“For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water…”
(This devotional is out of the norm for Verse-by-Verse Commentary in that we deal here with some scientific and philosophical issues of evolution and creation.)
that by the word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of water and in the water…”
God created the universe by His “word.” Ten times in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, we read, “And God said.” God created the world through His “word.” He did not use the process of evolution but spoke the universe into existence. Creation “by the word” is what we call special creation. God created the world by speaking it into existence ex nihilo (out of nothing).
Ps 33:6, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.”
He 11:3, “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.”
On the third day of creation, the earth emerged from the water (Ge 1:9-10).
The Bible submits a cosmology of the universe in this passage. The cosmos is ordered, the opposite of chaos. God is a God of order, not randomness. He, therefore, made creation a place of order and system.
Biblical cosmology is the opposite of uniformitarianism, which attributes the origin and development of all things in the cosmos to innate laws and processes eternally resident therein, with neither beginning nor end. Biblical cosmology presents the destiny of the cosmos in terms of creating and sustaining the universe by a transcendent yet immanent and personal God. God reveals the origin and nature of the universe, primarily in the Bible, not only in creation itself.
PRINCIPLE:
All present creation processes are processes of conservation and disintegration, not processes of creation and integration.
APPLICATION:
Uniformitarianism will be the philosophy of “latter day” thinking, as it is now. Without the principle of uniformitarianism, there would barely be a science of geology. This philosophy flies in the face of special, instantaneous creation.
Catastrophism holds that one or more catastrophes influenced the shaping of geological formations, such as the Genesis flood. Catastrophism is a fighting word among present-day evolutionists. Geology suffers from a great want of scientific data. Some evidence contradicts uniformitarianism, such as pollen grains in pre-Cambrian rock in the Grand Canyon.
Present processes from the viewpoint of Scripture are the process of providence, sustaining, upholding, and preserving (Co 1:17; He 1:3; 2 Pe 3:7) rather than the process of evolution. The basic structure of cosmic law (energy and entropy) supports creation. Energy is the capacity of a system to accomplish something. Entropy is a state of randomness and disorder.
The first law of thermodynamics states that total energy in a closed system is neither lost nor gained — it is only transformed. This law of thermodynamics is the conservation of mass energy. Nothing is now being created, but all things are in the process of preservation. The first law testifies that the beginning of the cosmos could have never been accomplished within present processes, none of which are creative processes.
The most established scientific law is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy (disorder) constantly increases in a closed system. The second law is the entropy of a system will increase without the injection of intelligence. It is what we call a “closed system,” a closed system is isolated from external sources or ordering energy. However, the system may be enlarged to any arbitrary size, even to that of the cosmos itself, in so far as the actual scientific evidence goes. Systems tend to become disorganized (entropy), approaching a maximum state of disorder or “death.” If the universe were indefinitely old, it would have already reached this state of maximum entropy. Since the cosmos is still far from dead, it must have had a beginning. The present conservative processes of the cosmos could not have accomplished that beginning.
If the universe were eternal, the universe would have had more than ample time to have reached a state of maximum entropy. We observe that the universe is far from a state of maximum entropy, so the universe cannot be eternal. This point is significant because until about a half-century ago, many scientists thought that the universe was eternal, despite this clear indication by the second law of thermodynamics to the contrary.
Living organisms obviously are highly ordered systems, far more ordered than non-living things. The naturalistic origin of life would require that non-living things gave rise to living things, which would amount to an increase in order and thus would appear to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Furthermore, biological evolution would be the development of life over time, which involves increasing order and also violates the second law of thermodynamics. Life cannot arise through natural undirected processes.
Summary: All present processes are basically processes of conservation and disintegration, not creation and integration processes.
The presupposition of natural science that our universe is an infinitely closed cosmology (all reality is declared to be within this realm of energy and matter) defined its own reality. However, this is not science but philosophy at its core.
Postulating creative processes that scientists cannot prove by the scientific method is just as metaphysical as postulating a Creator. The failure of uniformitarianism to establish its presuppositions scientifically has led to physics making metaphysics in science. To propose creative processes that cannot be proven by the scientific method must now be as metaphysical as to propose a Creator.
