It should be obvious that the God of the Bible would create everything complete and good, right from the start. In fact, He testified that all of it was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). The wastefulness and randomness and cruelty that is now so evident in the world (both in the groaning creation of the present and in the fossilized world of the past) must represent an intrusion into His creation, not a mechanism for its accomplishment. God would never do a thing like that, except in judgment on sin!
Furthermore, if one must make a choice between a full-fledged theistic evolutionism and a compromising “progressive creationism,” with its “day-age” theory of Genesis, one would have to judge the latter worse than the former, theologically speaking. Both systems are equally objectionable in terms of their common commitment to the geological-age system, with its supposed three-billion-year spectacle of random wastefulness and a suffering, dying world. However, progressive creationism compounds the offense by making God have to redirect and recharge everything at intervals.
Theistic evolutionism at least assumes a God able to plan and energize the total “creation” process right at the start. Progressive creationism imagines a world that has to be pumped up with new spurts of creative energy and guidance whenever the previous injection runs down or misdirects. Surely all those who really believe in the God of the Bible should see that any compromise with the geologic-age system is theological chaos.
Whether the compromise involves the day-age theory or the gap theory, the very concept of the geological ages implies divine confusion and cruelty, and the God of the Bible could never have been involved in such a thing as that at all.
3. Biblical Reasons
As far as the biblical record itself is concerned, there is not the slightest indication anywhere in Scripture2 that the earth endured long ages before the creation of Adam and Eve. The Lord Jesus Christ himself said: “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6).
The crystal-clear statement of the Lord in the Ten Commandments also completely precludes the day-age interpretation of the six days of creation:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work . . . for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it (Exod. 20:8–11).
If God’s six work days were not the same kind of days as the six days of man’s work week, then God is not able to say what He means! The language could hardly be more unambiguous and explicit. Note also this further confirmation later in the same Book of Exodus:
[The Sabbath] is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed. And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God (Exod. 31:17–18).
All Scripture is divinely inspired, but this portion was also divinely inscribed!
Still further, the record of the six days of creation concludes with the statement by God that everything in His creation was “very good” at the end of the six days (Gen. 1:31). There is no way that this could be harmonized with a worldwide fossil graveyard a mile deep all around the earth. The Bible makes it plain, in fact, that death never even entered the world until Adam sinned (Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:21) and brought God’s curse on the ground (Gen. 3:17; Rom. 8:20–22). The Bible says that death is “the wages of sin,” and that “Christ died for us” (Rom. 6:23; 5:8). The entire biblical doctrine of substitution and blood redemption becomes meaningless if death and bloodshed reigned in the world for ages before sin came into the world.
4. Scientific Reasons
Those who insist on accommodating the geological ages, despite all the biblical, theological, and historical arguments against them, do so on the grounds that “science” requires it. “God would not deceive us,” they say, “by making the earth look so old, if it were really young.”
But it is, in fact, the other way around. If the earth were really old, God would not deceive us by saying so clearly and emphatically in His inspired Word that He created it all in six days.
For that matter, the earth does not really look old anyway. Evolutionists have tried to make it look old by imposing the unscriptural3 and unscientific dogma of uniformitarianism (“present processes are sufficient to explain all past geological formations”) on the geological record of earth history as preserved in the rocks of the earth’s crust. The fact is that geologists are today finally abandoning their outmoded 19th century uniformitarianism, realizing that catastrophism (“past formations produced by intense convulsive processes”) provides the only realistic explanation for the great geological structures on the earth. Even though they are still unwilling to acknowledge the validity of flood geology as based on the Bible, they do recognize now that the earth’s various geological features were each formed rapidly, in intense catastrophes of one kind or another.
Furthermore, there are many times more geological processes and systems4 that imply a young age for the earth than the handful of radiometric methods that can be forced (through an extreme application of uniformitarianism) to yield an old age. This perversely continued insistence on an ancient earth is simply because of the philosophical necessity to justify evolution and the pantheistic religion of eternal matter, while rejecting the Triune God.
If it were not for the continued apathetic and compromising attitude of liberal and neo-evangelical Christian theologians and other intellectuals on this vital doctrine of recent creation, evolutionary humanism would long ago have been exposed and defeated. The world will never take the biblical doctrine of the divine control and imminent consummation of all things very seriously until we Christians ourselves take the biblical doctrine of the recent creation of all things seriously. Neither in space nor in time is our great God of creation and consummation “very far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27).
The Testimony of Christ and the Apostles
Christians who go along with the standard “old-earth” model of the evolutionists must realize that they are going against the strong testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ, for He clearly affirmed the truth of recent creation. Jesus Christ was the Creator of all things (note John 1:1–3, 10; Col. 1:16; Eph. 3:9; Heb. 1:2, 10; etc.) and so knows far more about when He created the world than all the modern evolutionary geologists and big-bang astronomers combined. Christ says that there have been people on the earth since the very beginning of the world — and He ought to know, for He was there!
For example, when the Pharisees asked Him about marriage and divorce, He replied that “from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). He did not say that God made the first man and woman 15 billion years after the beginning of the creation, but right from the beginning of the creation. In fact, the whole creation had been prepared for them — even the stars had been made to serve mankind “for signs, and for seasons” Gen. 1:14, 16), and they were given “dominion . . . over all the earth” (Gen. 1:26). Such a stewardship responsibility would be an anachronism if animals and plants had already been living and dying — many even becoming extinct — for long ages before they were placed under some kind of human “dominion” (note also Heb. 2:6–8).
Soon after this primeval dominion mandate, sin and death entered the world through man’s disobedience, and God had to begin His work of redemption. His divine Lamb “was foreordained before the foundation of the world” and thereby became “the Lamb slain from the foundation