Options for Design

REVELATION OF GOD Meditations No.2 of 10

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The Bible is blatant in ascribing to God the role of Creator. It doesn’t tell us how He created the world and in fact we are given only broad brush stroke descriptions.

This means we end up with debates about whether the world was brought about

- by pure-chance evolution (which excludes God, and leaves us with a meaningless and purposeless existence), or

- whether God brought it about by directed evolution (i.e. the chances weren’t chances but God’s way of moving from simple cell to complex organisms etc.,

- or some alternative.

Some believers even desperately put forward the idea that God made everything a few thousand years ago, complete with fossils etc. to give an appearance of great age. Well of course such a thing is possible but somewhat unlikely (wait to you get to heaven for the definitive answer!).

Those are the usual lines of debate which we aren’t going to follow here. We have a much more specific goal in mind. When our atheist friends deride God making a ‘primitive’ world which, they say, is much more likely to have come about naturally, they are in fact, without realising it deriding the almost only logical option. Let’s explain.

In this line of thinking, there are really only two likely possibilities:

Option 1:

God makes man fully developed in thinking, as modern man is, so that he didn’t have to learn, and he didn’t have to gradually develop. Please see this; this is the only possible alternative to what happened. The difficulty about this option, would have been how much knowledge to implant in us.

Option 2:

God created primitive man and allowed and encouraged man to gradually develop in all the ways archaeology suggests. Now we do need to note something quite specific here. Evolutionists suggest (and they may or may not be right) that mankind developed from apes. The only thing about this is that at some point there was a cut-off point where mankind suddenly developed and the apes didn’t. The differences between apes and mankind are staggering. Think of all the things that we do – communicate with words, think, plan, reason, formulate, investigate, research, invent, create, write, produce music, paint, sculpt and so on – and worship.

Something, somewhere, somehow did something that triggered the changes that make us so different from the animals. If you ever saw the film 2001 – A Space Odyssey, you may remember the apes come across the monolith that is used to suggest ‘something other’, and from that point they are changed. The Biblical description is that at some point God made the first two beings, male and female, as human beings with all the capabilities we now have. Now very little is said about them so we don’t know if they were ‘primitive’ men, or what, but the suggestion is there, because in following chapters men do develop and become those who raise livestock, produce music and invent tools from bronze and iron (a suggestion of the period that they lived in.)

Thus from the outset there is the concept of development, development that is slow and gradual – because learning is always that. Remember the only alternative is to have mankind dropped onto this planet as fully developed and my atheistic friends would object to that, so let’s think about this concept that we find in the Bible of a gradual revelation of God. That’s what this series is really all about.