Vol. IX • 1987 http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v09n2p04.htm
A Proof for Creation: The Hostility of Creation Denied
Ellen Myers
A Proof for Creation: The Hostility of Creation Denied
Ellen Myers
God warned Adam and Eve that if they ate of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would surely die, and they did. They forfeited life in Eden, the "garden of delight."' The ground was cursed for their sakes, and brought forth thorns and thistles (Genesis 3:17-18). Disobedience to the Creator and His fixed creation decree for man and the world reaped hostility of creation denied toward man.
We find this principle reiterated elsewhere in Scripture. The creation, when denied by man's rebellion against God, witnesses to God's eternal power and Godhead (Romans 1:18-20) by strictly enforcing man's submission to its inherent, fixed laws by peril, pain, sickness and death. For example, when Cain killed his brother Abel, Abel's blood cried to God from the ground which had received it. The result was Cain's, the tiller of the ground's, being "cursed from the earth," so that henceforth it would no longer "yield her strength" to him (Genesis 4:3-121.
The creation witnesses man's deeds Joshua could say of a stone that "it hath heard all the words of the LORD which he spake unto us it shall be therefore a witness unto you, lest ye deny your God" (Joshua 24:27). Moses therefore quite literally called upon the heavens and the earth to hear his words to the people of Israel in praise of the Lord (Deuteronomy 32:1-3). Most striking of all Bible passages about the witness of creation itself against God-denying man is a statement of Jesus Christ Himself. When the Pharisees asked Him to rebuke His disciples for welcoming Him as "the King coming in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest" (Luke 19:38), He answered: "I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out' (LuKe 19:40).
The rest of creation watches and suffers while man himself is subject to the bondage of corruption due to his rebellion against the Creator. The apostle Paul tells us of this fact in one of the Bible's most revelatory, sad, yet gloriously hopeful passages (Romans 8:18-23). This passage teaches that redemption in Christ is effective not only for believing, born-again "children of God" in their "glorious liberty" (Romans 8:211, but also all His creation. Our God's eternal purpose is established in and from the beginning of creation (Acts 15.18) and forever. The fixed laws and created individual entities of creation which we observe and must conform to are but the results and the proof of His eternal dominion and providence.
While originally made for God's joy and man's benefit, creation is of necessity hostile to men ignoring or defying it. Just so a hot stove, invented to cook nourishing and delicious food, painfully blisters the finger of the child who disregards his elder's warning, "don't touch HOT" We see the hostility and, so to speak, retribution of creation in our own bodies. We require a balanced diet and sufficient rest for well-being and life itself. We inevitably suffer when denying our bodily needs and limits. This is a commonplace of elementary knowledge, and it is a corollary of the fixed created identify of man. So is the innate 24-hour rhythm or cycle of our bodily functions, found also in many other organisms. Man's body rebels when this rhythm is violated, for instance in transcontinental air travel through the well-known "jet lag." This rhythm fits the biblical record of creation in six 24-hour days, but it does not fit supposed eons of evolving time and time spans. Many more examples exist which show that the denial of our physical created identity and its fixed needs and limits entails our physical suffering. While everyone really knows this, the basis and explanation of this fact in creation is not often recognized.
In other practical matters the fixed laws and boundaries of creation are plain and inescapable. Anyone working with plants knows that he will reap what he sows, that different plants require different conditions of soil and climate, that plants cannot live without water, that there are limits to selective breeding determined by the gene pool of the kind of plant we work with, and soon. All this is true for animal husbandry as well. Sometimes we "stretch" the limits of the original kind by purchasing one desired trait at the cost of sacrificing another. Likewise, we disregard the specific qualities of the materials we use in construction and engineering only at our peril. Especially in medicine the penalties of faulty medication are immediately evident, proving the fixity of created, inherent qualities of both medicinal substances and of the human body.
Man's practical existence in this world is thus evidently dependent upon his knowledge of and obedience to certain fixed principles. Now fixed principles are compatible with biblical creation, but not with the fundamental flux and change of any and all evolutionist models. Evolutionist belief in perennial flux and change at the root of all phenomena cannot account for the fact that poison does not heal but kills, that oaks always grow from acorns, or any other fixity of nature. To the evolutionist, the common truth of gardening and agriculture which provides his physical sustenance, "as you sow, so shall you reap, must be false, asfor him genetic and environmental change takes place continually, eithergradually(Darwinism) or by "mega-leaps" (Gould-Eldredge's punctuated equilibrium). Because of theirdenial of creation and its fixed kinds and laws, evolutionists could not produce and really cannot account for the rise of modern science, Instead, modern scientific advances had to await the coming and expansion of biblical creation-based Christianity (see Stanley Jaki, Science and Creation).
What all this amounts to is that evolutionism militates against survival of any and all natural entities. Darwinist evolutionism with its gradual transmutation of species amounts to continual dying out of species as they are transformed. Punctuated equilibrium evolutionism is really an accommodation to the fundamentally creationist "appearances" of the fossil record and the world we observe, that is, "stasis" or absence of cnange and flux. The very "mega-leaps" it postulates require genetic changes of a kind (mutation)which almost always instantly kills. Furthermore, the strange new entity suddenly arising through an alleged genetic "mega-leap" requires not flux, butfixity both of its own kind and in the world around it if it is to survive. This is really the error of evolutionism, and the proof for creation, in a nutshell: survival requires fixity of inheritance, environment, and behavior. Evolution, as evolution, denies fixity Creation, as creation, establishes fixity. The god of theistic evolution cannot be a true God because he is the author of fluxand death ratherthan fixed creation and thus survival-life.
Probably the denial of creation most harmful and hostile to man himself is found in human society. The history of mankind, particularly in our own century, clearly confirms that creation denied becomes the enemy of creationdenying man It is as Whittaker Chambers has written: "Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God man can only organize the world against man. "2 In its most innocuous form this fact is shown by creationdenying man's inability to give reliable advice and guidance to his fellow men. A humble erstwnile evolutionist college professor admitted that he "wasn't able to offer much guidance as a teacher. I thought my ideas were no better than anybodyelse's, and I never considered God's ideas. So, it was a matter of `what works for you,' which wasn't too helpful to students, of course,"3 A lack of values and fixed principles from which to counsel naturally stems from any perspective ignoring creation.
Active pursuit of philosophies, policies and views denying creation wreaks even more navoc upon man, precisely to the extent of their consistency and mplementation. C.S. Lewis sums up what happens:
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could "be like gods" could set up on their own as if they had created themselves . . . And out of that hopeless attempt has come money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery the long terrible story of man trying to fins something other than God which will make him happy.
The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us; invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it could not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were assigned to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on There is no other That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended civilizations are built. . . but . . Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks They are trying to run on the wrong juice.4
On occasion even passionate enemies of God and creation themselves recognize this truth dimly in their own despair. For example, V.I. Lenin wrote in a letter of 1921: "I hope we will be hanged on a stinking rope ... If this happens, it will be well done."5 Lenin had already acknowledged earlier that "The [Soviet] state does not function as we desired. How does it function? The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction."6
In his famous poem, "The Hound of Heaven," FrancisThompson has unforgettably expressed the truth that created reality is the enemy of all who would deny God and His creation:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
They beat and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
"Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."7
Our very misery, pain and death arising from denying creation and the Creator testify to the truth of creation as the foundation of reality, life and survival. In this hostility of creation denied, "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse" (Romans 1:18-20).
NOTES1 Gary E Parker, From Evolution to Creation: A Personal Testimony (San Diego, CA: CLP Publishers, Second Printing 1980), p. 36.
2 Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 83.
3 Parker, From Evolution to Creation, p. 11
4 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Paperbacks Edition, Nineteenth Printing 1975), pp. 53-54.
5 Quoted in Richard Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1986), p.49.
6 Ibid
7 Hugh T Kerr and John M. Molder, eds., Conversions (Grand Rapids, MI: 8 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983), pp 145, 146, 147, 148.
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