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There are many
opinions about the creation of the universe and the people who live
in it. One can pick up any science book and read that man evolved
(or devolved) from the ape. One can read that something exploded,
and everything came into being. One might find a paragraph that says
something crawled up out of the primordial ooze and grew fins and
flippers and eventually feet. That’s the scientific approach, very
much simplified.
The religions of
the world each have an explanation for the universe that is unique
to their belief. The members of each belief system believe they are
right. They reject all other explanations of the creation of man as
fallacious. There are many current religions that don’t even address
creation. For them there is no beginning or end, but a continuum. We
move back and forth along a path of existence, constantly submerging
and emerging.
In Taoism, the
belief is that the universe is in a perpetual flux, eternally
oscillating between two poles (yin and yang, representing two polar
aspects of primal ch’i (vital energy). There does not seem to be a
sense of beginning or original creation.
"The cosmos is seen
as evolving in a process of binary division; its manifestation as
ch’i generates rarefied and turbid aspects whose universally
observable principles are called yin and yang."
In other words,
we’re just…here. How we got here is not important. We’re here! The
emphasis is placed on the current life and how it may be maximized
through the influence and power of the yin and yang. The five
elements, earth, wood, fire, metal, and water play a very important
role.
The believers of
Hinduism stand on the same platform. For them there is no beginning,
no sense of original creation. Time, according to Hinduism, is also
cyclical, just as in Taoism. Vishnu is the primordial male and goes
through periods of expansion and re-absorption. The universe is
re-absorbed. Narayana, a Hindu god who is asleep, wakes up at this
point, becomes Brahma and begins creating everything, including man.
At the end of the Brahman day (which supposedly consists of 1000
"mahayugas" of 4,320,000 years each) there is a cosmic fire followed
by heavy rains which flood creation and prepare the scene for the
next creation.
Some religions
teach that creation was a team effort. Not one sole god was
responsible, but a group of gods who got together and produced the
world.
In Japanese
religion there is belief in a process where various divinities
emerged that were endowed with creative power. They created the
solid world by stirring a spear in the ocean, where drippings
created islands.
In the Australian
Aborigine belief system, the earth started out as a bare plain where
the ancestors were asleep under the surface. They emerged and began
to create landscapes. There was a rainbow snake ancestor who moved
about in human form. Human beings were regarded as reincarnations of
this ancestor and of his supernatural children.
Some religions
teach that creation was the cause of only one god, but not God as we
know Him.
In Zoroastrianism,
God is called "Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, the Creator of all things
by the Holy Spirit.
Other religious
systems believe in: A self-contained god…The Egyptians
believed that the god Ra emerged from the waters of the underworld
and created everything from within himself.
Some teach that man
was created by a high god….."Most traditional African
cosmogonies feature a high god and a mythology of rupture. Once, the
creator deity lived closed to the earth and the ancestors of humans.
Something strained that relationship and the deity removed itself to
the sky, the ancestors being form by that same rupture into their
present form as humans."
Some religions
teach that man was created by Someone powerful…."A fragmented
Cherokee myth says that a being which they called Someone Powerful
created the first man and woman from the mud of the lower
world…
It is noteworthy,
however, that in all creation myths, the Native American is created
from the damp mud of the Lower World and warmed by the divine Sun,
thus becoming a composite of the two opposing worlds."
Some teach that man
was created by a purposeful force…"Aristotle was a teleologist,
holding that everything in nature is the result of intelligent
design and direction. He believed that a purposive force created a
primordial mass of living matter from which all the forms of life
from the simplest plants to the most complex animals evolved."
And there are some
religions that simply state that they do not know how man came to be
on earth.
BUT THEN,
THERE IS GOD….
Islam teaches that
"God created man, sentient life, the heavens and the earth." In this
aspect, Islam and Christianity agree. Life abides in the one true
God and He created life in the universe, not by evolution, not by
explosion, but by His Word.
The creative
activity of the God of Israel is highlighted not only by Scripture,
but also reinforced by empirical evidence. Certain discoveries and
historical events mirror the Scripture. Questions unanswered by man
are answered in the Bible. The Bible tells us that God created man
from the dust of the earth. Scientists dispute this fact, but no one
can explain why the body of man contains the same elements as dirt
does.
The Bible tells us
that God created man as His ultimate creation, patterned after
Himself. Man was not created as a lower order animal, nor was he
created as an ape that change, for some inexplicable reason, into a
man. Scientists dispute such information, but no one can explain why
the DNA of man contains exactly the same enzymes as animals:
thiamin, guanine, cytosine, and adenine, but also contain a slight
variation that totally separates man from animals. No one yet has
been able to explain an evolutionary process where some monkeys
supposedly evolve into human beings while other monkeys very
obviously remain monkeys.
Scientists have
theories about the evolutionary process of animals. They dispute the
fact that God created all animals as they were and placed them in
the Garden of Eden. Scientists insist that animals evolved in
different areas of the planet, but no one can explain why the same
animals exist in Africa that exist in South America. No one seems
able to pinpoint the origin of a species found in one continent that
is also found in another. Yet, the Bible, written long before the
evolution theory was formulated, gives us a hint. There is one short
sentence in the book of Genesis that provides the clue.
"Eber, when he was
34 years old, begot Peleg, during whose lifetime the earth was
divided."
A comparison of the
pieces of land on the surface of the earth shows that the
continental coastlines fit almost perfectly together, just as if
they were once joined in one piece and somehow were broken apart.
(Footnote The Changing Earth, James S. Monroe and Reed
Wicander, West Publishing Company, New York, 1993,
p641)
When God created
Eden, the earth was not divided. It was one piece of land where
animals roamed. A division of the earth would have separated herds
and flocks and trapped them on separate plots of land. Even the
earth itself seems to testify to this event by the shapes and sizes
of the continents that populate the globe.
The great
famine of Egypt has been documented in many history books.
Archeologists have unearthed a house in Egypt in the land of Goshen
that bears an inscription stating its owner to be Joseph, the son of
Israel.
Discussions about
creation, about who created what, about what was created when, or
whether anything was created at all could go indefinitely.
The conclusion of
the matter is this. It is pointless to argue about creation. The
debate will be endless because the two opinions are a parallel road.
Such unprofitable activity is contrary to the Word of God. If one
believes the scientific argument, one cannot then believe that God
created the universe, because the scientific argument discounts the
creative activity of God. If one believes that God created the
universe, then one cannot accept the scientific argument for the
same reason. What a person accepts about creation is predicated on
what he believes and in whom he believes.
Jesus
once told a man "But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on
earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the
sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee,
Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine
house." And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went
forth before them all; insomuch that they were all amazed, and
glorified God, saying, We never saw it on this fashion."
This was not the
only time Jesus healed a person. The Bible is replete with such
occurrences. They are called miracles. We still call them miracles
today, for want of a better word. But what is a miracle? A miracle
is a supernatural event, inexplicable to the laws of nature.
In other words, the laws of nature have no bearing on the
performance of a miracle. The Greek word "semeion" means the same
thing, with the added definition of sign or token.
Charles Darwin
wrote his Origin of the Species at a time when people were
beginning more and more to fear and dislike God. They were looking
for ways to circumvent the necessity of believing in God. ""Then,
too, some men w were looking for a plausible theory that would
eliminate the Creator. Many felt with P. Broca that ‘creation
implies the permanence of miracles, that is, nature subjected to a
Will and not to laws. And if there be no laws, there is no more
science." People did not want to believe in God; they wanted to
believe in science. Darwin gave them that belief. He gave them a
system that could be forced to prove itself. But with time, and
faced with arguments and challenges from learned colleagues,
Darwin’s position on the variation of species over time weakened.
One colleague in particular, a Scottish engineer, criticized Darwin
and argued against the perpetuation of single variations, arguing
the point about one individual displaying a variation while its
neighbors did not.
Darwin wrote in his
sixth edition about his newly risen doubts over the perpetuation of
single variations, in other words, the central theory of the
evolution process. Darwin was a scientist who believed in scientific
observation and empirical evidence. Both of these proved fallible in
the attempt to explain away God in the creative process. But it was
too late. Darwinism had become "more a religion than a science, with
a goodly amount of dogma to be accepted on faith…" Darwin in his
later years lost faith in his theories of variation and its believed
effect in producing evolutionary changes, but by then people who did
not want to believe in God had taken hold of a new religion, and a
new explanation for the existence of man.
What a person
believes about creation is determined by what he believes about God.
The miracles that God did and does bring to pass are signs of his
creative, generative, regenerative power. These signs are
indications to the unbeliever, not to the believer. They demonstrate
God’s power over natural things as evidence that He also has power
over spiritual things. If one does not believe God has power over
natural things; that is, creation, it follows that one cannot
believe that God has power over spiritual things; that is, the soul
and spirit of man. To admit that God can work miracles and
subsequently deny that he could have created man from the earth is a
contradiction. To do so is to acknowledge God, but deny His power.
How then, can one be saved?
The creation of man
in the natural world is evidence of the power of God to recreate man
at the spiritual level. For a Christian the debate over
creation is pointless. If we as Christians have faith to
believe that God can recreate man at the spiritual level, that God
has all power over all things natural and spiritual, it is
contradictory to such belief to accept the origin of man
as being an accident or caused by anything or anyone but the God
whom we profess to believe is omnipotent, omniscient, and
eternal.
"So God created man
in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and
female created he them. And God blessed hem, and God said unto them,
Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it;
and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the
earth."
(c) 2004 Word of
Hope (All Rights Reserved)
Here are some
references if you would like to read more about the subjects
presented in this study.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Smith, Jonathan Z.
and Green, William Scott, The Harper Collins Dictionary of
Religion, Harper Collins Publishers, San Francisco,
1995
Parrinder,
Geoffrey, Editor, World Religions from Ancient History to the
Present, Barnes and Noble, New York, New York,
1999
Zachner, R.C.
Editor, Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes and
Noble, New York, New York, 1999
Taylor, Colin F.,
Ph.D., Editorial Consultant, Native American Myths and
Legends, Salamander Books, Ltc., New York,
1994
Zimmerman, Paul A.,
Editor, Darwin, Evolution, and Creation, Concordia Publishing
House, St. Louis, Missouri, 1959
Dawood, N.J.,
Translator, The Koran, Penguin Books, London, England,
1990
King James
Bible
Monroe, James S.
and Wicander, Reed, The Changing Earth, West Publishing
Company, New York, New York, 1993
Picture
courtesy of The Changing
Earth
Lexical Publishing
Staff, Editing, American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd
Edition, Dell Publishing, New York, New York, 1994,
p532
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