Did God Create The World?

Introduction

Opening your Bibles, if you will, to Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 1. And you can just kind of leave it open there because we’ll spend all of our time from the text in that chapter this evening for the most part. We’ve had guests in our audience today, and we do again tonight, and we’re so glad that you’re here. And we hope that you will profit from this time that we spend together studying God’s Word. We began a series of lessons last Sunday night that we simply have entitled Questions People Ask. A series in which we’re trying to look at questions, questions that are on the minds of people in our culture, questions that we anticipate we’re going to encounter as we go out and try to talk to others about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And you recall that on last Sunday night, we looked at what I suppose is perhaps the most basic question we may encounter when we go out and talk to people, and that is the question, can we be sure that God exists? We said last Sunday night that America is far from being a society of atheists. 95 to 98% of all Americans say they believe in God. And yet we also noted last Sunday night that we’re a culture that has been fed a diet of skepticism. And as a result, while many say they believe in God, many are increasingly less sure of themselves, less convinced, they’re plagued with more doubts and more uncertainty, even on such fundamental questions. Now the reason I went back and alluded to our discussion last Sunday night is because I want to kind of pick up there with the discussion we’re going to have this evening.

I’m convinced that one of the chief reasons that people are increasingly uncertain about such basic questions like does God exist? Is the Bible’s God’s word? Was Jesus really the Son of God? One of the reasons I’m convinced people are increasingly uncertain has resulted from the widespread teaching and the broad acceptance of the theory of evolution. From the time that our children are very small, I’ve got children who are still in elementary school. And already my children are beginning to be taught in school a theory of origins, a theory about where they’ve come from, that leaves God out of the picture and completely contradicts everything that’s taught in the Bible. Already my children are not yet out of fifth grade and they’re beginning to be taught those theories.

I want you to understand that children are being taught in school that the world was not created in six days like the Bible teaches, but instead everything that we know has simply evolved over billions and billions of years through the process of evolution. Now it disturbs me that that’s what kids are being told in school. But folks, I’m not just concerned that evolution is being taught. I’m concerned even more so with the way that evolution is being taught in the public schools. First of all, if kids are going to be taught anything about origins in school, it will only be the theory of evolution. Children in school are not even taught that there are alternatives, much less a consideration of those alternatives. Evolution is taught as fact, not as theory.

Children are told that all of the evidence points to evolution, and they’re not shown any alternative ways of looking at that evidence. Children are not given any of the arguments against evolution. They are not presented with problems with the theory. They’re not shown examples of how evolution contradicts the evidence. Basically, what happens in the public school system is that our children are taught only one side of the story, heavily slanted in support of the theory of evolution, and folks, the deeper they go into our educational system as they move out of high school and go into college, those kind of biases only become more and more pronounced. I want you to appreciate that because that change has not occurred without having a dramatic impact on the thinking of people in our culture.

I’m going to tell you something, folks. When they stopped teaching creation and started teaching evolution in our public schools, we lost a significant battle, bigger than we realize. Statistically now, more than half of all Americans believe that this world came to exist, not by God’s creative work, as recorded in Genesis, but through the process of evolution. Did you catch that? More than half of all the people that you meet reject the Genesis account and believe that the world came to exist through the process of evolution. And I want you to appreciate that that presents them with a real challenge when they pick up the Bible and begin to study it. How can the Bible be true? People are asking, if it gets the creation story wrong.

And that’s on the minds of a lot of people. If evolution is true and people have been convinced that the evidence says that it is, then how can the Bible be true? People are wondering. I’ve got to tell you, folks, there are a lot of people out there that are wrestling with that question. I would say that by far and away, almost every Bible study I’ve had over the last five or six or seven years, somewhere early on in that study, that specific question has come up. In fact, I don’t think he’d mind me sharing this with you. Many of you know Ken Wheely, who came to us a couple of years ago, the fiance at that time of Melinda Green, one of our members, and he sat down and we began to study together, and you know what his first question was?

When we started talking about the Bible as the authority and the Bible as the word of God, he stopped and he said, I only got one problem with that. He said, How can the Bible be true when it teaches this account in Genesis 6 that contradicts what we know to be true about evolution? And you see, we had to work on that. We had to study more about that. It’s a question with which people are wrestling in one brethren that we need to be contemplating, one that we need to prepare to discuss with those we encounter in our world. Well, let’s think about that question this evening. How then did our world come to exist? Did God create it in just the way it is recorded in the first chapter of the book of Genesis that we’ll look at this evening?

Or are the evolutionists right? Has the world just come to exist through the process of billions and billions of years of evolution? You know what I’d like to do in the lesson tonight? As Paul Harvey says, I’d like for you guys to consider the rest of the story. There’s another side of this great discussion about creation and evolution that we said isn’t taught in the public schools. Well, I’d like for us to think about it a little while tonight. I want you to think with me about some of the problems with the theory of evolution. Some ways that evolution simply doesn’t measure up, doesn’t rationally explain things when we look at what is in our world today. I want us to re examine some of the evidence that is used to support evolution, like the fossil record.

And notice how actually that evidence may be pointing us in a different direction, not in support of evolution. But it may in fact be supporting the biblical account of creation. I want us to notice tonight some simple answers on this controversial question that can strengthen our faith and as well empower us to help others who struggle with those questions. Now, let me tell you tonight, we’re only going to get a brief sketch. We’re going to touch on a few general points I want to make four with you this evening, but we’re just briefly outlining some things in this lesson. Anyone who’s ever undertaken to study the subject of evidences, even in dealing with creation and evolution, folks, it’s a broad subject. And you know what? I can prove that to you.

I went back in the library tonight, and you know we’ve got a few things on this subject. I won’t try to preach all this to you tonight, but I do want you to know these books are back there. In fact, I want you to know about one specific one called It Couldn’t Just Happened. This is an excellent book in our library. And if you want to talk to even your young children about this controversial question, I hope you’ll go back and check this out and use it. It’s an excellent work, along with a number of other ones we have on this subject. I want you to appreciate that we’re just going to touch on this and introduce some thoughts that I hope you’ll pursue and look more deeply into and think about, because I tell you, folks, the more you study it and look at the evidence, when honestly considered, the more convicted you’ll be that indeed the Genesis account of creation is far more reasonable than what we’re being taught about the theory of evolution.

1. Genesis Can Account for the Beginning

Well, why is that? Why are we saying that tonight? That it’s easier to believe Genesis than it is to believe evolution. Let me give you four reasons I want you to consider with me tonight. Number one, it’s easier to believe Genesis because Genesis can account for the beginning. And evolution cannot adequately account for the beginning. It seems to me that those who are going to defend the theory of evolution have two big leaps that they’re going to have to overcome if they’re going to establish their theory as being indeed factual and true. This is the first one. The most fundamental problem, it seems to me, with the theory of evolution, and one that I’m convinced we do not talk about nearly enough, is that evolution has no beginning point.

Evolution has no start. It cannot adequately at all account for the beginning. You see, folks, if we’re going to talk about evolution, we ought not to begin by talking about whether or not one kind of animal evolved into another kind of animal, which is what your kids are taught in school. You guys have been taught this, at least to some degree already, about how one kind of animal, how how fish gradually evolved into reptiles and reptiles into birds. Well, listen, if we’re going to talk about evolution, that’s not the place to start. And we can’t begin talking about evolution by talking about how non-living things somehow billions of years ago, under the right circumstances, suddenly sparked life and became living things. That’s not where you start.

And we don’t even start by discussing about how the earth came to be formed. You see, before we talk about those things, what we need to know is how the universe began in the first place. Where did all of the material and the energy come from that they say has evolved over billions of years into what we presently see? Some say, well, what about Big Bang? Folks, let me tell you, we can’t begin talking about evolution by talking about big bang. That’s still assuming some things that have to be proven. So there had to be some things there in order for a big bang to occur. Do you realize that? There had to be something to be blown up. Matter. And there had to be something to create the explosion, energy.

And there had to be an ignition to get that, set that explosion off. You can’t start with Big Bang. You’ve got to go back of that and say, well, where did the energy come from? And where did the matter come from? And what ignited this used explosion? And I tell you what the problem is with evolution. They have no way of accounting for that. You take an evolutionist back that far, and you know what he’s going to say? We don’t know. And the honest ones will tell you that. You see, the universe could not have existed forever. It had to have a beginning. And evolution, in no way, can account for that beginning. Now, without going any further, I want you to think about that. It seems to me that there is a certain absurdity in proceeding.

In going on to talk about big bang and spontaneous generation and evolution of one kind of animal to another, it seems to me a bit absurd to go on and talk about those things if we can’t even nail down what happened at the beginning. If there’s no starting point, folks, what sense does it make to go on and talk about the rest of the theory? It seems to me that in that sense, evolution is irrational and fundamentally flawful. I want to show you something different, though. If you’ll turn in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 1, I want you to notice that the Genesis account of creation does adequately deal with the beginning. It does adequately deal with the issue of origins. In fact, the Genesis account of creation agrees with what we know to be true.

The universe could not have always existed. Genesis says indeed it had a beginning, just as we know. And the record in Genesis adequately accounts for it. Genesis chapter 1 and verse 1 says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I know that sounds simplistic. But folks, it’s a whole lot more than what evolution can offer. Genesis teaches that an eternal, all powerful God created this universe by exerting his infinite power and strength. That explanation adequately accounts for the beginning of this vast world and the incredible things that we see around us. Genesis gives us a beginning. And we can proceed from there. Evolution offers none. That’s the first big hurdle they have to get over. And on that point, folks, evolution fails miserably.

2. Evolution Cannot Account for Life Itself, and Genesis Can

But there’s a second thing I want you to notice with me tonight. And that is that evolution cannot adequately account for life itself. And Genesis can. Assuming for a moment the very existence of our universe, assuming for a moment the beginning, since that’s what evolution must do. The second huge leap for evolutionists is to demonstrate, to explain how life, how living things came to exist. You see, removing God from the picture as creators of life, as the creator of life, one this then must figure out some way to account for the existence of living things. Because that is a reality in our world, is it not? This auditorium tonight is filled with living things. And we go outside and we look around us, and our world is teeming with all kinds of complex and intricately designed living things.

The question is, how did they come to exist? Now, the problem for an evolutionist is that he must say, he must say, that somehow non living things gave rise to living things. Or he must say that life came from non-life. They have a phrase for that. It’s called spontaneous generation. Now, the reason that’s such a problem for the evolutionists, folks, is because spontaneous generation just goes against everything that we know to be true. You don’t get life from non-life, do you? It is only living things that can beget other living things. Spontaneous generation does not occur. In fact, evolutionists will admit that today on earth it does not happen. You realize that? In other words, they’re taking a position that they acknowledge is itself. Now we’ll explain why they do that more in just a minute.

But you know, men have not always understood that. There was a time when men believed in spontaneous generation, that believed that you could get living things from non-living things. Centuries ago, for example, men believed that you could get living things from a rotting, decaying piece of meat. You realize that? See, several centuries ago, they’d take an old rotten piece of meat and they’d kind of pitch it outside with the trash, and a couple days later they’d come along, and guess what would be in that meat? Maggots. That’s right, isn’t that gross? It’d be crawling with maggots. And used to be, men believed that that meat, that rotting meat spontaneously generated maggots. Maggots come from decaying meat. That’s what they thought. Well, the experiments of men like Francisco Reddy and Louis Pasteur demonstrated that that wasn’t the case.

Reddy showed that in fact the maggots came, well, you know where they came from. They came from the flies that laid their eggs in the meat, and a couple days later the legs, eggs hatched, and the maggots were the larvae from the flies. And Reddy demonstrated that in his experiments. And a hundred years later, Pasteur demonstrated the same principle with microscopic creatures. And over time, what all men have come to learn and to recognize, including evolutionists, is that life only comes from life. That’s a problem, folks. That’s a huge hurdle. Those who defend the theory of evolution are going to have to get over it. And they’ve come up with a way to do that. What evolutionists are telling us is that, yes, today there is no spontaneous generation, but if we could just go back several billion years, if we could go back several billion years to the time when this earth was in its formative stages, they suggest that conditions back then were far different than they are today, and may well have been such that under just the right circumstances, non-living material could spark life.

Lawrence Richards in his book describes their scenario, and I want to read this to you so you can get a feel for what they say. He said that scientists who believe in the theory of evolution of life know it could not happen unless Earth was a very different place than it is now. They picture early Earth as a molten rock giving off volcanic gases like methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and water vapor. Some think thousands of meteorites struck the earth from space, bringing millions of tons of carbon. Perhaps water vapor was formed by gases from the volcano. However, after hundreds of millions of years, they supposed that the earth cooled. Rain fell on the black, jumbled, empty rocks of the earth. Finally, water lay in shallow seas and in millions of pools and streams.

Because there was no free oxygen in the air then, and therefore no ozone layer, powerful rays of ultraviolet light from the sun struck the water and the chemicals that were dissolved in it and caused change. Now here’s the key. No scientist can say just exactly how it is supposed to have happened. But evolutionists think that the carbon and the ammonia and the other atoms began to leak up to form chemical combinations necessary for living cells. Then somehow, these chemicals formed more complex structures. Finally, somehow, just the right chemicals were all together in the right place, and a living cell was formed. This living cell reproduced itself from the chemicals around it, and from this beginning, a single cell, all the plants and animals on Earth developed.

See what they’re saying? So if you go back far enough to a time when none of us were there to properly analyze the situation. Go back far enough, you’ll find that perhaps on Earth the conditions were such that under just the right set of circumstances, somehow from something non-living, life could come. Is that a reasonable way to explain the origin of life? Well, you know, folks, there are even a lot of evolutionists that have a hard time swallowing that one. J. Kiyasing, who is an evolutionist, made this observation. I want you to hear this. He said, the simplest cell is an intricate unit of harmoniously coordinated parts and chemical pathways. It’s spontaneous assembly out of the environment. Granting the unlikely simultaneous presence together of all the parts, get this, is not a believable possibility.

Did you catch that? Two significant things I think he said there. Number one, he says, listen, folks, it is a stretch. Well, that’s being generous. It is not possible to think that back then, leaving everything to the forces of nature, you could just get all the stuff in one place that you’d need to build a cell. In fact, interestingly, what some scientists tell us is that to get the right conditions necessary to make some of the stuff that goes into a cell, those right conditions would be completely wrong to make some of the other stuff that goes into cell. So you’d get some of the material, but when you got it just right to make that, it’d kill the other stuff you needed. You see, it’s not possible even to get all the stuff together in the same place at the same time.

But he said then to suggest that even if you had some little pool somewhere that had all this stuff in it, that somehow all these things naturally would begin to link up into all these intricate working relationships and somehow begin functioning as a living cell, he says it’s simply absurd. He calls it not a believable possibility. Some folks who are a whole lot smarter than I am. Well, they’re from Yale, I guess that would explain that. Sat down to calculate the probability that life could have begun in this way. Molecular biologist Harold Morowitz of Yale University sat down and calculated the possibility that could happen. And he said the chance would be like one chance in ten to the one billionth power. If you want to know how big that number is, ask David Duncan after services.

I don’t know that I can explain that. Someone said it would take several volumes of book to type out all the zeros that would have to go in there. I understood this one a little better. Someone went on to say to put that number in perspective, it is more likely that you and your entire extended family would win the state lottery every week for a million years than for life to begin this way. You know what those numbers are telling us? They’re saying it didn’t happen that way. It’s not reasonable to conclude that it happened that way. In fact, what I think is so funny, in fact, it’d be funny if it wasn’t sad, that there are many evolutionists who have appreciated the impossibility of spontaneous generation, who know that life can’t come from non-life, and who have started looking around for other plausible explanations.

And you know one that’s starting to gain some ground that they’re talking about today? Some scientists are beginning to suggest is that what happened is that billions of years ago, our planet was seeded with microscopic life forms by some alien race. Now, y’all are laughing about that. I’m glad you think it’s absurd. But our planet was seeded with microscopic life forms by some alien race, and that those microscopic forms started the process that led to the evolution to where we are today. Two things occur to me when I think about that. First thing that occurs to me is obviously they realize the inadequacy of what evolution has said about where life comes from. But what troubles me about that is the depths to which men will go to avoid believing in God.

Even aliens before God. I don’t get that. Dr. George Wall, the Nobel Prize winner from Harvard said this. He says, one only has to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Catch that? He said, all you gotta do is think about what’s involved, and you realize it’s impossible. But he goes on to say, yet here we are. A result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. Did you catch that? He says, when you think about it, you know it’s impossible, and yet here we are because of it. That’s what I believe. Question, who’s got blind faith? Here’s a man says it can’t happen, but I believe that’s what happened. Whose faith is blind? Not the believers. I suggest that the Bible accounts for life in a way that is far more reasonable.

Back in Genesis chapter 1 and verse 1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That’s more rational than anything evolution offers. Verse 11 of Genesis 1. Then God said, Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees and buried fruit after their kind, with seed in them on the earth, and it was so. Verse 20 of Genesis chapter 1. And God said, Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth and the open expanse of the heavens. And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the water swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind, and God, God saw that it was good. It is far more rational.

3. Evolution Cannot Account for the Survival Systems

Easier to believe that an all-powerful creator called this world into existence by the expression of his power than it is to accept the fantasies of evolution. Frankly, folks, I think God’s not quite the stretch that aliens are. How about you? Evolution simply cannot adequately account for life. But let me share with you something else. Seems to me that another fundamental problem with evolution is that the evolution is unable to adequately account for the survival systems that we find in plants and animals. Made the point last Sunday night that we live in a world that is a world of incredible design. But what I want you to appreciate is that many of these wonderful design features that we see in plants and animals are also features that are necessary for their survival.

We need it. We can’t live without it, can we? Which presents a problem for evolutions. How do they account for the design that they see in the world around us? How does the evolution explain all these intricate systems? Well, you know how they account for it. They say, just give it enough time. And as chance would have it, and enough mutations and change and all over the years, these things would evolve. Well, the only problem is how do you evolve a feature that you need at the beginning to survive? I’d like to illustrate that for you in a couple of ways. I found myself impressed recently with some of the incredible designs that one can see in something as simple as a flower. Doing a little research, I found myself particularly impressed with some orchids.

I’d never thought much about orchids before. I’m going to tell you, there’s some really impressive features in these little flowers. We’ll talk to you about a few of them.

There is one orchid that has a bloom that looks just like a particular male insect. I don’t know if you can see that up there on this chart. Kind of funny story behind this picture. But you see this bloom right here? And you see that right there? Kind of looks like a bug, doesn’t it? I showed that picture to someone sometime, and they said, What’s that bug doing on that flower? Well, that’s exactly the point. That’s actually not a bug on the flower. That’s what the bloom looks like. But you see, there is a particular male insect that when he sees that bloom thinks that it is an invader on his turf. And when he sees the invader, he instinctively attacks. And when he attacks, he gets pollen all over it.

Well, when he kind of comes out of his haze wondering what’s happened and where the enemy’s gone, he flies off, and lo and behold, he flies a short way, and he sees another bloom that looks like that, thinking he spies another invader, he attacks again, and guess what he’s just done? He’s spreading the pollen everywhere. And he’s helping these flowers to pollinate. There’s another orchid that I think this is fascinating, too. That attracts the insect, the particular insect that it needs to pollinate by giving off an aroma that smells very much like the female insect of that particular group. In fact, experts tell us that there are some 65 chemical combinations that go together to get just the right smell. So he’ll attack, so the plant will attract just the right insect.

We’ll ask you tonight. Had that plant come to look that way? Had it come to get the appearance of a bug? How did a plant come to have just exactly the right combination of 65 different chemicals so it would smell like the female insect of the male it was trying to attack, uh, attract? How’d it do that? You know what the evolutionist says. It just evolved that ability. Give it enough time. Give it enough chance. And it could happen. Well, number one, I reject that. I think that’s just absurd, and I hope you do too. That nature on its own could put together a system like that. But my question is even if we assume that is so, while this flower up here is evolving the right appearance, how did it survive?

How did it pollinate? Since that is key to its ability to pollinate.

One of my favorite orchids is nicknamed the bucket orchid, and it is my favorite because it has an unbelievable process of pollination. I tried to give you a good picture of it up there. I’m not sure if you can even tell what that thing up there on the right is. It’s a bucket orchid.