The Riddle of Theistic Evolution, Part 2

“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day,” Genesis 1:4-5. There was a day-night progression before the sun or moon had been created. God divided light and darkness to teach us that God separates constantly. He separated Abraham from his homeland. He separated Noah from his former people. He separated Moses from Egypt and Israel from among the nations. He separates Christians from the unsaved by giving them a heavenly city and a divine heritage; things not of this present creation.

The language of Genesis in verse 5 is very telling. The evening and the morning were the first day; God called the light Day and the darkness Night. To an unbiased reader this sounds much like a typical progression of 24 hours as we still see them today. The redundancy seems to indicate an effort to destroy unintentional misunderstandings. “For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little,” Isaiah 28:10. In other words repletion is a teacher God chose to hammer home simple truths we often find inconvenient to our own preconceptions. “To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe,” Philippians 3:1.

 “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day,” Genesis 1:6-8. The firmament we are presently reading about is our crust, which divided the waters in our seas, oceans and lakes from subterranean waters also called the “deep.” Psalm 136:6 states “To Him who laid out the earth above the waters,” again testifying that we are reading about the creation of a dividing crust that separated surface water from underground water; again we see God separating. This underground source would be the means by which God watered the entire surface of the earth prior to the Flood, according to Genesis 2:6. Verses 6-8 cannot likely be referring to the creation of Heaven since we already had seen its creation in Genesis 1:1. Also, the writer tells us that God divided the waters both above and below this firmament. It seems peculiar that God put water above “heaven.”

 Robert Hooke (1635-1703) proposed that Genesis 1:8 was describing an atmospheric firmament, a second firmament that included the sky, atmosphere or space. Whenever the phrase “firmament of the heavens” is used the second firmament is implied, Genesis 1:14, 15, etc.

The day-night cycles continue, and will do so numerous times in chapter one. Redundancy is a teacher’s tool, and God wanted to impress the literal nature of this creation account on us. Evolution demands long ages for time and chance to perform the trillions of miracles they would have needed in order to bring about the presently ordered universe we currently inhabit. God did things in six 24 hour periods, again running contrary to Evolution’s designs.

“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good,” Genesis 1:9-10. The seas were then gathered into their basins and the dry land was brought forth. Not unlike the days following the Flood, the earth had been brought out of the water. It seems the earth was given dimensions at this point with an atmosphere (verse 8) and lower elevations that captured sea water. God named the land and the sea, which in ancient times always denoted one’s authority over the object in question. Long afterward Jonah the prophet would attest to God’s sovereign act of creation, Jonah 1:9. This would also be why God chose to permit Adam to name the animals God gave him stewardship over, Genesis 2:19. God Himself however named our race, which again denoted His divine authority over us, Genesis 1:26-27. Adam was given the privilege of naming his wife, showing the authority of the husband in marriage, Genesis 2:23; 3:20.

Thus far God called everything good. This is a far cry from Evolution’s tooth and claw “survival of the fittest.” Death and misery would have been common place long before humanity arrived, and many species would never survive long enough to even be a contemporary of Adam, according to Darwinian Evolution. If God called Theistic Evolution “good” or “very good” our God apparently is a sadist, because He delights in the slow, grudging, destructive upward climb of countless life forms as they sought to survive. God intentionally created the universe in a state of decay and death, rather than sinless perfection prior to Adam’s fall and the entrance of sin, which began the curse of death and decay the whole universe presently suffers from, Genesis 3:17-19; Romans 8:20-22.