The history of the Church has featured many individual battles, all of which were eventually won by those who stood firm on the Word of God. For instance, the early church fathers were victorious over legalism and Gnosticism. During the Reformation, the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith was the battleground. In each case, insistence on Scripture in its purity and simplicity carried the day. Creation doctrine has also seen controversy. Beginning with the Gap Theory in the early 1800s and Theistic Evolution in the late 1800s, Bible believers have been able to defeat these compromises with truth.
The compromise of choice today is known as Progressive Creation, a modern revision of the Day-Age Theory. Advocating that the six days of creation can be equated with the billions of years of geology and astronomy, it proposes that God's creative acts occurred on widely separate occasions over the ages. To adherents, the world before Adam was identical to that of the secular view, with extinction of the majority of life forms, with disease, bloodshed, and carnivorous activity pre-dating Adam's rebellion and the resultant curse of death as the penalty of sin. By necessity, Progressive Creation minimizes the extent of Christ's work on the Cross, limiting it to the redemption of man's Spirit only, not his body or the rest of Creation.
Some have labeled this issue as "the seminal issue facing the church today." Most Christians are unaware of the problem. Many Christian leaders are fighting on the wrong side of the battle. Both are often intimidated into compromising Scripture by authoritative-sounding scientists. We feel God has raised up ICR, as a group of uncompromising Bible-believing scientists, to lead the church back from the precipice of compromise.
To do so, ICR recently called together a group of recognized creation spokes-men, equipped to address the errors of Progressive Creation and the scientific truth of Biblical Creation. ICR scientists Drs. Henry Morris, John Morris, and Russell Humphreys, were joined by Drs. John Whitcomb and Doug Phillips in ICR's radio room. This has resulted in a series of four, one-hour recordings which powerfully present the Christian/creationist worldview, exposing the false teaching of Progressive Creation, and specifically answering the claims of Dr. Hugh Ross in a similar tape set. Excerpts from them will be used on "Science, Scripture & Salvation" radio broadcasts in the months ahead.
Transcripts of these recordings form the basis for a soon-to-be available book entitled, After Eden—Understanding Creation, the Curse, and the Cross, authored by Dr. Henry Morris III. Covering Scriptural, theological, and scientific grounds, it will be a faith-strengthener to the Bible-believing Christian and a confrontation to the compromiser.
The Church at large needs to return to a fully Biblical worldview, and cease bringing secularism into their thinking in the guise of "science." Progressive Creation thinking is the lynchpin of modern wrong thinking among evangelicals. You can be assured that ICR will not shrink from its task.
* Dr. Morris is President of ICR.
