The Bible and Creation in the Light of Modern Science

“Know that Jehovah is God. It is he that has made us, and not we ourselves.”—Ps. 100:3.

1, 2. Why do many feel that science has disproved the Bible?

THE race for the moon and outer space keeps the eyes of many focused on science and its achievements. Protection of nations is sought by means of scientific advancements in military weapons. Underdeveloped nations look to machines that science has fashioned as the way to industrial progress. In the medical field science is thought to give much hope for the elimination of sickness and disease. Yes, the progress that science has made in some fields causes many to feel that it can be relied upon for the ultimate answer in many other fields of knowledge.

² Therefore, when respected scientists comment on the origin of man they are thought to be speaking of fact. Because most scientists accept and teach that man evolved from the lower animals, the masses of mankind believe this to be true. Since science is defined as “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws,” people feel that the scientists have facts when they speak about the ascent of man from beast. As this idea contradicts the Bible teaching that man was created by God, many feel that they can no longer believe the Bible; they think modern science has disproved it.

3. What will the facts show?

³ However, modern science has not disproved the Bible, not one line of it. Actually, the opposite is true. Although the Bible was not written as a scientific treatise, where it touches on things scientific it does not conflict with the facts, but it does conflict with some of the unproved theories and speculations of men. The “body of facts or truths” that have come to light in modern times has in no way contradicted the Bible, especially its account of man’s creation. To the contrary, modern scientific “facts or truths,” as opposed to speculations, have repeatedly corroborated the words of Jesus when he said: “Your word is truth.”—John 17:17.

WHY DO MANY DISBELIEVE?

4, 5. Why do some not believe the Bible?

⁴ If science corroborates the Bible, then why is it that so many people today do not believe the Bible and do not accept it as God’s Word, a guide for their lives? Most assuredly, it is not because science has disproved the Bible. Some have been led to believe it has, and for this reason they turn away. But there are also other reasons why many disbelieve the Bible, reasons that the Christian would do well to keep in mind so as not to be duped by unscientific mouthings just because they issue from prominent scientists. Keeping these reasons in mind will help you to “guard what is laid up in trust with you, turning away from the empty speeches that violate what is holy and from the contradictions of the falsely called ‘knowledge.’ For making a show of such knowledge some have deviated from the faith.”—1 Tim. 6:20, 21.

⁵ Some do not believe the Bible because they are simply ignorant of its contents, not having studied it with an unprejudiced mind. Others abandon the Bible because of Christendom’s ridiculous explanations of what it contains, such as teaching that the creative days in Genesis were each twenty-four literal hours long. Also, their doctrine of hellfire, their blaming God for wickedness, their wars, inquisitions and political meddlings have soured many on the Bible, who have been led to think that the basis for Christendom is the Bible. Many of such, if honest-hearted, can be reached with the message of truth when they see that the Bible, too, disagrees with the teachings and bad practices of Christendom.

6-8. What selfish reasons are there for rejecting the Bible?

⁶ Others, however, give up the Bible because they object to its pure laws, though they would hesitate to admit it. They want to gratify their lusts, their greed for money, power, fame, pleasures or immorality. The Bible’s righteous principles condemn such lusts and therefore stand in the way of those indulging in them. Rather than doing what is right, they push the Bible aside. Their selfish desires come first.—2 Tim. 3:1-4; 2 Pet. 3:3.

⁷ Some disbelieve the Bible because accepting it would deflate their ego. They desire to be well thought of in the world. Accepting the Bible would mean humbling themselves in submissiveness to Jehovah, his Son and his visible organization. They would not like that, as their adoration and adulation by others, or by themselves, would have to cease. Also, they would have to acknowledge that many of their previous concepts were in error. Their pride will not permit them to do so. It is as John 12:42, 43 records of some prominent ones in Jesus’ day: “They would not confess him, in order not to be expelled from the synagogue; for they loved the glory of men more than even the glory of God.”

⁸ Still others find the Bible too energetic for them. They will be required to do God’s will, associate with his visible organization, engage in the preaching activity and study for advancement to spiritual maturity. They feel that this is too much trouble; so they take the course of least resistance and look for an easier religion or none at all.—Luke 13:24.

9. Why should such disbelief not disturb the Christian?

⁹ For these and similar reasons many do not believe the Bible; so when a theory such as evolution comes along they eagerly grasp it to gain some comfort in their rebellion against God and his righteous requirements. But never let it disturb you because many do not believe the Bible. This harmonizes completely with the fact that we live in the last days of this system of things. Jesus foretold this when he stated: “The love of the greater number will cool off.” (Matt. 24:12) Satan the Devil, the god of this system of things, knows his time is nearly up. He is trying desperately to turn all men away from God. So how could we expect the majority of humanity to turn to the Bible? Only a minority will. “Narrow is the gate and cramped the road leading off into life, and few are the ones finding it.” (Matt. 7:14) It is not that the road is unavailable, but that most persons are not looking for it. Jesus assured us that those sincerely looking for the right way would find it: “Keep on asking, and it will be given you; keep on seeking, and you will find; keep on knocking, and it will be opened to you. For everyone asking receives, and everyone seeking finds, and to everyone knocking it will be opened.”—Matt. 7:7, 8.

GOD CREATED

10. What confidence can truth seekers have?

¹⁰ Truth seekers can have confidence that “all Scripture is inspired of God.” (2 Tim. 3:16) They can also be confident in the knowledge that modern science has corroborated the Bible in a most marvelous way. This is especially true of where the greatest attack against the Bible has come, and that is in respect to the first few chapters of Genesis, which chapters scoffers think science has disproved. But remember, science is defined as “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths,” so that it is necessary to separate facts from fancy.

11. How have the first words of the Bible been confirmed?

¹¹ At one time evolutionists ridiculed the very first words of the Bible, which state: “In the beginning God created.” They claimed, as had the Greek philosophers centuries ago, that matter had always existed and therefore the physical universe had no beginning. But with the advent of the age of atomic energy it became known that some elements of the earth give off radioactivity. If matter had always existed, then this process of radioactive decay would have been completed long ago. But it is still going on. Thus, it is now acknowledged that the universe had a beginning, and its age is estimated in the billions of years, for which the Bible record allows. One group of scientists said: “It is interesting to note that by declaring the universe had a beginning, the Bible anticipated modern science by some thousands of years.”a

12. How has the Genesis account of the creation of life been verified?

¹² Another problem for evolutionists was to explain how life started. They dismissed the Genesis account of creation and said that life arose accidentally out of dead matter. They believed much like the philosopher Aristotle, who wrote: “All dry bodies which become damp, and all damp bodies which are dried, engender animal life.” The Roman poet Virgil said seriously that bees were sometimes produced from the decaying internal organs of cattle. A famous physician in the reign of Louis XIV of France wrote: “The smells which arise from the bottom of morasses produce frogs, slugs, leeches, grasses, and other things.”b But then Louis Pasteur, the French chemist, performed his famous experiments that should have destroyed the notion that living things spontaneously arose from dead matter. He proved that smaller forms of life did not originate by themselves but came from other bacteria already existing. This showed that living things on earth come only from other living things.

13, 14. Why could not a living cell have arisen by accident?

¹³ In spite of this evidence, evolutionists who are atheists still believe that a living cell arose by accident. But even the most capable scientists with all their elaborate equipment have not succeeded in creating one tiny living cell! As one “distinguished authority on evolution” admitted: “No living chemist can shape a dinosaur, no living hand can start the dreaming tentacular extensions that characterize the life of the simplest ameboid cell.” (Harper’s Magazine, March 1964) If this cannot be done under the best of experimental conditions, it could hardly have happened by accident. The Bible correctly points to the source of life at Psalm 36:9 when it says: “For with you [Jehovah] is the source of life.”

¹⁴ One might be tempted to think of a living cell as being so simple that it could accidentally arise out of inanimate matter. However, as one scientist said, each cell is “a system so intricate and delicate that its complete functioning has so far escaped our study.”c Of its performance, he stated: “Each cell performs . . . activities with a precision that by comparison makes the running of even the finest watch a clumsy affair.” Another described a cell as “a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars of heaven.”d A magazine declared: “The cell is as complicated as New York City.”e

15. Show why anything organized demands an organizer.

¹⁵ No one possessed of his senses would claim that New York, London, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo or other cities came into existence by themselves. As one physicist said: “No material thing can create itself.”f But one living cell contains trillions of tiny units, each automatically performing functions more complicated than those performed in any city. Also, there are trillions of cells in just one adult human body! And we are asked to believe that this all came about by accident! No, nothing organized can ever come about by accident. If a housewife wanted to bake an apple pie, would she wait for some apples to fall off a tree accidentally into her oven, which accidentally happened to have flour, eggs and other ingredients in it, and then hope these would accidentally arrange themselves into a pie, which would accidentally cook itself just the right length of time? That would, of course, be ridiculous. But making a pie is simple compared to making living things, and if simple things cannot happen by accident, surely the infinitely more complex could not either.

16. How do parts of the human body speak of a Creator?

¹⁶ Consider, too, parts of the human body such as the eye, so intricate it took scientists centuries to discover some knowledge of how it operates. The camera is a clumsy imitation of the eye, but it took the genius of inventors, the accuracy of mathematicians, the skill of craftsmen years to develop. Did the far more complicated human eye just happen to develop by itself because some blind jellyfish wanted to see? How did it know it wanted to see when it could not possibly have known what seeing was? No, the human eye is a marvel of creation, brought into existence by One who could already see, as Psalm 94:9 says: “The One planting the ear, can he not hear? Or the One forming the eye, can he not look?”

17, 18. How do modern inventions show the universe had a Creator?

¹⁷ An astronaut comes back from orbiting the earth in a capsule of a few tons and is hailed as a hero. The scientists who devised the mechanism are lauded. What would they think if you declared that the thousands of pieces of metal just chanced to assemble themselves into a capsule and rocket, just happened to be filled with fuel, just happened to ignite when the man was accidentally in the capsule, and then the entire affair just chanced to go into orbit? They would dismiss you as a joker or a mental incompetent. Yet, Jehovah put the earth, weighing an estimated six and a half sextillion tons, into perfect orbit with millions of living things on it, with no reentry problems, no worries over oxygen supplies, no need to squeeze food from a tube or to be concerned about how to get rid of body wastes. And we are asked to believe that this just happened by itself!

¹⁸ It takes thousands of men constantly working to keep the schedules of one railroad or airline from going wrong so that no accidents occur, and they occur anyway. At the same time, suns and planets of incredible size move through space with a speed and precision that stagger the imagination, and that grand system is supposed to have had no designer! Sensible persons appreciate the truth of the words written by Isaiah: “Raise your eyes high up and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who is bringing forth the army of them even by number, all of whom he calls even by name. Due to the abundance of dynamic energy, he [Jehovah] also being vigorous in power, not one of them is missing.” (Isa. 40:26) David similarly exclaimed: “When I see your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you [Jehovah] have prepared, what is mortal man?” (Ps. 8:3, 4) So, too, in our day, honest persons recognize that what modern scientific discoveries and inventions emphasize over and over again is the fundamental truth recorded in Genesis, that “in the beginning God created.” Of those who do not believe this, the psalmist states: “The senseless one has said in his heart: ‘There is no Jehovah.’”—Ps. 14:1.

SPECULATIONS DISPROVED

19, 20. What changing theories have evolutionists advanced?

¹⁹ During the last century evolutionists believed that different forms of life came about by things slowly changing from one kind into another. Some thought giraffes got their long necks by stretching higher and higher for the top leaves of trees, and so their offspring were born with long necks. It was thought that people living near the equator got tanned from the hot sun, and then passed the tan to their children, resulting in dark skin. But then an Austrian, Gregor Mendel, discovered the facts of heredity, which prove such things untrue. He found out about the definite, orderly laws that fixed things from parent to offspring “according to its kind,” just as Genesis had recorded. This made the slow change of one form of life into another impossible, for while it allowed for great variety in color, size and shape, it did not result in new forms of life.

²⁰ Evolutionists next said that things must have evolved, not by slow changes, but by fast changes in the genes, by mutations. However, of this a scientist recently said: “Whether the mutations are natural or induced by some artificial means such as radiation . . . the evidence today suggests that much more than 99 percent of mutations are undesirable.”g Mutations distort, they do not create new kinds.

21. How does fossil evidence corroborate creation?

²¹ To help them out of their difficulties evolutionists have searched extensively for fossil remains that would show the connections between family kinds. But no such fossils have been found of creatures whose fins were changing into arms or legs, or whose feet were changing into wings. In short, all the many gaps between family kinds have remained, simply because no connections ever existed! As an article in the London Times (May 19, 1963) on the subject said: “The fossil evidence is really of little help [for evolution] here . . . it is only by a stretch of the imagination that one can visualize a specific transformation of particular specimens . . . into their alleged modern descendants.”

22. What has archaeology discovered?

²² As the lower animals were created suddenly, so was man. He was given a high mental capacity that the animals lacked. This is just what science corroborates, and not a slow ascent from a mud puddle. In the book New Discoveries in Babylonia About Genesis the author states: “It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilization ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case. When civilization appears it is already full grown. . . . In the face of these facts, the slow progress of early man is a disproved assumption, and the idea that an infinitely prolonged period elapsed before civilization appeared cannot be maintained.”

23, 24. What are some facts that disprove the notion that there were “prehistoric” men?

²³ But what of those so-called “prehistoric” men one frequently hears about? Some of such fossil remains are not human at all, but are animal. Others are simply varieties of the human family who were living at the same time “modern-type” man was, just as today there are many sizes and shapes in different living peoples. The Neanderthal man was at one time regarded as “prehistoric,” an ancestor of modern man in the evolution scale, but note what an encyclopedia now says: “Neanderthal man cannot be regarded as an ancestor of modern man. Neanderthal man and men of the modern type . . . must be looked upon as descendants of a common ancestor.”h

²⁴ Many of these so-called “prehistoric” men were not a “low” type at all. Of those who are called “Cro-Magnon” a university professor stated: “The Cro-Magnon race . . . are conservatively appraised as on a par with the finest stock today intellectually and physically.”i Another scientist reported: “These men represent in many ways the finest type the world has ever seen.”j Embarrassingly for those who persist in believing the speculation of evolution, Science Digest (April 1961) said: “Since the Cro-Magnon man . . . the human brain has been decreasing in size.” How accurate the simple Genesis account of man’s creation, his fall into sin and subsequent degeneration!

25, 26. What other facts show that “prehistoric” men did not exist?

²⁵ Evolutionists have also combed the earth looking for a people who speak a primitive language, as they feel this would support their theory. The book The Miracle of Languages says: “They have found none. . . . The language of the bushmen [of Australia] and the Sari [of lower California] are elaborate, and show evidences of decay. . . . All languages appear to have descended from one universal parent language.” Science News Letter (Sept. 3, 1955) confirmed this by saying: “There are no primitive languages. The idea that ‘savages’ speak in a series of grunts and are unable to express many ‘civilized’ concepts, is very wrong. . . . Typically, their grammars are much more complex . . . than any modern language.” How well this, too, fits the Biblical account of man’s having one language that was confused after the Flood, resulting in many languages spreading throughout the world, gradually degenerating.

²⁶ So-called “prehistoric” men exist only in the imagination of those who choose to ignore the facts, because no evidence derived in the entire history of archaeology has sustained the speculations of evolution. It is just as an article in Harper’s Magazine (July 1963) stated: “We have yet to unearth traces of the intelligent apes that gave rise to humanity.” And this article was written in support of evolution! Think of it, after more than a century of frenzied searching by hordes of evolutionists the record of the rocks shouts out louder than ever that “God created”! Evolutionists cannot “unearth traces of the intelligent apes that gave rise to humanity” simply because they never existed, except, as the London Times intimated, ‘in someone’s imagination.’

27. What truth does all the evidence affirm?

²⁷ In the face of such evidence, honesthearted persons will be convinced, but the skeptic never will be, since he wants to cling to the error that suits his purpose. “That is why God lets an operation of error go to them, that they may get to believing the lie, in order that they all may be judged because they did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” (2 Thess. 2:11, 12) God-fearing persons are not taken in by satanic speculations that belittle the Bible, God’s Word, and water down its effect; that make God unnecessary as Creator, Sustainer and Provider; and that push aside the reality of man’s fall into sin and his need for redemption. Humble ones say as the psalmist of ancient times did: “How I do love your law! All day long it is my concern.” (Ps. 119:97) These know for a certainty, as the evidence of modern science shows, that “Jehovah is God. It is he that has made us, and not we ourselves.”—Ps. 100:3.

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