Where do we come from? .................. Parables 418

April 26, 1994

I remember the first time I talked about creation with one of my grandchildren. She was an easy-going five-year old. First I pointed to the trees and flowers and said God created them. She smiled her approval of that idea. Someone once said you seldom find five-year old atheists. However, when I told her God also made her, she surprised me. She stamped her foot and declared, “Nobody made me!”

My intention was to show her the wonderful design in nature and let her know she was well-designed too, but her response reminded me that independence and a desire to be self-reliant starts in the crib. She was not about to give anyone any control over who she was, at least not that day.

Intent on building her sense of worth, I tried again a few days later. This time she grinned at me and expressed pleasure. For reasons only known to her, she decided it was okay to be created by God.

When I challenged the creation story, my mother strongly defended it. I was much older than my granddaughter. I did not mind the idea of being created by God but at that time the theory of evolution sounded reasonable. Not wanting to give up God, I tried to separate the issue into two camps: science and religion. God was someone to worship and hear my prayers but since science seemed to have proven otherwise, He must have created everything by some sort of evolutionary method.

What I didn’t know is that all scientific data is not in yet. Even since then, research has uncovered evidence of an instantaneous creation. Igneous rocks and coal have “radio halos” which indicated a very young earth. The familiar process of erosion also shows that the earth cannot be as old as once thought.

As far as where life came from, in the middle ages, people saw mold grow, insects come out of morning dew, and maggots appear in rotting material. To them, it was reasonable to believe life was spontaneously generated. It was only after Pasteur proved otherwise that this medieval alternative to Creation became obsolete.

However, there were some scientists that did not want to let go of that idea. They determined Pasteur proved very little. They said life may be able to occur spontaneously in other conditions. To them, scientific proof was not enough and life must somehow just happen. Author J. H. Rush says, “It illustrates beautifully the tendency to believe what we want to believe.”

Genesis 1:26-27 says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

It seems that people have said, “Let us decide that humans are creatures evolved from a primate, evolved from a one-celled whatever, and that this one celled creature came from... we are not sure. In any case, we intend to rule everything, including our creation history.” So men and women created gods in their own imagination and made them creatures that vaguely resemble themselves.