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This article is from
Creation 29(3):6, June 2007

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Is this your first time?

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Perhaps you have never had anyone say to you directly that ‘evolution is wrong, and the Bible is true’.

So how will you react to this magazine?

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Some of you will be surprised, wondering why you haven’t heard of this kind of information before. (That was my own experience, just 10 years ago.)

Others of you might be shocked, incredulous, and perhaps even angry and dismissive—a very common response from people being shown such material for the first time.

That was certainly the reaction of a class of final-year high school science students that I addressed on the creation/evolution topic recently, who objected:

  • The Bible is the words of man rather than God.
  • No ‘Holy Book’ can ever be all true, because such were written without (i.e. before) scientific knowledge.
  • Other religions are as valid as Christianity.
  • Genesis is only a story.
  • Jesus was not raised from the dead (someone stole the bones and hid them).1
  • We’re just evolved animals—there isn’t any point to life.
  • Richard Dawkins’2 written account of the primordial soup shows exactly how life could have started.

These objections reflect the students’ tacit belief that there is no Creator—everything just evolved. (None of the students, when I asked, were prepared to acknowledge even the possibility of there being a Creator.)

But it also seemed to me that there was another factor at work—an unwillingness of these fee-paying students at this prestigious school to accept the implication that the teachers whom they’d looked up to and trusted might have been wrong (i.e. taught them incorrect information). That’s understandable. After all, the school’s reputation for academic excellence had long drawn society’s leaders to enrol their sons and daughters there—the teachers were the very best that money could buy.

But you might be surprised, as I was, that at a church-run school—established and administered by a respected ‘mainstream’ Christian denomination—I did not find any final-year student willing to admit even the possible existence of a Creator.

Our interview with tree researcher Dr Geoff Downes (p. 24) gives us an insight into why. Geoff says of his student days at a similar church school that ‘it was too hard to be a Christian in that environment.’ But later at university, once he realized that the ordered complexity of living things could not have come about in some ‘primeval pond’, the way was open for Geoff’s mind to fully embrace the Creator.3

So why did it take so long for him to realize that evolution is not true?

Well, for a start, no-one had told him before, which also explains why my visit to the final-year students was their ‘first time’, and why my own ‘first time’ was not until a decade ago. We’d never heard it from parents, teachers or church leaders (cf. Deuteronomy 4:9; 2 Corinthians 10:5; Ephesians 6:4; Titus 1:9).

Thankfully, more Christians are real­izing that most of the widespread scepticism towards the Bible’s message about the need for a Saviour has its roots in the near-universal teaching of evolution. Thus they are increasingly disseminating literature on ‘the creation/evolution issue’, which might explain why you’re currently holding a copy of this magazine—perhaps for the first time?

Read on to discover that the Bible’s account of origins is trustworthy and is not contradicted by scientific observations; that Genesis was written as real history (p. 15); that human life is valuable (p. 50), and that all religions are not the same (p. 38)—Christianity alone proclaims the truth that can set people free (p. 23).

Further reading

Posted on homepage: 25 April 2007

References and notes

  1. Such an idea is not new. The Bible itself documents the first time that such a suggestion was bandied about, nearly 2,000 years ago (Matthew 28:13). In fact, the Bible says that sceptical voices have been around from the very first (John 8:44, Genesis 3:4). Ultimately, however, truth prevails. Return to Text.
  2. Richard Dawkins has written many books expounding evolution and atheism, including The Blind Watchmaker and The Devil’s Chaplain. For a refutation of his latest book, The God Delusion, see creation.com/delusion. Return to Text.
  3. Note how this relates to the first commandment; to love God with all your mind—Mark 12:28–31. Return to Text.