Where Did Everything Come From?

By: Dr. John Ankerberg; ©2005

Dr. Ankerberg explores, primarily through quotes from scientists and theologians, the failures of the Darwinian evolutionary model, and the marvelous wonders of creation.

Could blind chance create symmetry and rhythm and light and color and melody? Or begin with the mathematics of the universe? The great mathematicians—Euclid, Newton, Einstein—did not create mathematical order; they uncovered the truth that was already there. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878– 1969)^[1]

I. What Does Science Know About Life’s Origins?

What has science discovered about the beginning of the universe?

[Robert Jastrow] Astronomers now find that they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover.^[2]

[Sir Isaac Newton] This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centers of other like systems, these, being formed by the likewise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One.^[3]

[Robert Jastrow] For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.^[4]

What is the evolutionary theory concerning how life originated?

[Michael Denton] The first stage on the road to life is presumed to have been the buildup, by purely chemical synthetic processes occurring on the surface of the early earth, of all the basic organic compounds necessary for the formation of a living cell. These are supposed to have accumulated in the primeval oceans, creating a nutrient broth, the so-called “pre-biotic soup.” In certain specialized environments, these organic compounds were assembled into large macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids. Eventually, over millions of years, combinations of these macromolecules occurred which were endowed with the property of self-reproduction. Then driven by natural selection evermore efficient and complex self-reproducing molecular systems evolved until finally the first simple cell system emerged. The existence of a pre-biotic soup is crucial to the whole scheme. Without an abiotic accumulation of the building blocks of the cell no life could ever evolve. If the traditional story is true, therefore, there must have existed for millions of years a rich mixture of organic compounds in the ancient oceans and some of this material would very likely have been trapped in the sedimentary rocks lain down in the seas of those remote times. Yet rocks of great antiquity have been examined over the past two decades and in none of them has any trace of abiotically-produced compounds been found. Most notable of these rocks are the “dawn rocks” of western Greenland, the earliest dated rocks on earth, considered to be approaching 3,900 million years old…. As on so many occasions, paleontology has again failed to substantiate evolutionary presumptions. Considering the way the pre-biotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.^[5] [Dr. Michael Denton, an Australian medical doctor and scientist, has lived and worked in London, England and Toronto, Canada. This book by Dr. Denton attempts to explain the gathering evidence against evolution in its traditional form. It points out the growing crisis in biology and suggests that an increasing number of research scientists are questioning strict Darwinism.]

Do evolutionists have scientific facts to prove their theory that life arose from inanimate material solely by accident?

[Sir Fred Hoyle] The chance that higher life forms might have emerged (through evolutionary processes) is comparable with the chance that a “tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.”^[6] [Sir Fred Hoyle is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University College, Cardiff, Wales, Great Britain, and the originator of the Steady State theory of the origin of the universe.]

[H. P. Yockey] One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.^[7]

[George Wald] One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.^[8]

[Francis Crick] An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.^[9] [Dr. Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner and biochemist, was the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule.]

[William Day] A curious flaw of human nature is to permit the imagery of a catchy phrase to shape one’s reasoning. Haldane’s hot dilute soup became “primordial soup,” a feature that has been popularized for nearly 50 years without geologic evidence that it ever existed.^[10]

[Michael Denton] The intuitive feeling that pure chance could never have achieved the degree of complexity and ingenuity so ubiquitous in nature has been a continuing source of skepticism ever since the publication of THE ORIGIN; and throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless. When Arthur Koestler organized the Alpbach Symposium in 1969 called “Beyond Reductionism,” for the expressed purpose of bringing together biologists critical of orthodox Darwinism, he was able to include in the list of participants many authorities of world stature, such as Swedish Neurobiologist Holgar Hyden, zoologists Paul Weiss and W. H. Thorpe, Linguist David McNeil and Child Psychologist Jean Piaget. Koestler had this to say in his opening remarks: “…invitations were confined to personalities in academic life with undisputed authority in their respective fields, who nevertheless shared that holy discontent.”^[11]

[Chandra Wickramasinghe] Precious little in the way of biochemical evolution could have happened on the earth. If one counts the number of trial assemblies of amino acids that are needed to give rise to the enzymes, the probability of their discovery by random shufflings turns out to be less than one in ten to the 40 thousand.^[12] [Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe is professor and chairman of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, University College, Cardiff, Wales.]

Do some scientists reject the Darwinian theory of evolution?

Neither Sr. Fred Hoyle nor Professor Wickramasinghe accept the Genesis account of creation, but each maintains that wherever life occurs in this universe, it had to be created. They further reject Darwinian evolution itself.

[Emile Borel] If anything is ten to the 50th power or less chance, it will never happen, even cosmically, in the whole universe.^[13]

[Scott Huse] In the human body, DNA “programs” all characteristics such as hair, skin, eyes, and height. DNA determines the arrangement for 206 bones, 600 muscles, 10,000 auditory nerve fibers, two million optic nerve fibers, 100 billion nerve cells, 400 billion feet of blood vessels and capillaries and so on. Such extraordinary sophistication can only reflect intelligent design.^[14] [Scott Huse is a teacher and principal of Pinecrest Bible Training Center, Salisbury Center, New York. He also lectures on college campuses. He holds the following degrees: B.S., M.S., M.R.E., Th.D., and Ph. D.]

Did Darwin himself express some concerns about the validity of his own theory?

The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder. [Stated by Charles Darwin in a letter to Asa Gray, the American biologist, written in 1861—two years after the publication of THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES.]

[Concerning Darwin’s statement about the eye, Michael Denton writes]: It is easy to sympathize with Darwin. Such feelings have probably occurred to most biologists at times, for to common sense it does indeed appear absurd to propose that chance could have thrown together devices of such complexity and ingenuity that they appear to represent the very epitome of perfection…. Aside from any quantitative considerations, it seems intuitively impossible that such self-evident brilliance in the execution of design could ever have occasionally hit on a relatively ingenious adaptive end, it seems inconceivable that it could have reached so many ends of such surpassing “perfection.”^[15]

What problems have scientists admitted concerning Darwinian evolution?

[P. S. Moorhead and M. M. Kaplan] Evolutionists greatly depend on random mutations to bring about the tremendous variation needed to produce all the life forms that now exist, including man. But this is where the great evolutionary scientists think that the theory of evolution has broken down. For example, Dr. Murray Eden, Professor of Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. who at the conference entitled Mathematical Challenges to Neo-Darwinian Interpretation found in the Wistar Institute Press delivered a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory.” In this paper he commented on the possibilities of random mutations accounting for the great variation evolutionists say must have taken place. He states, “It is our contention that if random is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws, physical, chemical and biological.”^[16]

What are some of the things about the human gene that cause concern for evolutionary scientists?

Lewis Thomas makes this comment in MEDUSA AND THE SNAIL about the information-rich blueprint in the human gene:

The mere existence of that cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all though their waking hours, calling to each in endless wonderment, talk of nothing except that cell…. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime I will charter a sky‑writing airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all of my money runs out.^[17]

Writing about this same cell, Chandra Wickramasinghe, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cardiff, Wales, reminded his readers that the statistical probability of forming even a single enzyme, the building block of the gene, which is in turn the building block of the cell, is 1 in 10 to the 40,000th.^[18] The translation of that figure is that it would require more attempts for the forma­tion of one enzyme than there are atoms in all the stars of all the galaxies in the entire known universe. Though a Buddhist, Dr. Wickramasinghe concedes this supernatural notion.^[19]

So “impossible” is this event that Francis Crick, the Nobel-Prize-winning scien­tist who helped crack the code of human DNA, said it is “almost a miracle.”^[20]

Have scientists found evidence that life has come into existence by chance anywhere else in the universe?

Since evolutionists have not found scientific evidence for life originating from non-life on earth they had hoped they could find evidence of life somewhere in the universe. If they could, it would give them circumstantial evidence that life could originate by evolution someplace else.

[Carl Sagan] The discovery of life on one other planet—e.g. Mars—can, in the words of the American Physicist Phillip Morrison, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “transform the origin of life from a miracle to a statistic.”^[21] [Dr. Carl Sagan is an American astronomer.]

[Christianus Huygenus] That which makes me of this opinion, that those Worlds are not without such a Creature endowed with Reason, is that otherwise our Earth would have too much the Advantage of them, in being the only part of the Universe that could boast of such a Creature….^[22]

[Michael Denton] The discovery of life (on other planets), especially if it were to prove widespread, would of course have a very important bearing on the question of how life originated on earth. For it would undoubtedly provide powerful circumstantial evidence for the traditional evolutionary scenario, enhancing enormously the credibility of the belief that the root from chemistry to life can be surmounted by simple natural processes wherever the right conditions exist.^[23]

[Michael Denton] At present, if we are to exclude UFO’s and the claims of Von Daniken and his fellow travelers, there is not a shred of evidence for extra­terrestrial life, and there is no way of excluding the possibility of life being unique to earth with all the philosophical consequences this entails.^[24]

[Michael Denton] It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and an ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or a gene—is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything perused by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled, as neolithic man would in the presence of twentieth century technology.

To those who still dogmatically advocate that all this new reality is the result of pure chance one can only reply, like Alice, incredulous in the face of the contradictory logic of the Red Queen:

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the queen.

‘When I was your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”^[25]

II. What Has the Fossil Record Revealed About Darwin’s Missing Link Between All the Plants and Animals?

What evidence should we expect to find in the fossil record if Darwin’s theory of evolution is correct?

[Charles Darwin] Innumerable transitional forms must have existed. But why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?… Why is not every geological formation in every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory.^[26]

[Thomas Huxley] If it could be shown that this fact [gaps between widely distinct groups] had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution.^[27]

[Theodosius Dobzhansky] These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land vertebrate into a fish as it is to effect the reverse transformation. The applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter. And yet, it is just such impossibility that is demanded by anti-evolutionists when they ask for “proofs” of evolution which they would magnanimously accept as satisfactory.28

[Niles Eldredge] Darwin also holds out the hope that some of the gap would be filled as the result of subsequent collecting. But most of the gaps were still there a century later and some paleontologists were no longer willing to explain them away geologically.^[28] [Dr. Niles Eldredge is the chairman and curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.]

[Stephen Jay Gould] One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong.^[29] [Dr. Gould taught biology, geology and the history of science at Harvard University.]

[George Gaylord Simpson] The reason for abrupt appearances and gaps is not the imperfection of the fossil record. With over 200 million cataloged specimens of about 250,000 fossil species, many evolutionist paleontologists argue that the fossil record is sufficient: “In part, the role of paleontology and evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Actually, the record is of sufficiently high quality to allow us to undertake certain kinds of analysis meaningfully at the level of the species.”

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera and families and that nearly all new categories above the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.^[30] [Dr. Simpson, one of the world’s best-known evolutionists, was professor of vertebrate paleontology at Harvard University until his retirement.]

[Donn Rosen] Evolutionism has been unable to yield scientific data about the origin, diversity and similarity of the two million species that inhabit the earth and the estimated eight million others that once thrived.^[31] [Dr. Donn Rosen is curator of fishes at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, New York.]

[Austin Clark] On the basis of the paleontological record, the creationist has the better of the argument.^[32] [Dr. Austin Clark was curator of paleontology at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.]

[Betty Farber] Several cockroach fossils…from the carboniferous period of earth’s history make one thing clear, even back then, about 350 million years ago, the cockroach looked disgusting. It hasn’t changed much since.^[33]

What admissions have some evolutionists reached after studying the fossil record?

[L. Harrison Matthews] The “peppered moth” experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection—or survival of the fittest—in action, but they do not show evolution in progress, for however the populations may alter in their content of light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end BISTON BETULARIA.^[34]

[Pierre-P. Grasse] We are in the dark concerning the origin of insects.^[35] [Dr. Grasse is considered the outstanding scientist of France, the dean of French zoologists.]

[Louis L. Carroll] Unfortunately, not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian—reptilian transition unanswered.^[36]

[Jean L. Marx] True birds have existed at least as long as archaeopteryx so that the latter could hardly have been their ancestor.^[37]

[Charles Darwin] Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants.^[38]

[Gerald T. Todd] All three subdivisions of the bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?^[39]

The Evolutionist Julian Huxley admitted in his book Evolution in Action that the chances for the evolution of a horse are one in one thousand to the millionth power. (This is the number one followed by three million zeros, or 1,500 pages of nothing but zeros!) He admitted that no one would ever bet on anything so im­probable. Yet he persisted in believing it did happen!^[40]

Does the fossil record tell us anything about the origin of phyla and classes?

[Robert Barnes] The fossil record tells us almost nothing about the evolutionary origin of phyla and classes. Intermediate forms are non-existent, undiscovered, or not recognized.^[41]

[Colin Patterson] I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defense of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job.^[42] [Colin Patterson is a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London and a life-long evolutionist. Colin Patterson’s statement that he had left out the evolutionary transitions in his book, if he had known of any fossils, he certainly would have included them, is stated in PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS by Colin Patterson to Luther Sunderland, APPALACHIAN, New York, April 10, 1979.]

[David Raup] Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery: commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms.^[43] [Dr. David Raup, previously curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, is now professor of geology at the University of Chicago. He is a strong advocate of evolutionary theory.]

[George Gaylord Simpson] Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.^[44]

[Steven N. Stanley] The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic (gradual) evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.^[45] [Dr. Stanley is professor of Paleobiology at Johns Hopkins University. He is a recipient of the Schuchert award of the Paleontological Society and has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.]

[Stephen Jay Gould] Increasing diversity and multiple transitions seem to reflect a determined and an inexorable progression toward higher things. But the paleontological record supports no such interpretation. There has been no steady progress in the higher development of organic design. We have had, instead, vast stretches of little or no change in one evolutionary burst that created the entire system.^[46]

What assumptions have scientists made on the basis of the lack of transitional forms?

[British Museum publication] We assume that none of the fossil species we are considering is the ancestor of the other.^[47]

[Steven N. Stanley] The fossil record now reveals that species typically survived for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly, when species come into being by the evolutionary divergence of small populations from parent species. After their origins, most species undergo little evolution before becoming extinct.^[48]

[Niles Eldredge] If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatureslittle by little, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them.^[49]

[Stephen Jay Gould] New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region.^[50]

[Stephen Jay Gould] The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches…in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.”^[51]

Do evolutionists have a bias against the God of the Christians?

[Frederick Nietzsche] If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in Him.^[52]

[Clarence Darrow] It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origin.^[53]

[Norman Geisler] Fifty-six years later at the Scopes II Trial in Arkansas, which was to decide whether Creation could be taught along with Evolution, the Secular Humanists argued in effect and won, that it is bigotry to teach two theories of origin. Apparently what Secular Humanists mean is that it is bigotry to teach only one view when Creation is that view, but not when Evolution is that view.^[54]

Why do so many stubbornly cling to the Darwinian theory of evolution?

[Michael Denton] …The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past 80 years would have been impossible without its intellectual sanction…. the influence of evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age.

Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in Western thought, one might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth…. In the final analysis, we still know very little about how new forms of life arise. The “mystery of mysteries”—the origin of new beings on earth—is still largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle.^[55]

What has caused some scientists to consider exploring creationism?

[Sir Peter Medawar] There is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian theory.^[56]

[H. S. Lipson] I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.^[57]

III. What is the biblical model for creation?

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. — Genesis 1:1

Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earthand the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. — Psalm 90:2

By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. — Hebrews 11:3

You alone are the LORD; You have made heaven, The heaven of heavens, with all their host, The earth and everything on it, The seas and all that is in them, And You preserve them all. The host of heaven worships You. — Nehemiah 9:6

For thus says the LORD, Who created the heavens, Who is God, Who formed the earth and made it, Who has established it, Who did not create it in vain, Who formed it to be inhabited: “I am the LORD, and there is no other. — Isaiah 45:18

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy? — Job 38:4-7

[Keil & Delitzsch] “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”—Heaven and earth have not existed from all eternity, but had a beginning; nor did they arise by emanation from an absolute substance, but were created by God. This sentence, which stands at the head of the records of revelation, is not a mere heading, nor a summary of the history of the creation, but a declaration of the primeval act of God, by which the universe was called into being.^[58]

[Charles Ryrie] Though there are variations within the broad category of creationism, the principal characteristic of this view is that the Bible is its sole basis. Science may contribute to our understanding but it must never control or change our interpretation of the Scriptures in order to accommodate its findings. As far as man is concerned, Creation teaches that God created the first man in His image from the dust of the ground and His own breath of life (Gen. 1:27 and 2:7). No subhuman creature was involved, nor was any process of evolution.

Creationists hold to different views regarding the days of Creation, but to be a creationist one must believe the biblical record as factually historical and that Adam was the first man.^[59]

[The Westminster Confession of Faith] 4:1 It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost^[60], for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness^[61], in the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good.^[62]

4:2 After God had made all other creatures, He created man, male and female^[63], with reasonable and immortal souls^[64], endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after His own image^[65]; having the law of God written in their hearts^[66], and power to fulfil it^[67]; and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change.^[68] Beside this law written in their hearts, they received a command, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which while they kept, they were happy in their communion with God^[69], and had dominion over the creatures.^[70]

[Dr. Walter Kaiser] [The Bible] really does talk about an absolute beginning, and the text says, “In the beginning.” It’s very, very crucial that all who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture understand this is where it all started. And the rest of the phrase, “heavens and earth,” really is the biblical word for “universe.” It’s what we call “hen dia dis”: hen, “one,” dia, “through” dis, “two.” So we have one idea through two words, universe, expressed by “heaven and earth.”

So, the whole shebang was from “in the beginning.” And who did it? God. God created. The word bara is used forty-five times exclusively with God as the subject. No other. There are other words for “make” or “form” or things like that. But never does a human use the word “bara,” and never does it have any material used as agency along with it.

So I think our commitment ought to be to an absolute beginning, and that it was initiated by God, and that it covers the whole universe.^[71]

[Adam Clarke] A general definition of this great First Cause, as far as human words dare attempt one, may be thus given: The eternal, independent, and self-existent Being: the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence: he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, and most spiritual of all essences; infinitely benevolent, beneficent, true, and holy: the cause of all being, the upholder of all things; infinitely happy, because infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made: illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only to himself, because an infinite mind can be fully apprehended only by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived; and who, from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, right, and kind. Reader, such is the God of the Bible; but how widely different from the God of most human creeds and apprehensions!^[72]

Notes

1. ↑ Edythe Draper, Draper’s Book of Quotations for the Christian World (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers).
2. ↑ Robert Jastrow, “A Scientist Caught Between Two Faiths,” Christianity Today, August 6, 1982.
3. ↑ Sir Isaac Newton, “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 34, 1952, p. 369.
4. ↑ Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W.W. Norton Press, 1978), p. 116.
5. ↑ Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986), pp. 260-261.
6. ↑ Sir Fred Hoyle, “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, Vol. 294, November 12, 1981, p. 105.
7. ↑ Sir Fred Hoyle, “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, Vol. 294, November 12, 1981, p. 105.
8. ↑ George Wald, “The Origin of Life,” Life: Origin and Evolution (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman Publishing, 1979), p. 48.
9. ↑ Francis Crick, Life Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 88.
10. ↑ William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life’s Beginning (East Lansing, MI: House of Tabs, 1979), pp. 231-232.
11. ↑ Michael Denton, EVOLUTION: A THEORY IN CRISIS, pp. 327-328.
12. ↑ Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Where Microbes Boldly Went,” New Scientist 91, 1981, pp. 412- 15.
13. ↑ Emile Borel, Nobel Prize Winner, Probabilities and Life (New York: Dover, 1962) ch. 1-3.
14. ↑ Scott M. Huse, The Collapse of Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Bookhouse, 1983), p. 94.
15. ↑ Michael Denton, EVOLUTION: A THEORY IN CRISIS, p. 326.
16. ↑ P.S. Moorhead and M. M. Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpre­tation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Press, Philadelphia, 1967, pp. 109. [Here is an evolutionary mathematician calculating the probability of a single cell evolving into something as complicated as a man and concluding that his calculations show that the probability of a chance process to accomplish that is zero.]
17. ↑ Lewis Thomas, quoted by Henry Brand and Philip Yancey, FEARFUllY AND WONDERFULLY MADE (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), p. 25.
18. ↑ Chandra Wickramasinghe, quoted by Norman Geisler, A. F. Brooke, and Mark J. Keosh, The Creator in the Courtroom (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1982), p. 149.
19. ↑ Geisler, Brooke, Keosh, p. 151.
20. ↑ Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (London: Picador, Pan Books, Ltd., 1977) p. 358.
21. ↑ Christianus Huygenus [Dutch physicist], New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions cited by Carl Sagan in Intelligent Life in the Universe, p. 214.
22. ↑ Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 252.
23. ↑ Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 260.
24. ↑ Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 342.
25. ↑ Charles Darwin and quoted in David Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, 22 and 23.
26. ↑ Thomas Huxley in his three lectures on Evolution, p. 619.
27. ↑ Niles Eldredge and I. Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution, pp. 45-46.
28. ↑ Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History, June-July, 1977, pp. 22, 24.
29. ↑ George Gaylord Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution, p. 360.
30. ↑ Donn Rosen, “Evolution: An Old Debate With a New Twist,” in St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 17, 1981, quoted by James E. Adams.
31. ↑ Dr. Austin Clark, “Animal Evolution,” 3-Quarterly Review of Biology, 5-23, 539.
32. ↑ Dr. Betty Farber, Entomologist with the American Museum of Natural History. Quoted by M. Kusinitz, Science World, 4, February, 1983, pp. 12-19.
33. ↑ L. Harrison Matthews, The Introduction to Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (London: Dent Publishers, 1959) p. 11.
34. ↑ Pierre P. Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms (New York: Academic, 1977), p. 30.
35. ↑ Louis L. Carroll, “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Soc., #44, 1969, p. 393.
36. ↑ Jean L. Marx, “The Oldest Fossil Bird: A Rival for Archaeopteryx?” Science Magazine, 199, January 20, 1978, p. 284.
37. ↑ Charles Darwin in a letter to Hooker found in the book The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 volumes, John Murray, London, Vol. 3, p. 248.
38. ↑ Gerald T. Todd, “Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes—A Causal Relationship,” The American Zoologist, #4, 1980, p. 757.
39. ↑ Julian Huxley, Evolution in Action (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), pp. 45-46.
40. ↑ Stated by Robert Barnes, INVERTEBRATES BEGINNINGS in “Paleobiology,” 6:365-70.
41. ↑ Colin Patterson in a letter to Luther D. Sunderland, April 10, 1979, cited by William J. Guste, Jr. in the Plaintiff’s Pre-Trial Brief for a recent Louisiana Trial on Creation and Evolution, June 3, 1982.
42. ↑ David Raup and Steven N. Stanley, PRINCIPLES OF PALEONTOLOGY, p. 306.
43. ↑ George Gaylord Simpson at the Darwin Centenary Symposium held in Chicago in 1959. This is also stated in Simpson’s book THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE in the Chapter “The History of Life,” The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Pages 117-180: pub