Clough Genesis Lesson 6

The second day – Genesis 1:6-8; the third day – Genesis 1:9-13

We have God’s work on the second day, and Genesis 1:9-13 we have God’s work on the third day. Those two days, day two and day three, are the days that we are now studying in this Genesis series. Genesis 1:6, “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. [7] And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were from under firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. [8] And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. [9] And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. [10] And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas: and God saw that it was good. [11] And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. [12] And the earth brought forth grass, herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good. [13] And the evening and the morning were day three.”

We said last time that the days here cannot be interpreted legitimately in any other way than literal days, the reason for this being those I cited: Exodus 20:11, etc. etc. etc. The only serious people that try to make days ages are embarrassed evangelicals who are too cowardly to stand with the text as written and want to gain some sort of respectability, they think, in the eyes of evolutionary thought, when as a matter of fact that has been tried for at least three centuries and is found seriously wanting. And the only other option you’ve got is to say they’re literal and it’s wrong. I prefer that for a position to the day/age position myself.

Now Genesis 1:6, God says, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,” keep in mind the picture that has been developed so far in Genesis 1, you have the universe starting out as a watery blob. Whether the solid core of the earth was formed here, it’s an inference, not stated in the text, all we have here is a limited set of eye witness observations by God; man wasn’t there so we’re disqualified. But then the light comes and now the waters are said to spread outward and there’s an expanse. And this is the work of day two.

There’s immediately a big, big problem with the word translated in the King James by firmament. Now over the many centuries of argument and fights and debates in the book of Genesis there’s been considerable discussion about this word “firmament.” There have been those, and they number many in the liberal camp who would argue that the word “firmament,” which is a good translation of the Greek term here, simply means that the ancient people in the days of the Old Testament believed in what we call the “triple-decker universe.” That is, the land was flat, there were a bunch of water underneath, the land was sort of floating like paraffin in a bowl full of jam, and then on top you had a glass top and this was the sky, and they literally believed in a hard sky and something solid, like glass, and that the waters were above this glass, and that when it rained there were little holes here called the windows of heaven and the rain fell down from these holes.

And sometimes you will have some critic of the Bible get up and say ho-ho-ho, look how these stupid people of the Bible believed, and characterize this as the normative picture of Scripture. Well, the man who edited the International Bible Encyclopedia that has been around since 1900 says that this assumption is in reality based more upon the ideas prevalent in Europe during the dark ages than any actual statements in the Old Testament. In other words, this triple-decker idea of the universe is something that was a popular idea in the Middle Ages. But if you study the Old Testament text themselves you can’t show that they believed this, and the fatal blow to it anyway is the fact that the Egyptians measured the circumference of the earth at 25,000 miles and I would dare say that if the earth is flat, a piece of paraffin floating on some sort of water, one would have a slight difficulty getting the circumference of a sphere from that situation. So obviously the ancients did not believe in a flat earth; Columbus in his day did not believe that he was going to sail off the edge as it’s always narrated very sacred in the ritual of Columbus’ day. I will show you a map that Columbus had when we get into Genesis 9 that showed very clearly Cuba and all of North and South America. Columbus had no danger, no idea he was going to fall off the end of the world; he had a map ahead of time, a map which by the way also included the entire continent of Antarctica.

So obviously the ancients were not these stupid nincompoops that the liberals would have us believe, but they do have some Biblical texts that they used to claim this. Let’s look at those texts; one is Job 26:11, and in Job 26:11 they say surely this is an example of the fact that in the ancient world people believed in a solid sky. Obviously Job 26:11, if interpreted as though it is not a metaphor, but an actual literal description would teach that, for what does it say? “The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished as His reproof.” “The pillars of heaven,” well now if there are “the pillars of heaven,” then doesn’t this seem to say that there is, in fact, a triple-decker universe, and that in fact this glass dish that’s kind of like on a pot of hot food, that this is held up by certain pillars. Well you have to be careful because if you allow your eye to slip up to verse 7, you’ll notice it in the context that that seems to negate the idea of a flat earth being supported on anything. “He stretches out the north over the empty place, and hangs the earth upon nothing.” Well, you see this cosmological literature is filled with some difficult metaphor and you’re going to be very, very hard pressed to build the idea of a triple-decker universe out of one verse in Job.

But there’s another one, they say, that if you can get around Job 26 you can’t get around this one, this one really clinches the case. So let’s go to Job 37:18. See, they say, look at this, “Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass,” the picture there being of a mirror that was cast… see, glass, they say there it is, there’s the very idiom we need to show that the ancients believed in a glass sky.

Well, the answer to this thing is found in the little word we use in our English language, expanse. Now look at that noun for a moment and think if it doesn’t remind you of a very familiar verb—expanse. And it’s the same in the Hebrew text. Yes it’s an expanse, but it’s build off a prior picture of something expanding and we take you right to the same verse of our critics, verse 18 again; in what state, in verse 18, is the mirror? Solid or liquid? And the answer is that it’s liquid, and what does liquid glass do when it’s poured into a mold? It expands out to fill the mold. And so the picture of verse 18 has nothing to do with solidarity of glass, it has to do with another quality, physically, completely and that is the quality of expansion.

Now to confirm this interpretation all one need do is take a concordance and look up every place in the Old Testament where God is spoken of as the Creator of the heavens, and if you check text after text after text after text do you notice a consistent theme? Let these authors tell us what they believe, let’s stop reading medieval thought terms into their words.

So we turn to Isaiah 42 as one illustration among many, you can find these all by just going to your concordance if you want to, but here’s an example of a chain of references. In Isaiah 42:5, when the creation of the heavens is mentioned, it says: “Thus saith God, the LORD, He who created the heavens, and stretched them out….” Another nearby verse is Isaiah 44:24, same thing. So the picture we’ve got consistently in the Scripture has nothing to do with glass; it has to do with curtains, it has to do with molten glass, anything that gives the connotation of spreading out. The picture here is familiar to a nomad who lived out in the wilderness wanderings in a tent and you’d stretch the tent out and you’d lie back on the ground at night and you’d look up and see the roof of the tent. And so it’s speaking phenomenon logically and the man’s out there lying on the ground and he looks up and he sees the stars and the moon and so on and he conceives of this as a tent stretched out over him. That’s the picture.

Now this is not to be confused with the modern cosmogony of the expanding universe. The modern cosmogony of the expanding universe is grounded on certain light shifts that are interpreted to be signs of motion of those stars away from out point of observation. That, however, is one interpretation among several possible interpretations. But we’re not talking about an expanding universe right now; we’re talking about during that day when God said, “Let there be an expanse in the middle of the waters,” he just phhtt, did this, just like one would take the tent and put over the frame, he stretched out the universe this way.

Let’s go back to Genesis 1 and look at that picture a little more carefully, now that we’ve gotten over the problem of whether they believed the sky was glass. In Genesis 1:6-7 it’s said that this expanse, whatever it is, is to divide the waters from the waters, two bodies of water. Now often in fundamentalist literature in our circles this is taken to mean this kind of a situation; you’ve got the earth surrounded by an atmosphere and then above this atmosphere you had before the flood a canopy of water, just one big mass of cloud. Now that’s not the only interpretation possible out of this and I don’t think it’s the right one. I don’t mind having a canopy of water vapor high in the atmosphere before the flood, I think that’s necessary, but remember, it was water vapor, not water liquid, the one reason being that if you look in Genesis 1:14 you’ll see that the sun and the moon and the stars were visible, and if you’re going to have a thick layer of visible vapor, water droplets actually condensed, you can’t get light through it, it’s going to be translucent if it’s thick at all. Try going out and observing stars on a cloudy evening and you’ll see what I mean. Well, obviously whatever this was was not translucent but it was transparent; you occult look up, Noah, Adam, Methuselah, could look up and talk about the stars; they saw them.

Another feature that I think confirms this is found in Genesis 1:20 and this has to do with two Hebrew prepositions, or two meanings of a Hebrew preposition, the Hebrew preposition al, can be translated in one of two ways. It can be translated “upon” or it can be translated “over.” And you say well I don’t see anything, if something’s upon something it’s obviously over something. Just a minute; if we translate the preposition as “upon” then we would have the picture that we have the expanse of waters here, the atmosphere here, up to what we call the tropopause or something, and then above that we would have this layer of water and that would be the picture because the waters would then be “upon” or over the atmosphere. Well, now again, we have to be careful. Let’s interpret it the way these men are interpreting it. Let’s not be too fast to get our scientific data out and have a little discussion, let’s just be careful.

In Genesis 1:20, where it talks about God creating the fish and the birds, the exact expression, something over the heavens is used. In verse 20 it says, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and fowl that may fly above the earth” and in the Hebrew, “above the expanse of heaven.” Now just a minute; the birds don’t fly above the tropopause; the birds don’t fly above the atmosphere, so we must have another understanding of that idiom. And sure enough, very simple, very easy to understand, an everyday expression. When we look up at the sky as an observer on the face of the earth, here’s our little weather observer and he’s looking up, and he sees clouds. He measures the clouds as a certain percent, visually, a certain percent of the area of what is called the celestial dome, that is the visible blue sky. And so if it’s half-sky cover he calls it four-tenths sky cover, five-tenths sky cover; it it’s more than half you call it broken conditions, if it’s overcast it’s overcast. But notice the term—sky cover! The clouds are upon the sky; it’s phenomenal language, it’s describing clouds covering the sky.

So I would take this expression in Genesis 1:6-7 to mean the waters that are upon the heavens are simply sky cover. To confirm this interpretation let’s turn to Psalm 147:8; we’ve got to turn to a few Psalms that use terms about nature just to test whether our interpretation fits. In Psalm 147:8, “Who covers the heaven with clouds,” now there’s the same idiomatic everyday expression that we use. There’s nothing unscientific about it, it’s just written as an observer would view it.

Turn to Psalm 148:4, it’s talking about “Praise Him, heaven of heavens, and waters that are beyond the heavens,” and Psalm 148 is written after the flood. So obviously this term can’t refer to some canopy that was just suddenly a precipitator in the flood. It refers to normal, observed water that’s in the clouds, it becomes visible and it covers the face of the sky.

Now this isn’t to say that there wasn’t an invisible vapor canopy around the earth but you’ve got to prove that by another way than just waltzing in here at 60 miles an hour and coming out with a quick interpretation of Genesis 1:6-7.

So we then would say that what we’ve got in Genesis 1:6-8, what we’ve got on the second day is the creation of what we call the atmosphere, and probably more so, probably what we are to say, and I’m not dogmatic on this, but probably what we’re to say is that the waters were spread in a continuum outward so that you’ve got a lot of high density water vapor around the earth and then it gradually fades out and fades out and fades out and becomes less and less dense, the implication being that water is a prime compound throughout the universe.

Yesterday when I was flying back to Lubbock from Washington I was sitting next to Dr. Henry Morris of the Creation Research Society and we were sitting in the room waiting to board the plane at Washington National Airport and who should walk in and sit next to us but a courier from NASA, who was carrying this well-guarded metal container. And it turned out that he was a fellow creationist and we were walking about creation and the moon and so on and he said I’ve got part of the moon in this box. And he was carrying one of the lunar samples that the case had been damaged in the national museum and he was carrying it back to Houston to get it repaired. And so he took it out and we were able to look at this lunar sample and this led us to conversations about water in the universe and meteorites and so on. Everybody else was talking about football and we were talking about the moon. Anyway, this conversation was going on and I asked him about this problem of water and he was saying that on the moon none of the samples have indicated any presence of water. But he said that out beyond in space vapor clouds exist and have been measured. So the presence of water is found, though in infinitesimal quantities, is found in parts of the universe. The rings on Saturn, according to one theory, have ice in them; the moons around Saturn; this is H2O, it’s not just methane ice or something. So we’ve got a situation where this is one physical implication of Scripture that water is a prime substance.

But, the interesting thing about this day is where in the universe is water most concentrated? Earth; and that is an implication of Scripture. The reason being, because as you saw in the film, water is necessary for life. So the earth does have a unique environment; it’s made because of the spiritual struggles that would go on here that required the presence of life.

So we come to the end of that day, and God called this heaven, and please notice that in the prime substance, verse 8 is your primary picture of heaven; we would call it sky. It’s that simple and if you will capture that little picture in your mind, use it again and again, in Ephesians 2, for example, in the New Testament when Paul talks about the abode of Satan, Satan is the ruler of the air, the Greek word from which we get our word atmosphere, the picture is carried forward throughout the Scriptures.

Genesis 1:9-13 deals with the third day, and we again here are looking here for an advance. These days indicate systems in the universe; the first day you have the light/energy system. That’s brought into existence and made functional. And then the second day we have the atmosphere with the complexities of chemicals, maybe He’s making advanced heavier atoms here, we don’t know, but something is going on and He’s making the expanse of space in heaven. Then in verse 9 we have the earth appear.

“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.” Very important in verse 2 is the verb “appear,” for later on, when we get in verse 14 and it says God made the stars and the sun, on the fourth day, not the first day, the fourth day, everybody is ooh, no-no-no-no-no, how can we have light before we have light bearers? Well don’t ask me, I wasn’t there. God just observed that He made light before He had light bearers; I have to accept that as a piece of data and then I have to reason through why, if I can. But nevertheless, to get around this embarrassment you’ll always find some Christians that get oouchy here and they want to say in verse 14 that God made the stars to appear, that is, the earth was enshrouded in a translucent cloud and God kind of blew the kind away so at last blue sky appeared on the fourth day and then we could see, if we had been an observer there, we would have seen the sun, the moon, break out of the clouds and so forth. But that isn’t what is said in verse 4, I’m sorry, it’s not a legitimate interpretation.

Verse 14 says God made, it doesn’t say make to appear. But in verse 9 it doesn’t say “make,” it says “made to appear,” the implication then being the earth was already formed underneath this water and what we have is tectonic activity on this third day where the… we have this picture of the earth, apparently the surface was originally level and then out of it we have this wrinkling of the surface, the uplifting of land, and the down warping of these basins. So, “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together,” we don’t know what the boundaries of the continents were at this time in history. We have no idea; when we get to the site of Eden we’ll make some speculations but we’re not given that much data and where we’re not given data we have to admit its sheer speculation.

Then it says God called this eretz, or the Earth and the Seas. [Genesis 1:10, “And God called the dry land Earth’ and the gathering together of the waters called He seas: and God saw that it was good.”] Notice there were multiple seas, so again we speculate, perhaps it was that the ancient continents were what is now the ocean, what are now the continents may have been the ancient seas. The only reason this has been put forward as a speculation is because you look at the strata on the continents, very, very thick. You look at the strata under the sea, very, very thin. And it lacks whole vast ages. So one way of explaining it might be a complete reversal, that kind of thing but that’s just guesswork at this stage.

So God goes on and in Genesis 1:11 it says that He creates what biologists would call life. We would not, biblically speaking, it’s not just quibbling, the Bible reserves the word “life” for that which is coming out of, synonym—soul, “life” is that which is produced by a spirit plus a body. And that is apparently a characteristic only possessed by man, and the vertebrates. So that being the case we have to say in verses 11-12 the creation of plants does not, technically, in the Bible’s meaning, mean life; it means replicating cells the way the modern biologist would define life, yes. [Genesis 1:11-12, “And God said, Let the earth bring forth vegetation, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. [12] And the earth brought forth vegetation, and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good.”]

Now just so we don’t read Genesis 1:11 too fast and get over it and be slippery about it, let’s go back and look a little bit at God’s artwork in this regard and make a few comments as to how a Bible-believing Christian ought really to look at this phenomenon. One of the things we have to overcome as Christians is that we are taught to view nature wrong. In school, because of the influence of an autonomous science we are taught to look upon a flower of some sort as something objective. We describe the biological systems involved and so on, can give great dissertations on the circulation in the leaves and the stem, etc. the process of photosynthesis. And then, those of us who may be interested in art, we’re taught to look upon the flower differently. We’re taught to look upon the flower as an artwork and look more at the beauty of the thing.

Well, those are two ways of looking at it. But as Christians we’ve got to combine both ways. No Christian who is a scientist can ever look at a piece of nature and say what a nice interesting system, and be totally incognizant of the fact that God is the Creator who made that. Now one mental exercise while you’re looking at flowers like this, is to simply say… think in your mind what it must have been like of God sitting, so to speak, at a drawing board, thinking about how am I going to design this flower, what colors is it going to have, I want it to function in a botanical sense but I also want it to be artistic and good, because remember, as we come back to the text you’ll see the word “tob” or good is used; I want it beautiful. And so God has variations in His design. And again, as you think of this think of the fact of God’s hands actually creating this and you will get a picture of the way we ought to worship God through general revelation. God made these things, and when we look at nature outside of the church, outside of the Bible, that is a revelation of God also and it tells us something about Him.

[Shows slides or film] These are just a few things to show the details involved; here are the famous rings that are on trees, the usual annual growth, not necessarily have to be but usually, and if you want a mind-jogging exercise, ask yourself the following questions? How many rings did the trees in the Garden of Eden have? Here’s the inside of a seed, and again, as you look at that tiny structure with the cells and so on, working together, just ask yourself, what does this show about my God, and if I’m a Christian about my Savior. Those are things that He designed; He’s proud of them, He worked and brought them into existence. And this is why, now, when you read the text in verse 12, after looking at the details of flowers, why God then turns around and says “it was good,” it’s beautiful. I like it; it’s an appreciation of what He’s done.

[Genesis 1:13, “And the evening and the morning were the third day.”] I promised you that every time we went through a day I would also take you to a passage in the New Testament that showed a vital spiritual truth that depends upon that day’s work. Last week we took you to 2 Corinthians 4 to show you that the day of “Let there be light” is used to be the ground of revelation. So if you’re going to tamper with Genesis 1 you’d better flush 2 Corinthians 4. Now we’re going to do the same thing with these days and we’ll turn first to 1 Corinthians 15:38. [But God gives it a body as it has pleased Him, and to every seed its own body.”] In 1 Corinthians 15:38-39 almost casually the apostle drifts into the use of language borrowed from the third day. Now this almost casual use… this almost casual slip, shows you that deep in the apostle’s mind he conceived of creation in exactly Genesis 1 terms, because when he goes to talk about it he just slips right into the vocabulary. Watch.

The issue in the context is resurrection; what Paul’s trying to say is that there are categories built into the creation, and you don’t have a mortal body just suddenly mutating itself into a resurrection body; you have definite boundaries within which variation occurs. We’ll get into the implications of this more next Sunday, but right now I’m just interested in the parallel language. So you’ll see in 1 Corinthians 15:39, “All flesh is not the same flesh, for this is one sort of flesh of man, another flesh of beasts, another of fish, and another of birds. [40] There is one of celestial, and one of terrestrial,” the idea is that there are inherent categories, and that basically is a reflection of the Genesis 1 motif that plants are of certain kinds. You have the seed, it reproduces itself; yes it varies, there is diversification, micro evolution, within boundaries, but there are boundaries. Flowers don’t turn into something else and walk off and bark. There are boundaries within the creation and God placed them there and Paul uses these.

Now let’s look at another New Testament passage that looks back to these days of creation. This one is found in 2 Peter 3:5-7. In this most central New Testament passage we have discussed the flood and the world before the flood and the world after the flood. And I find it very interesting that all the critics of us strict mature creationists, they never deal with this passage. You can read Bernard Ramm’s book, the famous book, The Christian View of Science and the Scripture, modestly labeled and you will find in the Scriptural index not one reference to 2 Peter 3:5-7. You anxiously turn to Dr. David Young’s new book, Creation and the Flood, hoping that here, a geology professor who is also a Bible-believing Christian, surely Professor Young can illuminate our minds with 2 Peter 3:5-7 and he doesn’t even touch it. Do you know why? Because 2 Peter 3:5-7 is the crux, no critic of strict interpretation of Genesis has ever handled this passage. The only thing you can do with the passage is choke on it, if you believe in long ages in a uniformitarian system, just choke on it and throw it out.

2 Peter 3:5, “For this they are willing ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water.” Now that “the heavens” and “the earth,” it’s a word pair used from Genesis, appears to state something that even Genesis doesn’t state, that is the entire universe before the flood was of a different kind than the universe after the flood. That’s how radical the flood is, an utter discontinuity in the history of the earth. And before the flood it says the characteristic of that universe was that it was produced out of water and consisted, or came into its form through water. So if we want to argue in terms of any sort of chemical evolution, the way it went apparently under God’s creation was H2O very rapidly was the source, perhaps, of the heavier elements. In this regard, you who have a background in chemistry, isn’t it kind of interesting that hydrogen and oxygen have played a most phenomenal role in the development of the periodic table? But anyway, water seems to be a primary substance of the ancient world before the flood.

After the flood, the heavens and the earth which are now, according to verse 7, [“But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.”] our present geophysical system is so structured as it’s going to detonate by itself under… well under God’s sovereignty, through fire. So however the elements and the system is put together, it’s put together to destruct in a different way. This is also the answer as we’ll get into when we get into the flood itself, why we could have, theoretically generated all the necessary debris for the thousands of feet of strata by a flood, if the antediluvian surface of the earth was of a different sort than the present surface of the earth.

But right now, this morning, we’re only interested in using 2 Peter 3:5 to show you that when Peter goes to describe the earth he remembers the language of the second day. Just like in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul describing the resurrection body, remembers the language of the third day. You see, this makes Genesis 1 implicit in the New Testament.

Having said all this and having got to the third day, as I’ve also promised you, we always want to let the other side have its say, and we try to pick somebody from the other side who attacks the creationist position, who has scientific credentials and a reputable statement. We’re going to listen to about a four and a half minute tape of a man who is the director of the laboratory of chemical evolution at the University of Maryland, Cyril Ponerauma [sp?]. This man is an outspoken man for evolution; obviously as director of the laboratory involved, this doesn’t mean the laboratory is evolving, that means the laboratory studies, the processes they believe to produce chemical evolution.

Now as you listen, and I hope you listen very carefully; before you disagree listen, and listen to how he uses the word “spontaneous generation.” Listen as he uses the word two ways, and when he’s done, the tape will stop, when he’s done I will make a few remarks about but it’s very critical you understand this because this is the human viewpoint that is being brought against your beliefs. And if you’re parents here, then it’s going to be brought against your children’s beliefs, their textbooks. And the collision is between the creation by the Word of God, that is, the universe exists and every day of creation God is causing something to happen inside the creation, from outside the creation. That’s the creation work of God, versus the other option, in which inside the universe there are these self-transforming processes that the universe basically creates itself. We call that, at least at the boundary of non-life to life, spontaneous generation. If we can have the tape please:

[Tape played and is very hard to hear] This idea of life from {?} was not a strange idea to the ancients. It was presented to us as doctrine of spontaneous regeneration. We can go back to Aristotle, who in his metaphysics suggested that fireflies arose from morning dew. It was a simple observation that the morning dew which appeared like drops of water on the grass in the morning disappeared during the day and at night over the meadows were the fireflies. The conclusion was based on an erroneous observation; however, one can understand such observations and interpretations.

This idea was taken up by a line of thinkers, Newton, Harvey, Descartes, {?} all of them subscribed to this concept of spontaneous generation. We have Virgil in his Georgics who tells us how a swarm of bees arose from the carcass of a calf. We have the English Jesuit, John Turberville Needham who even quoted Genesis to say that after all, God did not create the plants and animals directly, but He bade the waters bring them forth. We own a recipe for the making of mice, given to us by the Belgian physician and chemist Rand Harrimond [sp?]. If a dirty undergarment is squeezed into the mouth of a vessel containing wheat within a few days, twenty-one is a critical period, a{?} drained from the garment and transformed by the smell of the grain encrusts the wheat itself with its own skin and turns it into mice. And what is more remarkable, the mice from {?} undergarments are neither weanlings, nor sucklings, nor premature but they jump out fully formed. Because ideas such as this could not long withstand to be advancing rigors of scientific thought and we have that entire controversy between Redi and Needham, the simple experiment of Redi by which he placed a card of muslin over a piece of decaying meat demonstrated that when the flies did not lay eggs on the meat there were no maggots.

However, when Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope we had another serious problem which came up when advance in science in one direction appeared to be a retrograde step in another; people who for the first time used the microscope could not distinguish between decaying organic matter and the first microorganisms they were able to see and once again the theory of spontaneous generation seemed to have acquired new and further strength. It was at this time that Louis Pasteur came to the fore and did his famous experiments with the swan-necked flasks and in 1861, before the French academy he announced his resolve in the following words: ‘Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from this mortal blow.’ We describe the experiments of Louis Pasteur to our beginning students in science and hold them out as a triumphal reason over mysticism.

But today we are coming back to spontaneous generation but the spontaneous generation we are talking of is the orderly sequence of going from atom to small molecules, to larger molecules, to the appearance of replicating systems, not to the appearance of frogs from a primordial ooze or mice from old linen. What about the scientific thinking with regard to this problem? One of the first who thought about this was Charles Darwin. In a letter to a friend he wrote: ‘If it could {?} in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salt, light, heat, electricity {?} that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.’ This was to our trade as a declaration for the conservative thinking of Darwin’s contemporaries. At the time of the controversy over The Origin of the Species, little or no attention was given to the remote question of the origin of mice.

However, in chemical evolution what one tries to do is to recreate Darwin’s one little pond and to see whether the protein compound which he first saw would indeed appear in the laboratory flasks. The impetus to the study of this problem after Darwin’s statement, perhaps came for the first time in 1924 when the Russian biochemist, in a preliminary booklet published in Russian, Oparin suggested that there was no fundamental difference between a living organism and brute matter; the complex combination of manifestations and properties so characteristic of life, according to him, must have arisen in the process of chemical evolution.

Clough: Now if you listened carefully you heard him say that in the early days of science there was a belief in spontaneous generation. It was a crude formation of this theory that you have, as he put it, frogs from a primordial ooze, so we’ll put ooze to a frog, and this is wrong; that crude form was wrong. But yet nevertheless in our day we’ve come back to the doctrine of spontaneous generation. But notice that the new doctrine of spontaneous generation is saying the same thing with one exception, and the exception is time. That’s the only difference. Frogs still, according to evolution, have come from a primordial ooze, have they not? It’s just taken millions of years to do it but nevertheless, it’s come that way.

Now philosophically what has happened between the first theory of spontaneous generation and the second? An investiture of time with magical properties; time has now acquired creative power, not because of any scientific observation but only because of a need to bypass the obvious, direct ex nihilo fiat creation. And because we want to bypass it, and yet we don’t want to resurrect the crude idea put to rest by Pasteur, we have to therefore resurrect it in a new form and to help us we will draw upon the powers, the mystical powers of time, that given enough time mice do arise from oozes. But now the question remains; this is a philosophic position in which matter, the world, has properties of creation within itself that come to operate over time, a long enough time function.

Well, this runs into another problem and now we’ll hear from a creationist critic of this sort of thinking, Dr. Gish of the Institute for Creation Research: If evolution is true, if we started with some primordial cosmic gig, now nobody had the foggiest notion where it came from or how it got there but there it was and it exploded, and some billions of years later, here we are people, containing thirty trillion cells in our bodies, twelve billion of those found in the three pound human brain, and each one of these twelve billion brain cells being connected to ten thousand other brain cells in the most incredible arrangement of matter imaginable; that means there is one hundred and twenty trillion connections in the human brain alone… one hundred and twenty trillion connections! Now that’s an incredible increase in order and complexity.

If that has happened, if we started with electrons, protons, and neutrons and it exploded and gave rise to this incredibly complex universe and living things that we have today, then matter must have some inherent ability to self-organize itself and to self-transform itself from a disordered state to higher and higher levels of complexity, giving rise to our universe, to life on this planet and all living things. If that’s true, then, matter must have this inherent ability to self-organize itself and to self-transform itself into higher and higher levels of complexity and scientists should have recognized this ability. We should find that described today in some natural law, some set of set of natural laws. On the other hand, if the creation model is true, which postulates that God created and would have created perfect in the beginning, if any change has taken place since that time, if there has been any vertical change at all, it could only be downward, it could only be deteriorative. We might expect some deteriorative processes operating but we’d not expect any upward process, any creative processes.

On the basis of evolution, of course, you would expect both, some deteriorative processes, some processes integrating or leading to ever and ever higher levels of complexity. But if we started with particles and end up with people, of course there was this tremendous upward movement. Well, as a matter of fact, ladies and gentlemen, no scientist has ever recognized any such property of matter. There are no natural laws which describe an inherent ability of matter to self-organize itself and to promote itself spontaneously and naturally into higher and higher levels of complexity and order. There are no such laws known in science, but there is a law of science and if there is a law of science this is one that describes exactly the opposite property in matter and that is the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that spontaneously and naturally everything tends to go toward the disordered state; the more probable state of matter is always the random state. That is always the more probable state of matter. There is this order going from order to disorder, from the complex to the simple. That is what is going on in this universe today. Let me quote a few scientists, experts in thermodynamics, and their description of the second law of thermodynamics. Now ladies and gentlemen, please understand, scientists just don’t sit down and write laws and command nature to obey. They have gone out there and see what happens in nature and then on the basis of what’s really happening in the world they describe these laws. [blank spot]

Now ladies and gentlemen, there’s no solution to this dilemma. There is an irresolvable dilemma here; no natural system can order itself; isolated, open or otherwise. If it has machinery and so forth and so on, yes it can exist temporarily but eventually it wears out and goes back to dust. Now at least evolutionists would maintain that the universe is an isolated system; that is, at least the atheist would say this, that there is no God external to the universe, it is an isolated system, but it’s a highly organized system, highly ordered system. It is an isolated system; now no isolated natural system can self-order itself, that’s impossible by everything we know in science, and yet the universe did get wound up. How did it get wound up? It could not have wound itself up.

Clough: And so based on the very same empirical evidence touted to be the source of the proof of evolution, you run into a problem of explaining this most basic… most basic axiom on the other side. So as Christians you do not have to hang your head; the creationist has just as much, if not more, empirical data on his side than the spontaneous generation advocate.

So we’ve learned, as we turn in conclusion this morning to Isaiah 40:28; we’ve learned several things. We’ve learned that in Genesis on the first day that light energy is not an inherent thing in the universe originally, it was put into the universe after the creation. Two, we have learned that water is a prime compound in the universe. Third, we found that plant life began, incidentally, not in the seas but on land, another little interesting observation for those tempted to make days into ages thinking thereby that you have solved the problem; you haven’t because the next problem you’re going to have to face is why does “life” (quote, end quote), the way we would define it biologically, why does “life” show up on land first in the Scriptures, when by evolutionary theory life shows up in the water; life shows up in the sea first, not on the land. And there’s the fundamental difference.

Well, all of that is nice but we want to close with how the thinkers of the Bible apply this spiritually. Isaiah 40:28, Isaiah has to address the depressed generation that would face the horrors of the exile. He has to prepare, in his prophetic outlook, the nation for catastrophe. These people are shortly going to suffer extreme horrors. They had already suffered some under the Assyrians and now they are going to be exiled, one of the most traumatic things that can happen to any culture is to be uprooted and marched for thousands of miles as captives, put into a land that’s totally foreign to you, all of your culture totally destroyed and you have to make the best of it. And this has happened to many peoples down through history. Tragically it’s happened to far too many and in one way it’s tragic that it hasn’t happened, at least in a mild form, to most Americans or we’d be far more conscious of the freedoms we have. And Isaiah has to face that kind of a suffering situation. Where does he get his platform to address a group of depressed people who are bowed down and crushed by the processes of time and history? He’s got to appeal to something for encouragement. Watch his appeal.

Isaiah 40:28, “Have you now known?” the implication being you ought to, “have you not heard,” the implication being you’ve heard this many times, “the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, doesn’t faint, nor is He weary? There is no searching of His understanding.” There’s omnipotence and omniscience. [29] “He gives power to the faint,” and the word “faint” there is just a person who is totally depressed, it’s not physical fainting, just that, but it’s somebody that’s given up all hope, total depression. “He gives power to the faint; and them that have no might He increases strength. [30] Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. [31] But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and never faint.”

Now that’s talking about a different mentality than you can never hope to have if you really believe in spontaneous generation and these sorts of things. Here time isn’t invested with a magical omnipotence. Here God is invested with omnipotence, and you don’t draw upon time when you’re depressed and you face catastrophe. The idea here isn’t to sit around and wait for what chance is going to bring. The idea is that God will give us the strength, in the hour that we need it, to carry on. That kind of a powerful God is only available if He’s the Creator, as it says here in verse 28, of the ends of the earth.