Old Earth Creationism

Old Earth Creationism is the belief that God created the universe and the world billions of years ago. Old Earth Creationists hold to an exegesis of the Biblical book of Genesis that allows for an old earth . Old Earth Creationists do not all agree on the extent of the Noachian flood, although many maintain that it was a local flood. Dr. Norman Geisler wrote that "both young- and old-earthers who are evangelical hold to the historicity of the Genesis account: They believe that Adam and Eve were literal people, the progenitors of the entire human race."

Proponents of Old Earth Creationism include Hugh Ross, David Snoke Greg Neyman, Francis Schaeffer, and Norman Geisler.

Lack of Any Clear Transitional Forms

Dr. Norman Geisler stated that "Both young- and old-earthers believe that God supernaturally, directly and immediately produced every kind of animal and human as separate and genetically distinct forms of life." Accordingly, creationists point out that there are over one hundred million identified and catalogued fossils currently in the world's museums. Creationist insists that if macroevolution happened, then there should be "transitional forms" in the fossil record that show the intermediate life forms. Another term for these "transitional forms" is "missing links". If creationism is true then there should be a lack of transitional forms or at the very least there should be merely a handful of disputed transitional fossils.

Charles Darwin himself stated that the evolutionary theory required the existence of "transitional forms." Darwin wrote: "So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon the earth." However, Darwin wrote: "Why then is not every geological formation and every strata full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory." Darwin thought the lack of transitional links in his time was because "only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored and no part with sufficient care...". Darwin's theory of evolution required that transitional forms exist. As Charles Darwin became older, however, he became increasingly concerned about this lack of evidence in regards to the fossil record. Darwin wrote, "“When we descend to details, we cannot prove that a single species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory.”

Scientist Dr.Michael Denton wrote regarding the fossil record:

"It is still, as it was in Darwin's day, overwhelmingly true that the first representatives of all the major classes of organisms known to biology are already highly characteristic of their class when they make their initial appearance in the fossil record. This phenomenon is particularly obvious in the case of the invertebrate fossil record. At its first appearance in the ancient paleozoic seas, invertebrate life was already divided into practically all the major groups with which we are familiar today.

Creationist scientists state that evolutionists have had over 140 years to find a transitional fossil and nothing approaching a conclusive transitional form has ever been found and that only a handful of highly doubtful examples of transitional fossils exist. Noted anthropologist Edmund Ronald Leach stated, "Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so."

"Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them…" wrote David B. Kitts of the School of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma.

David Raup, who was the curator of geology at the museum holding the world's largest fossil collection (the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago), observed:

"[Darwin] was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would .... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. ... [W]e have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time." - David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50 (January 1979): 22-23, 24-25.

One of the most famous proponents of evolution was the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. But Gould admitted, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection, we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study. In a 1977 paper titled "The Return of Hopeful Monsters", Gould wrote: "All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt."

This is the basis for there being two major divisions of evolutionary theory, punctuated equilibrium and gradualism. Gould is the best known proponent of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, Richard Dawkins is a advocate of gradualism.

The senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, Dr. Colin Patterson, put it this way: "Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils."

One of the more famous alleged transitional fossils claimed by evolutionists is Archaeopteryx. Dr. Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds and an evolutionist himself, has stated the following regarding Archaeopteryx:

“Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.”

Creationist scientists have a number of arguments against Archaeopteryx being a transitional fossil find.

A second famous alleged transitional fossil claimed by evolutionists is Tiktaalik. Creationists have a number of arguments regarding the fossil find of Tiktaalik not being a transitional find.

The Fossil Record and the Creationist Position

Creationist can cite quotations which assert that no solid fossil evidence for the macroevolutionary position exists and also show that the fossil record supports creationism:

"In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." Mark Ridley (Professor of Zoology at Oxford University), 'Who doubts evolution?', New Scientist, vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831

"...I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation." - E.J.H. Corner (Professor of Botany, Cambridge University, England), “Evolution” in Anna M. MacLeod and L. S. Cobley (eds.), Contemporary Botanical Thought (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 97

"We then move right off the register of objective truth into those fields of presumed biological science, like extrasensory perception or the interpretation of man's fossil history, where to the faithful anything is possible - and where the ardent believer is sometimes able to believe several contradictory things at the same time." - Lord Solly Zuckerman (professor of anatomy at Birmingham University in England and chief scientific adviser to the British government from the time period of 1964 to 1971), Beyond The Ivory Tower, Toplinger Publications, New York, 1970, p. 19.

"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether". Henry Gee, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.

For more fossil record quotes please see: Fossil record quotes

Mutations, Natural Selection, and the Life Sciences in General

Creationist scientists believe that mutations and natural selection would not cause macroevolution to happen. Additionally, creationist scientists state that the life sciences as a whole support the creation model and do not support the evolutionary model.

Creationism, Macroevolutionary Theory, and Experimental Data

Noted creationist Dr. Henry Morris in order to show that the macroevolutionary position is not verified by experimental data quoted a leading evolutionist regarding this matter.

Dr. Morris wrote the following:

"Even Ernst Mayr, the dean of living evolutionists, longtime professor of biology at Harvard, who has alleged that evolution is a "simple fact," nevertheless agrees that it is an "historical science" for which "laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques" by which to explain it. One can never actually see evolution in action." - The Scientific Case Against Evolution by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.

Implausibility of Materialist Explanations

Dr. Norman Geisler wrote concerning young earth creationist and old earth creationist the following: "Both groups are also agreed in their opposition to naturalism, which they see as the philosophical presupposition of evolution." Accordingly, creationist scientists often assert that evolutionary scientists regularly employ extremely implausible explanations to support their position and have done this since at least the time of Charles Darwin.

For example, Darwin in his Origin of the Species wrote a chapter entitled "Difficulties on Theory" in which he wrote the following:

"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."

Creationist often quote the prominent evolutionist and geneticist Professor Richard Lewontin admitted the following:

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." - Richard Lewontin, ‘Billions and billions of demons’, The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31

Creationist scientist Dr. Jonathan Sarfati wrote regarding the implausibility of evolutionary explanations:

...supporters of ‘jerky’ evolution (saltationism and its relative, punctuated equilibria) point out that the fossil record does not show gradualism, and that the hypothetical transitional forms would be disadvantageous. But supporters of gradual evolution point out that large, information-increasing changes are so improbable that one would need to invoke a secular miracle. Creationists agree with both: punctuational evolution can’t happen, and gradual evolution can’t happen—in fact, particles-to-people evolution can’t happen at all!

Dr. Safarti continues:

The same logic applies to the dinosaur-bird debate. It is perfectly in order for creationists to cite Feduccia’s devastating criticism against the idea that birds evolved ‘ground up’ from running dinosaurs (the cursorial theory). But the dino-to-bird advocates counter with equally powerful arguments against Feduccia’s ‘trees-down’ (arboreal) theory. The evidence indicates that the critics are both right — birds did not evolve either from running dinos or from tree-living mini-crocodiles. In fact, birds did not evolve from non-birds at all!

Creationists commonly point to the following in nature as being implausibly created through evolutionary processes: the bacterial flagellum, homing, the origin of flight in the animal kingdom, migration, the whale, the Venus flytrap, the Bombardier beetle, the woodpecker and various symbiotic relationships found in nature.

Lastly, creationists often quote biochemist Michael Behe who wrote the following:

"Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature—in prestigious journals, speciality journals, or book—that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that—like the contention that the Eagles will win the Super Bowl this year—the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster." - Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 186

Statements of Design

Creationist often cite the work of intelligent design proponents who assert the biological world has the strong appearance of being created as can been below:

"One of the world's most famous scientists, probably the most famous living biologist, is Sir Francis Crick, the British co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, a Nobel Prize winner... Crick is also a fervent atheistic materialist, who propounds the particle story. In his autobiography, Crick says very candidly biologists must remind themselves daily that what they study was not created, it evolved; it was not designed, it evolved. Why do they have to remind themselves of that? Because otherwise, the facts which are staring them in the face and trying to get their attention might break through. What we discovered when I developed a working group of scientists, philosophers, et al., in the United States was that living organisms look as if they were designed and they look that way because that is exactly what they are." - Evolution And Christian Faith by Phillip E. Johnson

"During the last forty years, molecular biology has revealed a complexity and intricacy of design that exceeds anything that was imaginable during the late-nineteenth century. We now know that organisms display any number of distinctive features of intelligently engineered high-tech systems: information storage and transfer capability; functioning codes; sorting and delivery systems; regulatory and feed-back loops; signal transduction circuitry; and everywhere, complex, mutually-interdependent networks of parts. Indeed, the complexity of the biomacromolecules discussed in this essay does not begin to exhaust the full complexity of living systems. As even the staunch materialist Richard Dawkins has allowed, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Yet the materialistic science we have inherited from the late-nineteenth century, with its exclusive conceptual reliance on matter and energy, could neither envision nor can it now account for the biology of the information age." - The Origin of Life and the Death of Materialism by Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D.

Scientific Journals

Advocates of the macroevolutionary position have often claimed that those who oppose the macroevolution position don't publish their opposition to the macroevolutionary position in the appropriate scientific literature (creationist scientists have peer reviewed journals which favor the creationist position). Believers in the Abrahamic faiths believe that the the natural world has been designed by God. Recently, there has been articles which were favorable to the intelligent design position in scientific journals which traditionally have favored the macroevolutionary position.

Controversy

Creationism and Intelligent Design

Believers in the Abrahamic faiths believe that the the natural world has been designed by God. Recently, there has been articles which were favorable to the intelligent design position in scientific journals which traditionally have favored the macroevolutionary position. Believers in the Abrahamic faiths have points of agreement and disagreement with the intelligent design movement. They agree that the natural world has an intelligent cause and was designed but some also believe that the intelligent design movement divorces the Creator from creation by not explicitly stating that the cause of creation is a supernatural being and also failing to state explicitly who that supenatural being is.

There is considerable disagreement on whether or not Intelligent Design amounts to a form of creationism and if so, where to place it in comparison to the other forms of creationism. This is due to the concept having many different definitions and proponents espousing different ideas.

For example, one major proponent of Intelligent Design is Young Earth Creationist Paul Nelson, while Michael Behe, another major proponent, accepts common descent. William Dembski has stated unequivocally that Intelligent Design is not theistic evolution and they should not be considered the same. Dembski has also asserted that Intelligent Design is the Logos in terms of information theory, while Dembski and others have given other definitions that do not include any specific theological references. Arguably, intelligent design can be summarized as the notion that at some point in the past, in some way, some entity (possibly God) created life, or altered life at some point, or created the universe to be compatible with life.

Behe and others have stated that Intelligent Design is not religious in nature but in the Dover trial, Judge John E. Jones III, a Republican and a US Federal District Judge, ruled as a one of his findings that Intelligent Design was essentially religious in nature. The opinion met with wide accolades, but some criticism that it borrowed too heavily from the ACLU's briefs. Nonetheless, it has been embraced by the legal community, and has quickly become the subject of renewed scholarship on the scope of the First Amendment.

External links

Old Earth Creationism Ministries

• Reasons to Believe
• Answers in Creation
• Godandscience.org

Criticism of Old Earth Creationism by Young Earth Creationists

Jonathan Sarfati addresses Old Earth Claims