Attack on Genesis

How can something come from nothing? That’s what a recent cosmology theory purports to explain. The scriptures present a different story:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 English Standard Version (ESV)

And this explanation isn’t confined to the first three chapters of Genesis but is found throughout the scriptures. If it is false, then all of scripture can be reckoned as false as well. And there are significant consequences if the scriptures aren’t true.

In an October 10, 2012 Ligonier blog post titled: “In the Beginning God,” which is an excerpt taken from the book God’s Love, R. C. Sproul discusses the Genesis account:

When Genesis speaks of a beginning, it is referring to the advent of the universe in time and space. It is not positing a beginning to God but a beginning to the creative work of God…Genesis merely asserts that the universe had a beginning…We declare with Scripture that God is eternal…Does His eternality mean that He is somehow outside of time, that He is timeless? Or does His eternality mean that He exists in an endless dimension of time?


Sproul then touches on a topic we covered last week:


And, as we discussed last week, all that we perceive in the world would not exist without their First Cause, God All Mighty. Sproul examines this consequence as he concludes:




The attack upon the Genesis account doesn’t stop at nothing, though. There is too much at stake. Another avenue is the reconciliation of the apparent age of the universe with the days of creation described in Genesis’s first two chapters. The church has been on the ropes over this one for decades if not longer.

CMB Timeline

Timeline of the Universe, circa 2006, NASA/WMAP Science Team, in the public domain in the United States

We’ve previously examined why the earth appears so old. Dorothy Leigh Sayers, in her book Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine, offers an intriguing explanation for Genesis, chapters 1-3:

…God had, at some moment or other, created the universe complete with all the vestiges of an imaginary past…Extravagant…if one thinks of God as a [scientist]…but, if one thinks of Him as working in the same sort of way as a creative artist, then [it seems] the most natural thing in the world.

Albert Mohler, in his sermon: “Why Does the Universe Look So Old?” says, “because the Creator made it whole,” that is, fully developed, and it “bares testimony to the effects of sin and testimony to the judgment of God.” This last point merits development.

Usually, some will object, how can fossils have been created in the first six days, which God pronounced very good, since these fossils represent the deaths of many creatures? The answer is that death entered through the curse (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12) sometime after the seventh day, a day of rest. Further, the Apostle Paul comments on Genesis 3 when he says:


Clearly, God’s curse on humanity materially affected all creation, including the earth itself, with corruption. For self-consistency, that corruption naturally must include dead creatures.

Therefore, if the Genesis account is true, how should we then respond?

W. Robert Godfrey: God’s Design for Creation, YouTube, Mar 2, 2016 , Ligonier Ministries