6 Progressive Evolution or Completed Creation?

Evolution: The entire cosmos, our earth, and all life-forms resulted from an extremely slow process of development from the simple to the complex, from barely structured to higher forms of organization, from inanimate to animate, and from low life-forms to higher levels. All organisms can be arranged in a line of descent and development right up to man. According to the evolutionary view, this process is still continuing. All earlier living organisms were merely temporary forms of life at that moment, and present-day individuals should then be regarded as halfway stations for future developments (see evolutionary assumption E11). In this respect, Wuketits believes that evolution as such has not stopped [W7, p. 275]. “It seems justified to expect new kinds and new degrees of differentiation to appear.” The following quotations confirm the assumption of continuing evolution in various areas:

1. Continuing cosmic evolution: “Not only life, but also the entire cosmos went through a process of development. Beginning with a singularity of immense density and temperature and with the ‘big bang.’ The universe assumed its present form after a development lasting approximately 15 thousand million years” (R. Siewing [S6, p. XIX]). In the evolutionary view, this process has definitely not been completed. An extremely distant stage of development is described by R. Breuer [B8, p. 51]: “The sun, together with the earth, may eventually be ejected from our galaxy. Then, in the dark isolation of intergalactic space, the earth will have all the time in the world to fall in slow motion into the black hole that had once been the sun. At this time, after 10²⁰ years, the classical evolution of the cosmos would end.” S. Weinberg justifiably referred to the “dark cloud of great uncertainty” that looms over such a cosmological model.
2. Continuing biological evolution: “Man and beast can no longer be seen as . . . completed creatures of a paradisiacal six-day activity. But the kinds originated during long epochs of earth’s history, one after the other, fulfilling themselves and changing, dying out or branching off in new directions from an upward-flowing current aspiring to the organic perfection of living matter. Eventually the present diversity of forms developed” (J. Illies [I2, p. 33]).
3. Continuing human evolution: “At the moment we are the apex reached by the great constructors of changing kinds on earth, we are ‘state of the art,’ but certainly not their last word. . . . If I had to regard man as the final image of God, then this view of God would drive me insane. But when I realize that our recent ancestors (in terms of the history of the earth) were very ordinary monkeys, closely related to chimpanzees, then I catch a glimmer of hope. It does not require undue optimism to assume that something better and higher may yet develop from us humans. . . . The long sought for missing link between animals and real human beings—are we!” (K. Lorenz [L2, p. 215–216]).

The Bible: The entire cosmos with all its countless stars, all basic types of life, as well as man, were created directly by God in one week, as described in Genesis. The whole of creation was finished and complete. All biological changes that occurred since that time only resulted in diversification within the original kinds (e.g., the origin of races).

We read in Genesis 2:2 that “By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all His work.” And in Hebrews 4:3: “And yet His work has been finished since the creation of the world.”