creation and the Flood, a period of at least 1,600 years!

Some people further argue that the rainbow after the Flood was the first rainbow ever. However, the text does not say that. After all, you can see rainbows in mists and waterfalls, not just after it rains. It’s entirely possible that God took a pre-existing thing (rainbows) and gave it a new symbolic significance, much like how He tells the Israelites to sacrifice animals they already kept (e.g., lambs) instead of creating a new animal to represent the Messiah.

7. Before the Flood, there was a water vapor canopy that surrounded the earth.

This idea fits with those who say it didn’t rain before the Flood. The argument goes that when God separated the waters on day two of the creation week, He made a canopy of water vapor (or ice) that shielded people from harmful radiation (allowing them to live longer); it also states that the canopy was destroyed to cause the rain for the Flood. It’s a cool idea that pulls together different ideas in Scripture. The problem with the idea? It doesn’t work.

When creationist scientists tried to model the vapor canopy, they ran into a big problem. Surrounding the earth’s atmosphere with a layer of water vapor causes an intense greenhouse effect, effectively burning up living things on earth. You could, of course, shrink the thickness of the canopy, which decreases that effect, but then you don’t have enough water to flood the earth.

As a result, modern creationist scientists have largely abandoned this idea, but this fact hasn’t gotten out to the church at large. Scientists aren’t always the best at communicating their research to the public. Instead, most creationist scientists are suggesting that the Flood was mainly driven by catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT).

This model points out that the Flood began with not only the “floodgates of the sky” being opened, but also “the fountains of the great deep” being “split open” (Gen. 7:11). The CPT model predicts that jets of superheated water would shoot up from the oceans into the sky all around the earth, resulting in enormous, worldwide rainfall.

8. Noah’s Flood lasted 40 days and nights.

This one surprises a lot of Christians, but it’s very clear in the text of Genesis 6-9. Yes, it rains non-stop for 40 days and 40 nights, but that’s not the whole duration of the Flood. Consider Genesis 7:24, “And the water prevailed upon the earth 150 days.” And then remember that there’s also the times that Noah sends out the raven and the dove, waiting for them to return. If you do all the math, you’ll find that the Flood lasts over a year!

This particular example isn’t going to be earth-shattering for most people, but it’s a good reminder that we should all be reading our Bibles more carefully. It’s easy to have ideas stuck in our heads that we are convinced are in the Bible even though they really aren’t. We always need to be eager and willing to have Scripture shape and reshape our thinking.

9. We found Noah’s Ark and fossils of giant humans.

If you’re a Christian on social media, then there’s a good chance that — at some point — you’ve seen someone post about explorers finding Noah’s Ark or a discovery of a giant human fossil. These reports are false. Yes, there are people who have gone looking for Noah’s Ark, but no one has found it yet. It concerns some Christians that this is the case, but it shouldn’t.

Just because something existed doesn’t mean it will turn up in the archaeological record. For all we know, Noah and his descendants tore apart the ark for building materials to make houses and furniture. Alternatively, lava flows from volcanoes may have destroyed its structure. Or maybe pieces of it are still out there to be discovered.

Regardless, we don’t ultimately rely on archaeology to prove the Bible. God’s Word is true. As cool and encouraging as it is when archaeologists find something that matches what the Bible says, God’s revelation doesn’t need man’s efforts to make it true. It is truth.

10. Creationists have all the answers.

Yes, when we accurately interpret God’s Word, we do have a true and certain record of the history of the world — but the details are sparse. The Bible doesn’t tell us about lots of things we might want to know in science and history. As such, we need to be humble and remember that there are many, many things that we still don’t know (and may never know before Christ returns).

That might discourage you, but it does the reverse for me. If we had all the answers, then we wouldn’t get to make scientific discoveries. As a paleontologist, I get to expose myself and others to God’s glory with every discovery, and that is such an enormous blessing.

Because we don’t know everything, we need to make sure that we are dogmatic only when it’s appropriate. When the Scriptures are clear, we can be clear, confident, and certain. But when we’re dealing with how many kinds of dinosaurs there were or what processes were at work during the Flood or whether Adam had a belly button, we need to realize that we’ll never have the same level of certainty that we do with the truths Scripture communicates.

Conclusion

We are all learning, growing, and changing — Christian or otherwise. As Christians, we have the exciting reality that we know, and are known by, the Creator of the universe. As such, we need to remember that our thinking needs to be based first and foremost on His Word.

Secondly, we need to be willing to analyze our own beliefs and the beliefs of others based on His Word and good reasoning.

Thirdly, we need to be humble enough to say “I don’t know” and curious enough to go and learn.

Finally, we need to be people who praise our glorious God and Savior every day as we see the beautiful world He made and read the glorious truths He communicated.

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