One of my favorite Christmas Scripture verses is I John 4:9. "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him." The marvelous incarnation in human flesh of the only begotten Son of God is not the end of the story, of course.

What is the Gap Theory?

One of the popular devices for trying to accommodate the evolutionary ages of the geologists and astronomers in the creation record of the Bible has been the "gap theory"—also called the "ruin-and-reconstruction" theory.

Among the very last words written by the great Apostle Paul were these: "The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments" (II Timothy 4:13). When he wrote, Paul was in a cold, damp, dark Roman dungeon, awaiting his imminent execution by Nero and knowing that "the time of my departure is at hand" (verse 6).

In a 1979 college textbook on evolution by Ayala and Valentine, the authors assert: "To be sure, both butterflies and humans have descended from a remote common ancestor, most likely a small worm-like marine animal resembling a flatworm." Such a statement is void of empirical evidence, and it must therefore be taken by faith.

The dating of rocks by the radioactive decay of certain minerals is undoubtedly the main argument today for the dogma of an old earth.