Holy Love and Creation
by Mark Bird
 
Love first existed in the Trinity. The eternal love between the members of the Godhead was completely satisfying. God needed no one outside the Triune life for personal fulfillment.[1] Yet God created. Why? Creation is the overflow of Triune love.

In the book Discovering the Character of God, George McDonald described the nature of God’s love and how it relates to His creation. McDonald said, “Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature, at the root of all his being. Love is the heart and hand of his creation.” Yes, God has the right to create and the power to create. “But it is out of love that he does create.”[2]

This love, as self-giving goodness seeking the good of another, is a holy love. Holy love is the essence of God’s moral character, and He created us to have a holy, love relationship with Him. Bill Ury explained, “When that limitless Love creates, the result is persons who are formed by that Love for love.  And the freedom to choose to return that love is foundational to human personhood.”[3] Genuine love implies freedom.[4]

Understanding God’s moral character as essentially holy love shapes our view of how God brought everything into the world and how He even now relates to all his creation, including humanity. From that perspective, this essay defends the traditional Creation/Fall/Redemption/Restoration narrative of Scripture. I briefly critique the idea that God used billions of years of evolutionary processes, with all its suffering, deformities, disease, death, and extinctions, to bring about a “very good” creation. My focus is on the completeness and goodness of God’s creation work, not on the age of the earth itself. I want to support the thesis that a holy, loving God created a “very good” world that reflected divine goodness in an originally idyllic (peaceful and pleasant) state. 

Dogma
Those of us who had the privilege of having Bill Ury as a seminary professor likely remember his emphasis on the concept of ‘dogma.’ The term ‘dogma’ can be used to refer to more than what the church considers to be essential doctrine; the concept can also be personalized. Ury defined dogma as “the basic, or essential, view of reality that informs (has explanatory power for) every other aspect of life – ontology, epistemology, beliefs, and ethics.” One’s personal dogma is his set of overarching beliefs, or presuppositions, that serve as the interpretive grid through which he understands all other things.[5]

The holy love of God is part of my interpretative grid. How I understand the way that God made the world is shaped by my appreciation of the holy, compassionate character of God as revealed in Scripture. 

I’m also convinced that this holy God inspired the Bible in such a way that it is harmonious, authoritative, and inerrant. I understand the words of each Bible writer as also the very words of God, who is perfect, omniscient, all-powerful, and loving.[6] This high view of Scripture guides my perspective on science. I choose to hold the current conclusions of the scientific community subordinate to my best understanding of Scripture. If the Bible really teaches that out of love God made everything flawless and whole in the beginning, we have warrant to believe that even if most scientists believe otherwise.[7]
 
Origin of Species According to the Bible
To set the context for our case that God did not use eons of suffering and death to produce a “very good” creation, let’s review the teachings about origins in the first chapters of Genesis.[8] There is no literary reason to view these chapters as anything other than historical narrative.[9] Genesis gives a factual and straightforward account of how it all began.

At the beginning of time, God (a timeless, incorporeal, and self-existing being) created the heavens and the earth (1:1) out of nothing, simply with an act of His will and by His Word. Initially, this planet was uninhabited and uninhabitable, but the Spirit of the eternal Creator hovered over the waters that covered the earth (1:2-3).[10] Day One continued with God creating a temporary light source so that the cycle of light and dark on the earth would begin with that first day (1:4-5).[11] The earth was likely rotating from the beginning. 

On Day Two, God separated the water below the expanse from the water above the expanse (1:6-8). On Day Three, God made the dry land, gathering the water into seas, and He also spoke into existence fruit-bearing trees and other vegetation that would grow on the newly dried earth (1:9-13). He made each plant and tree according to its kind (1:12), implying that one kind didn’t evolve from or into another kind. 

On Day Four, God spoke the sun and the moon into existence. These would give light to the earth, one during the day and one during the night (1:14-19). Also on Day Four, He made the stars, somehow making their light appear on the earth as He “stretched out the heavens” (Isaiah 45:12), in possibly a literal sense.[12]Notice that God made the plants before He made the sun. 
​
On Day Five, God spoke into existence sea creatures and birds. He made each of these “according to its kind,” and He declared that they were to reproduce, according to their kind (1:20-23). 

On Day Six, God made land creatures according to their kind (1:24-25). He also made man and woman in his image (1:26-27). According to Genesis 2, God made man from dust, adding the divine breath, and Adam became a living being (2:7).[13] Once Adam named the animals, he recognized he was the only human. “But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him” (2:20), so God put him to sleep, performed the first surgery, and made a woman from the rib he had taken out of Adam. Like Adam, Eve didn’t have human parents. She was taken from man.[14]   Adam and Eve, as distinct creatures made in God’s image, began the human race.[15]
 
Image of God in Man
The context of God’s making man in His image (1:26-27) is the scene in which He had just made many of the animals (1:24-25). In this passage, God is showing a definite contrast between the nature of animals and the nature of humans. Man was created in God’s likeness, designed for a special kind of relationship with Him and with each other, “made for mutual self-giving, reciprocal knowing, for communion.”[16] The ability to have freely-chosen love relationships is a core aspect of the image of God in man. Animals do not have the capacity for those kinds of relationships. Man having the freedom to choose relationships both makes love genuine and sin possible.

Good God; Good Creation
Notice that God said, “It is good” several times in Genesis 1. At the end of the creative week he declared, “It is very good.”[17] He was pleased with what he had created. It was perfect; everything had its place, and everything was in its place. It was of the highest quality. It was functioning the way He intended it to function. It was harmonious and beautiful. There was no suffering, no disease, no violence, no evil. It was perfect because He is perfect; it was good because He is good.

The “very good” creation was called that by God because it reflected His good character. Psalm 135:3 says that we should praise the Lord, for “the Lord is good; sing to his name, for it is pleasant!” (Or alternately from the Hebrew: “for he is beautiful!”).[18] The Hebrew parallelism in the verse associates the goodness of God to the pleasantness of His name, or the beauty of His character.  Psalm 145 extols God for His holiness and love, connecting these attributes to His mercy over His creation: 

The Lord is gracious and merciful,
    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Lord is good to all, 
    and his mercy is over all that he has made (8-9). 
The eyes of all look to you,
       and you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand;
      you satisfy the desire of every living thing.
The Lord is righteous in all his ways
       and kind in all his works (16-17).

God called His creation “very good” because it corresponded to His faithful, loving, beautiful character. We can assume that the original creation was pleasant to behold; it was beautiful, and there was nothing hurtful or destructive in it.[19]

The Fall and Natural Evil
It was the Fall that wreaked havoc on this very good creation. In Genesis 3, we find that animals and the ground were cursed (resulting in thorns) after Adam’s sin (Gen. 3:14-19).[20] We now experience severe pain, disease, and calamity because of moral evil. Natural evil is the consequence of moral evil. And it came after moral evil was introduced into the world.
         The most popular and the most challenging objection to Christianity is the problem of evil: Why would an all-powerful and all-good God allow evil (natural and moral) into the world? The theologians with the best response to this question—the best theodicy—are those who can use both the free will defense and the response that natural evil came both because and after the Fall. Suffering came into the world when man abused his freedom by disobeying God’s single command.[21] With their rejection of libertarian free will, Calvinists see a robust free will defense as inconsistent with their theological system.[22] Those who say the earth went through a long process of death, disease, and extinction before the first humans are also giving an inadequate defense of God’s character. 

Two Pictures of a “Good” God
Thane Ury stated that “to say that creation is now in a fallen state due to sin (traditionalist view), as opposed to saying the present creation is exactly the way that an all-loving, all-powerful God intended it from the beginning (accommodationist view), is to paint two conflicting pictures of a good God.”[23] Which picture is accurate?

In a debate with William Lane Craig, atheist Christopher Hitchens acknowledged that many Christians now accept what he considered the proven fact of evolution. He then pointed out the unreasonableness of thinking that if there were a God, he would use evolution to bring us into the world. Unlike many Christians, he saw the inconsistency between a loving God and such a cruel, wasteful process:

And you too are quite free to believe that a sentient creator deliberately, consciously put himself or herself or itself to the trouble of going through huge epochs of birth and death of species over eons of time, over the course of which 99.9% of all species ever to have appeared on earth have become extinct, as we nearly did as a species ourselves. You have to be able to imagine that all this mass extinction and death and randomness is the will of a being. And all of this should happen so that one very imperfect race of evolved primates should have the opportunity to become Christians -- the tremendous wastefulness of it, the tremendous cruelty of it, the tremendous caprice of it, the tremendous tinkering and incompetence of it, never mind, at least we’re here and we can be people of faith. It doesn’t work for me.[24]
 
It doesn’t work for me either. This picture appears inconsistent with the holy love of God, who tells us to care for even our own animals humanely.[25] I believe the accurate picture of a good God is one who made everything work beautifully together in the beginning. It is sin that brought death, disease, and destruction into the world.

Restoration Coming
According to Romans 8:20-21, all creation is groaning under its bondage to corruption, but it also anticipates the day when it will be set free from the curse. Someday, there will be a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21-22). The earth will have perfect conditions again. Isaiah 11:6-9 indicates that there will come a day when natural predators live at peace with their former prey. This suggests that non-violence was the original state, even among animals. Genesis 1:29-30 indicates that man and the animals were all originally vegetarian.

Historical Support for Natural Evil Occurring Because and After the Fall
The view of creation held by the church fathers is contrary to macroevolution and pre-Adamic natural evil. Church historian Gregg Allison surveyed the first few centuries of the church’s doctrine of creation and identified four themes that stood out:

1. There is only one God who alone is eternal, self-sufficient, omnipotent, wise, and sovereign…
2. This God created the universe and everything in it out of nothing…. 
3. Divine creation took place in six literal days in the not-too-distant past.[26] 
​4. The notion of an undirected process—a random collision of already existing elements—fortuitously resulting in the origin and development of the vast diversity of living beings currently in existence was strongly denounced and considered absurd.[27]

This was the doctrine of creation that the early Christians embraced and defended. It was enshrined in the first article of one of its earliest and most widely influential creeds, popularly known as the Nicene Creed: “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.[28]
 
The church fathers also affirmed a global Flood of judgment that covered the whole earth.[29] One of these church fathers, Augustine, argued in The City of God for the reasonableness of the flood rising fifteen cubits above the highest mountains.[30] And while Augustine thought that creation was in an instant, he did believe in a fairly recent creation and warned against accepting the view that the world was old.[31]

Prior to the development of modern geology (and biblical higher criticism), the majority view in the church was that creation was recent, the Flood was global, and that natural evil was due to sin.[32] The Reformers and Post-Reformers certainly affirmed these statements.  For example, John Calvin asked: “Whence comes the cruelty of brutes, which prompts the stronger to seize and rend and devour with dreadful violence the weaker animals?” He asserts that if “the stain of sin had not polluted the world, no animal would have been addicted to prey on blood, but the fruits of the earth would have sufficed for all, according to the method which God had appointed.”[33]

John Wesley also believed in a flawless original creation. He said that God made it “unspeakably better than it is at present….without blemish… [or] defect. He made no death in the animal creation, neither its harbingers, sin and pain.”[34] Wesley adds that “the scriptural account of natural, flowing from moral evil, will easily and perfectly solve” questions like “how can the invisible things of God be seen from such a ruined creation?”[35] We understand from Scripture that man’s sin brought upon the world a curse that affects everyone and everything. Yet the world is still beautiful in many respects. Though God’s creation is damaged, we can still marvel at the glory of His handiwork.

Scientific Problems with Theistic Evolution
Some Christians who believe natural evil preceded moral evil also affirm Neo-Darwinism, with its theory of common descent and the rejection of “intelligent design” arguments (due to their acceptance of methodological naturalism).[36] But why? There is no reason to believe that the blind, purposeless, directionless process of random mutations and natural selection could bring about the changes necessary for macroevolution to occur.[37]

One problem with macroevolution is that mutations would need to occur in the organism’s embryonic development to affect later generations,[38] but mutations that take place early are the most damaging to an organism: “Developmental biologists such as Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus have…discovered that mutations that occur early in the developmental trajectory of an animal (from embryo to adult form) are inevitably lethal.”[39]

Another challenge to Neo-Darwinism is the Cambrian explosion – so many new and anatomically sophisticated organisms appearing together suddenly in layers of the geological column that represent the “Cambrian period” (supposedly about 500 million years ago) without any evidence of simpler ancestral forms in the layers below.[40] The mechanisms of Neo-Darwinism are not able to explain this, but a loving Creator can.[41]

The Biblical Flood and Science
The Bible teaches that God destroyed the entire world with a Flood because of the extreme wickedness of the human population (Genesis 6:6). “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). Yet the holy God who was about to destroy the world had identified a righteous man “who found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (6:8). God spared Noah and his family out of love, and thus preserved the human race—out of love. The means of salvation was a large boat, which held at least two of every kind of land animals and birds. After Noah’s family and the animals entered the Ark, God destroyed the world.[42]

Is there any evidence that this worldwide catastrophe really happened? Several years ago, I went on a group trip through the Grand Canyon, rafting down the Colorado River. Accompanied by and instructed by young-earth geologist Andrew Snelling, we examined the rock layers and some of the fossils in those layers, as Dr. Snelling explained them in light of the Noachian Flood. My big takeaway from the trip was that though dating methods produce a great variety of results regarding the age of the rocks (because of the different assumptions that go into the various methods), there is no compelling reason for rejecting a plain reading of Genesis 1-11, at least on geological grounds. A good case could be made for a global, catastrophic flood, which has a lot of explanatory power. [43]

In researching for this essay, I consulted a well-respected theologian’s recent apologetics work that claimed to make a comprehensive case for Christianity. However, I could not find any references to Noah’s flood.[44] But Noah’s flood is important for understanding earth history and our origins, and it should not be ignored. Since the Bible teaches that the Flood was global and catastrophic, we should pay attention to the scientific evidence presented by flood geologists.[45]  If the Flood is responsible for most of the geological record of rock layers and fossils, then there’s no need to explain these layers with billions of years of death, disease, and extinction.[46]

Conclusion
God brought the world into existence out of the overflow of His eternal, Triune love. Humans are the pinnacle of His creation, made for a special holy love relationship with God. The world in which the first humans were placed was perfect, beautiful, and harmonious. But human sin brought suffering, death, disease, deformity, and destruction into the world. Because of the wickedness of man, God brought a Flood upon the world to destroy all animal and human life except for what He preserved on the Ark. The Flood account highlights both the holiness and love of God. 

It is through divine revelation (the written Scriptures) that we can understand why creation is no longer as harmonious as it once was. The once-perfect creation, made by the loving hand of the holy Creator, became flawed because of sin and God’s holy curse. The damaged creation now anticipates the day of full redemption, the day when God makes all things new. In the meantime, God is calling all of us to Himself, restoring us by grace into the holy, love relationship He has from the beginning longed to have with His human creatures.
 

Footnotes:

[1]This assertion is based on the historic doctrine of the self-sufficiency of God. He has no needs (Acts 17:24-25).

[2]Michael Phillips, ed. Discovering the Character of God (published 1989, Electronic edition by RosettaBooks), 31. This book consists of devotional selections from the sermons, novels, and poems of George MacDonald.

[3]Bill Ury, “Creation and Imaging the Holy One,” Chamberlain Holiness Lectures, Oct 8, 2019.

[4]Love is always offered freely, or it is not truly love. God made us in His image with the genuine freedom to accept and extend love or to reject it. And the love of God is extended to all. I disagree with theological determinism for the same reason I do not believe disease, sickness, extreme pain, and deformities existed before the Fall. These ideas are inconsistent with the holy, loving character of God.

[5]This is not to say that we create our own truth. Truth is objective. Truth is not truth unless it corresponds to reality. My point is that our fundamental beliefs or convictions color the way we see reality. If our fundamental beliefs are wrong, we are likely to misconstrue many other things.

[6]The syllogism that I use to argue for inerrancy is: Premise A: Every utterance of God is perfect and thus free from error. Premise B: All the truth claims of the Bible writers are the utterances of God.  Conclusion: All the truth claims of the Bible writers are free from error. 

[7]Theologian Hans Madueme argues this in “All Truth is God’s Truth: A Defense of Dogmatic Creationism,” paper presented at the Center for Pastor Theologians, Oak Park, IL., November 2017.  It is rationale for us to believe in creation, even if contradicted by the international scientific community, because of our absolute confidence in the author of Scripture.

[8]Bill Ury said, “I believed, but now I am convinced, that without Genesis 1-2 we would be lost theologically.  There would be no clear beginning of our reason for existence. Origin and purpose are inseparable.  In my reading I have come across this important question at least twice, ‘What are human beings for?’ These chapters are the foundation of the only comprehensive answer to that startling realization.  I can guarantee you that you will use the ideas found in Gen 1 and 2 for every issue touching humanity in our day.  It must be a priority if you care about ethics, gender identity, sexuality, AI, robotics.  I would add if you want to share the gospel in this age you must be fluent in these initial paragraphs of Scripture.” Chamberlain Holiness Lectures, Oct 9, 2019.

[9]Some say “exalted” prose narrative, but it is certainly not poetry. There is no Hebrew parallelism. The chapters were considered historical by Jesus and the apostles. There are at least 25 NT passages that refer to Genesis 1-11 and “all 25 take the account literally” (Todd Beall in Coming to Grips with Genesis, 146). In his essay ‘Theistic Evolution Undermines Twelve Creation Events and Several Crucial Christian Doctrines’ in Theistic Evolution, Wayne Grudem gives several reasons that Genesis 1-3 must be considered historical. He quotes James Hoffmeier, professor of OT and Near Eastern Archaeology at TEDS, who said, “Genealogical texts in the ancient Near East, by their very nature, are treated seriously by scholars and not cavalierly dismissed as made-up or fictitious, even if such lists are truncated or selected…. The “family history” structuring [of Genesis] indicates that the narratives should be understood as historical, focusing on the origins of Israel back to Adam and Eve, the first human couple and parents of all humanity” (796).

[10] Exodus 20:11 says, “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them” (ESV).

[11] The text doesn’t say the light was temporary, but this is an assumption based on the fact that there isn’t a separate light that illumines the earth now besides the sun and the moon. Maybe the original light source was later incorporated into the light of the sun. 

[12]Some creationist astrophysicists have suggested that Einstein’s general theory of relativity (which tells us that time is not a constant) helps us understand how light could pass quickly through the warp of our time-space universe. Explaining how light from distant stars became visible from the earth in a relatively short time is one of the biggest challenges for creationists. Yet evolutionists have their own challenges, like explaining why light from distant galaxies do not appear less evolved than nearby galaxies.  Here is a good discussion of various distant starlight models: https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/what-about-distant-starlight-models/

[13]‘Living being’ in verse 7 comes from the Hebrew ‘nephesh chayyah’, used also of sea creatures, birds and land animals in Gen. 1:20-21, 24, 2:19, and 9:9-16.

[14] According to 1 Corinthians 11:8, Paul accepted this to be true too. Humans did not evolve from lower life forms.

[15]“The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20). “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’” (1 Cor. 15:45).

[16]Bill Ury, “Creation and Imaging the Holy One,” Chamberlain Holiness Lectures, Oct 8, 2019.

[17]Genesis 1:31. “Very good” (tov me’od) is the superlative of “good” (tov), found in verses 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25. It is interesting to note that God said “it is very good” after he created man and women.

[18]ESV gives that alternate translation of the Hebrew word, nā’îm, a word translated sometimes in other passages as: “sweet,” or “lovely.” 

[19]I’m using the language of Isaiah 65:25 here. Isaiah is describing a kingdom to come but this may represent a restoration of what was lost from the original creation: “The wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,” says the Lord.”

[20]One example of cursed-liked conditions in the fossil record is evidence of cancer in dinosaur fossils. Because the diseases look the same, medical schools are beginning to have their students study cancer in dinosaur bones. See Heather Whipps, “Dinosaur Tumor Studied for Human Cancer Clues,” April 3, 2006, www.livescience.com/4013-dinosaur-tumor-studied-human-cancer-clues.html.

[21]The free will defense claims that man had a genuine choice between good and evil. He could have chosen other than he did. He is responsible for sin entering the world. On the other hand, theological determinists put the ultimate responsibility on God.

[22]John S. Feinberg was my seminary Apologetics teacher. He told us in class that if we were Arminian, we had a theodicy that worked in our system – it was the free will defense. But he told us that since he was a Calvinist, the free will defense wouldn’t work for him. He had us read his book Many Faces of Evil (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), in which he developed a different theodicy, which I considered inadequate. 

[23]Thane Ury, “Luther, Calvin, and Wesley on the Genesis of Natural Evil: Recovering Lost Rubrics for Defending a Very Good Creation,” in Coming to Grips with Genesis, ed. Terry Mortenson and Thane Ury, 417.

[24]Transcribed from the “Does God Exist?” debate between Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig at Biola University, April 4, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tYm41hb48o, 38:35-41:15. I left out words that were not directly relevant to the point I am making with this quote.

[25]Proverbs 12:10. Deuteronomy 22:6-7. God cares for his creatures (Ps. 104:14-16 and 27-28; Matthew 6:26-28).

[26]This point was, however, never put into creedal confession. (Gregg R. Allison in Theistic Evolution, 930). Augustine is an exception to the belief in a literal 6-day creation since he thought that God created the world instantaneously. However, he rejected evolution and believed in an originally good creation.  In regard to Genesis 1:31, he said, “Was it not obviously meant to be understood that there was no other cause of the world's creation than that good creatures should be made by a good God? In this creation, had no one sinned, the world would have been filled and beautified with natures good without exception.” City of God, 11.23.

[27]In his Historical Theology, Gregg Allison points out, “Although it is often thought that evolution did not present a challenge to the church until Charles Darwin’s theory, such is not the case. The early church had to confront ancient philosophies that resembled modern evolutionary theories in some ways.” Gregg R. Allison, Historical Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 256. Chapter 12 of Historical Theology is a great resource for learning the church’s historic doctrine of divine creation, which remained relatively stable for 1700 years.

[28]Gregg R. Allison, “Theistic Evolution is Incompatible with Historical Christian Doctrine” in Theistic Evolution, 933-944.

[29]Solomon Oyepa, Foundations Restored: A Catholic Perspective on Origins (Rt. Rev Sanctus Lino Wanok, STD, 2020), 65.

[30]“But they who contend that these things never happened, but are only figures setting forth other things, in the first place suppose that there could not be a flood so great that the water should rise fifteen cubits above the highest mountains.” The City of God, 15.17. Augustine also affirmed a global flood in City of God, 12.11. 

[31]Gregg R. Allison, Historical Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 259. 

[32]Thane Ury, in Coming to Grips with Genesis, 402.

[33]John Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948), 216.

[34]The Works of the Rev. John Wesley (London: Thomas Cordeux, 1812), 9:141.

[35]The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, 14:150. Wesley’s italics.

[36]Methodological naturalism is the philosophy of science that insists that only naturalistic explanations are allowed in the study of the natural world. No reference to the supernatural is allowed. Everything in nature must be explained by time plus chance plus the laws of nature working on the primitive matter of the initial big bang. Former NIH Director Francis Collins and the organization BioLogos represent this viewpoint. They believe that God is somehow behind the workings of nature, but that we cannot empirically detect intelligent causes. This belief is contrary to Romans 1:18-20, which indicates that everyone (not just scientists) should infer that God exists through the observation of nature.

[37]Richard Dawkins describes natural selection this way: “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.” Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York, NY: Norton, 1980), 5. Italics in the original.

[38]“Developmental biologists have discovered that only certain kinds of mutations—those that occur early in the embryological development of an animal—have the potential for altering an entire animal body plan—that is, for producing major evolutionary change.” (italics in original).  Stephen Meyer, “Neo-Darwinism and the Origin of Biological Form and Information” in Theistic Evolution, 119.

[39]Stephen Meyer, “Neo-Darwinism and the Origin of Biological Form and Information” in Theistic Evolution, 120. Italics in original.

[40]Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt. (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 7.

[41]Stephen Meyer has devoted an entire book to this issue. Darwin’s Doubt is about “the explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design” (subtitle).

[42]The Bible teaches that flood was global. According to the Bible: 1. The water covered all the mountains 15 cubits (22 feet) above their peaks. 2. Representatives of all the land animals and the birds were taken on the ark (Genesis 7:14-16). If not a global flood, why not just send them away to safety?  God blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. (7:21-23). 3. Noah’s family and the animals had to stay on the ark for months after it stopped raining (8:1-18). 4. The fountains of the deep were broken up (7:11). This points to the catastrophic nature of the Flood. 5. The Apostle Peter seems to refer to Noah’s Flood as global and catastrophic (1 Peter 3:3-6).

[43]Andrew Snelling published a 2-vol book called Earth’s Catastrophic Past (Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research, 2009). It has about 100 pages of biblical arguments and the rest consists of in-depth geological arguments and evidence, including on radiometric dating. 

[44]Douglas Groothius, Christian Apologetics (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2011).

[45]Here are some of the scientific reasons to believe in a global, catastrophic flood: 1. There are fossils of sea creatures in rock layers high above sea level over all the continents. 2. Extensive fossil graveyards show that plants and animals were buried rapidly by massive sediment. 3. Rock layers have been traced all the way across continents, and their physical features indicate that the sediment creating those layers was deposited rapidly. 4. Little to no erosion between layers, which means they were laid down continuously upon one another. 5. Rock layers are bent without being fractured. This shows that they were rapidly deposited and folded while still wet and pliable. For more evidence of a global flood visit: https://www.icr.org/article/why-christians-should-believe-global-flood

[46]A comprehensive overview of the flood by Terry Mortenson (PhD, history of geology): https://answersingenesis.org/the-flood/global/biblical-necessity-global-flood/