The great hall of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston looks nothing like a church. And yet I sat there, smiling amid an audience of scientists, shaking my head and laughing to myself as I remembered another talk, given long ago, inside a church to an audience of children.

Without warning, I had experienced one of those moments in the present that connects with the scattered recollections of our past. Psychologists tell us that things happen all the time. Five thousand days of childhood are filed, not in chronological order, but as bits and pieces linked by words, or sounds, or even smells that cause us to retrieve them for no apparent reason when something "refreshes" our memory. And just like that, a few words in a symposium on developmental biology had brought me back to the day before my first communion. I was eight years old, sitting with the boys on the right side of our little church (the girls sat on the left), and our pastor was speaking.

Putting the finishing touches on a year of preparation for the sacrament, Father Murphy sought to impress us with the reality of God's power in the world. He pointed to the altar railing, its polished marble gleaming in sunlight, and firmly assured us that God himself had fashioned it. "Yeah, right," whispered the kid next to me. Worried that there might be the son or daughter of a stonecutter in the crowd, the good Father retreated a bit. "Now, he didn't carve the railing or bring it here or cement it in place. . . but God himself made the marble, long ago, and left it for someone to find and make into part of our church."

I don't know if our pastor sensed that his description of God as craftsman was meeting a certain tide of skepticism, but no matter. He had another trick up his sleeve, a can't-miss, sure-thing argument that, no doubt, had never failed him. He walked over to the altar and picked a flower from the vase.

"Look at the beauty of a flower," he began. "The Bible tells us that even Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed as one of these. And do you know what? Not a single person in the world can tell us what makes a flower bloom. All those scientists in their laboratories, the ones who can split the atom and build jet planes and televisions, well, not one of them can tell you how a plant makes flowers." And why should they be able to? "Flowers, just like you, are the work of God."

I was impressed. No one argued, no one wisecracked. We filed out of the church like good little boys and girls, ready for our first communion the next day. And I never thought of it again, until this symposium on developmental biology. Sandwiched between two speakers working on more fashionable topics in animal development was Elliot M. Meyerowitz, a plant scientist at Caltech. A few of my colleagues, uninterested in research dealing with plants, got up to stretch their legs before the final talk, but I sat there with an ear-to-ear grin on my face. I jotted notes furiously; I sketched the diagrams he projected on the screen and wrote additional speculations of my own in the margins. Meyerowitz, you see, had explained how plants make flowers.

The four principal parts of a flower - sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils - are actually modified leaves. This is one of the reasons why plants can produce reproductive cells just about anywhere, while animals are limited to a very specific set of reproductive organs. Your little finger isn't going to start shedding reproductive cells anytime soon. But in springtime, the tip of any branch on an apple tree may very well blossom and begin scattering pollen. Plants can produce new flowers anywhere they can grow new leaves. Somehow, however, the plant must find a way to "tell" an ordinary cluster of leaves that they should develop into floral parts. That's where Meyerowitz's lab took over.

Several years of patient genetic study had isolated a set of mutants that could only form two or three of the four parts. By crossing the various mutants, his team was able to identify four genes that had to be turned on or off in a specific pattern to produce a normal flower. Each of these genes, in turn, sets off a series of signals that "tell" the cells of a brand new bud to develop as sepals or petals rather than ordinary leaves. The details are remarkable, and the interactions between the genes are fascinating. To me, sitting in the crowd thirty-seven years after my first communion, the scientific details were just the icing on the cake. The real message was "Father Murphy, you were wrong." God doesn't make a flower. The floral induction genes do.

Our pastor's error, common and widely repeated, was to seek God in what science has not yet explained. His assumption was that God is best found in territory unknown, in the corners of darkness that have not yet seen the light of understanding. These, as it turns out, are exactly the wrong places to look.

By pointing to the process of making a flower as proof of the reality of God, Father Murphy was embracing the idea that God finds it necessary to cripple nature. In his view, the blooming of a daffodil requires not a self-sufficient material universe, but direct intervention by God. We can find God, therefore, in the things around us that lack material, scientific explanations. In nature, elusive and unexplored, we will find the Creator at work.

The creationist opponents of evolution make similar arguments. They claim that the existence of life, the appearance of new species, and, most especially, the origins of mankind have not and cannot be explained by evolution or any other natural process. By denying the self-sufficiency of nature, they look for God (or at least a "designer") in the deficiencies of science. The trouble is that science, given enough time, generally explains even the most baffling things. As a matter of strategy, creationists would be well-advised to avoid telling scientists what they will never be able to figure out. History is against them. In a general way, we really do understand how nature works.

And evolution forms a critical part of that understanding. Evolution really does explain the very things that its critics say it does not. Claims disputing the antiquity of the earth, the validity of the fossil record, and the sufficiency of evolutionary mechanisms vanish upon close inspection. Even to the most fervent anti-evolutionists, the pattern should be clear - their favorite "gaps" are filling up: the molecular mechanisms of evolution are now well-understood, and the historical record of evolution becomes more compelling with each passing season. This means that science can answer their challenges to evolution in an obvious way. Show the historical record, provide the data, reveal the mechanism, and highlight the convergence of theory and fact.

There is, however, a deeper problem caused by the opponents of evolution, a problem for religion. Like our priest, they have based their search for God on the premise that nature is not self-sufficient. By such logic, only God can make a species, just as Father Murphy believed only God could make a flower. Both assertions support the existence of God only so long as these assertions are true, but serious problems for religion emerge when they are shown to be false.

If we accept a lack of scientific explanation as proof for God's existence, simple logic would dictate that we would have to regard a successful scientific explanation as an argument against God. That's why creationist reasoning, ultimately, is much more dangerous to religion than to science. Elliot Meyerowitz's fine work on floral induction suddenly becomes a threat to the divine, even though common sense tells us it should be nothing of the sort. By arguing, as creationists do, that nature cannot be self-sufficient in the formation of new species, the creationists forge a logical link between the limits of natural processes to accomplish biological change and the existence of a designer (God). In other words, they show the proponents of atheism exactly how to disprove the existence of God - show that evolution works, and it's time to tear down the temple. This is an offer that the enemies of religion are all too happy to accept.

Putting it bluntly, the creationists have sought God in darkness. What we have not found and do not yet understand becomes their best - indeed their only - evidence for the divine. As a Christian, I find the flow of this logic particularly depressing. Not only does it teach us to fear the acquisition of knowledge (which might at any time disprove belief), but it suggests that God dwells only in the shadows of our understanding. I suggest that, if God is real, we should be able to find him somewhere else - in the bright light of human knowledge, spiritual and scientific.

Each of the great Western monotheistic traditions sees God as truth, love, and knowledge. This should mean that each and every increase in our understanding of the natural world is a step toward God and not, as many people assume, a step away. If faith and reason are both gifts from God, then they should play complementary, not conflicting, roles in our struggle to understand the world around us. As a scientist and as a Christian, that is exactly what I believe. True knowledge comes only from a combination of faith and reason.

A nonbeliever, of course, puts his or her trust in science and finds no value in faith. And I certainly agree that science allows believer and nonbeliever alike to investigate the natural world through a common lens of observation, experiment, and theory. The ability of science to transcend cultural, political, and even religious differences is part of its genius, part of its value as a way of knowing. What science cannot do is assign either meaning or purpose to the world it explores. This leads some to conclude that the world as seen by science is devoid of meaning and absent of purpose. It is not. What it does mean, I would suggest, is that our human tendency to assign meaning and value must transcend science and, ultimately, must come from outside it. The science that results can thus be enriched and informed from its contact with the values and principles of faith. The God of Abraham does not tell us which proteins control the cell cycle. But he does give us a reason to care, a reason to cherish that understanding, and above all, a reason to prefer the light of knowledge to the darkness of ignorance.

As more than one scientist has said, the truly remarkable thing about the world is that it actually does make sense. The parts fit, the molecules interact, the darn thing works. To people of faith, what evolution says is that nature is complete. Their God fashioned a material world in which truly free and independent beings could evolve. He got it right the very first time.

To some, the murderous reality of human nature is proof that God is absent or dead. The same reasoning would find God missing from the unpredictable branchings of an evolutionary tree. But the truth is deeper. In each case, a deity determined to establish a world that was truly independent of his whims, a world in which intelligent creatures would face authentic choices between good and evil, would have to fashion a distinct, material reality and then let his creation run. Neither the self-sufficiency of nature nor the reality of evil in the world mean God is absent. To a religious person, both signify something quite different - the strength of God's love and the reality of our freedom as his creatures.

As a species, we like to see ourselves as the best and brightest. We are the intended, special, primary creatures of creation. We sit at the apex of the evolutionary tree as the ultimate products of nature, self-proclaimed and self-aware. We like to think that evolution's goal was to produce us.

In a purely biological sense, this comforting view of our own position in nature is false, a product of self-inflating distortion induced by the imperfect mirrors we hold up to life. Yes, we are objectively among the most complex of animals, but not in every sense. Among the systems of the body, we are the hands-down winners for physiological complexity in just one place - the nervous system - and even there, a nonprimate (the dolphin) can lay down a claim that rivals our own.

More to the point, any accurate assessment of the evolutionary process shows that the notion of one form of life being more highly evolved than another is incorrect. Every organism, every cell that lives today, is the descendant of a long line of winners, of ancestors who used successful evolutionary strategies time and time again, and therefore lived to tell about it - or, at least, to reproduce. The bacterium perched on the lip of my coffee cup has been through as much evolution as I have. I've got the advantage of size and consciousness, which matter when I write about evolution, but the bacterium has the advantage of numbers, of flexibility, and most especially, of reproductive speed. That single bacterium, given the right conditions, could literally fill the world with its descendants in a matter of days. No human, no vertebrate, no animal could boast of anything remotely as impressive.

What evolution tells us is that life spreads out along endless branching pathways from any starting point. One of those tiny branches eventually led to us. We think it remarkable and wonder how it could have happened, but any fair assessment of the tree of life shows that our tiny branch is crowded into insignificance by those that bolted off in a thousand different directions. Our species, Homo sapiens, has not "triumphed" in the evolutionary struggle any more than has a squirrel, a dandelion, or a mosquito. We are all here, now, and that's what matters. We have all followed different pathways to find ourselves in the present. We are all winners in the game of natural selection. Current winners, we should be careful to say.

That, in the minds of many, is exactly the problem. In a thousand branching pathways, how can we be sure that one of them, historically and unavoidably, would lead for sure to us? Consider this: we mammals now occupy, in most ecosystems, the roles of large, dominant land animals. But for much of their history, mammals were restricted to habitats in which only very small creatures could survive. Why? Because another group of vertebrates dominated the earth - until, as Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, the cataclysmic impact of a comet or asteroid drove those giants to extinction. "In an entirely literal sense," Gould has written, "we owe our existence, as large and reasoning animals, to our lucky stars."

So, what if the comet had missed? What if our ancestors, and not dinosaurs, had been the ones driven to extinction? What if, during the Devonian period, the small tribe of fish known as rhipidistians had been obliterated? Vanishing with them would have been the possibility of life for the first tetrapods. Vertebrates might never have struggled onto the land, leaving it, in Gould's words, forever "the unchallenged domain of insects and flowers."

Surely this means that mankind's appearance on this planet was not pre-ordained, that we are here not as the products of an inevitable procession of evolutionary success, but as an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out. What follows from this, to skeptic and true believer alike, is a conclusion whose logic is rarely challenged - that no God would ever have used such a process to fashion his prize creatures. How could he have been sure that leaving the job to evolution would lead things to working out the "right" way? If it was God's will to produce us, then by showing that we are the products of evolution, we would rule God as Creator. Therein lies the value or the danger of evolution.

Not so fast. The biological account of lucky historical contingencies that led to our own appearance on this planet is surely accurate. What does not follow is that a perceived lack of inevitability translates into something that we should regard as incompatibility with a divine will. To do so seriously underestimates God, even as this God is understood by the most conventional of Western religions.

Yes, the explosive diversification of life on this planet was an unpredictable process. But so were the rise of Western civilization, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the winning number in last night's lottery. We do not regard the indeterminate nature of any of these events in human history as antithetical to the existence of a Creator; why should we regard similar events in natural history any differently? There is, I would submit, no reason at all. If we can view the contingent events in the families that produced our individual lives as consistent with a Creator, then certainly we can do the same for the chain of circumstances that produced our species.

The alternative is a world where all events have predictable outcomes, where the future is open neither to chance nor to independent human action. A world in which we would always evolve is a world in which we would never be free. To a believer, the particular history leading to us shows how truly remarkable we are, how rare is the gift of consciousness, and how precious is the chance to understand.

One would like to think that all scientific ideas, including evolution, would rise or fall purely on the basis of the evidence. If that were true, evolution would long since have passed, in the public mind, from controversy into common sense, which is exactly what has happened within the scientific community. This is, unfortunately, not the case - evolution remains, in the minds of much of the American public, a dangerous idea, and for biology educators, a source of never-ending strife.

I believe much of the problem is the fault of those in the scientific community who routinely enlist the findings of evolutionary biology in support their own philosophical pronouncements. Sometimes these take the form of stern, dispassionate pronouncements about the meaninglessness of life. Other times we are lectured that the contingency of our presence on this planet invalidates any sense of human purpose. And very often we are told that the raw reality of nature strips the authority from any human system of morality.

As creatures fashioned by evolution, we are filled, as the biologist E. O. Wilson has said, with instinctive behaviors important to the survival of our genes. Some of these behaviors, though favored by natural selection, can get us into trouble. Our desires for food, water, reproduction, and status, our willingness to fight, and our tendencies to band together into social groups, can all be seen as behaviors that help ensure evolutionary success. Sociobiology, which studies the biological basis of social behaviors, tells us that in some circumstances natural selection will favor cooperative and nurturing instincts - "nice" genes that help us get along together. Some circumstances, on the other had, will favor aggressive self-centered behaviors, ranging all the way from friendly competition to outright homicide. Could such Darwinian ruthlessness be part of the plan of a loving God?

Yes, it could. To survive on this planet, the genes of our ancestors, like those of any other organism, had to produce behaviors that protected, nurtured, defended, and ensured the reproductive successes of the individuals that bore them. It should be no surprise that we carry such passions within us, and Darwinian biology cannot be faulted for giving their presence a biological explanation. Indeed, the Bible itself gives ample documentation of such human tendencies, including pride, selfishness, lust, anger, aggression, and murder.

Darwin can hardly be criticized for pinpointing the biological origins of these drives. All too often, in finding the sources of our "original sins," in fixing the reasons why our species displays the tendencies it does, evolution is misconstrued as providing a kind of justification for the worst aspects of human nature. At best, this is a misreading of the scientific lessons of sociobiology. At worst, it is an attempt to misuse biology to abolish any meaningful system of morality. Evolution may explain the existence of our most basic biological drives and desires, but that does not tell us that it is always proper to act on them. Evolution has provided me with a sense of hunger when my nutritional resources are running low, but evolution does not justify my clubbing you over the head to swipe your lunch. Evolution explains our biology, but it does not tell us what is good, or right, or moral. For those answers, however informed we may be by biology, we must look somewhere else.

Like it or not, the values that any of us apply to our daily lives have been affected by the work of Charles Darwin. Religious people, however, have a special question to put to the reclusive naturalist of Down House. Did his work ultimately contribute to the greater glory of God, or did he deliver human nature and destiny into the hands of a professional scientific class, one profoundly hostile to religion? Does Darwin's work strengthen or weaken the idea of God?

The conventional wisdom is that whatever one may think of his science, having Mr. Darwin around certainly hasn't helped religion very much. The general thinking is that religion has been weakened by Darwinism and has been constrained to modify its view of the Creator in order to twist doctrine into conformity with the demands of evolution. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it, with obvious delight,"Now the conclusions of science must be accepted a priori, and religious interpretations must be finessed and adjusted to match unimpeachable results from the magisterium of natural knowledge!" Science calls the tune, and religion dances to its music.

This sad specter of a weakened and marginalized God drives the continuing opposition to evolution. This is why the God of the creationists requires, above all, that evolution be shown not to have functioned in the past and not to be working now. To free religion from the tyranny of Darwinism, creationists need a science that shows nature to be incomplete; they need a history of life whose events can only be explained as the result of supernatural processes. Put bluntly, the creationists are committed to finding permanent, intractable mystery in nature. To such minds, even the most perfect being we can imagine would not have been perfect enough to fashion a creation in which life would originate and evolve on its own. Nature must be flawed, static, and forever inadequate.

Science in general, and evolutionary science in particular, gives us something quite different. It reveals a universe that is dynamic, flexible, and logically complete. It presents a vision of life that spreads across the planet with endless variety and intricate beauty. It suggests a world in which our material existence is not an impossible illusion propped up by magic, but the genuine article, a world in which things are exactly what they seem. A world in which we were formed, as the Creator once told us, from the dust of the earth itself.

It is often said that a Darwinian universe is one whose randomness cannot be reconciled with meaning. I disagree. A world truly without meaning would be one in which a deity pulled the string of every human puppet, indeed of every material particle. In such a world, physical and biological events would be carefully controlled, evil and suffering could be minimized, and the outcome of historical processes strictly regulated. All things would move toward the Creator's clear, distinct, established goals. Such control and predictability, however, comes at the price of independence. Always in control, such a Creator would deny his creatures any real opportunity to know and worship him - authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution.

One hundred and fifty years ago it might have been impossible not to couple Darwin to a grim and pointless determinism, but things look different today. Darwin's vision has expanded to encompass a new world of biology in which the links from molecule to cell and from cell to organism are becoming clear. Evolution prevails, but it does so with a richness and subtlety its original theorist may have found surprising and could not have anticipated.

We know from astronomy, for example, that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology we know that our tissues are not impenetrable reservoirs of vital magic, but a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge we can see, perhaps for the first time, why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution.

If he so chose, the God whose presence is taught by most Western religions could have fashioned anything, ourselves included, ex nihilo, from his wish alone. In our childhood as a species, that might have been the only way in which we could imagine the fulfillment of a divine will. But we've grown up, and something remarkable has happened: we have begun to understand the physical basis of life itself. If a string of constant miracles were needed for each turn of the cell cycle or each flicker of a cilium, the hand of God would be written directly into every living thing - his presence at the edge of the human sandbox would be unmistakable. Such findings might confirm our faith, but they would also undermine our independence. How could we fairly choose between God and man when the presence and the power of the divine so obviously and so literally controlled our every breath? Our freedom as his creatures requires a little space and integrity. In the material world, it requires self-sufficiency and consistency with the laws of nature.

Evolution is neither more nor less than the result of respecting the reality and consistency of the physical world over time. To fashion material beings with an independent physical existence, any Creator would have had to produce an independent material universe in which our evolution over time was a contingent possibility. A believer in the divine accepts that God's love and gift of freedom are genuine - so genuine that they include the power to choose evil and, if we wish, to freely send ourselves to Hell. Not all believers will accept the stark conditions of that bargain, but our freedom to act has to have a physical and biological basis. Evolution and its sister sciences of genetics and molecular biology provide that basis. In biological terms, evolution is the only way a Creator could have made us the creatures we are - free beings in a world of authentic and meaningful moral and spiritual choices.

Those who ask from science a final argument, an ultimate proof, an unassailable position from which the issue of God may be decided will always be disappointed. As a scientist I claim no new proofs, no revolutionary data, no stunning insight into nature that can tip the balance in one direction or another. But I do claim that to a believer, even in the most traditional sense, evolutionary biology is not at all the obstacle we often believe it to be. In many respects, evolution is the key to understanding our relationship with God.

When I have the privilege of giving a series of lectures on evolutionary biology to my freshman students, I usually conclude those lectures with a few remarks about the impact of evolutionary theory on other fields, from economics to politics to religion. I find a way to make clear that I do not regard evolution, properly understood, as either antireligious or antispiritual. Most students seem to appreciate those sentiments. They probably figure that Professor Miller, trying to be a nice guy and doubtlessly an agnostic, is trying to find a way to be unequivocal about evolution without offending the University chaplain.

There are always a few who find me after class and want to pin me down. They ask me point-blank: "Do you believe in God?"

Over the years I have struggled to come up with a simple but precise answer to that question. And, eventually I found it. I believe in Darwin's God.

No, they are not.

CHAPTER 4

The Six Days of Creation

Were they days or ages???

There are those who believe that the days in Genesis chapter 1 were normal 24 hour days (just as Sunday, Monday and Tuesday are normal 24 hour days).
There are others who believe that the days in Genesis chapter 1 were not 24 hour days, but that each day represented an age (a long period of time). They believe that each "day-age" lasted thousands or perhaps even millions of years. This is called the "day-age" theory.

WHAT DOES GOD SAY?

EXODUS 20:11—"For in ______ ___________ the LORD _____________ heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is."

Why do some people say that these 6 days were really ages?

Evolutionary scientists BELIEVE that life in its present form (including men, monkeys, giraffes, kangaroos, birds, fish, plants and all life as we know it today) is the product of an evolutionary process that has lasted about 4 BILLION YEARS (more or less, depending on the latest theories)! That is a very long time!

For the evolutionists it would be appropriate like to RE-WRITE Exodus 20:11 as follows:

"For in 4,000,000,000 years there evolved the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is."

How many DAYS is 4,000,000,000 years? How many days are there in one year? __________ DAYS

4,000,000,000 YEARS (the time needed for evolution)

X 365 DAYS (number of days in a year)

________________________________

1,460,000,000,000 DAYS

1 TRILLION, 460 BILLION DAYS!!!

God

God says in Exodus 20:11 that it took _____________ DAYS to create the world and all of its life forms.

EVOLUTIONISTS

Evolutionists say in their science books that it took ___________________________ DAYS for life to evolve to its present form.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE! It is amazing and wonderful what our GREAT GOD can do in just six days! It is sad and pitiful that the god of the evolutionists (the god of chance) needs so much time to get his work done! But the evolutionists believe that if you have enough TIME, anything is possible! They believe in this simple formula:

PLENTY OF TIME + PLENTY OF CHANCE (lots of luck!) = AMAZING RESULTS (plants, fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, people, etc.)

Let’s see if this is really true:

Suppose you had a monkey pounding away at a typewriter at a record speed of 12 keys each second. The monkey strikes the keys in a random fashion. How long would it take the monkey to type the entire book of Genesis (all 50 chapters)? Even if the monkey typed 24 hours each day without stopping and did this for hundreds of years, do you think the monkey would ever get "lucky" and actually type all those words? Could he do it if he had 50 million years of constant typing?
Suppose you were to line up a series of alphabetical blocks so that they spelled your name:

If you were to carefully drop the blocks out of an airplane, do you think they would fall on the ground in just the right way to spell your name? If you repeated this experiment 50 times each day, do you think the blocks would ever fall in the right way and in the right order? If we depend on luck and chance, do things normally fall into order or into disorder? ____________________

If you were to take apart a watch and put all of its parts into a box and then shake the box for 10 billion years, do you think the parts would ever "accidentally" shake back into their proper place so that the watch would work? Are animals and plants more complex and complicated than a watch? ________

***************************************

The evolutionists admit that evolution seems impossible and that the chances against it ever happening are great, but they claim that if you have enough TIME, anything is possible:

"The odds against the right molecules being in the right place at the right time (to form the first living cell) are staggering. Yet, as science measures it, so is the TIME SCALE on which nature works. Indeed, what seems an impossible occurrence at any one moment would, given untold eons (ages), become a certainty." (National Geographic Magazine, September 1976, page 390)

With time all things are possible! And the evolutionists believe that 4,000,000,00 years is enough time for all life on this planet to reach its present form, and all by chance!

GOD SAYS:
"It took six days!"

EVOLUTIONISTS SAY:
"It took 1,460,000,000,000 days!"

? ë Whom will you believe? ì ?

A few people listen to God and believe that creation took place in 6 literal 24 hour days.
Most people listen to the evolutionists and believe that 4 BILLION years were needed for all life to evolve into its present form.
Some people think that they can listen to God and also listen to the evolutionists. They believe both are true. They believe that the days of Genesis 1 were not really days but long ages ("day-ages"). They believe that God made all things in 6 ages (6 long periods of time).

Let’s think about this. If each of these "AGES" were of equal length, then how long would each "day-age" be?

4,000,000,000 years
divided by 6 days
= 666,666,666 years (in each "day-age")

Each "DAY-AGE" would be more than 666 MILLION YEARS! That is a very long day!

Were the days of creation really long periods of time? Were these days really AGES?

Before we answer this, we must first realize that the word "DAY" is sometimes used to describe a long period of time. Here are some examples:

We are now living in the day of grace (the day of God’s longsuffering; see 2 Peter 3:8-9). Certainly the day of God’s grace and longsuffering lasts much more than 24 hours!
The "day of the LORD" refers to an extended time when God will directly intervene in the affairs of men (2 Peter 3:10).
The day of Jacob’s trouble (Jeremiah 30:7) is a period of time when the nation Israel will go through a time of severe difficulty and trouble. This same period of time is described in Revelation chapter 12. How many days will this "day" be (verse 6)? ___________ How many years (see verse 14)?

(TIME = 1 YEAR) + (TIMES = 2 YEARS) + (½TIME = ½YEAR)

which makes a total of ___________ years

We might use the word "day" in this way: "We are living in a day when men love themselves, love money and love pleasures, rather than loving God" (compare 2 Timothy 3:1-4). Has this kind of day lasted for more than 24 hours?
"George Washington lived in a day when there were no cars and no telephones and no airplanes!" Did Abraham and Moses and Paul also live in this same day?

From these examples we see that it is possible to use the word "day" to describe a long period of time. The word "day" can also be used to describe a 12 hour period of time: "The sky was clear and the sun was shining all day!" Most of the time, however, we use the word "day" to describe a 24 hour period (scientifically defined as the time that the earth spins once on its axis). We might say, "There are seven days in every week." Here we are obviously referring to normal 24 hour days. The important question for us to ask is this: How is the word "day" used in Genesis Chapter 1?

10 Reasons Why the Six Days of Creation Were Literal 24 Hour Days

1. "EVENING AND MORNING"

God has carefully defined the word "day" by the expression "evening and morning." "And the _______________________ and the ________________________ were the first ________" (Genesis 1:5 and see verses 8,13,19,23,31).

There is something that every day contains: AN EVENING AND A MORNING!! How many days are represented below?

E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M

_________ DAYS

Daniel 8:14 (according to the Hebrew text) says "Unto 2,300 evenings and mornings; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." How many days is this? _________ DAYS. See also Daniel 8:26.

Every 24 hour day has an evening and a morning. Does an AGE have an evening and a morning? _______ (a long period of time would have many, many evenings and mornings!) An age may have a beginning and an ending, but it does not have just one evening and morning!!

2. Numerical Adjustive

God also defines the word "day" by putting a NUMBER before it: "And the evening and the morning were the ______________ day" (Genesis 1:5). God tells us exactly what day it was. It was the FIRST DAY. See also Genesis 1:8,13,19,23,31 and Exodus 20:11 ("SIX days").

When a number comes before the word "day," it almost always refers to a literal 24 hour day. Compare Numbers 7:12,18,24,30,36,42,48, etc. Let us consider these examples:

a) We are living in the day of manned space flight. (Is this a 24 hour day?)
b) Have you learned in history class about the first day of manned space flight in1961 when a Russian cosmonaut became the first man to leave our earth’s atmosphere?
(Was this a 24 hour day?)
a) "I can remember the day when I was in the first grade." (Was this a 24 hour day?)
b) "I can still remember the third day of first grade when the teacher told me to stand in the corner of my classroom because I was not behaving." (Was this a 24 hour day?)
a) GENESIS 2:4—"in the day the LORD God made the earth and the heavens (How long was this "day"? – See Exodus 20:11)
b) GENESIS 1:31—"And the evening and the morning were the sixth day" (Was this a 24 hour day?)

3. Day and Night

In Genesis 1:5 God has told us what happened on "the ___________ _______." What kind of a day was this first day? Was it an age? In verse 5 God has said that this first day was made up of a period of light called ________ and a period of darkness called ______________. So we know that this first day was a day-night period. DAY 1 of the CREATION WEEK was a period of 12 HOURS OF LIGHT and 12 HOURS OF DARKNESS.

DAY

(LIGHT)

NIGHT

(DARKNESS)

12 Hours	12 Hours
24 TOTAL HOURS = THE FIRST DAY!

How many days are represented above? ________

Every 24 hour day has a DAY (period of light) and a NIGHT (period of darkness). Does an AGE have a DAY and a NIGHT? _________ (An age has many, many days and nights!)

4. The Fourth Day

Genesis 1:15-19 describes the fourth day of creation. In these verses the word "day" or "days" is used 5 times. Please match the following:

_____ Verse 14–"to divide the day from the night"
_____ Verse 14–"for days, and years"
_____ Verse 16–"to rule the day"
_____ Verse 18–"rule over the day"
_____ Verse 19–"the fourth day"

A literal 12 hour day
A literal 24 hour day
An AGE (a long period of time)

5. The Seventh Day

The seventh day was a 24 hour day also (Genesis 2:1-3). On what day were Adam and Eve created (Genesis 1:26-31)? ____________________ Did God curse the earth on the seventh day, the day which He blessed (see Genesis 3:17-19 and Genesis 2:3)? ____ Did Adam and Eve live beyond the seventh day? _______ How old was Adam when he died (Genesis 5:4-5)? __________________ The seventh day was not a long age lasting thousands or millions of years. It was a 24 hour day just like the first six days.

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

6. The Fourth Commandment

The fourth commandment is found in Exodus 20:8-11 and in these verses the word "day" or "days" is used 6 times. To see how the word "day(s)" is used in these verses, please do the matching problem found at the top of page 35:

EXODUS 20

_____ Verse 8—"sabbath day"
_____ Verse 9—"six days"
_____ Verse 10—"seventh day"
_____ Verse 11—"six days"
_____ Verse 11—"seventh day"
_____ Verse 11—"sabbath day"

Literal 12 hour day(s)
Literal 24 hour day(s)
An age (a long period of time)

Notice in Exodus 20:11 that the number _______ is placed before the word "days" (see pages 32-33). Your friend might say to you, "I worked on a paper for school and it took me six days to finish!" Do you think your friend meant days or ages? ______ (When you are doing schoolwork, it may seem like ages but it is really only days!) How long did it take God to finish His work of creation (Exodus 20:11)? _____________________ Do you think these were 24 hour days? ________

In these verses we learn that God’s WORKING AND RESTING was to serve as a pattern for Israel’s WORKING AND RESTING. God told the children of Israel that He wanted them to work six days (Sunday through Friday) and rest on the seventh day (Saturday) because this was exactly what God did when He created the heavens and earth (Exodus 20:11).

If the days of creation were ages, then the WORK DAYS for the children of Israel must also be ages (if we are to be consistent). Can you imagine a hard working Israeli man coming home after a day’s work and collapsing in his wife’s arms, saying, "My dear wife, what a long and hard day of work I had! Today I worked 500 million years and I am really tired!! I can’t wait for the Sabbath to come so that I can rest!"

Of course, this would be ridiculous! This is what happens when a person tries to make DAYS mean AGES. It becomes silly. On the following page we will learn that DAYS (PLURAL) can never be ages.

7. Days (plural)

In Exodus 20:11 we are told that the LORD made everything in six days. The word "DAYS" is plural. When the word "day" is used in the plural (DAYS), it almost always refers to literal 24 hour days. The word "day" (singular) can be used of a period of time that is longer than 24 hours: "the day of the LORD" "The day of grace" "the day of trouble" "the day of modern science" etc. (see pages 31-32), but the moment a person speaks about DAYS (plural), he is talking about 24 hour days. Consider these examples:

How many days are there until your birthday?
It took the children of Israel 7 days to capture the city of Jericho (read Joshua chapter 6).
Mark 14:1–"two days."
Revelation 12:6 (the last half or the final 3½ years of the tribulation period).
Exodus 20:11—SIX DAYS.

8. The Basic Meaning of the Word "DAY"

We have already seen that the word "day" can be used to describe a 12 hour period of light (Genesis 1:5,14,16,18). The word "day" can also be used of a longer period of time (2 Peter 3:8-10; Jeremiah 30:7). But most of the time when we use the word "day" we are speaking of a 24 hour day. This is the normal and basic meaning of the word "day."

When we study the Bible we always should understand a word in its literal, normal, natural and basic meaning unless this meaning does not make sense. Here is our rule—If the basic sense makes good sense, then seek no other sense, lest it result in nonsense.

Here are some examples:

The basic meaning of "LAMB"—a four footed animal, a young sheep.
1. Does Isaiah 11:6 use the word according to its basic meaning? _____
2. Does John 1:29 use the word according to its basic meaning? ______
The basic meaning of "DOG"—a four-legged animal often used as a pet.
1. Does Luke 16:21 use the word according to its basic meaning? _______
2. In Philippians 3:2 and Revelation 22:15 is this word used according to its basic meaning? _______
The basic meaning of "BLOOD"—the red liquid in the veins and the arteries.
1. Does John 19:34 use the word according to its basic meaning?_______
2. Does Matthew 26:28 use the word according to its basic meaning? _______

Note: Roman Catholics have misunderstood this verse because they wrongly understand "blood" according to its basic meaning, and thus when they take the MASS they believe that the juice of the grape becomes the actual blood of Christ. Compare John 6:54 with John 6:40 where we see that eating His flesh and drinking His blood is equivalent to believing on Him.

Should we understand the days of creation to be literal 24 hour days (this is the basic meaning of the word)? Does this make good sense or does this make nonsense? Consider these questions:

Can an Almighty God complete His work of creation in 6 literal days? Is anything too hard for the Lord (Genesis 18:14)?
Could God have done this in one literal day? In one second?
Why did God do it in 6 days (Exodus 20:11)?
Did God need millions of years to make our world the way it is?
Does it make good sense to say that the days of creation were ages?

The only reason some people think they need to make the six days of creation long periods of time (ages) is because they feel they need to give the "god" of the evolutionists enough time to do his work. The god of chance needs plenty of time (see page 30)! He could never have done it in six days! In fact it is doubtful that he could have done it even if he had 6 quadrillion days (6,000,000,000,000,000)!

9. What did Moses Think?

Moses was the man God used to write the book of Genesis (Luke 24:27,44). Whenever you study the Bible you must ask yourself this important question: How did the original writer (in this case Moses) and the original listeners (the children of Israel) understand what was written?

Do you think Moses understood the days of creation to be long ages of time? Would the people who lived in the time of Moses have thought of these days as normal 24 hour days? Did they have any reason to think of these days as ages?

Moses and the people of his day believed that God began His work of creation on Sunday, created man on Friday and rested on Saturday. Do you believe what Moses believed?

10. Make Your Choice: Genesis or Evolution?

Some people believe that if you make the days of creation ages (long periods of time), then Genesis chapter 1 teaches the same as evolution. They believe that the order of events in Genesis 1 is the same order of events as given by the evolutionists. Let us see if this is really true:

Evolutionists say that the SUN came before the EARTH.

But God says the sun was made on DAY ______ and the earth was made on DAY _____. Therefore the earth is _______ days older than the sun! Was there LIGHT even before the sun was made? _______ On what day was this LIGHT created? DAY _____

Evolutionists say that life must first begin in the sea (in the ocean). They teach that after millions of years some life forms eventually moved onto the land.

But God says life in the ocean appeared on DAY _______ and life on land first appeared on DAY ______ (plant life). Thus, life on land appeared _____ DAYS before life appeared in the oceans (marine life).

Evolutionists say that reptiles came before birds (because they believe that birds evolved from reptiles).

But God says that birds were made on DAY ______ and land animals (which would included land reptiles) were not made until DAY ______. Birds are _____ DAY older than reptiles! Could birds have evolved from reptiles? ______ Certainly reptiles did not evolve from birds! (Not even the evolutionists would say this!). The Bible says God made the birds and God made the reptiles. Reptiles did not precede birds by hundreds of thousands of years.

"Every thinking person knows that birds were created before reptiles, because that is what God has told us in His Word."

Evolutionists say that land mammals came before whales (because they believe that whales evolved from land mammals).

But God says that whales and other great monsters of the sea were created on DAY _____ and land mammals were not made until DAY _____. Which came first, the whale or the pig? _________________ Do you think the whale has evolved from pig-like animals? ________ Therefore whales are ______ DAY older than land mammals! For a land mammal to become a whale he would need to return to the water, lose his hair and grow about 50 times as big! Do you think this really happened? ______ A large elephant (the largest land mammal) weighs about 7 tons! A blue whale (the largest kind of whale) weighs about 150 tons! The whale did not evolve by chance; it was created by God!

Evolutionists say that plant life is impossible without insects because the pollination process (the way plants reproduce) requires insects such as bees.

But God says that insects (creeping things) were not created until DAY _____ and plant life appeared on DAY ______. This means that plant life appeared _______ DAYS before insects. Do you think plants and flowers could survive for 3 ages without insects? ______ Do you think plants and flowers could survive for 3 days without insects? _____

"I was on time! The all-wise Creator created me at just the right time–on the sixth day of the creation week! That’s when I started making honey!!"

Evolutionists say that ape-like creatures came along thousands of years before man (because they believe that man evolved from ape-like creatures).

But God says that men and apes were both created on DAY _______.

Evolutionists say that the sun must have been here before life could begin (because they believe life began as the sun’s rays beat down upon the primitive oceans).

But God says that life (vegetation) appeared on DAY _____ and the sun was not made until DAY ______. It is possible for life to begin without the sun but can life begin without the CREATOR? ______ Who is the source of life, the sun or the CREATOR (see Acts 17:28)? _______ Life owes its existence not to the SUN but to the SON OF GOD (see John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16).

Please indicate on which DAY of creation the following were made:

_______ Whales _______ God rested on this day _______ Fish _______ The earth _______ The stars _______ Insects (bees) _______ Land Reptiles _______ Trees _______ Flowers _______ Monkeys _______ The Sun _______ Birds _______ Elephants
	_______ Man _______ Sharks _______ Light _______ Dry Land _______ Turtles _______ Firmament (an expanse of space) _______ Eagles

You cannot listen to both God and the evolutionists! They do not teach the same thing! If Genesis chapter 1 is true (and it is!), then evolution is false. If evolution is true, then Genesis chapter 1 is false, and the Bible is filled with errors. But the Lord Jesus said that the Word of God is ___________ (John 17:17) and we know that God’s Word is __________ from the ___________________ (Psalm 119:160). Who should you believe — the CREATOR or the evolutionists? Will you put your faith in the false god of the evolutionists who needs billions of years to do his work, or will you put your faith in an Almighty Creator who can create all things in 6 DAYS?

As you observe and study the world around you, you will discover that all the true facts of science and all the true laws of science agree perfectly with the Bible and with the book of Genesis! Do you think it is possible for BOOK 1 (God’s revelation in nature) to contradict BOOK 2 (God’s revelation in His Word)? _______ (see pages 14-21). Who wrote Book 1? __________ Who wrote Book 2? _____________ God is the Author of both! This is why both books say the same thing. And both books point to the greatness of the C________________, who is blessed forever, Amen (see Romans 1:25). Sad to say, the books that the evolutionists write often do not agree with the true facts of science and they certainly do not agree with God’s Word the Bible! CHOOSE you this day! (See Joshua 24:15.) Choose the true God of creation or the false God of the evolutionists (the God of chance)!

The Middletown Bible Church
349 East Street
Middletown, CT 06457
(860) 346-0907

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