Faith in Danger!
“Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the Sky Eden@Bedok Condo one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants,” said Richard Dawkins, a progressive creationist (Gitt 3). Is Genesis just a myth? That is what some people have concluded. Their theories lead to the belief that not only is Genesis a myth but the whole Bible as well. When all explanations for what triggered evolution were found faulty, people tried to combine evolution and God by reinterpreting the Genesis account of creation to fit evolutionary beliefs. However, all it creates is bemusement; Genesis clearly states the days of creation occurred in just six of our days.
The Hebrew word used in Genesis for day is yom. Yom means a literal twenty-four hour period or the daylight time (Ham 17). Compromising believers have changed day to mean millions of years. When Genesis is not being taken literally, people read into it. Scripture is twisted to say what they want. The gap theory, theistic evolution, progressive creation, and the framework hypothesis are four current ways people try to combine evolution and creation. These compromises between creation and evolution change their beliefs and faith in God.
The gap theory places a several billion year gap between Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and 1:2, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The gap theory declares God initiated evolution in Genesis 1:1, and then in Genesis 1:2, He destroyed the earth by sending Satan and his demons here (Grig 50). This event was so powerful, it created fossils all over the earth. Next, God used the six days of creation (recreation) to begin life on earth again like Genesis says in six twenty-four hour days. The Nelson Study Bible writes in its footnotes on Genesis 1:1,
“Here it means that God renewed what was in a chaotic state. God changed chaos into cosmos, disorder into order, emptiness into fullness… The two words, without form and void, express one concept, chaos. The earth had been reduced to this state–it was not the way God had first created it” (Morris b).
However, the earth did not begin, end, and begin again in Genesis.