Clough Evolution Lesson 5

Genesis 2:1-3

We continue our study of the Bible which is the third block of material in this series on evolution. The first block of material was very short and covered the definition of the three words, micro, macro and cosmic evolution, which was preceded by a discussion of a TV program. The second block of material dealt with the philosophical backgrounds of evolution, the various human viewpoint ideas and we have been dealing with the third block of material, the study of the Biblical text as it bears upon the evolutionary problem. So far we have dealt with two of the six problems. Again, by way of review, the six problems under this third block of material, the study of the Biblical text, will be Genesis 1:1-3; the problem of “days;” Genesis 2:1-3; Man’s creation; the curse; and the flood. These are the six areas of Scripture which must be considered in any consideration, any discussion of evolution.

So far we have dealt with Genesis 1:1-3 and we have dealt with the problem of days. Now we come to Genesis 2:1-3. Genesis 2:1-3 is an often overlooked passage of Scripture. To me this is one of the most significant passages of Scripture. It’s frequently overlooked, I think because people don’t really realize the implication of what is said in Genesis 2:1-3. “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. [2] And on the seventh day God ended His work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. [3] And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made.” Now it’s my fundamental belief that no, absolutely no discussion of the Bible and science can proceed any further without an awareness of what is implied by these three simple verses of the text.

The first thing that I want to point out and there are basically two things to point out with Genesis 2:1-3, the first thing I want to point out is that it teaches a finished creation, that God ended His creation work and this, whatever the creation work was, is not going on any more. This is confirmed for us in Exodus 20:11, where it says, “In six days God has created the heavens and the earth.” It is also confirmed in Hebrews 4:3 and 10, for in Hebrews 4:3 it says, “As I have sworn in My wrath, they shall not enter into My rest, although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.” Hebrews 4:10, “For he that has entered into His rest, he has also ceased from his own works as God did from His,” clearly referring in context to the Sabbath rest of the seventh day of creation.

So returning to Genesis 2:1-3 we see that throughout the Scripture the seventh day is taken as the fact that God stopped what was happening in the first six days. The very least that this tells us is that whatever processes were going on in those first six days, those processes ended on the seventh day. And therefore it’s important to realize that any scientific investigation must proceed on the assumption that this is not true, that basically the processes which were going on in Genesis 1 can be understood in terms of a science that is based on processes which are now going on. And I think this is a fundamental error; this is a fundamental error! You cannot, with a scientific structure, built upon things now going on in the universe, reason back of Genesis 2:1-3. Genesis 2:1-3 is a gate, it’s a wall without any door, and you can’t go through it, absolutely uncrossable, it’s an insurmountable barrier to scientific investigation because it teaches that whatever did go on in those times is not now going on: the doctrine of a finished creation.

Yes, God works in creation today but it’s a providential working that has to be sharply distinguished from His creative working before Genesis 2:1-3. Genesis 2:1-3 says God finished; in other words, there’s something here that is absolutely finished; there’s a program that is finished. God is not any longer working this way. Thus, if one, for example, were to try and synthesize Scripture with evolution, one would have to put all evolution before Genesis 1:1-3. If one wants to be a theistic evolutionist you would have to put all of evolution before Genesis 2:1-3. All those changes would had to have occurred and been done with by the time you get to Genesis 2:1-3. Of course we have shown previously, in a previous discussion that this hypothesis of theistic evolution runs into terrific difficulty with the text; it runs into terrific difficulties with the concept of days, with the order of creation in those days.

But nevertheless, even if one were to surmount all of those problems one would finally have to deal with Genesis 2:1-3. Now as Genesis 2:1-3 deals with the doctrine of a finished creation, and also introduces us into a problem known as the doctrine of apparent age. By this we mean that… perhaps the best way to do it is ask a question, ask a series of questions. How old did Adam appear one second after his creation? If you were there with a camera and could have taken a picture of Adam for us so that we could examine the picture and actually see, what would Adam look like? Would he look like he was one second old in terms of the processes of today, would he look and infant that had just been born from his mother? Absolutely not! Adam would look like an adult, Adam would look like a person, say 25 or 30 years old but he certainly would not look like a one second old infant. But the point of the question is that’s exactly what he is; Adam is only one second old when you took that picture of him. So again you see there’s a problem that comes in here, that there’s a certain apparent age that Adam would have if you were in the Garden with a camera one second after his creation. You would have an apparent age of say 30 years; would that age be true age or would it be an apparent age. Obviously it would be an apparent age.

Again one would say how many tree rings were in the trees in the Garden of Eden? If you were to take a saw and cut down one of the trees in the Garden of Eden five minutes after it was created, how many rings would it have? If you were to take an analysis of the soil in the Garden of Eden, soil in which today’s terminology is done by decomposition from rock and organic materials, how long did it take for that soil to be made in the Garden of Eden. You see, it would have an apparent age; you would reason on the basis of what is now going on, saying well it must have taken many generations for the formation of the soil; it must have taken many generations to build up the trees; it must have taken 30 years to produce this human being.

Now often you hear writers introduce this problem and then facetiously wave it away with well, that’s a nonsense question. I don’t think it is a nonsense question; frankly I’ve never heard an answer to it. The usual form you hear this is that: Did Adam have a navel? And of course people laugh and say ha-ha, silly question. No, it isn’t a silly question, answer it: did Adam have a navel? In other words, we’re dealing here with the idea that a doctrine of a finished creation introduces us to a problem of apparent age; with Adam it would be an apparent age of 30 years, with the trees, I don’t know whether the trees in the Garden of Eden had rings in them or not. Did Adam have a navel? I don’t know, I’ve never heard of an answer to that question. Let’s turn over into the New Testament where we find a similar problem with apparent age and I want to take you to the New Testament to show you this is not confined to just the creation account.

In John 2:6-10 we have the first recorded miracle of our Lord at the wedding feast of Cana. And in John 2:6-10 I think you all are familiar with the account. In verse 6 it says, “And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece.” And this amounts to about 120 gallons. Verse 7, “And Jesus said unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. [8] And He said unto them, Draw some out now, and bear it unto the governor of the feast. And they bore it. [9] When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not from where it was (but the servants who drew the water knew), the governor of the feast called to the bridegroom, [10] And said unto him, Every man at the beginning does set forth good wine and, when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now.”

Now what is the point here? The point here is that the men are plainly having a blast; this is a party and there is liquor being served. And although the liquor doesn’t have as high an alcoholic as our liquor today, it, nevertheless, did have some alcoholic content, with due apologies to any prohibitionists listening. In verse 6 we have the tremendous quantity involved in this miracle. In verse 9-10 we have a significant observation of this miracle. The ruler is the person who tastes the wine; now he is the one who does not partake of the liquor during the party. Everyone else partakes of liquor during the party and of course by this time the party has grown late, lots of liquor has been consumed and their taste buds aren’t functioning very well and so therefore it was the usual custom of the day to save your poor wine until the last for by this time most of your guests would have inebriated themselves enough so that they couldn’t taste the bad wine and therefore you wouldn’t be embarrassed by giving them this bad wine, they wouldn’t know the difference. You gave your good wine at the first.

Now when this man comes and he tastes this wine that Jesus has instantaneously made, instantaneously created, he says this is good wine. Now one doesn’t have to be a connoisseur of wine to realize the implications of the remark. The remark implies that the wine has been around a long time, it’s aged wine, the wine has fermented over a period of time. Yet how old is the wine? How old would you estimate the wine to be on the basis of the text? I would say five minutes would be a significant time, maybe 15 from the time the Lord made the wine until the time the ruler of the feast tasted it. Yet of course we know that normally it would take a very long period of time to produce this kind of wine; it would take a long time. And thus we are confronted right here in the middle of this miracle with apparent age. The wine must have had apparent age and the apparent age is implied in the remark of the governor of the feast. Thus we have a case, again, where we involve pure creation and a necessary corollary of pure creation is apparent age.

Now that this was a real creation and not a false one can be readily seen from the fact that what is wine? Wine is an organic solution. What is water? Just pure water. So therefore some atoms had to be created to make the organic wine. Jesus didn’t drop vegetable dye into the water and it changed color, there actually had to be carbon atoms, for example, to make many of your carbon-oxygen-hydrogen change of one organic solution; carbon atoms had to be created instantaneously in the water at this point. So we have legitimate bona fide creation and at this point we have creation in the New Testament, showing us once again that with creation, as it is understood in Scripture, you inevitably find yourself wrapped up with the problem of apparent age.

Now all of what we have been saying about apparent age could be summed up by looking back at Genesis 2:1-3 and considering the examples that we have asked questions about, such as how old was Adam a second after he was created; how many tree rings did the trees have; what was the appearance of the soil in the Garden of Eden. We can summarize all of this by saying that a finished creation means that when it leaves the hand of God, the creative hand of God, it never leaves the providential hand of God, but when it leaves the creative hand of God it is a functioning system. The system must be established wholly. For example, the human reproductive system was wholly functional with Adam. The human reproduction goes from adult to seed to baby to mature adult to seed to baby to mature adult, and so on, you have this never ending cycle that goes on and on and on. To create a system the system has to be created at some point in the cycle. And the Bible says that God created the human reproduction cycle starting at the position of a mature adult. He didn’t start the cycle at the point of infancy in the cycle; it would be as though the clock, when did the clock start? Did it start at 12:00 o’clock, 1:00 o’clock, 2:00 o’clock or 3:00 o’clock? It has to start at some hour, some hour has to be the first hour ever experienced in history and it’s the same thing here, that when Adam was created he either had to be created as a sperm, as an ovum, as an infant or as an adult. The Bible says he was created as an adult. So at this point the system starts off. But at that point the system becomes a totally functioning system. In other words, the cycle is totally functioning. The same with the tree ring; whether the trees had rings or not the point is that a season after the creation the trees of the Garden of Eden would have had a tree ring; the same with animals, the same with the soil and so on. They had to be created at some point in the cycle and thus you have often enigma, which came first, the chicken or the egg. The Bible clearly gives the answer: the answer is the chicken; the chicken came first, not the egg. God created the animal reproductive cycle in the case of the chicken with a mature animal, not the egg.

Now this doesn’t imply, for those of you who are concerned about variation in specie boundaries and so on, or within the boundaries of the kinds of Genesis 1 which we’ll discuss in detail later, this doesn’t mean that there cannot be changes within the animal, plant, and human kingdoms. Obviously, for example, all of the races of mankind came about after Adam, not before. Adam was the first man; all races trace themselves back to Adam. So there could be variations within the system but these variations are themselves limited. They never go outside the boundary of the system. There is just a created system, the outside universe is a system and the system may have cycles and periods within it but somewhere, somewhere along the line, there has to be a creation or a starting point.

Now we can draw some conclusions from Genesis 2:1-3 and the first conclusion to draw is that creation processes cannot be assumed to conform to present known processes, and that’s the fallacy that lies behind the assumption that one can recreate and intellectually one can make a model of how the universe was created. No you cannot, because one of the great cardinal principles of modern science is the first law of thermodynamics which says that matter energy system is neither being created nor destroyed. The algebraic sum of all changes equals zero. And this being so, then, and the doctrine of creation saying, in effect, that all things were created by God, thus at the point of creation, during the six days, energy and matter had to increase, obviously, doctrine of creation, therefore as matter energy increased it violated the first law of thermodynamics, but the first law of thermodynamics is the foundation upon which modern science is built in many, many areas. Thus, if the doctrine of creation as presented in the Bible is true, then at least the first law of thermodynamics could not have operated as it now does in the creation period. If this is so, then modern science analysis and any cosmology built upon the analysis of modern science must necessarily be unable to deal with what happened in Genesis 1 since the cardinal foundation of all, the first law of thermodynamics, could not have been operating at that time.

The second conclusion which one may make from Genesis 2:1-3 is that chronometers, such as radioactive decay and so on, are not necessarily absolutely true, since they measure time within a functioning system. Now by this I do not mean to say that all chronometers are absolutely and totally wrong; that’s now what we are saying. What we are saying is that they are not necessarily right and there’s a world of difference between those two statements.

Now the entire argument of apparent age has been brought into the limelight by Morris and Whitcomb’s book, The Genesis Flood. I wrote my masters dissertation, masters thesis, on a critique of this book, and I would say that of all of the positions taken in the Genesis Flood, none evoked a more emotional reaction than the statement in The Genesis Flood that the radioactive decay systems, all chronometers were wrong to the same degree. In other words, the authors tried to use it as a blanket solution for all radioactive geochronological methods. For example, on page 346 of The Genesis Flood, they write, “The obvious question then arises as to whether the apparent ages of the minerals so created would be diverse from each other or whether they would all exhibit some consistent value. It is more satisfying teleologically and therefore more reasonable,” they write, “to infer that all these primeval clocks, since they were wound up at the same time, were also set to read at the same time. Whatever this setting was, we may call it the apparent age of the earth, but the true age of the earth can be known only by the means of divine revelation.”

Now the universal apparent age was something first mentioned over a century ago and Dr. Ramm, in his book, The Christian View of Science and the Scripture, gives a discussion of this on pages 192-195 of his book. However, it has severe logical implications. Professor Leith has pointed out in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation for December, 1965, pages 120-121 that one immediate result of this thesis would make irrelevant all of the discussion on technical issues and dating contained in the book The Genesis Flood. Now I do not subscribe to Leith’s criticism, in large, of The Genesis Flood, his major weakness is the lack of exegetical interaction with the book. Professor Leith just wholeheartedly tears apart the book The Genesis Flood but gives no understanding, no sign of any understanding in his criticism that he understands, first, what The Genesis Flood is saying and secondly, what the text of the Bible is saying. And I would say this is a great weakness in Leith’s criticism.

However, I would say that one thing he is right, and that is that the universal apparent age, or the use of apparent age is a blanket solution for all our problem is faced with a great bit of difficulty. I would rather say, and I’d rather make the case weaker than that; I would rather say that the doctrine of apparent age means that various chronometers within their own systems were set to tune at different times. I don’t think there’s a reason we have in Scripture to say that, for example, radioactive decay it’s the lead method, the strontium method or any other method of dating, any of these methods would read exactly the same apparent age. I think they would all read differently. For example, in the Garden of Eden, if I were to photograph Adam I would say that he was 30 years old, for example; if I were to look at the tree rings in the Garden of Eden I would say it was maybe two minutes old because maybe the trees didn’t have rings. If I were to look at the soil I would say this must be at least 200-300 years old because the soil would…in other words, the various sources of chronology or time measurement would read different so that I would avoid making apparent age a blanket solution. I would rather just confine it to individual chronometers and just simply say, and leave the discussion with a statement, that Genesis 2:1-3 renders absolute certainty in chronometers wrong, renders it wrong, in other words, it leaves chronometers in doubt. It doesn’t necessarily say they’re all wrong but it says that they are not necessarily right.

To put it specifically, if we were to deal with the lead dating system, and later on we’ll deal with these various chronometric systems, if we were to deal with the lead method, for example, do we correct for a possible apparent age. For example, at the point of creation, did the universe already have lead in it that would look as though it was part of decay from uranium, for example? In other words, had the uranium to lead cycle, was it created at the beginning with all uranium and no lead or was it created partway down the decay cycle? Where was it? And I think this is a question for legitimate consideration. I think right here you have to consider this problem and it has to be considered seriously when we deal with the application of Genesis 2:1-3.

So now to summarize Genesis 2:1-3 we simply say this: that it teaches a finished creation and because it teaches a finished creation it necessarily involves us with the problem of how finished was it? Where in the cycle was creation made? And we are thus face to face with the problem of apparent age. Once again we conclude with the questions we opened with. If you were there in the Garden of Eden with a camera how old would Adam appear one second after his creation? How many rings did the trees in the Garden of Eden have? Did Adam have a naval? Of what was the soil in the Garden of Eden made?

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We now come to the fourth problem under consideration with respect to the Biblical text and this is the doctrine of the creation of man, given in Genesis 2 and also in Genesis 1:26 and so on. There are several things that I think should be covered and noted in connection with the Biblical text dealing with the creation of man. The first thing to notice is the importance of the doctrine of man’s creation. Man is made in the image of God, Genesis 1:26 and following. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. [27] And so God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”

Now the first question that comes up at this point is what does it mean when it says man is created in the image of God? Man is created in the image of God. In John 4:24 Jesus tells us that God is spirit, now he’s not referring to the Holy Spirit at that point, it’s not dealing with the distinctions of the Tri-unity, Jesus is telling about the essence of God, and God is a spirit in John 4:24, therefore if man is to be made in the image of God it must be a spiritual image of God. In other words, unlike, for example the Mormon heresy, we do not say that the image of God requires that God have a body like man but that when it says man is made in the image of God it refers to man’s spiritual dimension, and it is this spiritual dimension of man that distinguishes him from, say, the plants and machines. It’s one were to list in descending order of sophistication the levels of God’s creation one would have a list somewhat like this: angels, and underneath angels man; underneath man, animals; underneath animals, plants; and underneath plants, machines which I would use to include all of the physical mechanisms of creation and so on.

Now the Bible says that man is unlike angels, not in the sense that he is spiritually different so much as that he has a body. Man is a spirit incarnate, a spirit put in flesh; angels are spirits without a body. And so the difference then between man and angels is not over the issue of spiritual dimension, it’s over the issue of the material. Man is a spirit put in flesh. Now animals are different, man and animals, next in the list, differ from plants and machines in the sense that they are said to possess life or nephesh, soul; man and animals are said to have nephesh versus plants and machines. Now this is a very significant difference. Man and animals are said to live because they are a union of spirit and flesh in Ecclesiastes 3:21 it says animals have spirits. So man and animals differ from plants in the sense that they are embodied spirits.

Now the difference between man and animals and angels is that they have bodies; the difference between man and animals and plants is that they have spirits. So man and animals are hybrid creatures; creatures made both of spirit and matter and such a union in the Scripture is said to be a living union, or a nephesh. That’s very significant; the Scripture never calls plants living. Now it recognizes they die and so on, I’m not saying that. It’s simply that the technical term “living” refers to something far more specific that our adjective “living.” When we use the word “living” we think of the plant and animal kingdom as living, as organic versus over and against the inorganic. But this is not…repeat, this is not the level of contrast that is presented to us in Scripture. The level of contrast presented to us in Scripture is that man and animals both are living because they are a union of spirit and flesh. Plants are not said to be living because plants are wholly flesh.

Now this has repercussions all the down the line, particularly in the area of the creation of life that is spoken of so much in our media today. Biblically speaking what is being created, even if men were to progress over and above the tremendously difficult problem of reconstructing parts of a living cell, and were really to actually create a so-called living cell in the test tube, this would not be said to be living in the Biblical sense of the word for the Biblical sense of the word living includes not just the idea that something is organic but that something is organic plus has an indwelling spirit. And thus it is very significant that, for example, in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were commanded to eat of the plants. And one could say therefore that there was death and suffering before the curse, but there couldn’t have been death and suffering before the curse if the plants were not living. That is, man and animals alone are said to live, and this is why neither the animals nor man were given the right to eat each other in the Garden of Eden because in the Garden of Eden we were on pre-cursed ground, that is, we were in a point in history before suffering and misery, heartache and death were introduced into creation.

So this is not without significance; this is a very significant observation to make in Scripture, and you can do it yourself, you can check this out by simply going to a concordance, looking up nephesh, find out where it’s used, you will never find it used for plants, only for animals and man. Now man is distinguished from the animals in the sense that man is said to be made in the image of God, Ecclesiastes 3:21 says the spirit of animals goes down to the earth, the spirit of man goes up to God. So there is a distinction in the spiritual nature between animals and man and this distinction surrounds the image of God.

How can we communicate what it means for man to have been created in the image of God? I frequently illustrate God’s essence by drawing a box and in this box, a square box, on the left side inside the box I list attributes of God, and also on the right side inside the box I list attributes of God. In this box, which I call the essence box, we would have sovereignty, on the left hand side I would list sovereignty, I would list absolute righteousness, I would list justice, I would list love. On the right hand side inside the box I would list eternality, I would list omniscience, I would list omnipresence, I would list omnipotence and I would list immutability. Now one could quibble and one could say one could list different sets of attributes and so on, and theologians have. But from my own personal sake I’ve found this breakdown most useful in both explaining the gospel to the unbelieving people around me and also in clarifying certain aspects of the Christian life, clarifying what Jesus did on the cross and so on. So I find this breakdown most useful.

Now if that represents God and we have this so-called essence box, John 4:24 telling us that the nature of God is spiritual, and this box telling us the specific characteristics of God, now we can come to man and we can draw another box for man. And inside this box for man we can list attributes, this time not the attributes of God but the attributes of man, and we will list them in correspondence, an exact correspondence with the attributes of God.

For example, where we had sovereignty inside the essence box, for man we would put volition. Where we had absolute righteousness and justice for God inside the essence box we would have for man’s box conscience. Inside God’s box where we have the attribute where we have the attribute love, inside man’s box I would put satisfaction in personal relationships. Inside God’s box I would put eternality and inside man’s box I would put temporality, and by temporality I mean that man is confined to live one moment at a time whereas God is able to live all moments at the same time; God lives both in past, present and future simultaneously.

In place of the omniscience of God I would put the rationality and memory of man stressing that man is a rational creature. He is rational because God is rational, God has omniscience, God has real knowledge and this real knowledge is rational and therefore man has rationality; the whole Bible is written on the assumption that man reasons; the antithesis is true, that something cannot be both true and false. And so I would put rationality and memory inside the box of man, in place of omniscience which we have inside God’s box.

In place of God’s omnipresence I would put man’s mobility, where man is able to live only at one point in space, whereas God is able to live at all points in space simultaneously.

In place of God’s omnipotence I would put man’s power, that while man does not have infinite power, man still has power to influence the surrounding. In a modern vernacular man has the capability of making waves in history; he is capable of influencing his environment and producing real products in the outside world, products which will stand for all history. In place of God’s immutability I would put man’s continuity, stressing that man is not a stable creature through time as God is, he is not an unchanging creature but that he nevertheless he does exist down through time. So I would list one of his attributes as continuity.

Now underneath both the box of God and the box of man I would list two further characteristics, two for God, and two for man. One for God would be verbal communication, that God communicates verbally, He communicates with words. This is terrifically crucial; when one comes to the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, when one comes to the doctrine of verbal revelation, God is a person, how do persons communicate? They communicate by verbal revelation. Also God has a desire to glorify Himself; this is the outstanding desire of God, a desire which must totally control the master plan for the universe. For man, man being a person also communicates verbally; verbal communication would be a characteristic of man. Man, where God would have a desire to glorify Himself man has a need to submit expressed perhaps in no more poignant terms that Pascal when he said that man has a God-shaped vacuum in the heart that can only be filled by God as made known through His Son Jesus Christ. And so here we have man’s need to submit.

GOD Man

Sovereignty Eternality || Volition Temporality

Absolute righteousness Omniscience || Conscience Rationality/memory of man

Justice Omnipresence || Conscience Man’s mobility

Love Omnipotence || Satisfaction in Man’s power

Immutability || personal Man’s continuity

relationships

Now if you will look at both of these boxes and contrast them carefully, attribute by attribute, characteristic by characteristic, you will get an idea of what the Bible means when it says man is created in the image of God. And not only was man created in the image of God but to a certain degree that image persists on down to the present time. Example: James 3:9 and 1 Corinthians 11:7 both teach that man in some sense is still in the image of God this side of the fall. We also know from Ephesians 4:24 and other passages in Colossians that the new man is created after the image of God and it would suggest that when a person is saved, when a person is regenerated by the Holy Spirit this image is corrected back to its original form. But nevertheless, these functions that we have outlined in the box of man, these functions still persist in the life of an unbeliever and the fact that these functions still persist, incidentally, in the life of the unbeliever is the reason why we can talk to him about our Lord.

This is the reason why we can witness with meaning and purpose to the unbeliever, for the unbeliever is still a man, he’s a fallen man but he is still a man; he is a fallen man but he still has volition. He is a fallen man but he still has conscience; he knows, has an innate awareness of certain absolute standards. He has a need for personal relationships; he has a need to submit to God. He is an unbeliever but he still has rationality and memory. He is an unbeliever but he still has a sense of his finiteness, the fact that instead of eternality he has temporality, instead of omnipresence he has mobility, and because he has these things, even though as an unbeliever he has in union and totally depraved state, he has a totally depraved state, that is, he is totally oriented against the purpose of God, but nevertheless, because he is still a man and we are men too, we can communicate with the unbeliever as on a man to man basis.

And so when the Bible says that man was created in the image of God it means that man is utterly unique from the animals, the plants, and the machine, and any philosophy, any medical practice, any psychiatric school of thought, any of these systems of thinking which regards man as nothing more than a sophisticated animal is a lie and therefore as horrible as it may seem, one would have to say as a Bible-believing Christian that much of the total thrust of medicine and psychiatry and other systems of thought today that deal closely with man are utterly wrong and are not only utterly wrong but they are so wrong that they can be profoundly injurious to man himself. When one treats man as an animal he begins to act like an animal, he begins to deny himself, he begins to deny that he is a man and he produces tremendous tensions on the inside. And I suspect that this is one reason why we have such a rash of psychiatric illness in our society today.

The doctrine of the image of God, that God has created man in His image, it’s absolutely necessary to reiterate over and over and over again. We must iterate this and teach our children to iterate this in the classroom. I had a parent come to me whose daughter was exposed to an audio-visual film in the public school system in which on this film the statement was made how man slowly moved from the ape up to his present position, how man learned to speak from listening to the grunts of the animals around of him. All of this, not backed by a fact of anthropology, absolutely no facts to back this statement up yet it is presented with taxpayer’s money in a tax supported institution to serve all the public.

And if I have said this once I have said it a thousand times, that in our generation, the generation of the last half of the 20^th century, this generation will find the fight with the world centered upon the issue of public education. And Christian parents who are not public education conscious today, tomorrow are going to be sorrowful parents because their children have been brainwashed at a deeply profound level in such a sophisticated manner that it may take years and years and years of prayerful Bible study, self-examination and tears to restore the beauty of the unblemished divine viewpoint of God’s Word in their mind. You cannot feed a person a perfect diet except for a small does of poison daily and expect the person to grow healthy. Neither can we feed our children human viewpoint in small but very effective doses and expect to produce virile saints to the witness of our Lord and Savior in the next generation. The conquest and the fight and the struggle today is the struggle of the ideas and it is no more apparent than in the struggle for our children. So I would warn you that this issue of evolution in Scripture is vitally important to our time and if this series of tapes does nothing more, my prayer would be that it would stimulate you to begin to analyze, criticize, to evaluate all of the things that you’re exposed to in the light of the Word of God.

Now we have just presented the doctrine of the creation of man, what it means when it says that man is created in God’s image. And what we have to do now to appreciate what we have as Bible-believing Christians with divine viewpoint, to appreciate what we really have, let’s take a look for a moment at human viewpoint, at the viewpoint of the unbelief of the world, and let us see the poverty that exists in human viewpoint, that we may by contrast appreciate the riches of our own position.

What would the unbeliever have to say with regard to the personality of man? Basically there are only two alternatives that an unbeliever can take with regard to the personality of man, with regard to the spiritual nature of man; that is, (1) personality originated by Chance, with a capital “C.” Personality originated by Chance. This is one possibility, that is, that the universe is essentially impersonal, essentially material and that the universe being impersonal we can erect an equation: impersonal + time + Chance = personality. Impersonal, the impersonal plus time plus Chance equals personality, and this would be the equation of the origin of personality that an unbeliever must adhere to. Another option that an unbeliever would have would be to simply say that personality is an illusion, the distinctive features that make man man, his volition, his satisfaction in personal relationships, his rationality, all those things in the box of man, which we would call personality, the unbeliever could say, because he has tremendous difficulty in explaining how this came about, if he did not want to subscribe to the equation—impersonal + time + Chance = personality, he would have to say it is all an illusion.

These are the only two positions; it seems to me that if I were an unbeliever I could honestly take. Either the personality came about through Chance acting over a time period upon the impersonal universe or what we call personality is merely an illusion. You may say well how theoretical…oh not at all. Not at all! Let’s look at some of the practical ramifications once the unbeliever takes one of these two positions. First let’s see what happens when the unbeliever takes the position that the impersonal + time + Chance = personality. I would say that one of the close at home ramifications of this would be the desperate search by the United States and Russia for other life in outer space. In the last couple of years there have been several reports by radio astronomers saying that they had received signals from deep space, signals which had a symmetry, which had an order to them that suggested they might possibly be made by intelligent life and thus both Russia and the United States have together spent millions on designing tremendously powerful radio antenna, radio telescopes to probe into the depths of space to try and seek out the origins of these regular symmetrical signals. Why is this? I suspect one reason for the tremendous interest, when we need these millions of dollars to solve many of our problems at home, when we need these millions of dollars to resolve and protect us militarily, why are we spending them on these projects? For the reason that I think men are motivated to seek life on other planets because if life is not on the other planets then it means that man as man is a lone, lone creature of the universe.

And I would say that deep inside there’s a voice in the heart of the unbeliever that says something like this: my God, there must be life on other planets; could it be that we as mankind are a lone creation in all of the empty universe. How horrible! How discomforting! And I think it’s a hidden suspicion that this very might possibly be true; there’s the insistence that there has to be life somewhere else in the universe. Of course, as Bible-believing Christians we say there is. There are myriads of angels; these are part of the universe, obviously, taught in Scripture very clearly. So that it would seem to me as an unbeliever I would feel very lonely if I took this equation seriously, the impersonal + time + Chance = personality.

But no greater illustration, no better illustration have I found, than that that has been written by Dr. Frances Schaeffer in his book, The God Who is There, put out by Intervarsity Press, paperback edition costs $2.50. On page 87 Dr. Schaeffer writes and gives us an illustration of the horrible implications of this equation, the impersonal + time + Chance = personality. I want to quote at length from this illustration because I have never in my reading on this subject ever seen a more poignant illustration of the dilemma that an unbeliever faces and is immediately up against when he rejects the Biblical doctrine that God was there first and then created man in His image. When this is rejected the unbeliever has to switch over to one of these two viewpoints which we have outlined above. The first one we are considering is the impersonal + time + Chance = personality, and personality is a pure Chance product then. Now Schaeffer’s illustration reads as follows:

(Quote) “Imagine that a universe existed which was made up of only liquids and solids, no free gases; a fish was swimming in this universe. This fish, quite naturally, was conformed to its environment so that it was able to go on living, but let us suppose that by blind Chance, as evolutionist would have us believe, this fish developed lungs as it continued swimming in this universe without gases. Now this fish would no longer be able to function and fulfill its position as a fish. Would it, then, be higher or lower in its new state with its lung? It would be lower, for it would drown. In the same way, if man had been picked up out of that which is impersonal by Chance, then those things that make him man, hope of purpose and significance, beauty and verbal communication, love, motions of morality and rationality are ultimately unfulfilled and are thus meaningless. In such a situation, is man higher or lower? He would be the lowest creature on the scale; the green moss on the rock is higher than he for it can be fulfilled in the universe which exists. But if the world is that which what men say it is, then man, not only individually as a race, being unfulfilled, is dead. In this situation man should not walk on the grass, but respect it, for it is higher than he.” (End quote) the end of the illustration.

I think this illustration is very important because it shows you the logical dilemma that an unbeliever would face, alone, product of accident, and the great things that make man man, his rationality, his memory, his volition, his power, his desire and satisfaction in personal relationships, his conscience, all these things are nothing but products of Chance and an accident of history. Is man just an accident in history? If man is nothing but an accident in history, what is the sanctity of human life? In other words, the point is that once an unbeliever takes this position is he willing to live with it 24 hours a day. I rather doubt not, I have never seen an unbeliever willing to live 24 hours consistently with his unbelief. He always has to come over to me and borrow things from the Bible to make his life meaningful—steal things would be a better word.

Now I’d like to come to the second possible “out” for the unbeliever. If he did not want to select the impersonal + time + Chance = personality way, then he has one more option, and that is to say that what we call personality, the things that make man man, is just an illusion, we’re nothing more than a conglomerate of atoms, an organic compound of very sophisticated nature. And if this is true, again I would say, try and live that way, just try and live 24 hours of your life consistently with that belief. You see, you could take a professor in the lecture hall or a laboratory instructor in the laboratory and he might, with all the order at his command, asset that personality was an illusion. But the thing that would be interesting to watch is what happens when the laboratory assistant and the college professor leaves the lecture hall, leaves the college campus, goes home to their wives and their children. How do they act then? Do they treat their wives as though they are nothing more than an illusion? Do they treat their children as though they are nothing more than illusions? Of course not. In other words, Professors say one thing in the classroom and in their books but live quite another way with their wives and children. And so therefore I would say that if you took the position that personality is an illusion you couldn’t be honest with yourself; you’d be a schizophrenic in a very short time. It seems to me the only people that are halfway honest in this matter would be the nihilists, or those who believe in destruction of all things, you might say the campus radicals of our time; the younger generation is probably a lot more honest than the older generation, for the older generation was willing to deny the Biblical truth but unwilling to reject the fruit of the Biblical position. The younger generation is far more honest in that it says if we have rejected the root then we also must logically reject the fruit.