Creation & providence

Daniel Morgan said:

“Were the species all created ex nihilo?”

1.Before proceeding any further, let’s clarify our terms:

i)”Creation may be either first and immediate (which is simply ex nihilo) or secondary and mediate (which is made indeed from some matter). The former is unfit and out of order, not set in order by any force of second causes to the production of the terminus,” Turretin, Institutes 1:432.

ii)”Had he [Einstein] reflected more on what physics can do, he would not have bogged down in the futile question about the understanding of the how of the creation of the universe. For if that how meant creation out of nothing, it could not be understood in terms of quantitative relations, the sole business of physics,” S. Jaki, God & the Cosmologists (Regnery 1989), 95.

2.Gen 1 doesn’t deal with the creation of “species,” but natural kinds.

3.Exegetically speaking, the ordinal numbered diurnal series probably implies that time began with the creation of the universe.

This, in turn, logically implies the nonexistence of preexisting matter, for preexisting matter would have the property of duration.

4.This interpretation is supported by Col 1:15, which clearly implies creation ex nihilo.

5.Day 1 involves the creation of ex nihilo of matter/energy.

It’s possible that the creation of the organic order (days 3,5-6) made use of raw inorganic materials. Cf. Gen 2:7.

Such inorganic materials were preexistent vis-à-vis the organic order. But they were not preexistence vis-à-vis creation proper.

6.Even if the creation of the organic order made use of raw inorganic materials, the organic order did not originate by ordinary natural processes.

According to Gen 1, organisms reproduce according to their kind. But the natural kinds did not originate by this process. Rather, the process was instantiated by divine fiat.

Exegetically speaking, it’s possible that each organic or inorganic artifact was created instantaneously, although the totality of natural kinds was phased in over six days, in a series of discrete fiats.

Or it’s possible that each artifact was instantiated over time, but at a highly accelerated rate, so as to be fully formed at the end of each day.

The account is not that specific.

6.In either case, you don’t have plants made from other plants or animals made from other animals.

At most, you’d have fauna and flora directly constituted from the raw inorganic materials, which originated on day 1.

“1) Are the physicists lying about the age of the earth?”

Secular dating schemes extrapolate the age of the earth on the basis of radiometric decay rates. There are a few fundamental of problems with this extrapolation:

i) Given a cyclical process, you might be able to extrapolate up-to-a-point on the basis of that process.

If, however, the cycle was instantiated ex nihilo, then you cannot infer the date of creation from the periodicity of the process since the cycle itself was not phased in over time by some linear process, but given in toto.

Any chronological extrapolation would afford a relative date, but not an absolute date.

For example, if the power goes off, and the electric clocks are reset, you can calculate the passage of time from that point onwards, but this doesn’t tell give you the status quo ante.

Likewise, when a jeweler replaces a batter on a watch, he will reset the time, but in so doing he zeros out the previous reading.

When the power goes off, all the clocks give the same time, and when the power comes back on, they all give the same time, but the time they give is relative time, not absolute time. And unless they are recalibrated to make allowance for the power outage, they will all give the wrong time.

Synchrony is no evidence of absolute chronology.

Same is true if we reset our wristwatch as we pass from one time zone to another.

ii) Let’s also remember that radiometric decay rates are not designed to tell the time. That is not their natural function.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with putting them to some extraneous use, but to assume that they must yield an accurate result irrespective of their physical purpose is philosophically naive and ironically androcentric.

iii) So the question remains: if the universe was instantiated both in toto and ex nihilo in six stages, what would it look like?

Given a temporal process, we may be able to calculate the rate of change, but if the cycle is not, itself, the result of a temporal process, then we cannot use the cycle to date the origin of the cycle. Rather, we can only use it as a proximate point of reference to date other things.

iv) Does this make a secular geologist or physicist a liar?

No, but it does make him terribly gauche, which, in some ways, is worse.

Better to be a competent liar than a well-meaning klutz.

“2) Are the biologists lying about the descent with modification of species from common ancestors?”

This is, of course, another leading question.

i) It assumes that all of the evidence lines up behind naturalistic evolution.

ii) It fails to distinguish between evidence for microevolution and evidence for macroevolution.

iii) It skates over the difference between the solid front they like to present for public consumption, and the internecine warfare which resumes as soon as they think the microphone is off. Cf.

A. Brown, The Darwin Wars (Simon & Schuster 2001).

R. Morris, The Evolutionists (Henry Holt & Co., 2001).

U. Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociology Debate (Oxford 2001).

iv) Since a secular biologist denies divine creation, he is precommitted to something like naturalistic evolution, apart from any hard evidence whatsoever.

v) A secular biologist will make no allowance for the possible affect of a global flood on the fossil record.

vi) Then there’s the last-ditch resort to methological naturalism to putty over the factual gaps in the case for evolution.

vii) Not to mention the blacklisting of scientific dissent.