The Gap Fact and Out-of-Whack Creation Scientism

Michael Pearl

• Publisher: No Greater Joy Ministries
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781616441050
• eBook ISBN: 9781616441067
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

It is time to expose the truth about the Gap Fact.

The Bible clearly declares that the earth existed before the 6-Day Creation. To not believe in a gap between Genesis 1: 1 and 1: 3 is not only contrary to clear Scripture, it is not in keeping with the historical positions of both Judaism and Bible-believing Christianity.

CHAPTER 1

THE WAY IT WAS,
BY ONE WHO WAS THERE

“Evolution: Science Falsely So-Called”

In 1966 when I was in Bible College, I stumbled out of Greek class overcome with consternation and into the school bookstore, where everything was in English, looking for emotional comfort. That is when the clerk, knowing I spent a lot of time preaching on the streets to college students, directed me to International Christian Crusade’s little yellow booklet titled Evolution: Science Falsely So-Called. It confronted the subject of evolution on the grounds of science. I devoured the contents until I had practically memorized it. I then discovered The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb, published in 1961. It greatly expanded my appreciation for the science of Spoken Word Creation. I occasionally utilized the information to silence those who argued against the Bible from an evolutionary perspective. It was fun to win an argument. But winning an argument on the basis of scientific knowledge does not equate with winning the person to Christ. At the time I could not imagine that Creation Science would become an enemy of the Word of God.

Through Faith We Understand

When I was a young man sixty years ago, we knew from the plain sense of Scripture that there was an indeterminate time gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:3. Our belief had nothing to do with attempting to accommodate the supposed geological ages of evolution, nor were we attempting to provide time for the apparent age of the fossil record. Our belief was based solely on the text of the Holy Bible. Any professing Christian who believed in Day Age or Theistic Evolution was considered an infidel.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, as far as I knew, all Bible believers readily understood that according to the Bible’s chronology, about 6,000 years ago the Spirit of God moved upon the face of a lifeless planet that was without form and void, and there he commenced a creation week composed of six twenty-four-hour days. In those six days God spoke into existence this present ecosystem, including all plants, animals, and humans; and no process of evolution was employed. “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast” (Psalm 33:9).

Exodus 20:11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

Our confidence in Spoken Word Creation was not threatened by evolution, and we didn’t feel the need to harmonize the biblical record with it. We believed God and that was enough. We just laughed at organic evolution and wondered how anyone could believe something so preposterous. We were able to win thousands of evolution-oriented college students to faith in Christ with the Bible alone. The message of Christ overcame their skepticism with very little attention to evolution.

When an unbeliever resisted the Bible by saying the earth was very old, we agreed and said something like: “Of course. God created it a long time ago and placed a race on it that we now know as angels. Some sinned and became devils and some didn’t. God cursed the planet, destroying everything on it, and damned the fallen angels. About six thousand years ago God re-created this planet and replenished it with a new race that was not quite as smart or gifted as the first, and he gave us a free will so we could do as we pleased, but he offered the option to live in love and faith or to disobey and be damned like the angels that sinned. The fallen cherub entered paradise disguised as a recently created beast of the field. He spoke to Eve and informed her that God was preventing her from attaining special knowledge that would bring great fulfilment. Eve sinned, and then Adam chose to follow her in rebellion, taking his entire posterity with him. And that is why there is so much evil in the world, resulting in death and hell…But God who is rich in mercy…” And then with ten to twenty minutes of the gospel of Jesus, we had a new brother or sister in Christ. They stopped being evolutionists when they started believing Jesus was their savior, and we never had to debate the age of the earth.

We didn’t care what they believed about geology; the issue was the integrity of the gospel narrative, for it had power to win hearts first and then minds. I saw it happen hundreds—maybe thousands—of times. In recent years working in the prisons, I have observed the same results. When you give people Jesus, they forget the crutch of evolution without ever looking back. Evolution never made sense to them either, not even to their professors. They just assumed it because it was the only alternative to a legislating creator.

Seashells and Sand

In the days before the arrival of Scientific Creationism and the Young Earth Theory with its “one size fits all” attempt to answer geology and evolution, we simple believers knew that everything God created, regardless of how long ago, was created with the appearance of age. One second after creation, all the trees had annual growth rings varying according to their designed age. All vegetation was in various stages of development, appearing to be aged, some of it already matured and falling to the ground to decompose, providing nutrients for budding seedlings. The beach was covered with sand, as occurs over a period of time through the grinding action of surf. And old shells were strewn along the beach with hermit crabs peeking out here and there. The sea had the proper amount of salt as if erosion had been occurring for millions of years. Coral reefs were in place, teeming with new life representing every stage of development. The moon was cratered, and streams showed erosion in the rounded, water-washed rocks and sand—and all this just one second after creation.

The Chicken or the Egg?

Remember the philosophical question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” A Spoken Word Creationist answers, “Both.” A hen shedding old feathers was created sitting on an egg that was halfway through its incubation cycle, while a young and an old rooster fought over six hens in various stages of maturity, and another hen was leading her twelve little chicks down to the water where there were tadpoles that appeared to be two weeks old swimming around water reeds that had just blossomed and were being pollinated by bees whose hive was already half full of honey. The little chicks pecked at the fallen seeds and partly decomposed fruit until their attention turned to the tempting but elusive tadpoles. It was all in a day’s work—or I should say, six days. It could not be otherwise in this complex, interdependent ecosystem.

God Makes New Antiques

We know that the earth and universe were created with the appearance of age. To believe otherwise is to believe in some form of progressive creation or evolution, regardless of how you arrange the pieces. There is no other alternative for anyone who believes in Spoken Word Creation. This interdependent system must be activated fully intact for the individual parts to survive. It is aptly called “irreducible complexity.” The greater miracle would be Theistic Evolution over a great period of time, for in this irreducibly complex system God would have to keep the clock ticking while he waited millions of years to create the parts necessary for it to tick. Why employ an absurdly complicated and counterproductive mechanism to achieve creation? For life-forms to evolve into more complex organisms over an extended period of time, it would entail a new work of creation (something from nothing) on a daily basis. Doing it that way, God would use up additional creation energy. Is creation so hard for God that he had to work his way into it one little piece at a time? Either God is the Instant Spoken Word Creator, or he is a Theistic Evolutionist who created one piece at a time, supernaturally sustaining the individual parts that depend upon the yet-uncreated parts to survive.

Nature is a balance of competing forces, from the atom with its positive and negative charges to the ecosystem filled with rival fungi, enzymes, plants, insects, and animals, all dependent upon the mature function of the whole. An enzyme without a balancing enzyme would destroy a living organism. A flower without insects to pollinate it would not survive. Soil without composted matter to provide nutrients would not sustain the plants that depended upon it. God is either an organic farmer, creating a system that is self-reliant and self-sustaining or he is a Monsanto-chemical kind of Theistic Evolutionary creator who creates a little at a time and applies artificial fertilizer to feed the plants until sufficient composted material is generated to sustain them naturally. And he would have to manually pollinate the plants until he decided to create myriads of insects that depend upon the pollen for survival. Instant Spoken Word Creation with built-in age is the only possibility regardless of when the earth was created, be it six thousand or six billion years ago. Otherwise God would be exhausted and bored for years trying to keep a partial system functioning. Would an internal combustion motor run with only half of the parts assembled?

So it is nothing new to believe in God creating with the appearance of age. He made new antiques. If they look old, all credit goes to the craftsmanship of the Creator. If you don’t think they are old, you will have a hard time proving it. He is just that good at making new things look old.

When God created the stars of heaven, he didn’t wait one hundred million years for the light to reach his position. When he said, “Let there be light,” there was instant light all the way from the source to all corners of the universe. Astronomers have viewed stars nine billion light years away. That means that the light source they are viewing was there at that spot nine billion years ago. It may be long gone by now. To see that star as it is today one would have to wait another nine billion years. When you view the universe, you are looking at very old, archived images. When God spoke the universe into existence, he spoke its past into existence as well, creating the light in transit to all points in the universe. And since all things were created with the appearance of age, there is no way to determine the age of the universe or this ecosystem by the scientific process, for you must make certain assumptions about the uniformity and constancy of certain “laws” of nature for the scientific process to be reliable. The only thing a scientist can do is determine how old God made it appear to be. One minute after Adam was created, his teeth showed the normal wear from chewing, his toenails needed clipping, and—of practical necessity—his feet came equipped with calluses.

The Devil in the Details

Back in the days when Christians never doubted that every word of their Bible was inspired by God, a simple reading informed us that Lucifer and all the angels were present when the earth was created, for they “sang together, and… shouted for joy” (Job 38:6–7) as they observed the foundations of the earth being laid.

Kids in Sunday school knew that Lucifer’s sin predated Eve’s in that he was in the garden tempting Eve shortly after creation. Due to his disembodied state, it was necessary for him to commandeer the body of a “beast of the field” in order to manifest a physical presence and speak to Eve. Satan had lost his original physical body in death following his sin (Psalm 82:6–7; Ezekiel 14:12–17; Isaiah 28:17).

So we cannot do other than conclude that Lucifer was created before the earth, sinned before the six days, met with the wages of sin—which is death—before Adam, and was found in the garden as a sinner tempting Eve shortly after re-creation. Kids’ stuff. We will examine the issue of death before Adam later.

Having Done All, to Stand

When I was a teenager, Bible-believing Christians paid little attention to the battle raging in academia and went on as usual, shouting and praying-through in our revival meetings, and singing “Oh, thou great Creator.” We could accept a young earth, an old earth, or a half-old earth. It didn’t matter to us one way or the other. We were more concerned about young converts and old fogies who got tired after two hours of singing, praying, and preaching.

We believers in Spoken Word Creation have stood fast from the beginning on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into the twenty-first, believing in the inspiration and preservation of the Word of God, which tells us of a six-day creation that occurred on a previously existing planet that came to be without form and void. We never paid any attention to “science falsely so called” in the past and will not do so now. Here we stand; we cannot do otherwise.

Personal

I have shared my personal perspective as one who was part of mainstream conservative Christianity in the 1950s and ’60s. I am well aware that while I believed all was well, outside of my circle, in neo-evangelical institutions and apostate churches across America and around the world, the conservative viewpoint was giving way to an exaltation of science and psychology and a dismissal of the Bible as the infallible words of God. But the faithful church of Christ has always had a constant drip of apostasy from its ranks. There were those who stopped believing in Spoken Word Creation but continued as college professors and pastors, because their livelihood was tied up in religion.

You may think I came from a small, naïve sect of fundamentalist Christianity, not representative of the whole. That is partly true. But I can assure you my perspective in 1965 was typical of all conservative Christianity where a normal, grammatical approach to interpretation was employed.

For in 1954, noted theologian and writer Bernard Ramm, who did not believe in Spoken Word Creation nor the traditional view of the Gap, wrote in The Christian View of Science and Scripture:

“The gap theory has become the standard interpretation throughout hyper-orthodoxy, appearing in an endless stream of books, booklets, Bible studies, and periodical articles. In fact, it has become so sacrosanct with some that to question it is equivalent to tampering with Sacred Scripture or to manifest modernistic leanings.” (p. 135)

When Ramm referred to hyper-orthodoxy, he meant those who say “God said it and that settles it.” To avoid this label, one must harmonize his biblical interpretation with science—which equates to becoming a Theistic Evolutionist. In other words, from Ramm’s perspective, the Gap Theory was the standard interpretation of Bible believers in 1954, making us HYPER-orthodox. We relied solely on the Bible and did not believe in any form of evolution. Ramm was not aware of the Young Earth crowd, for it was a heresy waiting to be birthed from an illicit affair between Creationists and science.

The truth is that the Gap had always been the standard interpretation all the way back to the ancient, Hebrew-reading Jews.

Little did we know in 1965 that it would be “orthodox” Christians themselves who would attack the words of God as they were historically understood and eventually discredit the Bible in the eyes of secularists with their Young Earth Theory!

CHAPTER 2

ANCIENT GAP
CREATIONISTS

New Idea?

Young Earth Theorism, a recent development in the scientific theology department, of all things asserts that the doctrine of Gap Creationism is a new idea developed in the nineteenth century to accommodate evolution and make room for the geological ages. Christiananswers.net expresses the Young Earth Theory (YET) sentiment in “What is the ‘Gap Theory’?”

“Western Bible commentaries written before the 18th century, and before the belief in a long age for the Earth became popular, knew nothing of any gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.”¹

The author says, they “knew nothing of any gap.” We will prove otherwise.

They also assert that Gap Creationism is “A marginal view few have ever heard of.” If that is a measure of anything, be it known that few to none had ever heard of the Young Earth Theory before 1961. Tom Mclver in “Formless and Void: Gap Theory Creationism” (published in Creation Evolution Journal, 1988, Vol. 8), says that The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, first published in 1961, is “largely responsible for the revival of Flood geology and young-earth creationism.”

Here we are just sixty-four years after Ramm’s statement, and a group of scientists (ICR—Institute for Creation Research) are telling us that we are ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Way It Was, by One Who Was There
• Chapter 2: Ancient Gap Creationists
• Chapter 3: How Did the Gap Controversy Arise?
• Chapter 4: Young Earth Theorists Spread False and Misleading Information
• Chapter 5: History of Satan
• Chapter 6: God’s Kingdom Program
• Chapter 7: Scripture
• Chapter 8: Created and Made
• Chapter 9: Generations of the Heavens
• Chapter 10: AnswersNOTingenesis.org
• Chapter 11: Through Faith We Understand
• Chapter 12: Sincerely Wrong
• Personal Conclusion