Genesis + Error = Biblical Entropy

Any parent understands that a room left unattended will soon collapse into disarray, hence the call for daily cleanup time in many busy homes. And the tendency toward disorder is a phenomenon we are all forced to deal with, whether at work, doing chores and home repairs, or simply feeling the effects of time on our bodies—especially living in a sin-cursed world.

Apologetics and Theological Entropy

The Christian church as a whole has had to deal with what we’ll call “theological entropy” since its inception. The New Testament writers warned the church to “stay the course” that Christ established, such as Paul’s admonishing of the Galatians (Galatians 3) or Peter’s warning about false teachers (2 Peter 2), because error inevitably shows up where fallible, sinful humans are involved.

The Old Testament is also replete with examples of God’s own people being enticed to depart from the Lord’s ways because of various negative influences and then being drawn back to the truth of his word through faithful servants the Lord had raised up—and this is why biblical apologetics continues to be so relevant to us today.

Many believers think that apologetics is primarily for dealing with those outside the church, but this is not the case. Training ourselves to discern the truth of Scripture and having a logical defense of the faith is crucial for our own obedience to the Word of God because it lessens the tendency toward us believing and conducting ourselves in error.

The bottom line is that when believers stray from the truth of God’s Word, things get messy.

The bottom line is that when believers stray from the truth of God’s Word, things get messy.

The Deconstruction of Genesis

Because Genesis 1–11 is the seedbed of all Christian doctrines, nowhere in Scripture could the introduction of error be more negatively influential upon the rest of Christian theology. Like tampering with the foundation of a home, it can have profound effects on the stability of the entire structure.

And such a destabilizing effect has been done to the church for the last 200 years through the introduction and acceptance of naturalistic ideas within Christian theology like deep time and the story of evolution.

Alternate Views Are Disharmonious and Destructive

By accepting ideas like millions of years and/or evolution, the church has been forced to come up with alternative views to the biblical creation narrative laid out in Genesis 1–11, all in an attempt to harmonize and syncretize the concepts within and make it all fit somehow.

However, all such attempts have failed, which is why so many different ones have been proposed over time, including gap theory, day-age theory, soft gap theory, framework hypothesis, progressive creation, theistic evolution, retroactive death, evolutionary creation, etc. All may have a limited amount of coherency within the scope of the Genesis creation but have major problems in presenting a cogent, harmonious view of the entire body of Scripture and the numerous doctrines associated with it.

In other words, by messing with Genesis, the entire Christian worldview gets messed up, not only in the minds of professing believers but to the world at large.

Three Nonnegotiable Doctrines Affected

The amount of theological damage that the abandonment of historical, biblical creation has amassed is significant. For the sake of brevity, we’ll limit the scope of it to three major points to demonstrate.

1. God is good.

All believers hold to this unshakeable truth (and often, even non-regenerate people’s understanding of God usually embraces this concept for the most part). But all of the alternative views regarding Genesis always entail placing millions of years of deep time within the Genesis narrative before or during the six days of creation.

Old-earth proponents then acknowledge that a significant proof of deep time is the majority of sedimentary rock layers found all over the earth and that they must have been laid down at some specific point or continuously during the creation week (interpreted in a nonliteral fashion as representing a vast period of time) rather than during the great flood recorded in Genesis 6–9. They do this because there is no possible way to shoehorn millions of years into the biblical chronology after Adam and Eve appear.

In doing so, they then have to acknowledge that the record of death (fossils) within those rock layers all occurred before Adam sinned, which means Jesus (revealed as the Creator in the book of Colossians) used billions of years of death to create this world and finished by calling his creation “very good.”

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. (Colossians 1:16)

But is death very good? Some of the fossils found within the evolutionary timeframe carry evidence of cancer occurring in a wide variety of creatures.

God is good, and God is love. The self-sacrificial life of Jesus reflects the very nature and character of God because Jesus is God. Did Jesus create a world where people and animals were dying of cancer and eating one another before sin entered the creation? Does such a world represent Jesus as a good God? No, it does not, and many nonbelievers have pieced these ideas together and use them as an excuse not to trust the God of the Bible, declaring God is not good.

2. The gospel is true.

The gospel is that Christ paid the penalty for sin for those who put their faith and trust in him. All have sinned and are guilty of disobeying God’s law and are deserving of eternal punishment in hell. Romans 6:23 clearly states, “The wages of sin is death” (both physical and spiritual death), which is what Jesus came to overcome and why we need to repent and believe in him.

In order to articulate the gospel properly and comprehensively, one must include the history contained in Genesis to do so.

However, in order to articulate the gospel properly and comprehensively, one must include the history contained in Genesis to do so. Statements like “Jesus saves” or “Jesus saves us from our sin” become nothing more than pithy platitudes that collapse under even minor scrutiny should we attempt to replace biblical creation with a deep-time narrative.

For example, the simple question “If the wages of sin is death, how did sin and death originate?” unravels the fabric of an interconnected understanding of Scripture if placed in a “millions of years” framework because Romans 5:12 gives us the answer:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

The “one man” mentioned here is clearly Adam. However, if the results of sin (like death, disease, and suffering) were already present (recorded in the rock layers) prior to Adam’s fall, then the gospel makes no sense.

And this is why some professing Christians are now stating that our understanding of the gospel needs to “evolve” to accommodate the millions of years narrative. What might the theological consequences be? Well, Ian Barbour, professor emeritus at Carleton College, stated:

You simply can’t any longer say as traditional Christians that death was God’s punishment for sin. Death was around long before human beings. Death is a necessary aspect of an evolutionary world. . . . One generation has to die for new generations to come into being. In a way, it is more satisfying . . . than to see it as a sort of arbitrary punishment that God imposed on our primeval paradise.1

However, Scripture has some vivid warnings against believing in “other” gospels.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. (Galatians 1:8)

Perhaps Christians shouldn’t try to sweep inconsistencies like millions of years under the “theological rug” so quickly, lest they confuse Jesus’ message and bear false witness against him.

3. Scripture can be trusted as plainly written.

Canadian social commentator Professor Jordan Peterson once aptly described the Bible as a “hyperlinked text.” I found the analogy quite appropriate, in the sense that the overarching interconnectivity and self-reinforcement of the biblical text are truly astounding.

Indeed, it is a tribute to the divine inspiration of Scripture, as such consistency would be beyond human capacity considering the different chronological, vocational, cultural, and linguistic variation that the biblical authors exhibited.

However, that very interconnectedness contributes to the messiness of attempting to disconnect, replace, or modify any one area of Scripture, as it has ramifications that affect the entire corpus of the biblical text. And those deviating from historical, biblical creation find themselves constantly having to put “Band-Aids” on other texts relevant to Genesis because of that very cohesiveness displayed throughout both the Old and New Testaments.

As just one example, Exodus 20:11 is a proverbial thorn in the side of long-age proponents, as it reinforces the traditional understanding of creation that the vast majority of Christian laypeople and scholars understood for centuries, with zero support for an old earth.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. (Exodus 20:11)

Typical attempts to accommodate long ages into the Genesis account consist of savaging the text (both in Genesis and Exodus) by declaring the word day (yom in Hebrew) used throughout the Old Testament can mean something other than a literal 24-hour day, which is true from a superficial standpoint (the same could be said of the word day in English).

Sure, the word day can mean something other than a period of 24 hours—an older time period (back in the day), age (day of the dinosaurs), the time between sunrise and sunset (the animals hunt by day), a particularly good period of a person’s life (in his day), etc. However, as soon as you apply the concept of context to the argument, the veneer of intellectual credibility in the simplistic exclamation that “a day can mean other things” rapidly disappears.

For example, imagine observing a trial in which the dispute was between a homeowner and a construction company where a contract had apparently been breached. And let’s say the homeowner wanted their money back because the work had not been completed as negotiated.

The agreement was for the work to be done in six days, with details as to what was to be done given for each day. On day one, such and such would be done. On day two, so on and so forth would be completed, etc.

Now, if you observed the defendant attempting to convince the judge that the contract didn’t have to be understood as plainly written (and the case should be thrown out) because the word day in English can mean something other than a 24-hour day, would you (or the judge) accept that as valid?

Of course not. We all understand that words have meaning in context! For someone to simply declare that because words have different meanings, it is somehow legitimate to choose whichever one of those meanings serves their purpose is irrelevant.

Unless a strong argument contextualizing the word in a particular way (because of various factors derived from the specific use of the word) is presented, such an argument is nothing but special pleading, let alone a terrible use of grammar.

The fact is, the word yom is used over 2,300 times in the Old Testament in various ways. And according to its normal application throughout, its contextual use in Genesis has every indicator of it being a literal, approximately 24-hour day. As Hebrew expert James Barr (Oriol Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford University) once said,

So far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that

1. creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience
2. the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story
3. Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark2

If words in Scripture can be interpreted so far out of context that normal rules of grammar can be disregarded, then Scripture means nothing—because it can mean anything!

The Increasing Pile of Inconsistency

These are just a few of the many inconsistencies that result from the various attempts to synchronize deep time and Genesis. Shockingly, in an attempt to shoehorn long ages and/or evolutionary ideas into the text, many Christian theologians profess there are contradictions in Scripture that indicate Genesis need not be taken literally.

Many Christian theologians profess there are contradictions in Scripture that indicate Genesis need not be taken literally.

Declarations that there could not have been light before the sun was created on day four, that there couldn’t have been plants before there was a sun, that there are supposedly two contradictory creation accounts in Genesis, and that Jesus’ words saying that God created male and female “from the beginning of creation” (Mark 10:6) don’t actually mean what he plainly said all contribute to the messiness of biblical consistency and scriptural understanding. (Remember, these are arguments from professing Christians saying that the Bible is plainly saying things which they believe are contradictory.)

Why would professing Christians proclaim there are contradictions in God’s Word when that declaration is tantamount to saying that there are falsehoods within Scripture (known contradictions are lies)—which is exactly what Bible skeptics and atheists have been piling on for years now? As the saying goes, with friends like that, who needs enemies?

Evolution Is Messy, not Scripture

Compromising the plain reading of the Bible is a muddying experience for most Christians, resulting in a reduction of clarity and authority of God’s Word. The only true inconsistencies we find are when the biblical text is compared to the story of evolution, not God’s revelation. Scripture rightly interpreted always supports itself. As the psalmist said,

The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever. (Psalm 119:160)

For those looking for a way to learn more about how to defend the authority of God’s Word from the very first verse, check out the free Answers to Go! online academy today!