(Genesis) Evolution vs Creation — J. Vernon McGee

The Limits of Evolutionary Explanations

Now, as you know that even the evolutionists do not agree, they today have come up with many theories. I would like to, and I think this probably might answer the statement of a great many. You cannot put one little star in motion, you cannot shape one single forest leaf, nor fling a mountain up, nor sink an ocean presumptuous, pygmy, large with unbelief.

You cannot bring one dawn of regal splendor, nor bid the day to shadow it twilight fall, nor send the pale moon forth with radiance tender, and dare you doubt the one who has done it all. It's unfortunate that when you get down to the level of the pseudo-scientists, and I'm thinking of the teachers today in our public schools that teach science, they actually are not in a position to give a fair view of it as they were only given one viewpoint in college, but actually there are some outstanding men that very definitely feel that it is not demonstrated.

For instance, Dr. G .A. Kirkut, he's of the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry at the University of Southampton in England. And Dr. Kirkut wrote a book entitled, The Implications of Evolution. I'm quoting from him now.

There is a theory which states that many living animals can be observed over the course of time to undergo changes so that new species are formed. This can be called a special theory of evolution and can be demonstrated in certain cases by experiments.

On the other hand, there is the theory that all of the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form. The theory can be called a general theory of evolution, and the evidence that supports it is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis.

Now, will you listen to the statement of the Swedish botanist Heribert Nielsen? He has made this statement, and I'm quoting him now. He says, My attempts to demonstrate evolution by experiment carried on for more than forty years have completely failed.

At least I should hardly be accused of having started from a preconceived anti-evolutionary standing point. It may be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature out of a paleobiological fax.

The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of material. Deficiencies are real.

They'll never be filled. The idea of an evolution rests on pure belief. May I say to you, he's moving us in the realm of religion, and my friend, if you're an evolutionist, you have to take it by faith.

And may I say, it's speculation, and it has always been that, but unfortunately a great many have accepted it as fact. Now there is today a group of these theologians, young theologians for the most part, and they do not want to be called intellectual obscurantists, and so they have adopted what is known as theistic evolution.

Kirtley Mather in Science Ponders Religion, he makes this statement. Dr. Mather writes, when a theologian accepts evolution as the process used by the Creator, he must be willing to go all the way with it.

Not only is it an orderly process, it's a continuing one. The golden age for man, if any, is in the future, not in the past. Moreover, the creative process of evolution is not to be interrupted by any supernatural intervention.

The evolution of the first living cells from previously existing non-living materials may represent a quantum jump rather than an infinitesimal step along the path of progress, but it is an entirely natural development.

Now may I say to you that it is impossible, in fact that's almost an unreasonable tenet. It's an illogical position today to say that you're a theistic evolutionist. There are those today that are trying to run with the hare and with the hounds.

They'd like to move up with the unbelievers, but they would also like to carry a Scofield Bible under their arm. And I'm afraid that it's difficult to do both. It's like that old Greek race where you put one foot on one horse and one on the other and then you start out, and it's marvelous when the two horses keep on the same route.

But believe me, when one of them decides to go another direction, you're in for trouble. You've got to determine which one you're going with, and that's the condition of the theistic evolutionist, and he ordinarily ends up in the wrong field, by the way.

He generally rides with the wrong horse. Now today there are so many that seem to be misinformed that are intelligent human beings. For instance, Liberty Magazine, years ago, and I took this clipping out many years ago, and it says what according to biblical records is the date of the creation of the world.

And you know what they've given? 4004 B .C. How utterly ridiculous can you be? Who created this universe, may I say to you? God created it. Will you listen to this? This to me is very important to know.

The Scientific Mystery of Life's Origin

Here is what Life Magazine had as the origin, and I'm reading now. For perhaps one half of the long span of early history, the planet Earth lay barren and lifeless under its canopy of air. The waters of its oceans rose and fell with the pulse of the sun and moon and stirred with the respiration of the winds, but in them no living thing moved.

Above them the great continental platforms loomed rocky and bleak, devoid of greens the landscapes of the airless moon. Then at some indeterminate point, some say two billion years ago, some a billion and a half, the entity called Life miraculously appeared on the surface of the deep.

What form it took? What concatenation of physical circumstances brought it into being, science cannot specify nor indeed reply with assurance to the question, what is Life? All that can be said is that through some agency, certain giant molecules acquired the ability to duplicate themselves.

Now, friends, are you willing to go along with that? And fact of the matter is, we have some almost ridiculous statements that have been made. I know that one of them takes the position the way man began was in some garbage can.

It says, from some raw material, some prehistoric intelligent left his garbage here. Now that's a statement of a scientist, by the way. And that's the way that we got started. Now, some of them send us out to look at the seaweed.

Some of them send us to look up the tree at the monkey in the tree. And my friend, may I say to you, now they send us to the garbage can. May I say to you that this is getting worse and worse, is it not?

I don't know about you, but I still feel that God's statement still stands up in this modern age. Here is the definition that Herbert Spencer gave. It's a very famous definition, and let me read it. He says, evolution is an integration of matter in a concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity and the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.

You turn that one around for a little while and see what you come up with, friends. I do not know about you, but today it still makes sense to read, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Who created it? God did. Created it out of nothing. When? I don't know. I have news for you. Nobody else knows. They have this record that I read just a moment ago. Some say 2 billion, some say 1 billion, and I notice now that some are moving it up maybe to 5 billion years.

No one knows. I think they're all pikers. I think it was created long before that. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. May I say to you very candidly, you see, God's had eternity back of him.

What do you think he's been doing in all the billions of the years of the past, waiting for you to come on the scene and waiting for me to come on the scene? No, he's been busy. He's had this creation a long time to work with.

You see, he really hasn't told us very much, has he? And I think it's rather presumptuous on this little pygmy down here to presume he knows more than he really knows about it. We just accept these majestic words of the Word of God and can say with the psalmist, when I consider thy heavens the work of thy fingers, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.

And Paul writing to the Romans in Romans 1 .20, for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

And then the writer to the Hebrews, through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen are not made of things which do appear. You have to accept that by faith, because even science can't tell you how you can take nothing and make something.

God apparently did it that way, but man today cannot tell when this was created. And when you put down the account that's in Genesis, along with the other creation accounts, and most nations had it, I think most of them were perversions of the Genesis account.

You take the Bible account and the Babylonian account, for instance, the tablets that give the Babylonian account, they begin with chaos. The Bible begins with cosmos. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the heavenly bodies are gods according to the Babylonian account, and they're nothing in the world but matter according to the Bible.

And you have polytheistic theology in the Babylonian account, and you have monotheistic truth in the Bible account. And the Babylonian account is just the work of a craftsman, and in the Bible God spoke and it came into existence.

And the Babylonian account is puerile, it's grotesque, but in the Bible you have here the grand and solemn realities. And the Babylonian account is definitely out of harmony with known science, but not the Bible.

May I say that the fact that we reject evolution, it rejects God, it rejects revelation, it denies the fall of man and the fact of sin, and it opposes the virgin birth. That's the reason that we reject it with all our being, friends, because we do not believe that it is the answer to the origin of this universe, and there's so many other things that could be said.

Why God Created the Universe

Now there is a third question here. Not only who created and when did he create, but why did he create? And believe me, this is getting right down now to the nitty-gritty. This is important to see. Will you notice what the Word of God has to say?

This universe that you and I live in today was created for his own pleasure. He saw fit to create it, he delighted in it, and you read over in the fourth chapter of Revelation, verse 11, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.

Now he created this universe because he wanted to create it. He did it for his pleasure. You may not like the universe, but he does. He never asked me about where I wanted this little world on which I live placed in his universe.

He could have put it way out yonder somewhere, but he didn't ask me that. In fact, he didn't even ask me whether I wanted to be born in Texas or not. Of course, if he'd have given me the opportunity, I would have chosen Texas, but he didn't.

May I say to you that this universe you and I live in today was created for his pleasure. He saw fit to create, he delighted in the act. And then the second reason that he created this universe, it was for his own glory.

The original creation, you remember, sang that wonderful Creator's praise when the sons of God, you remember, they sang together. That was a wonderful time. And over in the 38th chapter of the book of Job, verse 7, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for glory.

May I say to you, it was created for his glory. It's for him. And then you remember Isaiah, he says in Isaiah 43, 7, I have created him for my glory. I have formed him, yea, I have made him. God has created this universe for his glory.

Creation, Human Fellowship, and Moral Freedom

And then God created this universe and man in it for fellowship. He wanted fellowship with man, and God placed that first man in the Garden of Eden, and he wanted this man that he created, he wanted him to have fellowship with.

And he had to make him a free moral agent. God could have made a bunch of robots. God could have made a mechanical man and push a button and have him bow down. But God didn't want that kind of a man. God wanted a man to be free to choose him and to love him and serve him.

You remember, that was the awful slur and blasphemy that Satan hurled against God and against Job. He said, you remember, does Job serve you for naught? In other words, you're paying him to. God says, I want creatures that will, by a free choice, choose me.

My friend, the greatest thing you can do as a human being is to, in this world of sin, where everything is against God today, and he's permitted it that way, but he has put you and me in this world as it is today, that you and I can make a choice for him.

And in the midst of all of this unbelief and the blasphemy around us, we can say today, I choose Jesus. I accept and receive him. I believe in God the Father, Almighty Maker of heaven and earth. That's the most glorious privilege that you and I have.

And you can talk about freedom of speech and freedom of everything else, but this poor crowd around us today that's talking about freedom really don't know about it. You have real freedom when you choose Jesus Christ as your Savior.

Revelation or Speculation About Creation

As we are suggesting that you are on the horns of a dilemma today relative to the creation of the world, actually you'll have to depend on speculation or revelation. There's not a third one at all. Now, someone is going to say, but evolution explains the origin of this universe.

Well, listen to Dr. Howard Shapley, and we'll be quoting him later on. He is director of the Harvard Observatory, and he says, we are still embedded in abysmal ignorance of the world in which we live.

We're still absolutely in the dark relative to the creation of this earth on which you and I live. You see, today it's either revelation or speculation. It would seem now that these rocks that have been brought back from the moon are not advancing the theory of the origin of the universe that they had before, that it was the result of a tremendous explosion.

It would look so far as if the rocks on the moon do not correspond to rocks on the earth. Well, that's quite upsetting, and as you have probably noted, that the scientists haven't been jumping up and kicking their heels together because of the rocks that have been found on the moon.

The Unbridged Gaps in Evolutionary Theory

In other words, there are three areas in which evolution cannot move, and we'll see that here in Genesis, and that is it cannot bridge the gap from nothing to something. It cannot bridge the gap from something to life, and it cannot bridge the gap between life and humanity, that is, self-conscious human life with a free will.

These are gaps that evolution so far has not been able to bridge at all. And the press, of course, always looking for something sensational, comes up with something that's quite interesting, and one of the things that's been put in my hands in the past few days is a fellow Texan sent me something that they're doing down in Texas.

As you probably know, that they found down near a place where I used to live on the Paluxy River in Glen Rose, Texas, they have found dinosaur tracks. Well, I've known about that for years, and of course you might expect that in Texas you'd have the biggest of everything, so they apparently had the dinosaurs.

Now, not only that, but they now have found something that's quite disturbing. They have found some giant human tracks there, and you know that's really upsetting because it's very difficult to start out with a little amoeba or a little scum on top of the water, and all of a sudden you find walking back there with the dinosaurs human beings that are much bigger than any that we've got today.

I want to say that evolution is going to have a lot of problems in the next few years, and may I predict right now that, and I'm merely quoting some scientists, that by the end of this century evolution will be as dead as a dodo bird.

This brings us back to this wonderful story that we want to continue in.