Often we speak of the creation way of thinking as incorporating and being founded upon three main points: creation week, the Fall into sin and its resulting Curse, and the great Flood of Noah's day. These major episodes were worldwide in scope, affecting everything. As such, they must be acknowledged and included in our understanding if we hope to interpret the world of evidence correctly.
For instance, if God truly created all things at some point in the past (Exodus 20:11) and we try to understand anything without incorporating creation into our thinking, we will err. In our frail human wisdom we might derive some other origins theory (a Big Bang, maybe), but we would be wrong. On the authority of God's Word, He called things into existence using processes different from those He uses today, for He rested from His creative activity (Genesis 2:1-2).
Different laws were in operation during creation. The basic law of science recognizes the impossibility of creating or annihilating today. Now God maintains His completed creation, using processes and laws with which we are familiar (Colossians 1: 16-17). Creation may have changed somewhat, but where could we go in the universe, what could we study, that is not ultimately the result of creation activity? We should see the fingerprint of His creative hand everywhere we look. We should see such an amazing level of precision and design that we would be "without excuse" (Romans 1:20) to attribute such perfection to natural forces only.
However, we do see much that is less than perfect today, and this fits in with the second great event--the Curse on all creation due to Adam's rebellion. He had been placed in charge of all God had made and was to exercise dominion over it for man's good and God's glory. But he rejected God's authority, incurring God's just punishment for his sin, and all things in his domain came under sin's penalty (Genesis 2:16-17; 3:14-19; Romans 6:23). Creation has suffered much under this penalty of death and decay, and everywhere we go, everything we see "groans and travails" (Romans 8:22).
Surely these are not the creative processes God employed to create His "very good" (Genesis 1:31) masterpiece. Science recognizes this spiral of death and decay as the second most important law of nature, never violated. It states that while the total energy of a system remains the same, it does deteriorate. Without an organizational force from outside, everything moves from order to disorder, a lower level of complexity.
But things are still at such a high level of organization. How did they ever get organized to begin with? Order is not created or increased without intelligent, purposive help. The Big Bang can't provide the answer, but the Bible can.
The third aspect concerns the types of processes operating in the past. Were they limited to the "uniform" processes of today or were they substantially different in rate, scale, and intensity, or "catastrophic"? Catastrophic process levels are required in the past to produce the state of things as they are. Floods occur, hurricanes form, erosion happens, but past events often were regional and mighty in scope, not the local, normal events we are familiar with today. Something different happened in the past and we now view the results of such past out-of-the-norm processes.
Thus, "big-picture" science observes what Scripture has always taught. Creation, Fall, and Flood were historical events, with results that are observable today. Bible history really happened and makes good scientific sense. Denying history--especially biblical history--leads to error, even scientific error.
* Dr. Morris is President of the Institute for Creation Research.
Cite this article: Morris, J. 2010. A Marvelous Symmetry. Acts & Facts. 39 (9): 15.
