Creationism is a scientific framework that views the universe as created rather than a random accident. Biblical Creationism is distinguished by its basis in the Bible’s teachings about the creation of the world. Christianity includes different flavors of creationism.
Christians have various interpretations of the Biblical timeframe of God’s act of creating everything. The purpose of Scripture is to show us who God is and point us to God’s plan for salvation. It is not meant to teach historical or scientific details of reality. Christians can believe the Bible is true without denying scientific observations of nature. Furthermore, secular scientific research changes its views all the time, so a scientific theory that contradicts the Bible today could be disproven tomorrow. This demonstrates that humans never absolutely know everything purely through natural means. Therefore, Christians don’t need to conform our theology to the fallible reasoning of humans, especially reasoning that omits God from reality.
Theistic Evolution:
Some believe in Theistic Evolution, which says that Adam was not a real person and that humans evolved from a common ancestor with animals, so they reinterpret the Bible to fit naturalism by viewing the supernatural acts of creation in Genesis as metaphorical. In this view, God used natural processes observed today and guided them over billions of years. Nonbelievers, specifically atheists, will parrot the idea that the Bible contradicts science because it doesn’t fit the mold, so some Christians try to adopt their theology to meet nonbelievers halfway by suggesting God created life through macroevolution over billions of years.
The only distinction between this and Naturalism is that God started it. However, “God” in this framework could be any god, because it dismisses the Bible’s unique supernatural claims. This view treats the Biblical creation narrative as poetry rather than a historical record of creation by the God of Israel, which distinguishes it from other pagan creation stories. This means this view can lead to agnosticism or atheism if we are not careful.
Biblical Creationism:
Then there is Biblical Creationism, which says the world was not created by natural forces but rather that God created everything supernaturally by his word (Heb 11:3). In addition, in this view, each creature was created distinct from one another, as Genesis 1:24 says. This means they were separately created and reproduce only with limited variation within a defined creature genus, rather than evolving from a common ancestor of all creatures through random or guided mutations. This view holds that microevolution occurs via natural selection and minor adaptations within a species. Like differences between lions, tigers, and cougars, while recognizing that they are all felines and have not been observed morphing into a canine or anything else, as macroevolution would require.
There are different views of creationism; there’s Old-Earth Creationism, Gap theory, and Young-Earth Creationism.
Young-Earth Creationism:
Young-Earth creationism (YEC) means that God created the raw materials in Gen 1:1-2 and then formed the earth from them over the next few literal days, separating the air, water, and land (Days 1-3). Then, on Day 4, he created celestial bodies such as the Sun, Moon, and stars. Then animals (flying and swimming creatures on Day 5) and humans (and land creatures on Day 6). The creatures were all formed supernaturally from the dust of the Earth. All of this happens in six 24-hour days, and the age of the universe is calculated from this week to now. Based on the genealogy lists in Gen 5 and 11, this means the universe is just under 6000 years old as of today. After all, the weekly Sabbath that the Bible instructs the Israelites to follow is based on God resting on the seventh day of creation.
In this view, the massive collection of fossils of prehistoric creatures found in sedimentary layers is a by-product of the global flood described in Genesis 6-9. That means most dinosaur fossils were a by-product of the Genesis Flood, and whatever dinosaurs went on the Ark went extinct immediately afterward, either from a post-flood Ice Age, overhunting by humans, or some lack of adaptability. Prehistoric hominins like Neanderthals and Denisovans are simply humans who may look weird because of their long ages but are human nonetheless.
YEC rejects uniformitarianism, the belief that natural laws and processes shape the Earth today in the same way they did in the past, consistently enough to let us accurately determine past events from present-day observations. This means we can simply look at geological layers and determine the age of the Earth. For YECs, this seems oversimplified and based on assumptions that fill in gaps for something that cannot be tested or repeated. For example, carbon dating is viewed as flawed because it assumes the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere in the past was the same as it is today. If the amount of carbon-14 has changed over the years, carbon dating can yield different results when measuring fossils of the same species. Another example is the rate at which the Moon is drifting away from Earth. YEC suggests that if the Moon’s drift rate is constant, it should be farther away than it is if the Earth and Moon are billions of years old.
YEC essentially accepts only directly observable scientific data, rather than inferences and implications about the past based on what we measure today. The core argument for what we observe in geology is that the Genesis Flood could have terraformed the Earth and deposited multiple layers of sediment, making it appear older based on geological evidence. Just like Mt. St. Helens, when it erupted in the 1980s. It deposited 600 ft of sediment in as short as 3 days. Just imagine what a worldwide deluge, including multiple volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, can do in a year and 10 days (the duration of the flood in Genesis).
Literal vs Non-Literal Creation Days:
Some YECs take a longer date, such as 11,000 years, based on alternative manuscripts of the genealogies in Genesis and an allegorical interpretation of days in passages like 2 Peter 3:8. There are also variations in the ages of the figures in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 across Old Testament manuscripts. The Greek Septuagint has some longer ages than the Hebrew Masoretic text. In the Masoretic Text, there are about 350 years between the flood and the birth of Abraham; however, in the Greek Septuagint, the patriarchs’ ages are extended by around 750 years.
Some say the days of creation can be viewed metaphorically and may represent 1,000-year spans, based on scriptures like 2 Peter 3:8, so the range can go up to 10,000 years as of today.
“2 Peter 3:8 (NLT )But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 9 The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent.
Peter uses a metaphor for God’s patience based on Psalm 90:4. This was in response to an objection from false teachers that Jesus would never return because Christians keep waiting but haven’t seen him yet. Peter’s answer is that God is slow to anger (Exodus 34:6, Numbers 14:18) and is patient with the fallen world so that more people can get saved. He explains in the verse afterward: 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. So, in context, this passage doesn’t necessarily affirm an absolute application of 1000 years equaling a day.
This conflicts with the shorter YEC view of the creation week because the weekly Sabbath is based on the seven days in the creation account. The OEC response is that the seventh day in Genesis 2:1-3 never receives an ending like the other 6 days, which always start and end with descriptors such as “evening passed and morning came.” Since it doesn’t end, it must be symbolic, which allows for a non-24-hour interpretation of the creation days. 2 Peter 3:8 is often cited by OEC in reference to longer-age creation days.
However, Scripture also uses time words like “day” and “week” nonliterally, as in Daniel 9:24-27. In Daniel 9:24-27, the prophecy speaks of the Messiah’s crucifixion around 477/478 years after the rededication of the Temple in 444/445 BC, which would be around 31-33 AD at the latest. Daniel 9 uses the term “weeks”, which can be interpreted as a Shmita (7-year) cycle, so each day is prophetically symbolic of a year. More on Daniel 9’s Prophecy here.
Moreover, the term Sabbath applies to more than just one day a week; it is used throughout Scripture in reference to special holidays like the first and seventh day of Passover (Lev 23:7-8) and Sukkot (Lev 23:35-36), as well as Sabbath years like the 7th year or Shmita (Lev 25:1-7) and the 50th year (Lev 25:8-21) or Jubilee.
Furthermore, from the OEC perspective, there is an argument that the day can be used for part of a day in reference to the morning, rather than being limited to the whole day-part of a 24-hour period. The day-night cycle itself is relative to Earth’s self-rotation and is not based on a cosmic clock, and it can be longer or shorter depending on the season and the latitude and hemisphere a person is in. So how we experience time in human language, based on our relative position on Earth, is not a cosmic definition of time, which leaves room for Old Earth Creationism to be more interpretive, including the Creation Days of Genesis 1.
Old-Earth Creationism:
Old-Earth Creationism (OEC) holds that God created the universe over long periods through natural geological processes, and that the days in Genesis are interpreted as long epochs rather than literal days. So the OEC view accepts naturalism’s estimate of the age of the Universe as around 14 billion years and humanity’s age as at least 100,000 years old. This is based on the principle that the days sometimes serve as allegories. Like the prophecy of Daniel 9:24-27 and other scriptures mentioned above that allow flexible usage of the Sabbath. This view, however, rejects Theistic Evolution and maintains that there were a literal Adam and Eve and that all created creatures remained within their created kinds, such as felines and canines. Dinosaurs, in this case, were created millions of years ago and went extinct long before humans.
Prehistoric hominins like Neanderthals and Denisovans are regarded as non-human simians not made in the image of God. OEC allows interbreeding between humans and hominids like Neanderthals and Denisovans because trace amounts of their DNA appear in the human genome, but many OEC don’t believe they are human.
This can be a tricky theological idea since the idea of human exclusivity as images of God, and each creature being created to stay within its own kind, wouldn’t allow for crossbreeding. OEC defines the lines of species with less specificity than YEC, and believes humans can maintain the image of God while being able to crossbreed with other hominins, though they don’t have a locked-down, detailed theory of how sin nature, and the Spirit of God in a human get passed down in such a union.
This controversial allowance of crossbreeding is based on the idea that humans could procreate with fallen “Sons of God,” the rebellious heavenly beings mentioned in Genesis 6:1-5, who mated with humans and produced Giants. Christians differ on whether Giants were figurative or literal. Likewise, views on whether Neanderthals are related to modern humans have varied among researchers over the years. Over the years, we have learned that these hominids have human DNA, which means either they are just as human as we are, as YEC believers suggest, or they are non-humans that mated with humans in the past, as many OEC proponents believe. The main point about hominids is that they could not have gone extinct before humans, since we share genetics with them, so Gap theorists must accept that they are either human descendants of Adam or were created alongside Adam and are sexually compatible with humans.
Genealogies of Gen 5 and 11:
Believing the Earth is older than 6,000–11,000 years conflicts with a literal reading of the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies (which span about 2000 years); however, OEC interprets the genealogies as general ancestral records of important figures rather than literal ages in a perfect succession. It’s similar to how Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus do not include everyone because that is not their purpose. Matthew includes only 42 generations (Matt 1:17), three sets of 14: one from Abraham to David, then from David to the Exile, then from the Exile to Joseph; it skips many kings between Solomon and Jeroboam.
Matthew, which ends with his non-biological father, Joseph, focuses on the inheritance of the throne of David and the fulfillment of covenant promises of Messianic succession made to Abraham and David. Luke’s genealogy has 77 generations and goes from Adam to Jesus, but if we start from Abraham like Matthew, then there are 57, which is 15 fewer than Matthew’s. Luke’s genealogy traces Jesus’ biological lineage, connecting him to David through his mother, Mary. This means it has a different purpose and is meant to be biological rather than about inheritance.
Other examples include 1 Chronicles 6:4-14 and Ezra 7:1-5, which outline Aaron’s genealogy. Just like Matthew and Luke, each account ends at a different point in the family line, and Chronicles’ genealogy is longer than Ezra’s. This suggests genealogies were not meant as chronological markers but as markers of relational significance in an agrarian society that valued land inheritance and national/tribal identity, as in most ancient Near Eastern cultures. Lastly, the Hebrew word yalad (יָלַד), translated as “begot,” can refer to being the ancestor of a prominent figure, not just to the act of conceiving/giving birth to a direct descendant. Example: In Galatians 3:16, Paul calls Jesus the “seed” of Abraham, but Isaac was his actual son.
The YEC & Gap counterargument is that, unlike many other genealogies, the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 include age markers that specify each person’s birth and death dates, implying they were designed to keep time. OEC views the numbers as symbolic and related to Hebrew numerology. For example, according to Gen 5:31, Lamech lived for 777 years; seven means completion in Hebrew.
Gap Theory:
Gap theory mixes OEC and YEC by saying the beginning in Gen 1:1 is the actual beginning of the universe, but Day 1 of creation is the beginning of the “time of man,” which is the last 6000 years. These are two separate beginnings, with a gap between them. The belief is that during this Gap, prehistoric life existed on Earth, but then a cataclysm struck, plunging it into chaos and desolation, and God had to recreate it. The theory is that a powerful force, such as an asteroid impact, caused a Great Catastrophe that ended with a Great Flood, which explains why the Earth was covered in water at the beginning of the creation week in Genesis 1 and why the land had to be pulled out of the water on Day 3. Therefore, Day 1 in Gen 1:3-4 is the first act of recreating the Earth. In Gap theory, the creation days are the beginning of the “recreation period”, so they can be literal or 1,000 years, depending on the YEC variant a Gap Theorist takes.
This is based on a unique interpretation of Gen 1:2, which says the Earth was without form and void. YEC believes this means God created the raw materials and then formed the Earth from them over the next few days. OEC views this as a description of the creation process. Gap theory holds that this describes a cataclysm, based on the idea that God would “never create anything without form and void”. This is further supported by Genesis 1:28, which instructs humans to “replenish” and “subdue” the Earth. The King James uniquely translates the Hebrew word “male” (מָלֵא) as “replenish,” not “fill,” in both Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 9:1.
In Gen 9:1, God says the same thing as in Gen 1:28, but to Noah and his family, because Gen 9 takes place after the Great Flood of Noah’s day. So some draw a connection between these two, suggesting a previous Great Flood based on this unique translation of “replenish” in only these two verses in Genesis. That, paired with the fact that the Earth is not only “without form and void” but covered in water according to Gen 1:3, leads to this conclusion of a prior cataclysm before the separation and formation of the sea, sky, and land in Genesis 1.
“Male” is translated as “replenish” only in the King James, and that happens seven times out of 253 occurrences of male in the Bible. In every other instance, including Gen 1:22 (6 verses above Gen 1:28), the term is translated as “fill”. So while this view is biased toward the King James translation, Gap theory allows the Universe and Earth to be billions of years old, while maintaining the orthodox Biblical view that mankind was created only about 6,000 years ago, preserving the time-keeping view of the genealogies in Gen 5 and 11.
Celestial Bodies:
The Big Bang model requires stars and the Sun to come before planets, moons, and asteroids, which conflicts with the Bible’s chronology. Some believers have interpreted Genesis 1:3 to mean that the initial light was a celestial body, such as a star, but the Bible says those were all made on Day 4, which doesn’t seem compatible with Scripture. This creates issues for OEC and Gap theorists.
People often ask what the light was before the sun in Genesis 1:3? A direct reading of Genesis suggests that there was light for daytime on Earth during the first three days of creation week, before God created the celestial bodies (Sun, Moon, and Stars) on Day 4. Isaiah 60:19-20 and Revelation 21:22-26 state that at the end, when God creates a new world, there will be no sun, moon, or stars, and that God will illuminate the universe with His glory. So things return to the way they were before Creation Day 4, as described in Genesis 1.
Rev 21:23 (NLT) “And the city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its light. 24 The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the world will enter the city in all their glory. 25 Its gates will never be closed at the end of the day because there is no night there.”
How can the first three days be defined without the Sun? God’s light, in the beginning, could have been an omnidirectional light that lit the whole of space that turned on/off every 12 hours, or it could have been a point light like the Sun that only lit one side of the Earth as it rotated. In Genesis 1, under a literal day framework, God started the clock in darkness and, 12 hours later, turned on the light, then did that three times (each in 24-hour cycles), and then on Day 4, he made a celestial body to “rule” over the day, while other bodies “ruled” over the night for the Earth.
Planetary self-rotation (the Earth’s spin) isn’t dependent on other bodies like the Sun. All bodies in space rotate, so an Earth day, from an astronomical point of view, is based on Earth’s 24-hour rotation and is not directly tied to the Sun. Therefore, the existence of light itself has nothing to do with the celestial bodies in space. Anyone can light a match or rub two sticks together to create a fire that produces light even while underground and away from sunlight. Lightning produces light right here on Earth without the help of anything in space. Some creatures even produce light through chemical reactions; these creatures, such as fireflies and various sea creatures, are bioluminescent. In non-YEC creation views, the creation of light is usually interpreted as the Big Bang and applies to the entire cosmos.
Genesis 1:14-19 says the Sun, Moon, and Stars were created after the Earth on Day 4, which challenges OEC, which holds that the celestial bodies are older than the Earth. The challenge for the Gap theory is that prehistoric creatures before Day 1 would have been walking around in the dark, since light was created on Day 1 and the celestial bodies came on Day 4. Gap theory’s pre-6000-year-old cataclysmic flood would have affected only Earth, not the cosmos, so the stars couldn’t have been destroyed in the “First Earth Flood.”
The OEC and Gap theory responses are that God didn’t create the celestial bodies on Day 4; rather, they became visible from Earth then and were assigned their purpose as a celestial clock for humans. The idea is that Earth’s atmosphere was still hazy with debris from the long creation process (OEC) or the great cataclysm (Gap) for the first 3 Creation Days, so by Day 4 the atmosphere was clear enough to see the constellations. It’s also possible the Sun and Moon weren’t placed in the orbital system we have today until Day 4.
In other words, Day 4 is when the celestial bodies were assigned their roles and positions to help humans keep time, suggesting they had existed since the creation of light and the heavens but were not visible from Earth and lacked their assigned purpose until then.
This is based on how the Genesis account is told. Genesis 1:2 says that the Spirit of God hovered above the waters, implying that God is on Earth hovering above the ocean. Since the creation account is an eyewitness testimony from God Himself, handed down to Moses, everything is written from God’s perspective as He hovers above the ocean on Earth.That means that for the first three days, God is observing the illumination of a hazy Earth, the separation of water and land, and the planting of vegetation from the perspective of standing on Earth. Then, on Day 4, the haze clears, and the celestial bodies become visible and are assigned their purpose of helping humans keep time.
Is the Genesis Flood Local or Global?
Views of the Genesis Flood vary, ranging from YEC to OEC to Gap Theory. The more common traditional view is that the flood was global, while others believe that it was local, citing passages in the Bible where it says something affected “the whole world” but really only meant the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean (Genesis 41:56–42:2, 1 Kings 4:34, Acts 2:5, and Romans 1:8).
Many YECs and Gap Theorists hold to the Global Flood view, while OECs lean towards a Local Flood view. One of the most common challenges to the Global view is whether the Earth has enough water to cover the planet. Water only covers about 70% of the planet, so where did all the water go after the flood? The solution from the Global view is that there was less water on the planet’s surface before the Genesis flood, and that the water came from external sources such as underground aquifers and an atmospheric canopy.
The theory is that there was water in a canopy above the atmosphere (waters above the firmament from Genesis 1:6-7) and water beneath the Earth’s crust (interpretation of fountains of the great deep in Genesis 7:11) that drove the flood. The atmospheric canopy broke (possibly due to an asteroid impact), and major tectonic shifts on Earth released underground water. This left the post-flood world with 70% water, most of it salty and undrinkable (possibly a byproduct of the flood). In addition, Revelation 21:1 says that in the new Earth, there will be no more sea. If we believe God will restore things to their pre-Flood state, then this implies that there was no salty ocean before the Genesis Flood. This may also have divided the supercontinents (Pangaea and Rodinia) into the continents we see today. Not everyone believes there is sufficient evidence for this, and those who don’t subscribe are more likely to default to a local flood.
One theological argument for the Local view is that since giants like Goliath lived in Canaan at the time of the Israelites, the Flood didn’t kill everyone. If the creation of giants is a byproduct of humans mating with the Sons of God (heavenly rebels) in Genesis 6:1-5, then how did they survive the Flood?
The Global Flood view answers this by saying post-Flood giants were either a byproduct of another Heaven rebellion around the time of the Tower of Babel, or that the genes to produce giants were carried through Noah’s family (maybe his daughters-in-law) and re-expressed post-Flood. The genetic view raises new questions: why don’t we see them today if they are in our genes? This question can apply to the other options as well: if giants avoided a local flood, or were reintroduced in a second invasion of heavenly beings, why don’t we see them today?
Were the giants literal or figurative? This is another area where some Christians will suggest that the term “giant” is an exaggeration and any measurements indicating they are taller than 7 feet are hyperbole. While it isn’t a salvation issue, one question to ask is why the whole army of Israel was afraid of one guy (Goliath) if he was just “pretty tall”?
Those who believe they are literal figures argue that they simply went extinct at some point, killed off by humans. These post-flood giants were associated with specific nations in Canaan, which suggests they were a literal historical part of the Bible’s account of Israelite history. The Bible shows us that at least three groups of giants (the Anakites, Emites, and Zamzummites) remained in the Middle East and were extinguished by the Moabites and Ammonites (Deuteronomy 2:11 & 20), and eventually by the Israelites.
The orthodox Biblical view is that the giants are literal because they are associated with specific nations, and one of them alone invoked fear in the whole army of Israel. The conclusion on why we dont see them anymore is that they were totally exterminated at some point, even at the genetic level. The only thing close to Biblical giants today are people with gigantism, which is a debilitating disease, meaning they are not healthy enough to be warriors like Goliath.
Lastly, the Universal Flood view is a variation of the Local Flood view. This view holds that the flood was geographically local yet affected all humans, so everyone at the time who wasn’t on the Ark died, as it was a judgment on humanity. The idea is that humanity did not spread out across the world until after the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, so the flood affected the central region where the entire human population was gathered. This region is most likely the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. With this Local Flood variant, the animals that were preserved on the Ark don’t have to be every kind of creature on the planet, just the ones that were local to the region. A simple counterargument against the Local Flood view is that birds would not have needed to be placed on the Ark if the flood was local, since they could have just flown away. Why even build an Ark if Noah could have just moved?
The Global view says that even if humans were limited to a region, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t global, since the text says that even the mountains were covered and everything died in Gen 7:19-21. Furthermore, this position holds that the planet’s geography was reshaped by such a catastrophe, thereby splitting the supercontinent into multiple landmasses. This leads to the question of whether the long ages of the Earth proposed by geologists are explained by the Global Flood, since it would have reformed the planet, laid down abundant sediment, and caused a mass extinction event, thereby creating many fossils. The Local view argues that no specific scientific evidence supports this, so it is not necessary to believe it. The OEC view holds that statements like Gen 7:19 are hyperbole, not literal. When looking at the fossil record, the Local view says fossils from different creatures are not mixed in a single layer, as a Global Flood would suggest. Instead, fossils of creatures with varying levels of complexity go from simple to complex as we move from the deep earth to the surface.
The Global Flood view rejects this and suggests that more complex creatures simply had more intelligence and mobility to escape being swept up by the flood first and would naturally have ended up in the upper strata. The Global Flood view is also supported by marine fossils on mountaintops, which seems to affirm Gen 7:19. When it comes to scientific evidence, there is less need for it with a Local Flood because a short-lived regional flood is unlikely to leave long-lasting evidence, as a Global one would. With local disasters, geographical evidence can be erased within decades. This means a local flood can’t be proven or disproven, making it the safer option, but a global one can be disproven if contradictory evidence exists. There is no consensus on when the Flood occurred in the OEC local-flood view, nor is it relevant, since Genesis genealogies are not interpreted with calendar accuracy for dating humanity. YEC and Gap place the Flood about 1,650 years after creation (around 4,500 years ago).
Death and the Fall:
One of the biggest conflicts between the various Biblical Creationism views is the idea of death before the fall of man. How can there be death before Adam’s creation if death is a byproduct of Adam’s sin? Romans 5:12 says that when Adam sinned, death entered into the world. The standard YEC position is that death itself never existed until Adam sinned. This is based on scriptures like Genesis 1:30-31, which suggest that all creatures were vegetarian and so no creature killed another. This idea is reinforced by 1 Cor 15:26, which says that death is the final foe to be defeated. To reconcile this, OEC and Gap theory believers (and even some YECs) hold that death itself in nature is not the product of the fall but rather a part of God’s good creation.
Old Testament passages like Psalm 104:21 praise God for providing prey for young lions to eat, and passages associating wisdom with predation appear in Job (Job 38:39-41 & Job 39:26-30). The idea is that the death that came into the world through Adam’s sin (Rom 5:12) only applied to humans who were created immortal because they were made in God’s image and put in charge of the Earth. It is humans, not animals, who can sin and therefore need to be saved from eternal condemnation (Hell/Lake of Fire) by Jesus and are promised eternal life. Matt 1:21 says that Jesus’ name means he will “save his people from their sins”, and Paul talks about this in 1 Corinthians 15:20–22.
1 Corinthians 15:20 But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died. 21 So you see, just as death came into the world through a man, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man. 22 Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life.
This allows for death to exist before the Fall and even possibly in eternity for animals at least. Some view things this way because they assume the New Earth promised in Revelation will not have an infinite carrying capacity. This means that, in order not to overcrowd the Earth, reproduction must either stop or death must occur. According to Jesus in Matt 22:30, humans with eternal life will not engage in marriage at that point, which means no reproduction. What about animals? Well, if they die, then the carrying capacity is maintained. If they don’t die, then they would need to stop reproducing, but there is no scripture that says they will, so there is no guarantee that they will. If the New Earth is not limited to a specific size, as Earth is now, then there can be infinite reproduction among animals; otherwise, animals must either die or cease reproducing.
There are scriptures in Isaiah 11:6-9 that imply a future vegetarian diet for all creatures, including lions and wolves. So, for those who believe that God never intended for any death at all based on the vegetarian diet prescribed in Gen 1:30-31, this passage reiterates that this is God’s intended design and all will be restored to that way. The standard YEC argument from this point is that any creation interpretation that allows for death before the Fall of Genesis 3 or after the new world described in Bible prophecy is inconsistent. For those on the other side, Isa 11:6-9 may simply mean carnivorism won’t be a cause of death, but animals will still have life spans and be susceptible to fatal accidents. Some may interpret Isa 11:6-9 as a symbolic allegory describing the world’s peaceful nature at that time. We won’t know for sure until we get there.
Christianity and Creationism:
The main goal of Christians when navigating creationist views is to maintain the doctrine of Christ dying for our sins and offering eternal life to those who believe, and to trust what Jesus believed about the Bible. Sin and death are what Jesus died for us to be free from, so the view of death as negative is an important aspect of creation for any Christian. It’s just that for some, the death that Christ freed us from is specifically eternal death and physical death for humans, not for all creatures.
In addition, Jesus references events like the flood from Genesis 6-9 in Matthew 24:37-38 (& Luke 17:26-27) and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from Genesis 19 in Matt 10:15 (& Luke 10:12), Matt 11:23-24, and Luke 17:29. He also references people from that period like Abel in Matt 23:35 (& Luke 11:51) as real historical figures. So Jesus believed that the events in Genesis were real history, which doesn’t allow for a purely allegorical view of Genesis.
Christianity requires a belief in the supernatural; there can be no secular materialist version of it. Jesus believed death (at least for humans) to be a problem, which is why he died for our sins. Scripture refers to Adam as the father of all nations in Acts 17:26, and the first human in 1 Corinthians 15:45. Jesus is called the second Adam in Rom 5:12-17 because he undid what Adam’s sin did, and that is why Luke’s genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3 goes all the way back to Adam, which implies that Jesus and his disciples believed in a literal Adam.
With some of the other creationist divisions, like the exact age of the Cosmos/Earth, there is a little more flexibility, but the belief in a literal Adam, as well as events described in Genesis as historical, are necessary beliefs for those who subscribe to the doctrine of Christ as the New Testament teaches it.
It makes no sense for a person to believe in the virgin birth, or that Jesus could do miracles like walking on water, healing people, and raising the dead (and was himself raised from the dead), but not that God made Adam from dust on Day 6 of creation as the Bible says. All of these things are supernatural and therefore not testable or repeatable, as they do not occur within natural laws. The Sadducees were Jews in Jesus’ day who denied the future literal resurrection of the dead, but Jesus rebutted them in Matt 22:23-33.
Likewise, there are some Christians who deny the resurrection of the dead in Revelation, and say it’s all symbolic, and say that the events of Revelation were allegories for the historical destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD, with Nero (the anti-Christ) attacking Christians and Titus destroying Jerusalem. However, even this contradicts Jesus’ own view, since he tells the Sadducees (who didn’t believe in the resurrection) that the resurrection is literal. The supernatural reality we live in is something that Jesus and the Pharisees agreed on. This helps explain why some Pharisees, such as Paul, Nicodemus, and Joseph of Arimathea, came to Jesus’ side. Even Paul has to defend the future literal resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15.
The same process God used to create Adam (Genesis 2:7) is the same process he will use at the end (Rev 20:1-6 & 11-14) to resurrect the bodies of everyone, including people whose bodies were not preserved. This applies to those whose bodies were destroyed by fire, nuclear weapons, or devoured by animals. How else can there be resurrections of everyone in existence for judgment day since some people’s bodies were not preserved? Some corpses have decomposed (unpreserved), been eaten by animals, or burned and destroyed (via acid or explosion). So we know God is capable of doing what He has to do; otherwise, Jesus was wrong about the resurrection when talking to the Sadducees in Matthew 22:22-33, Mark 12:18-27, and Luke 20:27-40. Jesus confirms that there are two resurrections yet to come, one for the righteous and one for the wicked in John 5:28-29. In John 11:24-29, Martha shows belief in the final resurrection when she confronts Jesus about Lazarus, and Jesus confirms to her that he is the reason there is even a resurrection; belief in him leads to post-resurrection eternal life. Also in Luke 14:14, Jesus mentions the first resurrection as a reward for a dinner host who invites the poor, lame, and blind to their party rather than just their rich friends.
These supernatural actions are not bound to the laws of nature. Hebrews 11:3 says nothing existed as it is until God spoke it into existence, so none of the laws existed until the lawgiver gave them. That means supernatural acts are allowed by God for the formation of the universe and anything He wants to do, like the virgin birth and resurrections. He is not bound by natural laws, since He created them Himself. God can only limit Himself, and that is by His own words. This means God won’t do anything that goes against His moral standards and character, such as breaking His own covenant. If He makes a promise, He will keep it. He is faithful even when we are unfaithful (2 Tim 2:13).
There is no point for a Christian to reject the supernatural and submit to explaining the forming of reality through only known natural means. The Big Bang model itself implies that the universe has a beginning, based on evidence like the readings of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and such, but the universe itself can’t create a new reality since it is a creation bound by natural laws, However, the maker of all reality is above the limitations of nature itself, and God alone can commit supernatural actions that are beyond what happens in nature.
Science and Christianity
This issue isn’t Christianity vs. Operational science, which is the science that gives us medicine and technology. The issue is observable Operational Science vs. Assumptions about the Past. Unfortunately, there are some Christians (typically in the YEC camp) who deny things in reality, like the existence of dinosaurs, or believe the Earth is flat, and non-believers view all Christian creationists as having these views, but these are not Biblically required views in Christianity; These are the views of conspiracy theorists, and there are non-Christians who have these views.
Both denying observations in reality and trying to retrofit secular science based on anti-God naturalistic assumptions into Biblical theology are two extremes on either side of the Bible’s teachings. Dinosaurs don’t have to be fake for the Bible to be true. YEC views them as animals and simply believes they died from rapid burial in the Genesis Flood. Old sedimentary layers can be laid down within a year by a cataclysmic global flood, so millions of years are not absolutely required for Dinosaurs to exist. Moreover, the Earth’s shape is not a Biblical or salvific issue either. More on Round vs Flat Earth here.
Operational science is based on testable, observable laws of physics, biology, and chemistry, while assumption-based historical science is not. The latter requires assumptions about variables that are presumed to be constant enough to remain the same now as they were in the early universe. Without any specific proof that these things are absolutely constant, our measurements can be way off. While natural laws governing temperature and pressure are consistent, Earth’s climate and weather experience changes. So even though laws of physics and chemistry are consistent on an atomic level, a dating method like carbon dating can be incorrect if the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has varied over the years, because it depends on the ratio of carbon-12 to 14 being the same today as it was many years ago. The consistency of natural laws doesn’t mean that the outputs are consistent.
Assuming things work exactly the same as they do today, without disproving the opposite, is not an absolute fact. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that things are gradually moving towards a new, more disordered state every day, so we can’t rely on what we see today to give an absolute understanding of the past.
Science is not God; science is man’s interpretation of nature, and that can lead to False conclusions. Remember this: false conclusions can come from true premises.
For example:
– Premise 1: all dogs are mammals
– Premise 2: all dogs have tails
Conclusion: all mammals have tails
The premises about dogs are true, but the conclusion is false because not all mammals have tails.
So we balance science and scripture by recognizing scripture as more authoritative because it comes from God, and scientific conclusions, even when based on true observations, can vary because of man’s fallible reasoning.
The central conflict between creationism and evolution lies in how we interpret data. Namely, in the case of human origins, the blurring of definitions regarding what evolution means. Microevolution and macroevolution are often lumped together as just “evolution” in general conversations about human origins. There is no theological conflict between microbes with mutating genes and viruses committing horizontal gene transfer. The issue arises when someone claims that a whale evolved into a wolf, because that contradicts the biological principles that distinguish genera. Does the wolf genome contain anything that resembles fins? Do pigs have wings in their genome? The traits in our genes are fixed and limited to a particular set of features in each kind of creature. In other words, cats are cats and dogs are dogs; no catdogs.
Naturalism and the Big Bang model say that life came about randomly and that there is no God or outside force, but everything emerged randomly from some pond scum. Even though DNA chemically can’t survive in water because of the dissolution of sugar. Abiogenesis goes against natural laws, so how does evolution even start without something supernatural? None of these unguided processes can produce anything specific on a consistent basis since we have yet to observe life emerge naturally from nothing. Much of this is based on the concept of true randomness, which contradicts the laws of thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transferred, which means there is no natural force that creates anything new in reality. As stated previously, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that things go from order to chaos, not the other way around. So the randomness principle that drives naturalism runs counter to the observable laws of physics.
Conlcusion:
Christianity holds that a Supernatural God is not bound by natural laws, and YEC follows from the most straightforward reading of the Bible. However, the Bible doesn’t record everything that ever happened in the history of the world, nor does it discuss outer space in depth. In fact, it never mentions animals in regions and continents outside of the Middle East and North Africa. This means there can be things the Bible doesn’t say that are true and don’t contradict the doctrine of Christ, which allows for Gap theory or OEC to possibly be true. We don’t need to believe in fringe conspiracy theories (denying the existence of Dinosaurs and believing the Earth is flat) in order to believe in the doctrine of Christ as Lord and Savior. Our interpretations of the text can differ on minor points of framework while still maintaining a unified belief in the core truth promoted by Christ. Theistic Evolution, I would say, is the exception that specifically denies key doctrines in the Christian faith, like the existence of Adam and the uniqueness of humans from the animals created by God directly apart from all other animal kinds. That is a boundary that I believe shouldn’t be crossed. More about Theistic Evolution here.
Resources:
Male (מָלֵא) https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3335.htm
Yalad (יָלַד ) https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3205.htm
YEC
Age of the Earth YEC
Mt. St. Helens Eruption and Origins
The Context of Second Peter
Were the Creation Days 24 Hours Long?
Gap Theory has Holes
Are a literal six days necessary for Christian theology?
Did Jesus believe in a 6-day creation?
Could God have created everything in Six Days?
YEC on Dinosuars
Local Flood Flaws
Moon Drift and Old Earth
Biblical Views of Creation
OEC
Age of the Earth (OEC)
An Exposition of Genesis Pt 1
An Exposition of Genesis Pt 2
Genealogy Gaps
Days of Genesis 1
Interpreting Creation Days Literally
Neanderthal and Human Interbreeding Pt 1
Neanderthal and Human Interbreeding Pt2
Neandertal Gene Deserts
Flood of Noah (Global vs Local)