Some of you may have seen the article a week ago in the Boston Globe Concerning a couple Joseph and Bonnie Smith who hail from a very affluent suburb of Kansas City, Kansas Turns out that Joseph and Bonnie are both well-educated, botical, and intelligent people Joseph is highly regarded engineer and Bonnie is a schoolteacher And you wondered, well, what was the point of the article about such? Apparently, well delightful, but nevertheless somewhat ordinary couple well turns out as indicated by the title that they are neo-creationists and the purpose of the article was to Share with the readership what a surprise it is to find that there are actually human beings on the planet earth Living at the end of the 20th century on the cusp of a new millennium Who actually believe in a god of creation and they are not anti-intellectual country bumpkins who've never had an original thought Turns out in fact that Joseph is a very avid paleontologist from way back has an extensive fossil collection And so what is this with their faith in the creator god? The article goes on to share something of Joseph's testimony how he first accepted Jesus Christ as his savior at a vacation bible school, but then fell away. It didn't really mean very much Until he came back after the war in Vietnam and found himself With the responsibilities of a child who had only seen once now having to face the demands of Fitting into society and discovering a job what his work was to be and he said that's when I made a choice Evolution he writes is just someone's nice theory and it doesn't impact my life But if you become a Christian and believe in god's creation That changes everything Everything in your daily life He said suddenly life is not pointless a pointless progression from school to work to a pile of ashes It means some one loves you Someone is watching over you It's picked out a mission for you and for the rest of his creatures It means that you have a reason to get out of bed every morning This is of course where the rubber meets the road Uh, this whole issue of the struggle between the testimony of scripture and the apparent implication of modern science However you work out the reconciliation of those two things Uh, the real rob is not how did multicellular organisms derive from unicellular organisms It's rather what is the meaning of life How do I fit in are we the result of just billions of years Of meaningless chance in the operation of unsupervised natural law But do our lives really as I say have significance Joseph Smith could see that and gives evidence of how he decided that question All right the defense attorney for scopes in the famous 1925 Scopes trial Clarence Darrow Wrote after the trial uh, something of his own Assessment of life and he writes it with disarming candor as one who embraced the Darwinism of his day He decided that life was an awful joke. This is another testimony an opposite testimony He writes This weary old world goes on Begetting with birth and with living and with death and all of it is blind from the beginning to the end He wrote later on in life and an essay called his life worth living He writes life is like a ship on the sea Tossed by every wave and by every wind a ship headed for no port and no harbor with no rudder No compass no pilot Simply floating for a time and then lost in the waves And he concludes Life is not worthwhile It's an unpleasant interruption of nothing And the best thing you can say of it is that it does not last long I mean obviously this is The using of a man deeply disillusioned with life and much more is playing into that than simply his evolutionary perspective I nevertheless. I do think this is the point with which we must wrestle as we consider this apparent antagonism between science and faith A last week we started by trying to clear the decks eliminating some of the misunderstandings that have often confused this discussion and I think misled many I have included in a handout in the bulletin a rather fearsome amount of information Don't be afraid. I'm not going to wreak it. We hash all of this I already have dealt at least with the first four points and maybe kind of partly with the fifth point And I just like to jump right ahead But at least you can sort of follow along if you fall asleep midway and find out where we are I would like to deal with this whole question the apparent understanding of some Christians with respect to the implication of Genesis 1 That the universe was created in seven literal days of 24 hours each We call it the 144-hour view With 24 hours for rest at the end on the seventh day This is the only view of course that the media have a clue about And generally speaking in the polarizing of opinion They are painting with a very broad brushstroke or Bible believing Serious Christians as if this were the only option that they could possibly embrace Uh some years ago Dwayne Thurman in his book how to think about evolution published by University Press A reminds us that at least in his day there are already six major alternative views of Genesis 1 held by Serious Bible believing Christians who pay attention to every word that proceeds from the mouth of God Six views and that doesn't include many of the minor variations of it Let's not force ourselves into some you know either or a choice as As the media would want to have it. Let's be like the Bereans and search the scriptures and see if these things are so And have a more nuanced view understand clearly what the Bible has to say in fact If Thurman mentioned six views I plan to try to persuade you of a seventh view I think it's seven is the perfect number Who knows maybe it's in fact the most adequate view but The view that the Smiths with all due respect to them are the one that they have a championed is certainly a very appealing view I think it has all the advantages of a very natural reading of Genesis 1 at least at least an initial encounter with the text Uh to understand these six days and the seventh day of rest as being exactly 24 hours each I think it's important for us to recognize that for thoughtful Christians their opposition to an alternative approach of evolution It's not born out of some Supposed indignity that comes to us if we imagine that human beings have descended from the eight This is a common A bit of Stereotype thing that the media love playing up But but that that's not our problem because those who believe the Bible would actually hold to something Far more insulting than dissent from the eights a we claim that God made us out of the dust of the ground And so you know if you want to have a more humbling kind of view you might well embrace the scriptural testimony I think it's also important to recognize that those who've held the view that the Smiths are Described as holding I have done us a great service of reminding us of the place of presuppositions in this empire discussion And that we ought not allow our interpretation of scripture to be bent in twisted in order to accommodate the latest whatever anti-supernatural bias That is floating in the culture out there Most of us would recognize this problem when it comes to other controversial matters for example if some modern Medical researcher were to come to us and say that modern science has determined beyond the shape Of a doubt that dead men don't rise We wouldn't then try to reinterpret the gospel witness concerning the resurrection of Christ in order to somehow rather accommodate that I know we'd say well that's the whole point you see it's a miracle This is the this is the very thing that the Bible is insisting on it was just as amazing and marvelous and unexpected back then as it is now my goodness Even the disciples themselves weren't ready for it But we would also acknowledge that Though this resurrection of Christ or the creation Involves a miraculous intervention of the sovereign god into space and time There ought to be consequences of that interruption of space time continuum Consequences of that are amenable to scientific investigation. There ought to be some falsifiable conclusion that would be drawn from it For example in the case of the resurrection It's helpful if you can then demonstrate that the tomb was empty After the resurrection now. I can't prove to you that bodies naturally rise from the grave I can't even prove mine's going to yet. I believe it will But I can I think satisfy myself and other people who are open-minded to look at the evidence that that tomb was in fact empty We have Evidence from the second and third century of the existence of reports and the imperial archive and Rome We have this attested to in the writings of Justin Marta around 150 AD and then later titullian 200 that were open for public inspection That were the pilots report the governor's report concerning that empty tomb And now it doesn't prove the resurrection But it's certainly a consistent with it and it is a kind of scientific Confirmation the kind of thing we would hope to find that would be supportive of the biblical claim So it is also with creation Even though we gladly all of us acknowledge creation is a miracle There ought to be consequences that you could confirm scientifically even if you couldn't have predicted it No creation is the saying that God couldn't have created the world using natural processes And we all acknowledge that there is a chemical basis to life and so it's even possible that somewhere in some lab in Cambridge some day Someone's going to concoct a biotic soup and there will be self-replicating life on the other end of the experiment No one's claiming that it's impossible because we acknowledge That bacteria are made up of molecules and so if molecules can be put together in such an appropriate way It will eventually in a bacterium. I would assume this is the case But it's like the same problem that Michael Polani The philosopher of science the professor at Cambridge University some years ago talked about when he described an experiment where you have An army of a billion monkeys all strapped to word processors And uh have given them the responsibility of trying to type out the complete works of Shakespeare in proper order Uh Of course the professor's research students are the ones that have to monitor the results They go and take care of the monkeys make sure they're not destroying the equipment and so on And you can imagine Polani says some Eager research student looking over the shoulder of one monkey and watching oh here it comes you know to be or not to be That is the guandromal ridge. No, no, no, that's not it. You know and then we move on to the next monkey and billion years later outcomes the complete works of Shakespeare In their proper order entirely possible Because after all the works of Shakespeare do consist of words on a page But knowing it is right mine would conclude that that's how Shakespeare wrote it Uh, you see just because you've proven a natural mechanism that accounts for the final outcome that doesn't make it so Uh, and so we're left with a whole problem of creation Even though you can posit natural mechanisms it's still up for grabs whether that's the way it actually happened In some creationists, I think fairly say that uh, there we are really dependent on Revelation God's word to let us know what actually took place For one thing we have the problem of a parent past to deal with If we take the scriptures at base value and with respect to the creation of Adam and Eve, which I actually do Affirm and I will try to persuade you out Uh, that Adam was created apparently with a past I assume he was created as a perfect specimen adult male probably 51 or so years old Full linguistic capability pattern recognition software all in place so that he would be able to recognize first the animals and how Unstutable they were and then finally uh, you know be swept off his feet when Eve shows up I assume when Eve was created she was not created as a fetus But that she was created as an adult woman now. That's not to say Eve couldn't have been created from parents God could have done it that way uh, why not? I mean after all uh you and I have parents And it doesn't even deny the possibility of God's creative work some 139 tells us that God created us Born dust in our mother's womb so that it's not that God has to be a deistic God who kind of sets it all up like clockwork and let's it go He's involved and everything that's happening even to today even the creation of you I know and saying that can't be and it's possible then that if Adam and Eve had an apparent past That every other aspect of creation had an apparent past that stars were created Let's say those recent ones photographed by Hubble spacecraft at 14 billion light years away Uh, rather than insane the universe is 14 billion years old actually maybe God created them with a Light all in transit. It's possible. God can do anything In fact as my brother Ron Barnes points out he might have in fact created us all yesterday or today Early this morning with memory of having been alive prior to this. I mean, you know He can just go nuts with this sort of thing Uh, but is it so? And then the real problem is what about the Bible? Uh, you know, let's get to the Bible. What does it say? Does the Bible actually support this common view of the 144-hour creation? And here you see we have the difficulty that on the fourth day That's when the scriptures tell us God created the Sun For the determination of days So at the very least we have a problem that the first three days aren't Solar days 24-hour days in any sense that we could possibly understand They're not at all normal 24-hour days. This is something St. Augustine Understood long before modern science and evolution which troubling anybody if you read the article in US news and world report this week You know that uh, St. Augustine concluded that those days can't be literal Because God doesn't contradict himself and the fourth day is when he created the sun moon and stars the great System precisely for the appointment of time the the whole Outworking of cannot you know chronometry so we'd know what our days and months and years And then moreover if we believe the New Testament we have John chapter 5 telling us that Jesus believed that God was still in his Sabbath rest at the seventh day was still going on And Hebrews chapter 4 tells us that the Sabbath rest of God in his seventh day is still going on In fact it awaits all of us. It's our great eschatological hope. We're waiting to join him in his Sabbath rest And so if we're going to believe Hebrews 4 and if we're going to be John 5 and if we're going to pay attention to I got a I don't know what do I got seven 10 different proofs here You know, we're going to have trouble with that conventional view What other view is there? Well as I say Thurman gives us six. I'm going to give you the seven In my opinion what is going on here is that these seven days are precisely what the New Testament implies they are which are days in heaven They're days in God's experience Whatever that means In other words, this is an accommodation to human ignorance. We can compare it to other Accommodations to human ignorance that we have in Genesis chapter 1 when it says that God saw That it was good. I mean he didn't know that it was good before he looked I mean clearly the Bible is using an anthropomorphism isn't it when it speaks of God seeing that it was good It's an accommodation to our ignorance. It's an analogy that helps us understand something that's genuinely the case That God assessed all of which that which he made and determined its goodness Or that when God spoke does that mean that he has vocal cords and that there were Refractions and you know rare refractions and compressions of air coming out of his mouth. No, it's an It's simply an anthropomorphism when it says he rested and then when Exodus tells us he was refreshed On the seventh day. Does that mean that God was exhausted by his work the omnipotent sovereign God who could have spoke The entire universe into existence with just one syllable Of course not It's all in accommodation to our ignorance And so the Bible is revealing God's creative work in this sequenced way in terms of his experience of a week He for whom one day is that's a thousand years and a thousand years as a day He and for whom it is the case that when Christ was crucified It could be said he was crucified before the foundations of the earth So he can't even go by the sequence the temporal sequence. There's not a clear mapping From things that happen in heaven to things that happen on earth So you're not even really sure that the sequence is mirrored The fact is this is why we have weeks. This is the point of the fourth day the fourth day tells us That every other unit of time is determined by the cedereal system. It's all determined by the wrote revolution of the earth Rotation or revolution around the the rotation of the earth and revolution around the sun and by Things that we know all from astronomy and every other people in the ancient world had days Had months corresponding to the phases of the moon and had years corresponding to the transit of the earth around the sun No one but Israel ever had a week Because you see a week doesn't come from astronomy It comes from heaven It comes from God's experience of a week God who's still in his seventh day according to the word of God And it's a mapping onto our experience our weeks are just a reflection. We do what God does Are we name things Adam and Eve name things because God named them first We imitate God He filled the earth with his creatures and now we're commanded to fill the earth Fruitful and to multiply and in our creaturely fashion to imitate him as though to bear his image his likeness This argument that I say saying Augustine hell All the early fundamentalists some of you know that the fundamentalists were named because of 12 volumes of books published in 1910 to 1915 called the fundamentals Three of the articles in the fundamentals were about creation two of them were supporting the view that I'm sharing with you The fundamentalists all held this view are many of them in the early years Child's hodge other great theologians mage and a Francis shaper and other names that would be familiar to you have told Have shared with us the results of their careful study of genesis one in light of what the rest of the scriptures say and in argue for such a point I In my outline. I mentioned a number of other supports for this including the fact that well, we have texts like in in genesis chapter two The described in verse 19 man's naming of all the species of animals. I once worked it out just for the fun of it If it were a 24-hour day. Let's say there were 10 million species at the time Based on what is the proliferation of life now the Bible says he gave names all the lifestyles birds here all the beast of the field 86,400 seconds in a day means that he had about nine one thousandths of a second for each name He must have a bionic mouth You know if this is all to be compressed in such a limited amount of time. Well, I'd say these days aren't Solar days these aren't our days are gods days. That's what the text says Solar days don't start to later. What then is going on if it's not a chronological report in the sense We're used to if instead we're talking about God's experience of time What goes on is reflected in the other side of the handout What is organizing all of this is this relationship between kingdoms and kings Genesis 1 2 starts by telling us the problem the earth was formless and void Formless means uninhabitable Boyd means uninhabited The universe was uninhabitable and it was uninhabited The first three days make it inhabitable in the second triad of days make it inhabited the first three days are the Habitation The things that from our perspective are immovable The fact that you have light and darkness the expanse of the sky the waters below dry ground plants. They don't move All the remaining days involve from an anthropocentric point of view geocentric point of view from men centered point of view The things that move from our perspective the sun moon and stars move. That's why they're on the fourth day From our perspective the living creatures that swim move and the flying birds across the sky Move and so they're on the fifth day and from our perspective animals and mankind move and so they're on the sixth day We're to state it a little differently The things that are mentioned in the second triad are the kings after all the text tells us that God made the greater light to rule over the day Don't you see how on the fourth day the things that are created rule over the things that were made on the first day The Bible says he made the lights to rule over the day the lesser light to rule over the night and to separate the light from the darkness Likewise the living creatures that fill the waters rule over the seas by virtue of their inhabitation and that birds rule over the sky because they traverse it The animals and mankind and then of course the text goes and becomes very explicit regarding mankind's calling to rule over everything Uh, this is the implication of the text that it's telling us something about our calling our place in the universe I know it's ultimately all a matter of presuppositions Uh, it's ultimately a matter that escapes someone like Carl Sagan who's testimony I shared in viewpoint last Sunday When he shows us the photograph of lonely planet earth taken from 3.7 billion miles out calls it a lonely speck and a great enveloping cosmic dark He tells us take a good long look at it stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself God created the whole universe For one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of death That Sagan's conclusion when he looks at the works of God's hand Oh, what is our conclusion to be? Well ours of course is the diametric opposite uh, because by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command so that what a scene was not made out of what was visible as he brood says A by faith we look at the We're out working of all of God's creative plan and what we see is this We see man the crown of creation The one authorized to be under God's sovereignty the vassal king the king of kings Uh, they one who rules over even the animals In the birds in the fish the king of kings the one who bears the likeness of God the image of God We see one even of whom sawmate speaks oh lord our lord how majestic is your name in all the earth When I consider your heavens and the work of your fingers the moon and the stars which you've set in place What is man that you're mindful of him or the son of man that you care for him we too sagger At the position that God has given us in creation We don't understand such mercy and love yet you made him ruler over the works of your hands And you put everything under his feet all flocks and herds and the beasts of the field the birds of the air and the fish of the sea And all that swim the paths of the sea old lord our lord how majestic is your name in all the earth Well, we'll wait for next week for the evidence from design But whatever our understanding of genesis one Uh, Christians, whether we take any one of those seven views that are so well represented among God's people No matter what there still are empirical Verifiable results that follow and we want to look at them things you can test and use for evidence to satisfy you That it's so that our world is the work of his hand. Let us pray our Father in heaven We thank you for your word we pray that you would help us as we search it out To satisfy ourselves that these things are so we pray that your Holy Spirit would enable us to edit that which is good From that which is not appropriate or good or faithful that we might Know that Revelation and build our lives upon it that you have given to us. We pray in Jesus name. Amen